Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and I've talked before in my videos about how to
take a backyard nursery like this one and try to turn it into a viable business so you can support
yourself or add to your income with it this is a topic that goes along with it: the question
of when should you leave your day job to make your side hustle a full-time thing and i'm struggling
with that one myself so normally my videos are more or less instructional in nature or maybe the
odd opinion this one's a little different because i don't know the answer to this one
i don't know when is the right time to leave my day job and come and work on the farm full-time
when should i make a go of it and in that regard it's the people in the internet people on youtube
who may have some more experience than i do i'm sure i'm not the first person to go through this
whether it's in gardening or farming or whether it's somebody who wants to start their own
restaurant or hair salon when is the time that you feel comfortable enough that you can make
the transition? How much preparation do you have to have done? How much income do you need
to have? so i'm going to talk about that today i'm going to do that while i pot some roses
i'm doing that for two reasons one because i have some roses to pot and number two
it's kind of an old youtube trick to keep your hands doing something and keep yourself moving
so that people have something to watch while you're talking about a topic these are some david
austin roses that i'm putting into pots and i'll talk about that as i go so i actually saw this on
one of my youtube groups recently that somebody uh i was a little jealous actually of the question of
somebody saying i've i've i'm doing it i'm quitting my day job i'm going to go and make my
farm a full-time business and in that case i think they were talking about veggie veggie farming
but you know same thing same question you know when is the right time to quit that job and
and i've struggled with that a little bit i actually took a long transition in my life moving
from retail management in an unrelated field over towards growing plants for a living and
that's what i do in my day job in the meantime i started this farm as kind of a side hustle
and it's always been my hope that at some point this farm can be my main thing and it's not that
i hate what i'm doing now i like growing plants i like the challenges of that job but ultimately
it's not it's not my own plants it's not my own decision making and just while we talk here i'm
just going to trim off some of the blackened tips on these bare root roses sometimes when they come
to you they come with uh like the machine or the people who have harvested it have just
thrashed off the tops of the roses and that leaves little blackened sections across the top so i'm
just going to remove those as we go here just to get a nice clean presentation once i potted and
should help it to to recover a little bit better i don't do a whole lot of pruning on the root
end unless i see that something is broken so you probably see me concentrating on just taking off
the tips as i see necessary but you probably won't see me do too much with the roots of the roses
uh and just one other note on that while i'm talking about the roses again is that normally my
roses in the greenhouse my my own propagated roses i put into a sort of a two gallon uh pot like this
one here uh because these are kind of a deluxe brand the david austin roses i'm gonna be putting
them into a three gallon pot that kind of ensures that i could put the entire root system into the
pot without having to trim the root system which is a is a good thing as far as the success in the
garden later so like i say you know it's not that i hate my day job it's not that i hate
what i'm doing right now but you know it's not my own decision making it's not my own business
and i think that's the same thing i'm going to use the analogy of people who start their own
hairdresser or restaurant or those kinds of jobs it's not that necessarily you would hate being a
head chef in somebody else's restaurant it's just that it's not your restaurant well that's the way
i feel about my business is you know i've gone as far as i can i think in producing plants for
somebody else and now i think it might be time to start planting and growing a business for my own
benefit and so that's what i'm looking to do right now but the steps that i had to take to get to the
point where i feel ready for that um have been you know along along the lines of trial and error i've
had to try to figure out you know what is what do i have to accomplish so i can feel comfortable
to uh to make my own uh to make my own way on this and i have to say the first thing i did and i made
a video about this as well is the first thing i did was i made uh i made a trial of the market
i learned how to sell my plants and i think this is always the first step so i'm just pushing this
down a little bit and tamping it down to get the soil to settle as i fill up the pot so this is the
i feel like i'm making two different videos here but this is the level that i usually put it to
is that the graft union is just about at the soil level and that's what i feel good about
it and then just a little bit of tapping down to make sure that the soil has settled
okay back to the topic at hand um you know i i made a video and i i think this is the way to
start your business is to prove your sales is to figure out what is the what what will the public
buy of your plants and at what prices and where is your market so i started out at the farmers market
selling plants relatively inexpensively just to random customers who were there
for buying veggies and that kind of thing it was an okay approach but eventually i realized that
speaking to garden clubs and going out and having plant sales and going to the
plant-specific events were a slightly better approach for me and so i focused my efforts
in that direction and ultimately i spent some efforts on social media marketing things like
what i'm doing on youtube here uh also facebook and uh facebook marketplace um
craigslist uh instagram all of those types of marketing have helped me to grow my business so
now i have that step one that proof of concept that there is people who want to buy my plants
and then the next thing i have to do is proof of concept of can i produce the plants can i can i
can i actually grow what i want to sell now that part actually was a nice easy step for me because
i've grown plants professionally now for a number of years so i actually have a lot of confidence
