Top 5 Tactics to Reclaim Time on Your Farm
As an Independent Farmer, you manage a variety of demanding tasks while looking to balance time for family and friends. As your Farm grows, operations can become more time-consuming, limiting your availability to complete work on the Farm. With limited time, efficiency is key to scale and manage your business. Here are five tactics successful Farmers have implemented to ditch the office work and save 20-30 hours of work every month.
Simplify Your Farm With Automation
No one calls Amazon to place an order. The same is true for your Farm. Buyers want to make a purchase on their own time from their phone, computer or tablet. With Farm e-commerce software you can provide a 24/7 hassle-free experience for Buyers. Tracking orders on spreadsheets, email or text can be a constant source of stress and drain your valuable time. Streamline your efforts with software that does the work for you. With Barn2Door, orders, payments, inventory, customer details and delivery preferences are all updated automatically with the click of a button.
Real Time Inventory Sync: Keep your product inventory organized and up-to-date with real time inventory syncing. Whether Buyers’ complete a purchase online or in-person, items will be automatically deprecated to keep your inventory accurate and up-to-date. Saving you the hassle of manually tracking your inventory on a spreadsheet or clipboard after every purchase.
Pick-and-Pack List: Streamline product picking and simplify order fulfillments by automatically aggregating items needed to be assembled. With automated pick lists, your harvest team can pull inventory from the fridge, freezer or field, and then use pack lists to assemble each order. Pick and pack lists can be sorted with the click-of-a-button by date(s), buyer type or fulfillment. Simplifying your inventory pick and pack efforts will help your Farm run in a more timely and efficient manner.
Delegate Farm Tasks
Successful Farmers don’t attempt to tackle everything on their own. It is impossible to be an expert in every area of your business while managing all your Farm tasks. Instead, leverage employee and community help to reduce burnout, and behind-the-scenes professionals to help manage the details. Explore strong skill sets of your family or friends to identify areas they can assist you. Leverage the expertise of an accountant and software vendors to better organize your business - its tax deductible. Whether that would be drafting your newsletters, managing the books, or advertising email sign ups at the local farmers market. Additionally, during harvest and delivery days, you might be surprised how many loyal Buyers will volunteer to assist your Farm at no cost.
Hiring Part-time: Many Farms find that fulfillments take a large bulk of their time. Whether it is managing the pick-up location or delivering to Buyers doorsteps, hiring a part-time employee to work 1-2 days a week will save you hours of work.
Leverage Domain Experts: Fees paid to accountants, bookkeepers and lawyers are tax-deductible. The same is true of your business software for e-commerce, email and accounting. Save hours of time and gain peace-of-mind by leveraging expert people and products to support your Farm business.
Sell Out Before Harvest
Aligning harvest dates with same-day fulfillments will streamline your order schedule, reduce your labor costs and keep your Farm out of the freezer business. Successful Farms leverage pre-orders to get ahead of the busy season and boost profit margins. No matter the season, knowing Buyers have paid upfront assures your Farm can move products when the time arrives, while increasing near-term cash flow.
Pastured Proteins: Schedule your pick-up from the processor in the morning, then pack and run fulfillments that same afternoon to deliver the freshest product to Buyers, while reducing the demand for freezer space.
Produce Farms: Plan your harvest schedule well in advance, then shift your pick crews to gather products early in the morning, then pack and fulfill orders that afternoon for purchases that are already on the books.
Dairy Farms: Send out Order Reminders each week, including an “order cut-off” date for Buyers, to drive urgency and sell-out your inventory prior to fulfillments (3-5 days in advance). This will provide you with a buffer time to fulfill and prep orders ahead of delivery day.
Make Sales Anytime, Anywhere
Make it easy for Buyers to access your products by linking your Online Store across all channels (website, social media, email, and newsletters). This removes friction in the buying process, creating easy ways to shop your Farm store. Successful Farmers also leverage in-person avenues to establish relationships, expand their market reach, and convert new Buyers to repeat purchasers.
Local Markets: Participating at local Farmers Markets, or pop-up events, where you can also form partnerships with other businesses will boost your in-person sales. This also becomes another avenue of marketing, saving your Farm time and boosting Buyer demand.
“Local Loop”: Increase your Farm’s exposure in your local community where prospective Buyers frequent regularly. Local businesses, churches and schools are venues where many Buyers engage weekly, making them convenient venues for local pickups (while increasing brand awareness).
Listen: Building Farm Partnerships in your Community’s Local Loop
Simplify Your Product Mix: “Pinned Items”
Buyers suffer from decision fatigue and become too overwhelmed to make a purchase when presented with too many options. Successful Farmers can increase conversion by limiting their inventory items to no more than 55 products and assembling “Pinned Items” at the top of their online store (of their most valuable products). Up to 60% of Buyer purchases will come from the Top 3-5 pinned items. This placement creates a timely Buyer experience to quickly recognize and purchase Farmer-recommended products.
Bundle Boxes: Move more products by assembling bundles of similar or complementary products. For instance, a protein, produce or dairy box designed to satiate the weekly or monthly expectations of a given product. To entice Buyers, get creative assembling bundle boxes that tap into holidays or seasonal events (e.g. “Game Day Grill Box”).
Subscriptions: Offer several products on a subscription basis, featuring those items at the top of the storefront (also known as a “Pinned Item”). Subscriptions can provide year-round cashflow - without added effort. Saving you the time of chasing down individuals for one-time-purchases every week of the year.
Conclusion: Ditch The Boring Office Work
Farmers are one of the hardest-working groups of individuals, but they can’t do it all. No Farmer has extra time on their hands. As you tend to the land, animals, and soil, your time increasingly becomes one of your most precious assets (not to mention time off with your family and friends). By leveraging e-commerce software to automate the order experience, delegating tasks and simplifying your product mix, you can ditch the office work and focus on serving your own needs on the Farm.
Barn2Door offers software for Independent Farmers to make more money, ditch the office work and look like a pro. If you’re curious to learn more, watch this 5-minute video.