From Homesteading to 6-Figure Farm Business
Erica Benoit shares how she transitioned from a "bare-bones" lifestyle to building a thriving, six-figure protein operation. Learn how the Benoit family utilized automated systems and rigid budgeting to de-risk their business and achieve the dream of farming full-time
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go to podcast for do it yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand and sell online and in person.
Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Janelle Maiocco: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle, CEO of Barn2Door, and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners are aware, Barn2Door has built software for independent farmers all across the country who want to remove the middleman and sell directly under their own brand.
This helps them maximize their profits, has a system in place that makes [00:01:00] it easy for buyers to order from them online and in person, and helps them automate things like inventory, order management and make sure they have effective and efficient marketing to maximize sales. It's a lot, but it's a system to run a business.
We help them promote their brand, build up that loyal base of local customers and automate as much of the busy work as possible. Very excited for today. We're talking to Erica from Benoit Family Farmstead in Missouri. We get to dig into her story, really starting at the life before farming to becoming a farmer to really full-time farming and now even scaling up and growing their farm year over year.
It's been an incredible journey and story and I'm very excited to dig in. I think if I'm correct, Erica, 2025 was like last year, that's so close. But last year you eclipsed six figures. That was a big goal of yours and you achieved that.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Which is really crazy to say out loud. Yes.
Janelle Maiocco: I literally was like, I can say this out loud, right? Like it's a big milestone. It's huge.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. Five years ago I would've [00:02:00] never believed it, but yeah, very exciting.
Janelle Maiocco: So just for the sake of the audience, and we've had you on the podcast before, which I love and I love having you back 'cause you have so much to talk about and we already have ideas for the next but today let's listen to your story.
But before we even get started, just tell them a little bit about where you're from and what you are farming. The actual kind of farm today, and then we'll start at the beginning of life before farming.
Erica Benoit: So now we are doing, we have a small herd of Dexter beef that we only sell like whole and halves of those.
We do dirt raised hogs, we do pasture raised chicken. We do a little bit of eggs, but the meat is our biggest sellers that we do. 2025, we built an on-farm butcher shop. Which is under the 20,000 bird exemption. And so that means we're able to raise 20,000 poultry and butcher them on our farm and sell them through our store.
So attached to the butcher shop is a retail shop. So our retail store is only open Saturdays 10 to [00:03:00] two, and that's all we do. We completely eliminated all the deliveries. And then if somebody wants to come in during the week or something, they can shoot me an email or something and pop in.
But we really try to condense everything to make it as simple as possible this year.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. It's interesting though. The story often is, you need to cast a wide net to start and then you can start building in efficiencies.
And I know a lot of farms that actually are opposite. They use delivery to grow exponentially, right? So it's interesting to learn the various stories, but a lot of them, especially when you're scaling and growing, include how can I be more efficient? what from my timing, week over week, day over day, can I actually consolidate?
Which is really cool. But I feel like that's on the back end of the conversation. Let's go back. Now that we know you're having this great success to the very beginning, which was honestly like what was life before farming, and then what inspired you to be like, Hey let's go this route.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. So it was a complete accident, which is crazy. Me and Jared, we got married super young. I was 19, [00:04:00] he was 21. Got married. We were both working at a factory full time, just saving as much money as we could. So we got married in 2011, which was the same year I graduated high school.
Then in 2013 we had our first kid and I was a stay at home mom and then less than two years later, we had another kid. So during that time I was really getting into like homemaking and homesteading and trying to do as much as I possibly could. 'cause we were living on one income, so we had to be as cheap as we could.
And I had to learn so many skills to make sure I was able to stay home with my kids. And so right after our second was born. My grandma, she used to live where we are now. She was ready to move to town, so we swapped houses and we bought the farm from her which was pretty cool. We started out here wanting to be homesteaders.
We wanted to grow our own food. We just wanted to do, just a little bit, to have a big garden, chickens. And it just snowballed. In the moment, it seemed like it snowballed really slow, but looking back like it just snowballed so quickly. So that was 2015 [00:05:00] whenever we bought this farm.
It was just, it felt like just a couple of months later that my husband decided he wanted to get some pigs. So he calls up his friend. It was like two days later, there's pigs at my house. Which led us to like how can we make money off this farm? How can we make even more money to keep me home to get a steady income which we all know now that farming is not a great way to create cash quickly.
