Hi good morning it's Jason from Fraser Valley rose farm a while back somebody
challenged me to talk about some of the biggest mistakes that I've made in
starting my plant nursery here and happy to do so I take pretty healthy attitude
towards making mistakes so I'm going to post on the screen the five
biggest mistakes that I've made in running and starting my plant nursery so
you can just get an idea what I'm going to talk about and you can skip to the
one that maybe you're most interested in hearing about so let me say a few things
about this first of all is that I don't feel bad about making mistakes not at
all I think that making mistakes means you're working the problem and there's
lots of problems to solve when you're starting a business so I don't mind
making mistakes in fact most of these mistakes are things that have benefited
me along the way they produce something in my business and again making that
mistake right now just means I haven't found a better way of solving the
problem of my business or growing my business so I'm happy to make the
mistake in the meantime second thing I'll say is you'll notice that most of
these problems are not things that are related directly to the plants which is
funny for a plant business but it's true usually if you've under watered
something over fertilize something killed something with kindness prune
something at the wrong time these are not big mistakes in your business
they're things you have to learn but they don't usually cost you a lot of
money the mistakes that are more serious are the ones that have to do with
managing your expenses managing your sales and just the whole business end of
running the business all right now you've had a look at the list I'm going
to proceed on to number one here and it's actually one then I'm working on
solving today the first big problem I'm going to talk about today is a doozy
it's something that's a real threat to my business a mistake that I've made of
relying too much on a single market or a single customer for all of my plant
sales and it's come back recently to bite me in the butt pretty hard it's
sort of the equivalent of the of the idiom "don't put all of your eggs in one
basket" and that's what I did so let me tell you a little bit about how I got to
this point in my business and then how I'm going to try to solve it so when I
first started growing plants on a very very small scale just out of my suburban
backyard I didn't know where to sell my plants I would certainly have too small
a scale to consider wholesale ordering I did a little bit of on
listings on Craigslist to try to sell them online but the way I've had the
most traction in the way I had the most success was to go through local farmers
markets I went to local farmers markets and a couple of specialized plant sales
locally here and that worked out great I mean it gave me access to new customers
it gave me access to direct market feedback so I knew what people wanted to
buy hands-on as they talk to me and what prices worked so it was a fantastic step
in growing my business but the problem was that and I think I knew this on some
level that it's a bit tenuous I mean you'd go to the farmers market one week
and have a great week of sales it could be raining the next week and now your
week of sales is done for and you were really at the mercy of the way that the
farmers markets and these events managed their businesses so sometimes one of my
primary markets move locations and we lost a lot of customers that way so
you're really not able to control all the variables of your business
I think I knew that this was a problem and so for the past couple of years I've
been doing a little bit more on posting on Facebook on Craigslist and also on my
online store so I did an experiment of selling plants by online ordering across
Canada for shipping last year which worked out ok so I knew that there was a
problem here but I didn't know how big the problem was that I guess it didn't
come to roost until this year when I guess you can guess the punchline of
this but the pandemic has wiped out those local markets I had no longer have
a farmers market I can go to I no longer have a plant sale I can go to I have no
place to sell my plants so I talked about this recently and of course I'm
not taking this lying down I doubled down immediately on that
online store which had initially only been set up for selling plants across
Canada by mail-order ok the next thing I did was I started
listing all of my local plants for local pickup now I have to say my initial set
up on this is rudimentary the pictures are public domain pictures basically the
descriptions are quick like as quick as I could put them in and not all of my
plants are even on there yet but push everything through really fast and
arranged this with my customers and today is the day when it gets to pay off
so I posted this about two weeks ago and people have been placing order since
then and today I've set up the plants for a self-serve pickup along the side
of my parking lot each one a little bit of space that people don't have to be in
each other's space while they're picking up their plants we also put out some
plants there for opportunity sale if people wanted to buy something for five
dollars just just they're here to pick things up so it did a little bit of a
plant sale set up but nothing so big that would count as a crowd and
everybody can come on their own time over a four hour period
so the initial sales results on this we're fantastic I have to say a couple
of things that were awesome are that I could get this going earlier than the
farmers markets most of my farmers markets don't start until May I could do
this at the middle of April which was a big advantage to me second of all I
didn't have to pack everything up into a van I could just pull the items that
people had ordered and so I'm only handling things that people have paid
for which is like fantastic it didn't take up a lot of setup it didn't take a
lot of take down I didn't have to pay a vendor fee or a an annual membership to
a farmers market to sell this way I did have to pay PayPal a two and a half
percent fee for processing the payments so I did have some money going out there
but the financial results on this one I don't mind discussing openly we're
actually better than my first week of the farmers market last year I and that
may have to do with timing you may have to do with people not having other
outlets to buy their plants but I ended up doing I'm gonna put this in US
dollars because that's where most of my customers are I ended up doing somewhere
in the range of about $800 a US in my first plant sale for the year which for
me for one day is a really good day of sale so I'm not gonna say I have it
fixed yet but I'm well on the path to diversifying the way that I sell my
plants and if the plant selling events come back later I'll consider those on a
case-by-case basis but I think I'm on the way to a solution to my first
mistake my number two mistake is having to do with spending
money on equipment and supplies right up front maybe even before you've proven
the concept so when I first started my business one of the first things I did
