"Not a Tech Person?" How Barn2Door's Onboarding Team Makes it Simple
Worried you're not "tech-savvy" enough to sell online and use software to manage your orders and inventory? Farmer Alex felt the same way! Learn how Barn2Door's Onboarding Team gave him the tools and confidence to grow his Farm business.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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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 into today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Koleton, I'm an account manager at Barn2Door and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barn2Door offers an all in one business solution for independent farmers who are cutting out the middleman, taking control of their businesses, selling under their brand, and making sure their customers can purchase [00:01:00] from their farm online and in person.
And today we'll hear about the lessons that he learned in his early farming career, why he chose Barn2Door, his onboarding experience, and how Barn2Door has continued to help him reach new heights with his business. I'm happy to welcome back Alex from Chucktown Acres. He's been with Barn2Door for five years.
He's actually a part of our Farm Advisory Network where he readily shares his knowledge and experience with our farmers. Through his mentoring and his guidance, he has led many of our farms to greater sales and greater profits. But he didn't always know how to be a successful farmer. He was once a beginner farmer and he had a few roles prior to Chucktown Acres. So let's go ahead and welcome Alex.
Alex Russell: Thanks, bro. Great job. Happy to be here.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Love it. Well, thank you for being here, we really appreciate it. So we've crossed paths a handful of times between the Grassroots Marketing Academy, which I think you're gonna be putting on again this week.
Alex Russell: Yep. Thursday. It's on.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Love it.
Alex Russell: Oh yeah.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Also in connect. Been meeting there. Met you there a handful of times. And I remember that you mentioned that you weren't always planning on being a farmer, but you got [00:02:00] this bug around your early twenties, I think.
Alex Russell: Yes.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Tell me a little bit more.
Alex Russell: I was in college and I was thinking about how much weight I had put on in my freshman year. I started talking to people about health, diet, nutrition, what the heck was going on? Because I pretty much got to college and I was eating hot dogs and ramen noodles, a lot of rice, a lot of pasta.
And, you know, I'm 19 years old and I felt less healthy than I had in my entire life. And I was like, what the heck is going on? And I just happened to make a bunch of hippie friends in college, and this was a Bible college so instead of being pot smoking hippies, these guys were like raw milk hippies, like they went to go meet their raw milk dealers in a parking lot, in a back alley somewhere, and everyone's handing cash for the milk and you're getting uninspected meat brought in through mysterious coolers with no labels on it. , those were my kind of hippie friends that I made in college.
And, my sophomore [00:03:00] year, I learned so much about diet, nutrition, farming, agriculture, and processed foods. I mean, I was just downloading information. I was fascinated by it because I have a justice oriented worldview. And so when I see injustices in the world, I get fired up by them, and I want to be a part of a solution.
And the injustice that's happening in our modern day agriculture, and not just animal justice, but the effect that this food has on our human bodies and on our soil and our water, and the animals that live and the wildlife and, the whole ecosystems as a whole. Modern day agriculture is just doing so much damage to every aspect of life in the ecosystem.
I got really fired up about this, so I still graduated Bible college. I was gonna be a preacher and then pretty much my senior year, I decided after I [00:04:00] graduate, I'm gonna try farming out. So I found out that Joel Salatin, at Polyface Farms, he offers an internship for people who have no idea what they're doing.
That was me. That was perfect for me. I had no idea what I was doing. Lots of people applied and I was blessed enough to be one of the people selected for the internship. And then, ended up working with Polyface for another two and a half years after that as a contract farmer in Virginia before we moved down south to South Carolina to start Chucktown.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's amazing. So you did the internship, you were then a contract grower, and then from there you eventually started Chucktown Acres.
Alex Russell: Exactly.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's awesome. What a trajectory from preacher to farmer.
Alex Russell: Yep. I try to use my preacher skills in my Instagram account, where I'll do my little one minute sermons on what's going on in the food industry. And people seem to enjoy that. That's fun.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah, I've definitely checked out a few of those. Those are solid. So when you were starting out, after you'd gone through those different phases, you just established Chucktown Acres, how were your tech [00:05:00] skills? How would you describe those in the beginning?
Alex Russell: Oh, zero.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Really?
Alex Russell: Zero. Oh, yeah. When we started Chucktown, this was six years ago, I had a little hundred dollars Chromebook that I started on. I've always been an outdoorsy kind of guy and never cared about technology.