There was no plans. We just went right into it. So we had, gosh, we had up to like nine or 10 sows. We were getting incredible litters, like we just had pigs everywhere. We were selling feeder pigs. We started selling a few fat hogs. We had just had our little girl, so this was in 2017, and my husband got tusked by a boar and he was home alone with the two boys.
He ended up having 32 stitches in his leg. It was very dramatic. And so that was pretty scary to see how dangerous all of this was with our young kids. So we completely sold out of pigs. My dad had left a full-size herd here. Nothing that was being taken care of or anything.
It was just they were [00:06:00] here. So we sold all the full-size cows and I really wanted a milk cow. We compromised, meaning that I told Jared what I wanted to do, and that's what ended up happening. So we bought a herd of Dexter beef. They're half size cows. I was able to manage them myself.
They weren't nearly as risky, we felt like with kids around. And so that's how we pivoted to do the Dexter. We started just buying feeder pigs from a local farmer and reselling them, and that was how we kept the pigs long term. And then around 2020 it was hard to find feeder pigs.
They were super expensive. Lockers are filling up fast. There wasn't really any control on our end, so that's when we bought the sows and the boar and got back into the breeding side of it. And then 2019 is when we started doing butcher chickens. We ordered a hundred of 'em.
Again, we were very naive. We're like, we'll butcher 50 for our family and 50 for everybody else. And we'll sell half of 'em and that'll cover the cost of our chicken for the year too.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. Along the way you're like we thought we knew what we were doing, and then we did it.
And then we [00:07:00] realized we didn't know what we were doing, but we learned so much.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. We did. Gosh, we were not prepared at all. And so I think we probably lost 50 chicks overnight just 'cause we didn't know how to care for 'em in a brooder house. And I'd also started pre-selling them, and so I sold 50 of 'em overnight.
And thankfully most of those people were friends and people my husband worked with and people that knew what we were doing. And so it wasn't a big deal to be like, Hey, we don't know what we're doing and we don't have enough chicken. So that was a big learning curve.
But we ended up butchering 500 chickens that year in 2019. We were butchering chickens every other weekend, all summer long. We didn't have any for us 'cause we sold 'em all. So in November we finally got to butcher about 50 chickens for our family so we could have chicken to eat too.
But that was a crazy experience that many people were willing to buy that much chicken. Now, at that point it was super cheap chicken because we didn't know how to price them. But that really got us going. And I'm like, next year we're selling a thousand [00:08:00] chickens, which was the limit to butcher ourselves.
And then 2020 happened and everything was easy to sell in 2020. It was so easy. We had a thousand chickens sold two months. Before our last butchering, we didn't even have our last chicks on the farm yet, and they were all sold for. So that was pretty cool. And then that next year, 2021, it's like we just ran into a brick wall.
everybody's freezers were full and we couldn't get anything sold. That was so hard which led us to find you guys that year.
Janelle Maiocco: Wow, because you're asking yourself what's next. It's so interesting. I wonder, because there are certainly people who are starting farming today and interested, there's a lot of folks that are doing a great job homesteading.
I feel like you guys fell into it and figured it out and now it's a thing. But they were growing their farm, like you even said in 2019 before COVID. You sold out and of course that happened faster during COVID, but I wonder if you'd already discovered demand. That the demand was already there in the absence of COVID, it would've been [00:09:00] maybe less bumpy.
It might've been a little more of a natural growth. But still the demand was there.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. Or even like steady.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, steady.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. so like 2020 brought everybody out. people that have never supported us beforehand or since then, everybody was trying to find somebody with some sort of food.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. It accelerated in a really neat way. I love that because it helped accelerate opening up consumer's eyes to the fragility of the food system, which I think is incredibly positive. There was definitely momentum in that direction and I think that's one of the silver lining for that terrible set of years or experiences nationwide.
But I think having folks realize that buying local, knowing the source of your food, trusting the independent farmer too. I think there's a lot of that going on, which I think was actually healthy.
So you found us. So you had been doing that and you were like, okay, we need to regroup, because that was a weird, some people would call Black Swan event .Where it [00:10:00] just threw, even in the normal business world, I mean, I run a business too, like everybody, it was just a weird timeframe for everybody to navigate.
I think we all learned a ton. And there was a silver lining, but it was certainly not typical of navigating a new and growing business. So what happened then, at that reset you're coming back down to Earth. Life's starting to come back into focus again for everyone in a more routine way.