that i can grow the plants successfully so that part uh is not something i had to worry
about quite so much but honestly if you're if you're starting your own business like this
so i've got a crossing branch here i have to take out if you're starting your own business
like this that's the second thing you'll probably have to prove to yourself is that you are able to
produce the plants that and so you have to learn all the propagation steps and take a couple of
crops through their full cycle and make sure you can produce a good quality crop get familiar with
the challenges that you have what are the pests what are the times of year that give you a little
bit of quality issues with your plants that kind of thing the third thing that i would talk about
is then try to fix your processes so you've taken care of your sales you've you've proven
your sales you've proven your plant growing skills the third thing would be to prove your processes
and by processes here i mean if you have you know if you're shipping things if you're shipping
plants like i'm doing a lot of shipping today and i'll maybe insert a video here a short clip of
our shipping process but we do a lot of shipping across canada here and it's taken a little while
for us to figure out what is the right process for that shipping how does how do we make that work
uh in our in our business and so uh that took us two to three years of trialing it i think we've
got it down pretty good now but obviously we're gonna have to continue to improve that process
but even other processes like accounting you know figuring out how you how you maintain your bills
and how you're trying to keep track of things um you know all of the processes around how you mean
manage your your greenhouses or your facilities so those are the three steps that i've taken
they aren't they aren't necessarily written down anywhere by anybody else as just the steps you
would do to prepare yourself but you know again prove your sales improve your plant growing skills
prove your processes try to get your your business sort of under control a little bit
before you try to take that final step but now this is the part that i have the problem with
and it's the part that i have to ask you about is when is the right time to make that move i mean
everybody has financial obligations they have to try to live up to in my case you know i have a
couple of uh a couple of kids still living with me i'd like to be able to contribute to their college
i still have financial obligations to do with house and farm so it would be irresponsible of
me to not think or ask the question anyway what is the right amount of revenue or income that i will
need to make this work now i did a video a while back where i talked about how to price your plants
and pricing your plants came down i gave you a formula in that video where you have
to go somewhere above two times the cost of the plant preferably in the plant business
in the range of two and a half to three times the cost the the direct cost of your plant uh to make
sure that you're making money doing that using that same kind of formula or that same kind of
thinking let's say you marked your plants up by two and a half or three times and you divided
that into three sections one part would control would cover the cost of producing the plant
the second part could cover uh overhead and other expenses in your business marketing expenses and
so on and the third part would be going towards your income let's just put it there that way
as a simplified version of what it would look like in that case what you'd end up having is
if you want to insure yourself an income and i'm just pulling a number straight out of the air here
but if you want to ensure yourself an income of about 60 000 from the business you'd have to sell
180 000 worth of plants and you know i've been growing my business for a number of years
and i have to say i'm nowhere near 180 000 worth of plants right now uh it would take me another
well here's the thing i'm balancing my time working full-time in a business elsewhere how
do i get to the point where i can feel like i can make this leap of faith where i can move up from
you know 50 000 worth of sales and push it straight up to 180 000 worth of sales
and the funny bit is that in working at the farmers market i've run across other growers
especially the veggie growers who take bigger risks than this all the time i've seen them
people come into the business like yep just going straight forward i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna go
ahead and develop my farm in one year i don't have to prove my market i don't have to prove
my processes i don't have to prove that i can grow the things i'm just gonna go straight for it and
go for uh you know a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of produce straight away and i
have to say i have all the respect in the world for people who jump in like that with both feet i
mean that's that's impressive that they're able to do that um i don't have the constitution for it so
uh for me i had to move my sales up into that 50 000 range uh and now i'm considering what is the
next step and and so this is the part i have to ask you know other people who have made this leap
before if you've made this leap from your side job or from your main job into your side hustle
you know how did you evaluate what how much money do you need to make or what's the
you know if you're at a quarter of what you need or if you're at half of what you need
how do you have that confidence that you can make that next jump where if i quit
my job today and i went full board propagating plants and i went full bore into buying plants
how would i know that there's going to be enough there in my business to support me and my family
in a year from now or two years from now how much time do i give myself to do that so i could use
your help on that one i don't have the answer that i'm just giving you my considerations here
is first i prepared my business for it and now i'm sort of in that spot where i have to wonder
okay if i gave up the day job and all of its income you know what would that leap of faith
look like to me so that's where i'm going to leave you on this i don't ha this is one of those videos
where i don't have the answer for you i just can give you the considerations the questions and uh
and maybe you can join me in the comments below and give me some of your answers or what you think
is the right step right time to ditch the day job and move into full-time farming or full-time into
your side hustle and i would really appreciate that feedback thanks so much for watching