I was pretty addicted to video games in high school, but then I kicked that and then I just didn't look at TVs or computers or anything for years. It just was not anything interesting to me. So joining with Barn2Door I was very overwhelmed, to say the least.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Oh, really?
Alex Russell: Yes. I knew we needed the software. I knew we needed to do home deliveries. I knew we needed to do online sales, and I knew for sure I could not set all that up by myself. I needed someone to basically carry me through this whole new world of selling stuff online and getting it to customers.
That was the main reason I signed up for Barn2Door was because I didn't know what the heck to do on a [00:06:00] computer to even get started. I was real, like a real caveman, like Sasquatch with the laptop.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That is a great image right there. And so you established right, Chucktown Acres, not huge into technology.
Most of your experience had been outside in nature with the animals. How did Barn2Door, how did we come across your plate? How'd you find out about us?
Alex Russell: Well I used the one tool I knew how to use on the computer, which was Google you know, this was before you could have AI put a list of the best 10, online platforms or whatever for you. This was just hardcore old school Googling. I can't remember exactly what I Googled, but it had to do something with, online sales platform for farmers. I knew I needed some kind of software platform, something where I could pay to have somebody help me with this.
' cause we had no website. No, nothing. We launched our business during COVID. It was June of 2020 that we launched. And so the shutdowns were in full force at this point. No one was going anywhere. People were spraying Lysol all over the packages that come to their [00:07:00] house. I mean you didn't roll your windows down, nothing.
We knew if we're going to get people to shop with us, we cannot expect them to come out to our farm. It's not gonna happen, especially right now during these shutdowns. That actually really helped, it helped push us towards looking for an online platform. So we googled it at the time, there were three options and in doing the research Barn2Door was by far the best option. And I got started pretty much right away.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. That's awesome. And I'm curious on how you knew you needed that.
Because you said you did start the business right around COVID, but was that from your previous experience working, as a contract grower Polyface or as an intern? What led you to knowing that you needed the online presence?
Alex Russell: Yeah, I hope that Joel doesn't listen to this because when I was at Polyface, I didn't even know how to buy things on their website. Like I couldn't figure out how to buy ground beef on their website. There was like a membership thing [00:08:00] with a secret website and I'm sure it's way more simple now. I'm sure they've solved the problems now, but as a person who worked there, I was like, thank God I'm physically here.
The farm I was running was just 10 minutes down the road from their headquarters. So I could go to the physical farm store and go and buy the ground beef. Cause I was like, there's no way I'm gonna figure out how to get this thing online. Now that being said, they had thousands of customers that did figure it out, but I was a real caveman with the technology. So I couldn't figure out the website. So having that experience in my back pocket, made me want to have a website and an online store that was super easy to use. That was my number one priority. If I'm gonna expect busy moms and dads to shop with me, I need the purchasing experience to be super simple.
I need it to be as close to an Amazon experience as possible. So when I got to go look at Barn2Door powered online stores from different farms, I really [00:09:00] liked what I saw there.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. Great to know. Thank you. When you first started Chucktown Acres, what did you imagine, what did your dream operation look like?
Alex Russell: Oh my gosh. I had a lot of different dreams. I've always been a flexible dreamer so I saw different avenues. I saw an avenue where we really try to blow it up and we try to get to be, a farm with. 10 to 15 person staff, logo trucks and trailers and delivery vans, and a whole big operation. You know, about a $5 million operation or so, there was that option.
And then there was a second option where, maybe we just try to, get $500,000 in sales every year. And we coast with me and, maybe another staff person or two, and we don't try to blow it up, but we want a successful farm operation. We're profitable, we can pay ourselves, we're debt free. We're not trying to go crazy, we're not trying to slap our logo on every person that walks by, but, we build a [00:10:00] solid customer base. We have 50 to 75 subscribers to our meat boxes. And we just hang out there.
The third option was maybe we'd just be a homestead. Maybe we just grow veggies and we do some strawberries and we have a couple cows. Very quickly we learned that the homestead option was not going to happen if we wanted it to be a profitable, sustainable business . I would need another job to be able to support our family with the homestead kind of lifestyle and that wasn't interesting to me. I wanted to be full-time on the farm.
I'm not a huge hype person, I don't try to make big promises or rally up a bunch of hysteria around myself and my farm. I'm a lot more private of a person than that, so we set our sites at the middle option.