What was next? Because at that point you really were gunning for, we want to do this full time, we know we can make a business of it. There's clearly demand. And so is it at that point where you're thinking about scale.
Erica Benoit: Yes. So Jared didn't quit his job till 2024. So looking back about around probably the beginning of 2022 is when we realized we might actually be able to make, go at this and do this full time. Oh, also we had a baby in 2020, so that I
Janelle Maiocco: I think we're counting. You're at four?
Erica Benoit: I'm at four, yes. So very crazy life.
Our last chicken butchering was two weeks before our youngest was [00:11:00] born.
Janelle Maiocco: Oh my goodness. I bet those photos are amazing.
Erica Benoit: Oh, we probably should have took more pictures.
Janelle Maiocco: no time for that.
Erica Benoit: No time for that. No, that was, that was pretty crazy. actually, I wanna point out too, like I was trying to get into our local grocery store.
Get our chicken into there and try to get some sort of avenue. And so I used to work at that grocery store when I was a teenager, so I knew the guy that was there. And he told me, you're not really gonna do anything here. Nobody in our town's gonna wanna pay your price for chicken when it's so much cheaper.
They're in the meat counter like I was trying to sell out of the frozen area. And so he's like, you gotta go online. And looking back, I think he probably thinks that if you just put something online, it's just gonna sell and you don't have to work real hard to sell it.
But it's really hard to sell online too.
Janelle Maiocco: You still need buyers. We always tease isn't there like some old movie that's build it and they will come and we say, you can't just put something online. You're still a needle in a haystack like think of how many gazillion websites there are online.
You still need to help your buyers be aware that it is a great way for them to buy from you. And then once that starts to [00:12:00] catch on, that's great, but you have to help it catch on, right? Really, it comes down to an email list. I know you and I could talk about that for hours, but it's, I think healthy, what a great shift and a very honest realization that online there's not really a silver bullet to having customers fall out of the sky, even though that would be amazing and there is so much demand for food. And so arguably compared to other things people are selling, everybody eats every day. There's a huge high demand. Nine in ten people want local food, and so it's a beautiful opportunity, but you still have to catch those people and push them towards your store to make those purchases online.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. I don't think people really realize how much time and effort in the background that I'm doing, making all of our sales and doing the marketing and learning how to do all that. Yeah, there's a lot. So in roughly 2022 is when we're both hitting burnout too. We have worked so hard. He's working a full-time job. I'm home with four kids and we are both just scraping by. Like it was rough. It was [00:13:00] very hard. And so we started talking to uh, I'm a big Dave Ramsey fan. Most farmers, oh, they hate it when I say that name, but that's the only thing I've ever learned about money was Dave Ramsey.
That's all I knew at that point. And so we talked to one of his investors that teaches people how to invest. I walked in and I'm like, all right, we have this farm and I wanna make sure that this farm does not fail.
I want Jared to come home, but I wanna do everything I can to make sure that this business never fails. And he is like, you can't guarantee that a business isn't gonna fail. But me being me, I'm like we're gonna do everything we possibly can to get as close to this business will never fail as possible.
And so he really sat down and we made a list of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to feel before Jared made that commitment to stay home. And so that meant having six months worth of expenses in the savings account. I knew as soon as Jared came home that everything was gonna go wrong.
So I'm like, if we can plan ahead for everything going wrong, then maybe it will be fine.
Janelle Maiocco: You are a contingency [00:14:00] planner. I appreciate that. You're like let's de-risk this as much as possible. And to be fair, we have to just pause for one second because you're saying something really important here that I think is very important for any Farm to know, no matter what stage they're at, but including, especially if they're starting small and then going big and making it a viable, full-time farm, you have recurring income et cetera. And we certainly help farmers with that as well. But you certainly need to plan for that and make sure that you do have ways for recurring income.
And I know that we help a lot of people, subscriptions, for example. This is one of the ways that our software can help farmers have that recurring income, and it's made a big difference. But the important thing is its business. We often say farmers run a farm full-time, but they also run a business full-time.
it's so important to acknowledge that, right? Because if you're talking to a dentist or even like a brewery or a hairdresser or even a chef, they all are passionate about their craft, and whether you're growing food or making food or cutting hair or fixing [00:15:00] teeth, those are small business owners typically.
but they're doing their craft out of their heart. But there's also the reality of this as a business. I still have to pay all the bills. There's operating costs. I have to hire employees. I need equipment that, to your point, the tractor's gonna fail. I might have to fix something or build something new.
