Shifting Your Farm Mindset for 6-Figure Success
In this episode, host Janelle Maiocco welcomes back Alex Russell from Chucktown Acres. Together, they pull back the curtain on the critical growth phase between five and six figures, sharing real-world insights on how to stop being your own operational bottleneck.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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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 Maiocco, CEO of Barn2Door and your host for today's episode. As you may be aware, Barn2Door is all about helping Independent Farmers make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro. By getting a system in place to sell direct, market under their own brand, and manage orders, Farmers can [00:01:00] skip the middleman, build a strong local business with recurring sales, and maximize their profits.
We just also debuted helping Farmers with local delivery. Very exciting. In today's conversation, we're gonna be chatting about not going from zero to 60, but going from 60 to 120. In other words, after you've been building your Farm for the first few years, what happens?
What needs to change? What does it look like when you actually turn from beginning entrepreneur into bona fide businessperson, today I'm happy to welcome Alex from Chucktown Acres in South Carolina, who is part of our Farm advisory network and has worked with us for a number of years. Welcome back, Alex.
Alex Russell: Oh, I can't believe you asked me back. I'm so happy.
Janelle Maiocco: You know, every time we do a podcast, we come up with three more ideas for more podcasts, so I can't not invite you back.
Alex Russell: I'm just tricking you guys into keeping me on the airwaves. It's just it's my secret model.
Janelle Maiocco: There's so much good advice that we need to cover and that you have experience that you can then share to other Farmers, so it makes so much sense to keep chatting.
Alex Russell: Thank you. It's so [00:02:00] fun to do this, and I was honored you asked me back after the first one that we did. It just dropped, right? Like a week-
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah
Alex Russell: Or something ago as we record today. It just dropped, and we had so much fun. It was like, well, once we get them past the homesteader phase and into some kind of real Farm business, we need to talk about what do we do after that.
Janelle Maiocco: Yes, absolutely. And I love it because in that meeting, we realized, because we were talking about, we sort of started it as the five fastest, you know, best tips to become a successful Farm.
And what it morphed into naturally was what do you do when you're just getting started to quickly get to success, which is really going from zero to 60. Like you're saying, " I'm a homesteader," or, "I love Farming want to have this be my full-time job, not my hobby, and turn it into a viable business."
But those first, let's say roughly three years five figures, if you will, is when you're still, doing all the entrepreneurial exercise of you're putting in way more time and money on things that later on you don't have to or shouldn't. But you must when you're an entrepreneur, you have to do all the [00:03:00] things yourself, and invest before you've made a profit and all of the above.
One thing you and I were chatting about was, we chatted with a bunch of our Farming friends, too. You were there, and we were like, "Well, when do you turn from one-man show entrepreneur, you know, say yes to everything, barely sleep," right?
And all the things that you're, you know, say yes to every customer, do anything that you can, even if it's not, the best use of your time or it's not gonna scale ultimately. But to get your Farm going, you have to do these things. And then you get to the point where arguably it's been a few years, things are starting to come together and look like a bit like you turn from, I think you said, from entrepreneur to business person.
Alex Russell: It's so weird.
Janelle Maiocco: Yes. And you-- When did you notice that about yourself?
Alex Russell: It was like year, probably year three. For us, I was able to finally bring some help onto the Farm and actually take the time to sit down and think about ideal customers, marketing strategy, understanding [00:04:00] what my customer wants.
Th- these kind of things that you're like, when you're just a Farmer, you don't really think about that stuff. Like, I still remember my first call to the butcher where he's like, "Okay, how do you want these two cows cut up?" And I was like, "Oh man, I wasn't ready for this. Uh, I don't know. Rump roast?
Uh, what, what, what are we doing? Ribeyes and rump roast? I don't know what they-- I don't know how to get it broken down. How much ground beef do I get out of one cow?" And so all of a sudden, as you get into the flow and you just start doing the stuff, you start to realize, "Okay, I'm taking some stuff to the market.
People buy this; they don't buy that. They want to see us on social media. They wanna get newsletters." you start to do some accounting work. You start to get in Excel spreadsheets, and you're like, "This isn't Farming. This is something else. This is business."
Janelle Maiocco: Was business an aha moment for you? Did you just all of a sudden go, " Holy [00:05:00] cow," no pun intended, " I just learned from I love Farming or I wanna be a Farmer to, oh, I have to run a business"? Was there a moment or is that more of a there was a couple, it just came together?
Alex Russell: I think it's probably like the second or third time I did my taxes. Like, "Oh, we made zero dollars." Yeah. It was like the second time I pulled the P&L out of QuickBooks, I was like, "Ah, we have to make money.
Janelle Maiocco: You do. You have to run a business well to have a Farm. and that is true. If Farming is your number one job and it's how you pay the bills and make a living and provide for your family or, and even in this case, your community, it's-- you actually have to run a business well.