Let's grow organically, let's do a hundred thousand dollars extra each year, and let's just grow incrementally nice and slow and we'll try to do as much free marketing as we [00:11:00] can, we're going to reach out to people. Let's do farmer's markets and online. And even in our fourth year, we added an in-person farm store.
That's way more suitable for my personality as the owner of the business. And so that's what we've done. We've just slowly, incrementally grown this thing. We're a debt-free business and we just go little bits at a time. It's worked out really well and I'm super happy with where we are.
We haven't had to do giant campaigns for anything. We haven't had to build up a bunch of hype. The most exciting thing we do is Thanksgiving turkeys, and then once a month we'll do a hay ride and a farm breakfast. And that's as exciting as it's gonna get with us. I just wanted a business that matches my personality and something that I could oversee and run and not feel like I was drowning the whole time.
When you own a business, you are gonna get five suggestions every day of how else you could run your business from people who don't [00:12:00] run businesses. They're all gonna say, you guys should plant pumpkins, you guys should do a corn maze, you guys should ship. And a bunch of suggestions that if you're a psycho, you're gonna do it and then you're gonna regret it later.
I say no to a lot of ideas 'cause they're always pouring in. But for me, the slow, gradual growth has been really nice. Just setting our expectations and our goals to be reasonable, but progressive at the same time. That's been great for us so far.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's awesome. And maybe we'll touch more up on that a little bit later, we'll kind of backtrack right before we get to where you're currently at. I'd love to hear more about your onboarding experience as this caveman with a Chromebook. Trying to figure out online selling and onboarding, like you said this is a new venture.
Alex Russell: Dude. I'm seeing a t-shirt, I'm seeing a Barn2Door T-shirt of a Sasquatch in the middle of the woods with a little, a tiny little laptop.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That would be epic.
Alex Russell: Okay. Sorry, I cut you off.
Go ahead.
Koleton Kleinsmith: No worries. So you've now [00:13:00] signed up to Barn2Door, right? All the reasons you talked about why you went with us. So you were definitely not new to farming, but new to online sales. When you first started with Barn2Door how was the onboarding process? How did that go for you?
Alex Russell: Oh, man. It was like drinking from a fire hydrant. It was intense. If I had had any kind of technological skills at all, it would've been a lot easier. Or if I had ever worked with software before, it would've been easier. I'm sure I've worked with some software growing up, but there wasn't a lot like it was Microsoft Word, maybe some Excel spreadsheets. I just had not worked with a program before where I'm in control of all of these different aspects as far as selling the product, getting it to the customer. So I asked a lot of stupid questions and I feel very grateful to my onboarding manager.
I just kept meeting with her and kept asking dumb questions. When you're first getting on Barn2Door and you're in the onboarding process, you don't know what [00:14:00] those confirmation emails look like yet. You don't know what your online store is going to exactly look like yet.
You don't know what kind of subscriptions you're gonna have. You don't know so many things. You don't know what zip codes you're gonna deliver to, yet you don't know what prices you're gonna have yet. There's so much that you learn in the onboarding process that it can be overwhelming, but I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have an onboarding manager meeting with me every week or so answering all my stupid questions.
I mean, I would give up. That's the part where a person like me gives up and just says, I think I'm gonna cancel this thing because I can't figure it out. And there's no human people to talk to.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. And for a lot of folks, that's a lot of the software out there is, Hey, great, you're a farmer.
I know you're, you're rocking and rolling in your field every day. Here's a bunch of technology and a bunch of software. Make it happen.
Alex Russell: Forget about it. Dude. I tried to build my own blog on Wix one [00:15:00] time. That lasted about 10 minutes. And I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing here. This is so stupid. I quit and I did.
But when I got going with Barn2Door y'all were able to handle the things that were most difficult for me. I remember when we were in the website building process, my onboarding managers said, just send me some pictures and let's get started with some pictures.
And it took me like four weeks to send her the pictures.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Sometimes it'd be like that.
Alex Russell: Yep. Yep. And then she said, okay, now we need some words to go on your website. Can you write some words? And I was like, poof. All right. You're asking a lot here. Words are tough. And so it probably took me another four weeks to get her some words.
Once I did it, it was like, oh, that was easy. That took me 10 minutes. It seemed like a daunting task to me at the beginning to launch a website and an online store, but then I realized that Barn2Door does most of the work for me.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yes.