is I took a big trip out to the horticultural store and I bought myself
a big bin of rooting hormone a big container of disinfectant I got myself
some sticky cards I even went to a different place I got myself a whole
bunch of brand-new plastic pots I really spent a lot of money right up front a
couple thousand dollars right up front just on the enthusiasm of starting a new
business later on when I went into tomatoes same thing repeated the mistake
went and bought myself a fancy produce scale and got myself some packaging for
selling those cut flowers again flower preservative I built myself a flower
cooler which cost me some money so all of these things are a byproduct of my
enthusiasm for growing the business but I really wish in some of those cases
that I'd held off and taken the more natural approach to growing these needs
or these getting these supplies as the needs presented themselves in my
business I mean as it turns out using used plastic pots is not a problem in my
business my customers don't bat an eye at somebody's old label sitting on the
side of a pot or a bit of broken plastic or dirty plastic not a problem and so I
could have saved myself some money there I don't know that I actually ever needed
flower preservative for the amount of cut flowers that I was doing and for the
for the expectations of the customer of how long they would last is just a
backyard bouquet so there were lots of reasons why I should have held off but
my enthusiasm got the best of me you know natural in the business I think
I'll forgive myself on that one number three mistake is a really really
common one both for me and for the industry itself it's overproduction
it's hard to make money on something if you have to end up throwing it away and
honestly it the hazard here is really a lot more pronounced on those things that
are cheap and easy to produce so I made a video on that topic which I'll link up
above but something that just because it's free or cheap or easy to make
doesn't mean that you should plot a thousand of them and it's easy to get
into this fallacy of okay so if I make a couple dollars on each of these and I'm
a hundred will only only make $200 but if I make a thousand then I make $2,000
not carrying it through two if I sell it if I sell it is a big if and I've made
this mistake on last year I made a bunch of Violas I made trays and trays of Violas
and and grew them beautifully but what I didn't take into account is that by the
time I show up at the farmers market because they don't really start until
May I only really have one or two markets to sell through these people get
sick of Violas it's sort of an early season crop and I ended up having to
throw a whole bunch of those away easy to propagate plants like gooseberry I've
made the mistake on those ones there I've made mistakes on all sorts of
plants by seed seed is super easy to start cheap and then that encourages you
to do big numbers which of course in my case I couldn't move through with the
small markets I'm going to so I would say overproduction has been a big
mistake and I'm trying to keep it down now my mistake number four was
continuing to grow a crop after it stops making financial sense and I have a
story to go along with this one it has to do with me growing tomatoes so the
strategy behind growing tomatoes was that I had early spring plant sales at
the farmers markets and that was working fairly well for me but by June and July
people were less interested in plants but I still wanted to be out there
showing my plants to customers I still wanted to be making some sales to add
money to my business so what I decided to do was to grow tomatoes so that I
could be there at the farmers markets still interacting with my customers and
at first it was a roaring success it was a good hole in the market there weren't
a lot of people at my farmers market that were selling tomatoes and my sales
were fantastic and things were going along really really well then it stopped
making sense quite so much what happened was there was another competitor in the
at the farmer's market who has gets government funding for growing their
plants now know no insult to that grower here I guess if if they get government
funding they're gonna do what makes sense for for their business but what
ended up happening is they went into Tomatoes pretty heavily and it cut down
my sales dramatically then a third petter moved in who had other Tomatoes
well I mean what had started out as something that made a lot of sense with
me as the only guy there who consistently had tomatoes at the market
ended up with two other competitors one of which had a distinct financial
advantage because they were getting funded by the government and I guess I
could get all bitter here and say oh you know the government shouldn't be funding
farmers against farmers or something like that
but in the end the onus is on me to make sense of what plants I should be growing
and what things I shouldn't be growing I stuck around in Tomatoes as the sales
dwindled and I really wish I'd pulled the plug on that as soon as it started
down sliding I could have focused my efforts on something made a little more
sense in my business instead of staying with something that I was putting in a
lot of effort and not getting a lot of return my fifth business mistake has to
do with pricing and in my case it's more on the end of underpricing rather than
over pricing although really the lesson should be the price appropriately to
your market I know in my case that I have a bias that I'd like to see my
customers getting a really really sharp value so they have no hesitation and
making that plant purchase now the other end of that equation would be that if
you price a little bit higher you can be sure that you're gonna get the maximum
value for the plants that you're growing and because I'm growing specialty plants
that are not easy to find I'm using doing a lot of rare and uncommon roses
roses that are not easily found in the market that I should actually keep that
a little bit on the high end so that people who are willing to pay a little
bit more pay a little bit more and maybe have a few more of the common items at
the lower price points that's what I'm working on right now believe it or not
when I started selling roses in a gallon pot I was doing it about $10 a pot
currently at about 18 which I still think represents a fair value but I have
some rather uncommon plants perennials and other things like that but I'm still
under pricing but fair bit and so I'm working on that problem right now I
think the fact that I'm selling things online a little bit more is giving me
some more flexibility to adjust that pricing and see what the price points
are that people are most interested in and will accept for their plants so I'm
going to use that tool to improve my pricing strategy all right
that's all I have for you today on the mistakes that I've made in
growing my plant business my backyard nursery if you have questions or if
you'd like to share some of the mistakes that you've made drop those in the
comments below I'm sure every would love to hear that thank you so much