To be fair, there's chefs and barbers and doctors and dentists and, hairdressers and all the people who have discovered the same thing, which is I love, this is my passion to run a restaurant and cook amazing food for people, but I'm not gonna have a restaurant if I don't run the business well. [00:06:00]
Alex Russell: Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. I still remember like running the numbers 'Cause we were doing really, really high-end eggs. We were doing organic, or at least organic feed, and we were doing corn-free, soy-free, and obviously, mobile range coops and all that. But I wanted our egg price to be like $5 a dozen.
And then I ran the numbers of like, we have this many chickens, it costs this much to raise them. Now they're laying eggs and this feed is costing me buku dollars all of a sudden. And I realized I had, my cost was like 8.50 a dozen. And this was like 2021-ish. So I was like, "This feed, first of all, is way too expensive.
And second of all, that's crazy. I don't wanna sell my eggs for $12 a dozen. That's crazy." I do now, but I but I didn't.
Janelle Maiocco: I was gonna say, it's very interesting 'cause it's like you had this notion, so were you married to the [00:07:00] $5 or did the information help you realize that it was okay to charge more, right?
I feel like sometimes when you become a business owner, you have ideas and hypotheses and sometimes more information will cause you to make different decisions and sometimes you actually have to get out of your own way.
Alex Russell: Yep. And in Charleston we have very little competition, but the little competition I do have is with eggs.
So there are about four other Farms in the Charleston area that pretty much just do eggs. They might do broilers and eggs, maybe a little bit of hogs. but they're all at the, like the five, six, $7 mark, but they just all do conventional feed. And so I had to make the business decision to differentiate even though I was like, "I really wish I could just do conventional feed or even just like a non-GMO something and do the $5."
But even then the money was not working out because those guys are only egg layers and maybe some broilers. They've got thousands of laying hens, They do the restaurants, [00:08:00] they do the wholesale, they do grocery stores. And so I was like, "Dang, dude, I don't wanna have that many chickens on my Farm."
I'm in the hundreds of chickens, not in the thousands, we went through a lot of iterations and we finally landed on non-GMO, corn-free, soy-free. So we differentiated enough from the rest of the guys so that our product didn't just blend in with everyone else.
But the price point stayed really high, and it's always been really high for us. We have 600 layers now. It's nothing crazy. but we sell out of eggs every week
Janelle Maiocco: Well, and it the beauty of it is, is it's not the only thing you're selling either, right? So they're getting more value than just a single product from your Farm, which is really neat.
Before we proceed, I wanna like just double click on like, again, the last podcast, which I think is the five tips to quickly get to success as a Farm, which is akin to, you know, going from zero to 60. Like I'm just getting started. I'm spending [00:09:00] tons of it, investing tons of time as a one-man show and money before I've become profitable.
This phase, what we're talking about today, 60 to 120, is really like shifting from homestead to business. And we chatted with a bunch of our other Farm advisors on a call recently with Alex, and most of them said they felt when they hit six figures, right? Like the produce people started to think business and turn their attention and decisions up to more business-minded around 100K plus, and many of the protein Farmers said it was around 250K in terms of annual, income.
So just if you're listening to this and are like, "Where do I fit into this conversation?" again, if you're an entrepreneur, I mean, shoot, when I started Barn2Door, I was an entrepreneur, right? We would pass the phone to the other ear when they wanted support versus marketing. that's just what you do when you're starting a business.
You do it all and you're doing everything. And so, but it's really neat when you do get to shift a gear, to [00:10:00] like, "Hey, I've gone from five to six figures. I've gone from hobby to business. now I need to think about business and Farming differently and like really dial in on efficiencies and process and make decisions, um, across the business that are good for business,"and it can be very freeing.
And then I, I'll say this one thing, which at some point we'll need to do a podcast on going from six figures to seven, 'cause we also have lots of Farms that do that. I feel like it's going from entrepreneur to business owner to enterprise, There's another shoot for the moon, that comes after this when you wanna go for seven figures, which is another conversation for another time, but-
Alex Russell: I need to listen to that podcast myself. We're on the cusp, but we're not there yet.
Janelle Maiocco: I know, but I love that 'cause I'm glad that we're sitting in the middle of this business stage for you because it's a long stage. This has been years now for you in this business stage, anywhere from making 100K up to almost a million, that's a lot of room of growth as a business owner
It's in a really important part of ensuring success [00:11:00] and profitability, and sustainable business. It's exciting. I love it. I wanna start with how you think about money. You go from doing something at any cost to actual cost and profit.
Alex Russell: Yep. Especially when you're a Farmer, everyone has great ideas for you to do, you know? Everyone's like, "You guys should try guinea hens," and, "You guys should have turkey all year round," You guys should do Wagyu." And you're like, "Dude, if you had any idea how much it costs to set any of that stuff up, you wouldn't be saying these kind of things."
At the beginning, you're really, really searching for anything that will work, you know? I'll do lettuce and strawberries and chicken. fumbling around in the dark, really. And then it's like at some point...
Janelle Maiocco: Which is normal. Which is normal. It's normal. This is good. You must do that.