Alex Russell: As long as I did my homework and did what y'all told me to do, everything went great.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. Which is so great to hear. You, as [00:16:00] not the most tech savvy. The process was a little, like you said, a little scary from the onset, but you just kept showing up, and then you followed the Barn2Doorway, so to speak.
Alex Russell: Yep. I needed to follow instructions, and then everything went great.
You know, I'm a natural rebel, so I, I don't follow instructions very well, but when I did, everything went great.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's fantastic. I wanna deep dive a little bit more. Onboarding has no doubt changed a lot in those six years since you've gone through it, but I'd love to hear your experience, what kind of resources were helpful as you were, diving into Barn2Door outside of your onboarding manager.
Alex Russell: That whole time was such a blur for me. I think it would've been easier if I had started my business and tried and failed to make enough sales, and then I got Barn2Door. But we started with Barn2Door while we were launching our business.
I think we even signed up with Barn2Door, four to six months before we even formed our LLC. A lot of that was very ethereal for me. I didn't have beef in the freezer when I signed up. I didn't have eggs to sell yet. I just knew we are [00:17:00] gonna need this thing. So, I don't know if there are resources for people now.
I'm sure there's blogs and eBooks and all kinds of stuff to help these guys that are signing up now. And those things were probably available to me then. I don't think I used them just because I probably was not paying very close attention and I was probably on a tractor 90% of the time.
But my onboarding manager, I just hassled the heck out of that lady. And I sent her emails and we did so many, Zoom calls and phone calls and I was like, how do I set up the schedule the deliveries are gonna be on? I have no idea what I'm doing. I didn't even think about, you gotta pick a day of the week to deliver this stuff if you don't set up a certain day that you're gonna be bringing the meat to the people they're gonna be expecting you to deliver seven days a week.
So a lot of stuff like that came up during the onboarding process. You know, what day of the week do you want to deliver? And I was like, oh gosh, I have no idea. I don't even have beef in the freezer [00:18:00] yet. How am I supposed to know what day of the week? So having a person to be able to have that real life conversation with, what day of the week should I do?
My onboarding manager helped me with a lot of tiny little decisions like that. How big to cut the briskets. I didn't know, I didn't have any briskets, so what size was I gonna put on my website? I didn't know yet. So we were just able to talk about so many tiny little things like that and have a hundred conversations that were so helpful for me.
Can you tell me what's available? The things I should have been using?
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah, I can for sure.
Alex Russell: Okay.
Koleton Kleinsmith: But before I do that, it is something that we have seen. So farmers sign up, they don't have product yet because our sales team is fantastic at helping people build their brand.
But I reckon you weren't that motivated to get through because you didn't have product like in the interim. Right. You weren't looking at it. So there was not a whole lot you could do. Was that the general feeling?
Alex Russell: Oh yeah. Like I said, it felt ephemeral to me.
It felt like mystical. It was hard to imagine a subscription box without any chicken in the [00:19:00] freezer
Koleton Kleinsmith: And to all of our farms that do join Barn2Door and don't have product yet, this is a great time to get things set up in Barn2Door and then start to build your brand.
Alex Russell: Yep.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's the one thing that I wanna drive home there, is you had a prime opportunity to build up that brand, build up that customer base.
and I dare say you've probably been doing that as well during that time.
Alex Russell: Oh yeah. We were collecting email addresses. We had the Instagram going off. I've told this story a hundred times but I hated Instagram. I was against social media.
It wasn't like I didn't care. I was against it. Thankfully I had a friend, my friend Stephanie, was helping me with the Instagram at the beginning, and she would put up a picture every single day of something. Just anything, she eventually was the one to convince me to start doing videos.
And that was one of the main things that really helped our brand was having Instagram reels of me explaining something on our social media. When people were able to connect me and my [00:20:00] message with the brand and the products, we saw a huge influx of interest in our brand.
And I would always suggest for people that don't have any products yet, but you probably have some chickens or you have a garden, or you have something that you are actually farming currently. Maybe you just haven't harvested anything yet. Start taking videos because I've seen some Instagram accounts really explode.
When this person is not even selling anything yet. And then let's say they want to do beef shares for next year. I've seen people get up to 40,000 followers in a year just by explaining the kind of grazing that they do and keeping it interesting. And they hadn't even sold anything yet. And then they opened up their beef shares sold out within a day.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Oh, yeah.