And so. it's really, I think, productive and positive to just pause on that reality of, You're running a farm and that's lovely, but you're also running a business at the same time, so the two full-time jobs that you have, which as working with Barn2Door is where we get very excited because we love to automate the whole business side of it for farmers as much as we possibly can.
That's where we're like, let us help, we'll help save you time and make it easier for those buyers to buy and help with all the business pieces of it that help alleviate some of that stress and pressure.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. Um, Yeah, the subscriptions, well, we'll go back to the investor guy.
We did six months of expenses saved up, putting a high yield savings. Do not touch it, I have to make that embarrassing phone call and [00:16:00] call the investor and be like, Hey, I need my money back. So that was helpful for me that I have to go through him in order to get that.
And so I haven't made that call. I still haven't made that call. That was very important to me. Another thing was what if we never get to save for retirement after he quits? Which seems like a silly thing, but we really bulked up his retirement account through his job to make sure that my goal was that we have enough in retirement that we can keep it in the 401k and if we never invest again, we still can retire.
Janelle Maiocco: I don't think that's silly. I think that's lovely.
Erica Benoit: It's something nobody thinks about. We're in our thirties but I really wanted that security that stuff can go wrong for the next 10 years and we're still gonna be able to retire. And we don't have to count on our farm like the value of our farm isn't part of our retirement.
it's all separate. So our kids, we can gift this entire farm to my kids and that's okay. We're not banking on the value of our farm. So that was really important to me too.
Janelle Maiocco: That is important. That's not a reality for all farmers out there. Some are probably getting [00:17:00] shivers.
Which I appreciate, and there's still ways to do that, right? It's not too late to keep thinking about these things. It might just be more of a longer term, plan or strategy for them to slowly chip away at. Yeah.
Erica Benoit: And like we were in our thirties, so we, I feel like sometimes I feel like our bodies are really wearing out, but we're still so young that we have so much time to create things and change things and.
And invest later. And so we're at like just a really good spot in our lives right now for everything that we're doing. Another thing was getting my subscriptions, that we had enough subscriptions, it got pretty close to paying my feed bill every month. So I knew that the feed bill was gonna be paid every month.
No big deal.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I remember you and I have talked about this before in a prior podcast, like It's your first, and maybe this isn't your very first milestone, but it's an important milestone, which is this is my operating cost for these animals, and when I clear that that's like a huge first hurdle.
And I think you lined up like you offered [00:18:00] subscriptions and then you had what a certain percent of your revenue actually was subscription based to the point where you knew your feed was covered.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. Or it got really close, feed costs are, it goes up and down every month, but.
I knew I had pretty darn close to the feed cost and just that security of knowing that,
I'm a huge budgeter. You have to be in this line of work. If you don't know where your costs are, you just keep losing.
Janelle Maiocco: I have a question for you, because that is a skill and a talent of yours. And you're not afraid to go there. But what if you're a farmer where it's like that numbers aren't your thing and you want to know the cost and you know you need to know them, but to some people that just feels like a black box or like a big overwhelm.
What would you recommend for those folks?
Erica Benoit: Yeah. Gosh, I just use a spreadsheet. Or I am just looking at the bank account pretty much every single day I'm in there.
I know what's going on. Even my schedule, like I have a calendar and each one of our bills that come out, it's written down on the calendar. And so I can look at the calendar and be like, okay, I need to make sure that I start selling my bulk hogs at this time. So the money is [00:19:00] deposited by this day.
So this bill gets paid.
Janelle Maiocco: So you have your bills due on your calendar for what you would say the year in front of you. Is that a good guess?
Erica Benoit: I just have a schedule, just like a, book.
And there's a calendar, like a full month's view. Every month I go through there and write when the electric bill, insurance, all those things that are set. I have that all written down. And then I just know, like when I need to make sure oh, we're low on money now. I need to make sure I get these hogs that are going in two months. Let's go ahead and start getting those sold so we have enough to pay those bills.
Seeing in advance of what's going on and not just looking at this is how much I have right now. Because, tomorrow or a week from now, that's totally different. So just not looking at, just today, but really looking at the full picture. Another thing is if you did your books and you realize that there was a time that I realized I was paying people to buy my stuff, like I was losing money on bulk Hogs for probably a year.
And I looked at it and I'm like, I might as well be handing them all a 50 bill right now. So that's a really hard reality.
