Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today i want to talk about how to price
your plants to sell now this can be an awkward conversation my first impulse when talking to
a plant person is to talk about plants that's what we have in common and it's what we both
love why should we let a little thing like money come between us however if you're selling
plants and you intend to make that a part of your hobby or a small business at some point they're
gonna ask you how much you're charging and the better you prepare yourself for that conversation
the more confident you can be in quoting a price so the principles of this are very very simple
you have to look at two points of price the first one is what can you make money at how
what's the markup what's the price where you can make money and the other one is the price that the
customer is willing to pay and these may not be the same price at all if if the customer is not
willing to pay what you can make money at you shouldn't grow that plant and some of the best
plants to grow are the ones where you can make money at this level and the customer is willing to
pay quite a bit more so those are the principles involved here that sounds simple enough but let's
delve into them first let's talk about how you how you can tell if you can make money on a plant
the easiest way to calculate whether you're making money on a plant is to apply in a standard markup
to a known cost i'll give you the quick example let's say you bought a plant for five dollars
and you sold it for 10 that means you doubled it or you went to two times markup a two times markup
is typically across all of retail a decent markup to start looking at for any product you buy in and
resell i know that we're also going to talk about growing our own plants in this in this section but
let's just start with that simplest example that you bought something and you sold it so two a two
times multiple across retail is pretty standard or pretty reasonable in plants we try to go a
little bit higher than that the reason for that is because plants are a little bit more perishable
a little more time sensitive in nature you get a short season to sell them in and you have your
spring you have your summer but usually by fall people have come their attention has come off of
plants so you may get stuck with that plant over a longer period of time if you can't sell it in that
in that season in addition to that it takes effort and work to keep it in good condition and
if you have to hold it very much longer there are there is a chance that you will lose those plants
so you compensate yourself by making your multiple a little more than two times usually two and a
half times or three times so if you were taking a different example you bought a plant for two
dollars and you times it by two and a half you'd end up with five dollars as your selling price
and that in general is going to be enough to make sure that you're going to make money on that plant
every time okay so now you have the question of what if you grew your own plants because you know
we're plant geeks we'll grow our own plants we grow them from seed we grow them from cuttings
we grow them from divisions how do you cost those so you can take a bit of a shortcut here
and i'm going to describe the shortcut first and then we'll go into the detail of whether you had
to cost it yourself the shortcut would be that you look for a wholesale in your area that sells
the same or a similar plant in a similar size of pot and you apply their cost or what they would
charge you for that plant and then just times it by the same multiple so if you're buying a pot of
lavender in nine centimeters you're buying and you grew it yourself from seed but a wholesaler across
town sells it for three dollars then you would look and say well i'm going to sell that for 7.50
okay makes sense the next thing is if you have to determine cost now determining cost yourself
is a little tricky because most growers tend to underprice their own labor their own growing space
they really don't apply costs well and honestly this is this goes right up to large growers who
don't do a great job of costing their plants so i'm going to give you some some numbers here
some of them are very easy that you can determine from your own costs so you can determine from the
volume of soil how much you paid for the soil and how much went into that pot you can determine your
cost of your pot and if you bought a plug in then you could determine the cost of that plant input
taking those three together you can say i'm going to make an example here let's say you assumed i'm
just going to use round numbers that you paid 10 cents for the pot you paid 10 cents for the soil
and you paid 30 cents for the plug so now your cost on that plant is 50 cents
so would you apply the multiple right now call that a dollar 25
no you wouldn't because there's a growing time involved too and for growing time you actually
have to apply a cost to that as well otherwise you're more or less saying that your growing space
and your growing efforts are an unlimited resource and you can if you don't cost them in like that
you're going to end up under pricing your plants and it may skew your business in the direction
of you doing a lot of extra work for not a lot of extra money so you have to apply a cost i'm
going to give you a cost here that is reasonable although it's not exact and and this is this is
hard to do because everybody has different growing situations but based on a study that
i read from 2006 and cost forward until now the average price for a grower per square foot week
of a nursery plant or young plant is somewhere around 50 cents per square foot week okay now
a tray and let's say we've got an 18 up tray like this guy here a tray like this takes up one
and a half square feet so for every week that this tray sits on a bench you should apply 75 cents of
cost to your to your plant so if i grew this tray for 10 weeks i should apply seven dollars and 50
cents across the tray and i would divide that by the number of plants and then i would get a
cost per square foot week applied to the plants of what i grew and then i can calculate that out to
add that to the other costs and give you your base price or your base cost so that you can multiply
that out to make your margin sorry that sounded complicated but you really do have to just get
your head around the fact that even if your costs are different than somebody else's you still have
to apply some cost to it and unless you are an accounting whiz uh you probably should just pick
a number uh that is reasonable and in this case i'm talking about uh 50 cents per square foot week
for your plants and apply that across and to the number of weeks that your plants live in your care
once you've applied that formula once you've come from a cost and you've gone up to your
your final profitable price you really shouldn't consider string below that even if your customers
are only willing to pay a little bit less than that that should be a warning to you that this is
not a profitable plan you can grow it for yourself if you'd like but you shouldn't be growing it for
resale to your customers because they're just not willing to pay a price that's going to make you
any money i did another video on how to choose plants for your nursery business i will link
that one up above here it is a little bit more in detail on this about how to choose plants
but the the basics of it is you don't want to choose the common stuff as a small grower you
don't want to choose the common stuff that the bigger growers will beat the hell out of you on
so the idea on this is that customers actually do know some prices they don't know all of them
but on the common items if you went down to walmart and you were buying a pack of pansies
for 1.99 once that price is in their head it's a very common item they're not going to pay more
than that price for the same pansies from you so at that point if you can't produce them for
far less than that if you can't double double and a bit your price and still make money on
it you shouldn't grow that plant and that's that goes across a whole wide range of plants
now there is a little bit of room in the idea of rarity or scarcity so if you go and you find
items that are a little bit less well-known a little bit special a little bit interesting
you can increase your your markup generally and you'll find customers who are willing to pay a
little bit more for it i'll give you an example here is that i have this clematis and i this is
a clematis integrofolia doesn't look like much right now mongolian bells is the cultivar i grew
it from seed and i don't see anybody else on the market having it so if in this size other
people were selling perennials for ten dollars i might consider lending it a premium up to twelve
dollars or fourteen dollars based on this item not being very common so that's the idea here is
that you can sometimes take advantage of a little bit of this thing of if you're good at choosing uh
uncommon items or putting items out there that are a little more scarce then you can charge a little
bit more of a premium and your customers won't mind that quite so much because there's nothing
to compare it to now as for how figuring out what the market is willing to bear on these things
you're going to have to do some shopping around on that and i i assume as a plant lover you're
going to shop around your local nurseries it doesn't hurt to pull out your smartphone
and uh and just take pictures of prices of any items you would be considering selling
and see what they charge for it uh and then compare that back to your own varieties are
your items the same items in the same sizes well then you have a price that's a comparable price
if your items are a little more scarce or a little uh more interesting you might charge a bit of a
premium on that you can also go online and look at online stores and see what people are selling
you do want to try the apples to apples comparison sometimes online stores that ship across the
country are in a bit of a different price league than what your local sellers would be and so you
have to keep that in mind as well but you know there's no better way to figure this out than to
shop all right thanks for watching the video today on how to price your plants for sale i wish you
best luck on that if you have any questions or a conversation that you'd like to make
on how to price your plants for sale love to hear from you drop that in the comments below the video