Alex Russell: I mean, like years worth of beef shares. I didn't know that getting started. I have seen that along the way now. so when there are new farmers [00:21:00] joining Barn2Door when there are new farmers all together who have never really farmed anything before, I always tell them, please just start taking videos of yourself, explaining what you're doing and why it's better than anything that they could get in the grocery store, even if you don't have anything for sale yet.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. It is so good. So you mentioned, you asked, Hey, what kind of resources do we have in onboarding? I mean, you're a part of some of them. We touched on 'em, right? We have Connect, which you host. Actually, I think you're gonna be hosting later today.
Alex Russell: Yeah, soon as we hang up.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. So you can meet with our farms that are producing at a really high level. They use Barn2Door. They're very successful and they just pick your brain, right?
Alex Russell: Yeah, absolutely. I love connect because we get real life questions from people who are hitting real walls in their business.
it's usually something that one of us farmers in the fans network has been through and has found our way through this path so we can help new farmers get through their problems. I like that it doesn't have to be about [00:22:00] sales. It can be about any kind of agriculture questions.
It could be livestock handling questions, it could be soil questions or it could be sales questions. That makes it really fun for me because then if someone asks me about what kind of broilers to raise you better, hold on 'cause it's gonna be a 10 minute explanation of all the best options. So it's really fun.
Koleton Kleinsmith: And academies are something that we started fairly recently too. We didn't have those in the beginning. and this is on top of meeting with your account manager. I think we probably had the Learn Center, which is just, how to do anything in Barn2Door.
Alex Russell: Yep. There was a frequently asked questions page that I would hit every now and then.
How the heck do I change the price on something or give someone their money back or something like that. You know, I feel kind of jealous for new farmers that are coming up ' cause they can take all these academies, social Media Academy, email marketing academy, the legal academy.
And, I get to teach grassroots Marketing Academy. It's shocking the amount of people in that class that don't have anything for sale yet. It's probably a 50 [00:23:00] 50 ish I would guess maybe 40, 60. But there's a lot of people in there that are really just getting their feet wet in farming and it's pretty exciting to be able to catch them early and save them from making a ton of mistakes.
so that's gotta be a great resource that people get pointed to, I'm sure.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Mm-hmm. It really is. Yeah, we try to sign as many people up for Connect as we can just to have these conversations with a seasoned producer.
When you were starting out, when you were new, who did you go to for advice that you knew was selling?
Alex Russell: I didn't have anybody.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Really,
Alex Russell: I feel like most of the farmers that I talk to now, are all in the Barn2Door Network, and I can't express how helpful that is to have met people like Tom Bennett and the Shenk family
all of these guys have been such a big inspiration to me, and I'm sending them Instagram dms and texting them all the time, and these are people that I had no idea existed in the beginning. And even at Polyface when I was in Virginia. [00:24:00] Everyone kind of looks up to them. So I didn't know a lot of other people who were starting their own independent farms.
It wasn't like I was in some kind of coalition or anything. I had just come out of like Mecca and I was coming to start my own thing, if I had a question on what do I charge for ribeyes and what weight do I look for to send my cows in for processing? Or anything has to do with sales and marketing.
I really didn't have a lot of people to ask, I definitely felt like I was on an island out here. To have someone at Barn2Door be able to give me good ideas and good feedback and say, Hey, here's five farms. I'm gonna send you their websites.
Go check them out. see what they're charging for ribeyes here's their Instagram handle. Send them a message. That became way more valuable than I ever thought it would. Being able to bounce ideas off of people, ask stupid questions and, know that, these were successful farms that were doing the right thing, and I was this new kid on the block I feel like that really helped me [00:25:00] skip over a lot of dumb mistakes.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's fantastic. I love that you've had such a good experience. And I know that our other producers, you know, it's hard to find somebody who's maybe in their area. Or doing something similar that they can actually ask questions to.
Alex Russell: I'm also in a unique place because we're on coastal South Carolina and there's just not a lot of agriculture here. It's a lot of fishery, shrimp, oysters, a lot of seafood happening around here. It's very rare to find a farm and it's even more rare to find a farm that sells direct to consumer.
It's almost unheard of. We really didn't feel like there was a lot of people around who understood what we were doing and could give us advice. Being able to connect to other farms through Barn2Door was massive. when I'm doing the grassroots marketing class, I make sure that those guys sign up for the newsletters of other farms in our farm advisory network because I feel like it's those email newsletters that are probably the most intimidating for new [00:26:00] farms, either that or, social media and you just have no idea where to start.