Janelle Maiocco: That wasn't a good [00:20:00] day, was it when you discovered that?
Erica Benoit: No,
Janelle Maiocco: It was maybe not a great realization, but also at the same time, amazing information for you to make changes to make sure that you weren't paying to be a farmer at that point, right? You're like, no, this must be profitable. That's one of the reasons we love the subscriptions
We've had so many farms share stories about just knowing I have X dollars coming in weekly or monthly. And some people it's 20%. Some people it's 40, 50, even up to 80% of their sales and it's just. It's such a relief, a stress relief to know that they have that kind of baseline of their operating costs and their business covered in an ongoing capacity.
It's like the ongoing revenue matching, the ongoing operating costs. In parallel. so that's just, there's so much power in that. There's freedom in that.
Erica Benoit: Oh, yes. Which speaking of freedom, I forgot to add too. One of my things is we paid the farm off. I think it was maybe 2020, I think we made the last payment. So that was another big thing, was to keep all of our expenses as low as we possibly could. Heck, we didn't even have internet here until [00:21:00] probably 2022. I was using my phone hotspot that's 10 bucks and we didn't have any streaming services. We were bare bones on everything.
Janelle Maiocco: That's amazing. Yeah. Very disciplined. It's hard because you also, to your point, you're also anticipating hard lessons and things gone wrong. So even if you're the best planner in the world, sometimes it still goes sideways, right?
Erica Benoit: Yes.
Janelle Maiocco: I appreciate that.
Erica Benoit: Another thing that was really helpful is it seems like around that time of 2022, we know we can make the transition, but we just don't have everything quite lined up yet. I remember talking to Tom Bennett in our connect calls and he was talking about how he's got so many revenue streams.
He is doing fantastic. So I really looked up to him and one of the things was he was like renting out his trailer and making extra cash with that. So I was. What are all these other little revenue streams? Tell me more
Erica Benoit: Yeah.
Erica Benoit: I know, but my trailer doesn't have lights on it.
it doesn't even have a jack on it. [00:22:00] Like you gotta use a super dangerous jack to jack it up. it is not something you wanna rent out. And so I had to really focus like, I can make enough on our farm and stop adding in things like quit trying to go here and there and that wasn't focused on what we should be focused on? We have enough things here, we can make a living on what we have. Let's really make sure what we're doing is profitable.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you shared that because there are sometimes so many good ideas and by the way, for all of you listening, Tom Bennett is in addition to Erica. They are both farm advisors to and they host office hours for other farmers, which is called the Connect program, which is what Erica was just referring to. So Erica also hosts them. And that's just part of when farms are part of the Barn2Door ecosystem using the software to run their business.
That they have access to. And sometimes you're, you get great ideas, but 10 out of 10 times they don't fit your farm. And so it's so good to flush out all the ideas, but then try to distill [00:23:00] it down to if it makes sense for your farmer, not. And you might try it and be like, no it doesn't.
Or you might try it and be like, yes it does. But I love that you recognized all these great ideas, but also that they might not all, they might be too much. You might be trying to quote unquote boil the ocean, which in business is a real way to sink. It really truly is if you try to do things shallow and wide versus deep and well, sometimes you can burn out or you can spread yourself too thin in any capacity, whether it's from a time perspective, revenue perspective et cetera.
So that's a powerful lesson. Thank you for sharing that.
Erica Benoit: I feel like farmers, we do that all the time. Like we see somebody on social media, they're doing pasture raised chicken and pastured eggs and they have raw milk and they got this whole long list of stuff and they're probably not making money either.
we really need to focus on what we're good at and not string ourselves so thin everywhere. And what works on other farms isn't gonna work on our own farm. So in roughly 2023 is when I [00:24:00] was like, all right, we're gonna sit down and the farm is gonna pay us, and the farm is gonna pay for all the things that are farm related.
And so, the book Profit First, which was recommended by Tom Bennett, excellent book. So we started paying ourselves. It wasn't much, it was probably like a hundred dollars a week or something, something really small. But it was the intention that we are gonna pay ourselves and the farm is gonna pay for itself and we're not gonna dump any more money of our own into the farm.
And so we had to be very intentional. It paid for all of my gas. Just for my deliveries, all the things. And so it worked out. It was like the craziest year that, hey, that actually worked out. And so that was really when we could really see in the books. Jared can be home.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you might not believe this. But that's part of my story at Barn2Door as well. I worked for three years starting Barn2Door as a volunteer. And my husband actually works with me too and he's like, we've gotta figure out that you get paid too, right?