It was me trying to have a website. I just had no idea where to start. So if you can have a bunch of examples and then you're getting someone's newsletter every week and you can see how they switch it up from week to week to week. You get a lot of good ideas of what you could be putting in your newsletter or on your social media.
I tell these guys it's okay to copy what someone else is doing until you find your own thing. You gotta do something, you gotta send newsletters, you gotta post on social media. If you're gonna kind of copy someone else's style, that's okay until you find your own style, that's better than not posting or not sending emails.
And if you're intimidated, like I was, I needed to be able to follow someone else's lead. If you're out there on your own without the community aspect of Barn2Door then it can be really difficult to know how to make a newsletter, how to design it, what to put in it, what kind of sales to run, how to [00:27:00] get email addresses.
All this stuff can be very mysterious and overwhelming on the front end. So if you can jump in with a pool of farmers that are kind of doing what you're doing, you get a lot of great feedback. So, I feel like the people who are signing up for Barn2Door now are really, really lucky.
Barn2Door gets better every year as an interface, as a resource for farmers. And right now I just feel like it's the best time to sign up because it's almost foolproof . There's so many podcasts, there's so many eBooks, there's so many resources.
It's what I tell people in the Grassroots Marketing Academy, there's a scale of how much effort you put into your marketing and how much success you're going to have. Okay? You can have efficient marketing or you can have crappy marketing, but at least if you're trying and putting the effort in, you're gonna succeed.
And if you don't put any effort in there's no hope for you. I feel that way with people who are signing up with Barn2Door now. The amount of opportunity that's there in the knowledge [00:28:00] that's there is so rich. The resource is so great and so helpful.
I tell everyone, if you're gonna sell direct to consumer, you need to sign up because I've seen farmers try to set up their own websites before, and they always suck. They look like a five-year-old made them, even though I know a 30-year-old man did it. They look terrible they don't work very well.
I'll go on a farm's website that isn't with Barn2Door. And the process is very mysterious. You don't really know when you're gonna get the products. The website's just there to take your money.
And then you need to set up how you're gonna get it. And that is going to lose you tons of customers. There are tons of people like me that would never put my credit card on a website where it doesn't guarantee exactly when I'm gonna get it, how I'm gonna get it, that information needs to be clearly laid out. When I see farmers that build their own websites and their own online stores, that's what I see. Or the other thing I see is that they're always sold out of everything. They realized it [00:29:00] sucks and so they turn it off. They just like turn off anybody's ability to buy anything on their website and we don't want that that's why inventory tracking is so helpful. And why you really need to have a professional doing this kind of thing or at least a software. You could hire your own person to run your website and I'm sure it'd be great. Or you can just use Barn2Door and it's gonna save you 80 grand a year to do that.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah, I guess you don't have to pay for that individual anymore.
Alex Russell: Exactly.
Koleton Kleinsmith: You could hire somebody or just use Barn2Door.
Alex Russell: Yeah. And then you can hire someone to do your chores for you, since you'll have all that extra cash floating around.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah.
And you said it, Barn2Door is great for people that are starting out.
Is the same true for people that are like seasoned producers? Or is it only good for people that are newer?
Alex Russell: Oh, yeah. It's gonna be great for seasoned producers because they're gonna be the ones who tried to build their own website. They're gonna be the ones who have been relying solely on on-farm sales to come through.
they're gonna be the ones who have been riding the [00:30:00] wave of the farmer's market trends. at some point they're gonna realize. Man, it would be so much better if I could sell my products to someone at 10 o'clock at night, and I don't have to try. We just launched our Thanksgiving turkeys on our website on Thursday.
Today's Monday. We've sold about 53 turkeys over the course of this weekend, and I haven't met a single person to sell them a turkey.
Koleton Kleinsmith: That's amazing.
Alex Russell: I have not sold a Turkey in person yet, and we have been selling, I don't know, 15 a day. Since we launched and all those sales have come through our website.
Okay? So I didn't have to take down a number, a credit card, an email address. I didn't have to do anything except for set it up, send out a newsletter with links to my online store and people can go buy it at seven o'clock at night, nine o'clock at night, one in the morning. I sold one at 4:00 AM this morning.
I don't know what that guy was doing. I sold some at 8:00 AM [00:31:00] this morning. If you've been only selling at farmer's markets and in person at your own farm store, or God forbid you've been taking email orders, that just sends a shiver down my spine. when you realize I could sell stuff at 10 o'clock at night and not be there and just have a place where customers could go and order and they can use their phone. It's a no-brainer. Koleton, I don't even remember the original question, but I got fired up about, Able to sell turkeys in the middle of the night.