We have to pay ourselves as we're growing Barn2Door. Because that's partly sometimes how you build a company. [00:25:00] You're like, I will volunteer because I believe in this so much. And in this case, wanting to help folks like you all across the country have success, right? But you don't make profit on day one, right?
You have to build the product first. You have to get the oars in the water and everything else. So I remember that too. We paid ourselves. I had an intern who I paid $11 an hour for some time. He was the only one paid. Until there was a point where, we too started to pay ourselves very nominally as well.
But, absolutely relating to so much of what you're saying, and people might not think that's true in a non-farming situation, but it is when you're starting a company in other instances as well. It's just a constant learning curve, and staying organized with your time and being smart and to your point, trying to continue to make good decisions based on all the lessons that you're handed day after day.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. So I guess we can fast forward a little bit to 2024.
Janelle Maiocco: You're tracking your timeline. You're doing such a good job. I can't even believe it and I love that because you've learned so much, and here we are, you're paying yourselves even if it's nominally at first.
But you did it. [00:26:00] And that was 2024.
Erica Benoit: Yeah.
Janelle Maiocco: Now the fun begins, right? Your children are helping with chores, I hope, at this point.
Erica Benoit: Yes we homeschool too, so they don't leave the house much like they are just stacking cash left and right.
Janelle Maiocco: No kidding. It's so neat. And then they get to learn to budget and those are such beautiful lessons. And they learn responsibility. We could digress on that all day long, but I, I think the world would be such a better place. If every kid worked on a farm, I'm just gonna say that once, but I'm such a big believer that the responsibility and the confidence and just the air outside and caring for other animals there's just so many layers of goodness.
Erica Benoit: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's a whole nother podcast.
Janelle Maiocco: I know. I was just like We'll digress on that one later, but Oh, okay.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, I had just had a mom in one of the Connect calls asking about how to getting kids involved
Janelle Maiocco: Oh, we're definitely doing a podcast on that. Okay. We'll put a feather in that one.
So this is fun because now you've taken us through the whole journey and here you are, [00:27:00] 2024, turning a corner. So tell us about 2025.
Erica Benoit: So 2024 is when Jared quit his job. And just as I predicted everything was gonna go wrong. So he quit about a month before we started butchering chickens.
And our first chicken butchering, we had 200 chickens. They were in the freezer just like we do every single year. And the freezer didn't keep up, so we lost over $4,000 worth of chicken and most of it was pre-sold. So we had at least, probably over half of that was already pre-sold. I took a day to absorb. Everything was going on. I was not gonna email everybody whenever I was distraught. I didn't have a plan, so I waited till I had an exact plan. I knew exactly what to do. I had called like our meat inspector.
Everything was working. I knew exactly what we were gonna do to fix the problem. And so like the next day I emailed everybody, let 'em know, Hey, I promised you guys I was gonna have this chicken. The freezer did not keep up with cooling the chicken. And so we just set everything back a month.
And they were supposed to get their chicken June through October. They got their chicken July through [00:28:00] November, and nobody cared.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. So much. Oh,
Erica Benoit: nothing happened. It was just fine. I think that was the biggest thing that's happened since then. But we knew something was gonna happen.
We prepared for it. It didn't set us back. It was just fine.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I appreciate that. Oh my goodness. way to roll with it and way to take a moment. I read a book once where it was a business book of like when everything goes wrong, take an hour or take a day, just like you said, and just either be mad about it or be frustrated or whatever it is.
Let that happen and then be done with that. And then make a plan and go forward. 'cause you can't go backwards. And so there's just, there is certainly value in that as well. But I think you and I share the love of planning too, so it's helpful to have a plan go forward in that regard.
So now that you're getting larger in this regard, maybe just a quick segue into managing orders and inventory customers. Because when we're talking about farm business and, you know, this is a little bit of a plug for Barn2Door because that's. Very much a passion area, right? Is [00:29:00] making sure that it's easy for farmers to stay organized and not spend more time than needed in the office.
We often talk about trying to help farmers ditch the office work by automating different things like that and making it simple. And I know that was important to you.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. I was spending so much time just sending reminders out, if we had a load of hogs going. That was before we were taking deposits, and then we would take the final price before it went to the locker.
then I had to contact everybody. I had to figure out, did they text me, did they email me? Did they message me on Facebook? Like, how did I communicate with them? It was, it would take me almost two weeks to get everybody contacted and people are mailing checks.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, just make sure you get paid.
And most farms I've talked to, I mean this in the nicest way, but have been stiffed from time to time as well. Like you're trying to get that check and it's not getting to you, that's one of the things that like we, and I think you use that part of Barn2Door, where people can place their deposits directly to on the online store with their credit card or whatever else, [00:30:00] but then you can later.
Auto charge them the difference or invoice them the difference for cash. Check whatever you want, but just so you're not doing that, like you're not trying to track them down. You can get paid and have certainty of getting paid and then it just automatically subtracts the deposit and gives them a receipt.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. and also you guys taught me to collect the entire payment for the hogs up front. And that has been fantastic.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. That's awesome. I'm glad you do that.
Erica Benoit: I was like, I was really skeptical
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, no, I appreciate that you were skeptical. When people are just getting to know a farmer, they might be less inclined just to do a deposit. Versus the whole hog. But if your customers have the money in the bank and they know you as a farmer, then it sounds like it did work for you. Where they are like, yeah, I'll pay for the whole hog, which is lovely.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, and we keep raising our prices and they keep selling out.
I have yet to. Take anything to the sale barn because I couldn't get it sold.
Janelle Maiocco: I feel like we should repeat that statement because we talk [00:31:00] about that a lot actually here, because the sale barn, any farmer who's done that I think knows that there's good years and bad years. And when we talk to farmers about like, great, if you wanna bring your proteins to the sale barn.
But the beauty of selling direct and at least having that customer list is if the sale barn isn't in your favor. 'cause you do not set the prices. You have de-risked your business and have a sales channel directly to consumers where you know you can command high prices and ensure you have profit.
That conversation we have with farmers is all about de-risking the business, even if they're still going to the sale barn. And we hear that story too, which is there's so much demand on the consumer side, and if you give it love and attention and build those relationships, you sometimes are selling more and more directly versus the sale barn.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. So like, even since we started our farm, we've never taken anything to the sale barn, which is I don't know, like I really pride myself in that. I'm so proud of myself to be able to say that. I got super close one time that I had 12 hogs to sell. I had 11 sold.
I took them to the locker. I came home and somebody contacted me as soon as I pulled in the driveway wanting the [00:32:00] last one. And so then I'm loading it up and I'm going back to the locker. We were able to do that, and I still can say that I've never had to take anything to the sale barn.
But we grew small, we grew with our customers. We didn't try to grow, to this point overnight. It was, I just kept telling my customers, if you keep supporting us, we're just gonna keep growing. And that's exactly what we did.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. And to be fair, we do sometimes get some very large operations and ranches and folks that come to us.
And so for them to start a direct to consumer model is. them just starting that from scratch versus the entirety of their farm. Right?
Erica Benoit: Yeah. Which is really cool for them because they already know how to grow cattle. They already know how to, they can take it to the sale barn.
They have that option. They know exactly how to do that, so they're not completely starting from scratch.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. That's a really good point. I appreciate that. Okay, we have to talk a little bit about customers. I know we need a whole nother segment on this, Erica, because you're so good at FOMO and marketing well building loyal customers.
And so that kind of merits its own podcast in my opinion. But [00:33:00] can you just give a plug for email collection because I think some farms who start smaller, sometimes that's scary to them to think about growing emails. And I know when farms come to us we automate a lot of that.
We automate a lot of the email collections, whether it's in-person POS or whether it's online e-commerce or through their website. We make sure they have the automation to collect emails if somebody makes a purchase. It's automatically added to their list. But we talk so much when farmers are working with our onboarding managers, account managers about just the email list.
You need to keep growing it 'cause people move or you're always gonna lose a certain percent of customers. So you always need to replace them. And then if you wanna grow, you need to grow even more. But it doesn't need to be intimidating.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, I definitely love my email list.
We've gotten to a point where I very rarely post on social media when I have like our bulk hogs or beef for sale. I can sell it all through our email. It might take me a month to get it all sold, but I hate posting that kind of stuff on social media. There's always those random people that come outta nowhere that want to tell you, you're too [00:34:00] expensive.
And those people just drive me nuts. just block 'em and go on. But it's just like they get in your head and I don't like it.