Koleton Kleinsmith: No, you hit it. Exactly. I don't even need to bring it back up. It was so good.
Alex Russell: Great. Moving on.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yeah. I think we've kind of reached a point here, right?
you started out, this is what you're, onboarding experience was. Let's talk a little bit about where you're at currently, right? Like you said, you've been running Chucktown acres for at least six years. I mean, you've got to try a lot of things. You've got to talk to a lot of producers.
You've got to no doubt see a lot of people start businesses and go to farmer's markets and then they disappear and you've stuck around. What are the practices that you've adopted that have helped you stay relevant and helped you be successful?
Alex Russell: Oh gosh.
Koleton Kleinsmith: If [00:32:00] you had to narrow it down cause I'm sure there's a whole lot.
Alex Russell: Okay. So number one is weekly newsletter. And I would put an asterisk under that of aggressive but not annoying email capture. So people volunteering to give me their email address on a clipboard at the farmer's market has been our number one way. Our number two way to collect email addresses has been doing exciting things.
Remember I said I don't do that many exciting things, but, like Thanksgiving, turkeys alone, we sell about 200 turkeys every Thanksgiving. That's about 50/50 new customers and returning customers. And so we get about a hundred new emails per year just through Turkey sales.
It's something exciting. Then we have our other exciting things that we offer, like a hay ride farm tour, farm breakfast, that kind of thing. We do that once a month. So that kind of stirs up some excitement. But the main way that we've gotten email addresses is old school clipboard farmer's [00:33:00] market.
Ask every customer that you don't personally know or remember. Ask them if they're getting the emails yet, explain to them why it's beneficial for them. People don't like saying no to people in person, so they're usually gonna say, alright, fine. And they'll put their email address down.
Koleton Kleinsmith: It's a good tactic.
Alex Russell: Yeah, because it's harmless, the worst thing they can say is no. If I go home at the end of the day with 20 new email addresses, and I do that for every farmer's market for the last five years, that's a lot of email addresses
And they're high quality email addresses too. These are people who signed up with a pen on a piece of paper saying, yes, I want to receive your emails. So they're high quality emails too. So I would say email marketing weekly newsletter has been the best thing for us.
Number two has gotta be subscriptions. Subscriptions keep the lights on around here. We're at 65 families now signed up with our subscription. That's not a massive number, but if you're looking at a $75 box and we also have a $150 box. I don't have a [00:34:00] calculator in front of me, but that's a lot of recurring income that comes through every single week.
That keeps me from having to push extremely hard on the marketing side to get a la carte orders. We still offer an a la carte portion of our online store. For the people who don't like subscriptions.
And those people still put their orders in every week, but it's not nearly enough to keep us going at the pace that we're going at now. Our subscriptions make up a big bulk of our annual revenue. A massive chunk. So those things have been great for us. And you'd be shocked at the amount of people that I talk to in person that have heard about our meat subscription, and they don't. They always say, don't you have a thing where you bring it to my house every week and I sign up one time. Yes, we do have that thing. It's called the meat and egg, CSA and you sign up on our website, gimme your credit card one time and you never have to think about it again.
Over the last three or four years [00:35:00] I've been having to turn the inventory for that subscription on and off because we didn't have enough product to keep up with demand. Then we get enough product, I'll add some more on there.
So that thing is in a constant state of selling out and being restocked and selling out. And that's just been massive for us, for our bottom line as a business. Having recurring revenue and then being able to use a flexible subscription to work with our inventory has just been a lifesaver. I can't tell you the amount of chicken wings I had stocked up before we started subscriptions. It was absurd. I was selling chicken wings to restaurants for $2 a pound, just 'cause they were gonna expire. I couldn't get anyone to buy chicken wings and so I basically gave them away for free just so they didn't go bad. So being able to do that has been massive for us.
Number three, I would say meeting people in person is still very, very relevant. As much as I've talked about making sales online, I still see a [00:36:00] massive connection between the people that you meet in person and converting them to online sales. You hear this a lot in the Grassroots Marketing Academy.
I'll tell these people, you have to build trust with these customers. If you want them to leave Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and Costco and ButcherBox and go to you instead, they're gonna have to build some pretty big platforms of trust for these people. And one of the best ways to build trust with new customers is to meet them in person.