Janelle Maiocco: I agree. I love that. Thank you for saying that. For all the farmers out there, some have experienced that too, and I agree too. Like just ignore it and move on. If you're doing something right, you're gonna have naysayers. It's just, it's true and it's just focus on your business. Focus on what's good, focus on what you're doing well, because you all are.
Doing amazing things, so I appreciate that. so you're to the point where you're just the emails and you have to send emails. People love to be reminded.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Oh, they love my emails. I always assumed, like nobody was reading them. I can see that there's 30, 35% of people opening them, but I don't see them until we opened this farm store. I didn't like, see people. And so I'm just like, maybe my grandma is reading my email and honestly, I don't think she is either. But now people are coming in my store and they're telling me things about the email that I wrote to them and repeating it back to me it'll be like, I told him about how we went to Nashville and saw you guys, and so many people came in like, I'm so glad you guys [00:35:00] took time away from the farm to reset. You guys needed a break. People loved that.
I had people with Alpha Gal, I had one customer that she's like, you really need to reach out to the people with Alpha Gal. So I sent out my emails every Friday. It's very conversational. If it's a sales email, it's a sales email.
Otherwise, I like to tell a little story to get started and just ease them in and then teach 'em something. So I mentioned Alpha Gal and I had four people show up the next day with Alpha Gal wanting our chicken.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that
Erica Benoit: they'd been on our email list for years. They didn't have any reason to come out, but because I mentioned something that related to them, they were here the very next day.
That was pretty cool.
Janelle Maiocco: I love your emails. I get them too, Erica.
Erica Benoit: Oh, thank you. I'm glad somebody's reading them.
Janelle Maiocco: I'm on your reader list because I'm not near you so I don't get to buy it directly, but, I loved how you explained to the buyer, just what does it mean to buy bulk beef?
you broke it down for them in a very digestible, casual way that just made it so approachable, and I loved that. But you don't do that every time, You just [00:36:00] pace it out, right? Like you mix it up. Is it, can we tell folks, do you mind sharing, even for all the firms that are listening, where they can subscribe to your email or find you.
Erica Benoit: Oh yeah. So on my website, benoit family farmstead.com I try to have, I think it's almost on every page to sign up for my email list, so it's for sure front and center on the very first page, sign up for my email list. I, I encourage people to do that. Like I've done a lot of research on how to write those emails.
I try not to be like businessy about emails. It's a conversation just like I would have with them if they came into my store.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I love that. We'll do a podcast with Erica again digging into emails. FOMO fear of missing out. It's basically how do you create urgency to move product? And Erica has a ton of great suggestions. I watched from afar and talked to her in person and in the Connect program, if other farmers are joining her office hours she has so much wisdom to share.
So we wanna dig into the emails and the FOMO and the marketing. And also don't be overwhelmed. It's much more doable than you might think, right? We can help you collect emails automatically. A lot of people don't know, even basic [00:37:00] marketing, we help, I don't know if you ever used our order reminders, but we have automated order reminders that farmers can set up where it just weekly goes out to remind people even if you don't have time to do newsletters.
You can do this. You can automate it and then if you wanna get just really educated on it, listen to the next podcast with Erica. So any final words before I sign off? And then we will definitely do another podcast.
Erica Benoit: So probably some of my final words was, I love doing this.
So we were getting started with you guys and I would listen to these connect calls or your podcast, everything. I always wanted to be the person that I wish I had when we got started. I have such a passion for helping other farmers get going and learning because I didn't have anybody to talk to during those very first years.
And so learning through yall's podcast and everything has helped me grow, and I'm excited to help other farmers grow too.
Janelle Maiocco: That's amazing and beautiful and dropping the mic. So, Yes, please listen to Erica follow her. I think your Instagram, I've got it right here. It's at Benoit Family Farmstead?
And then Benoit is [00:38:00] spelled B-E-N-O-I-T Family Farmstead, just in case you're listening. Erica, thank you for joining us on this week's episode. Again, follow her on Instagram, sign up and stay tuned. I think we already have scheduled to record at the end of next month, so that won't be in the too distant future.
The next podcast we do at Barn Door, we're humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools including connect programs with folks like Erica to Farmers to help them be successful in their business. Ditching the office work, making it easy to do marketing, helping their buyers buy from them more effectively, efficiently, and easily on their own.
If you are an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at a while and want to simplify the business side of farming check us out at barn2door.com/learnmore. Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
[00:39:00] Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn2Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country.
For free farm resources, or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barn2door. com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.