Shake their hand, ask them the name of their kids. Ask them the name of their dog. Ask 'em how they're gonna cook the chicken thighs and get to know them. Look them in the eye, smile when you see them. And those types of things are stuff that they're never gonna get at any grocery store ever. So if you can offer a personal connection with a customer, it's going to build the platform of trust that then encourages them to take the leap to try out buying something off of your website. I [00:37:00] know a lot of people buy food online, but they buy it from big places. You don't usually buy food online from a small farmer, it's a unique kind of purchase. The world is going in that direction for sure and consumers are moving in that direction.
If we can encourage them and say, hey, you've met me. You bought the chicken thighs, now you can go to the website, you can buy those same chicken thighs again, except this time I'm gonna bring it to your house, or my delivery driver's gonna bring it to your house. You don't have to fight the traffic and park in the stupid parking lot at the farmer's market to get to the chicken thighs.
Now, if you just take one or two minutes on my website, you can make the same exact purchase and I'm gonna bring it to your house. It's a succession that we walk these customers through without them ever knowing they're going through it. That builds a long-term customer, and it's the best way to build a long-term customer that's gonna love you.
They meet you in person, you collect their email [00:38:00] address. You give them maybe a flyer or a business card with your logo and website QR codes on there. And then you work on converting that in-person customer to an online customer, and that person will shop with you if you can get 'em signed up for a weekly CSA.
Now you've got that customer locked in every week instead of, we know the statistics, say farmer's market shopper. They don't go every week, one out of four weeks at the best and so now you converted a person that's gonna shop 25% of the time to a hundred percent of the time. And for me, that's irreplaceable.
And that's been such a major success for us. I do caution new farms that think that they can just get away with only being online. Because now that we're all online, it's really, really difficult to get your name out there only by a social presence and some email newsletters.
It really, really pays off to put the boots to the ground, [00:39:00] get into a farmer's market, or start marketing at some local gyms or some coffee shops. Do something to where these people are gonna run into your brand in person. And it's really gonna be a much more efficient way to get a solid customer base and a solid email list than just hoping that people run into you online.
'cause now there's thousands and thousands of farms online. And again why should these people trust your farm over the rest?
Why would they trust your farm if they've never even met you in person before? And why would they choose you over those other guys? You need to give them a reason to trust you. For me, I just push, push, push in person. You gotta do it. Get out there and meet people in real life. My last point that I always make when talking about farmer's markets is be nice
Don't be a grinch. Even if you really don't want to be at the farmer's market because you're a farmer and a lot of farmers are recluse kind of people. If you can be nice and put on a grin and ask that person the name of their [00:40:00] dog, it's gonna go a long way.
That's it. That's the last thing I always tell people.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Thank you. That was awesome. You've touched on a whole lot today. A lot of it, really good information. How can people find you online? If somebody has a question, they wanna reach out, how do they do that?
Alex Russell: Yeah. A couple different ways they can check out our Instagram. It's just at Chucktown Acres, pretty easy to find. They can go to our website. We have a little form that they can fill out on the bottom to send me an email question. But my favorite thing to do if they're farmers, I tell them, you should sign up for Barn2Door and join a connect session with me. Or join the grassroots marketing and we can work through your issues and your questions.
It's one of my favorite things. I'm so passionate about the regenerative farm movement that I love being able to help other farms with any kind of problems or issues they might have. I just, really care about helping these guys out and seeing conventionally farmed land converted over to regenerative.
That's what I really get [00:41:00] pumped about. And so if I can ever help anybody who's starting a new farm, I try to do my best to set aside some time to be able to do that while running my own farm too.
Koleton Kleinsmith: And thankfully because of Barn2Door, you have all this extra free time, so you can actually do that now.
Alex Russell: I do. It's crazy the amount of sales that you can do when you’re selling things online and you're not having to make those sales in person. It's really a game changer. I love it.
Koleton Kleinsmith: Yes. Well, it has been fantastic chatting with you today. Thank you so much for joining us for this week's podcast.
If you wanna follow him, his Instagram is at Chucktown Acres. He mentioned his website as well. Feel free to check him out. Here at Barn2Door, we are humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase their sales, and save time for their business.
If you're an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at it a while and want to simplify your business management, please visit Barn2Door.com/learnmore. Thanks for tuning in. We look [00:42:00] forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
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.
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