Alex Russell: Yep, and then s- at some point, you get, like, night vision, and you can kind of see in the dark, and you're like, "All right. I understand what I need to do now. My customers want [00:12:00] this. I can make a profit on this, Profit sometimes feels like a naughty word, l- because you hear about these giant corporations making gross profit. But like, you need to be able to make profit to grow as a Farm. if you wanna do more chickens than you did last year, you need extra cash to be able to do those.
So profit is a beautiful word. We need to, make sure that we're focused on profitability with each enterprise. So if there's something that's killing us along the way, we may need to get rid of it, even though that it hurts. 'Cause at the beginning, you wanna be a yes man to everything.
So you, you change into, like, a no, a no guy or a no girl after a little while, and you say, "I really need to focus on what I'm doing, master the craft Be efficient and then find the best ways to make that enterprise the most profitable it can be.
Janelle Maiocco: And that's one of the things you wrote down here. And actually you titled it "Making Changes on the Farm," which I quite love you do have to start to look hard at the business because [00:13:00] you, necessarily say yes to everything, and so now you have to learn to say no.
It doesn't mean say no to everything. It just means you learn when to say yes and when to say no, which I think is really interesting. And you said here, taking on one big enterprise for profit's sake was one of the things that shifted for you.
Alex Russell: Yes. You start making decisions differently. You're like, "Okay, I'm not just going to buy the new truck because I want a new truck." Like we just bought, um... Well, two years ago, we bought a really nice tractor, a brand new tractor, before that we had what we call Old Blue.
It was a 1965 Ford 2600 that has no loader. It just drags things, you know? And it's, it's not worthless, but it's, you know, y- you can't lift a pallet of feed or anything like that. And so we were able to justify the cost of, okay, this is gonna be a $60,000 tractor that we buy. we're not buying any fancy brand.
We go with Kubota or something real, New Holland, [00:14:00] something basic like that. But we said, "I can do so many things with that tractor and that will actually make me more money because I have the thing. I'll be able to order feed in bulk and I will get way better prices on things." So your mind starts to shift to, "Okay, I need to get these enterprises in a place where they're all making me money, and what tools do I need for that?"
Then you start making really, uh, careful decisions. Like you may also wanna get a walk-in freezer for my protein people. I mean, you can only operate out of those chest freezers for so long before you just want to snap and just strangle somebody. And so the walk-in freezer is expensive.
I mean, it's the, a new one is 30 to $60,000 for a new walk-in freezer, and you're like, "This is totally terrifying that I'm gonna do this for a freezer." I mean, this is just, when you're new to [00:15:00] the Farming world and selling direct to consumer, you're like, "I would never spend $30,000 on a freezer." But then after you spent the first three years in chest freezers cussing every time you lift that lid and you can't find the drumsticks at the bottom, you finally are like, "All right, fine.
I'm gonna do it, or just, we're just gonna, we just have to do it." Like, "I can't stand it anymore." And so your decision-making becomes, more precise and, it really helps you in the long run to be able to know I bought this thing, and five years from now I'm still gonna love this thing, and I'm still gonna probably use this thing every day.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. And you pay for it in X number of months, right? You're making a choice. If you're saying yes to a tractor or walk-in freezer, you're saying no to something else, You're saying no to an extra Farmhand part-time because now you have a tractor and you can't afford to hire that Farmhand, right?
So it's, you know, these are, sort of operating cost analysis where if you're spending it somewhere, you're not spending it [00:16:00] somewhere else. And so it's important to look around. Like I see one of your points here is you're leasing land for cattle. Well, that's a way to save money while you're growing an enterprise
Alex Russell: Yep, exactly. Yeah, so it's gonna be way easier to be able to get into a situation like that than trying to buy something and taking on a big old mortgage. Uh, we see a lot of people-- I mean, we're on leased land here, and it's a really great way for beginning Farmers to kinda get their feet under them, because I see a lot of Farmers make the mistake where they really wanna own the land so bad that they end up buying something they probably shouldn't have, and it's, maybe it's three or four hours away from their customer base, which we know is possible to still run a business that far away from your customer base, but it makes it really, really hard.
Where maybe you could have leased something for the first few years that was a lot closer and, and would've made your life a lot easier. You start making big boy decisions when, when this happens because [00:17:00] you get out of the homesteader phase where you're kinda wanting to do this for your family and friends, you know?
If you have three or four cows and it's just kinda for you, you don't care if it's profitable or not, really. I mean, some people might, but it's for the most part, you're kinda just doing it for fun. You're doing it to feed your family. And then, you know, you start getting to 20 cows and then you think, "Huh, we're kind of out of cash.
I wonder where it went." And so you start tracking things down and going, "Oh."
Janelle Maiocco: Tracking, tracking, that's the key. Listen to that. Tracking, tracking, tracking. Like, how did you know you could cover the cost of a tractor, Alex? We just talked through, "Oh, I can buy a tractor, I can buy a walk-in freezer, but I'm gonna lease my land." how do, how did you justify the tractor purchase?
Alex Russell: Yeah. I think, for one, I was gonna lose my mind without it, so that was, like, the number one thing. If anyone knows coastal South Carolina, they know that we have insane mosquito seasons. And so [00:18:00] from, like, May to September, you're kind of dying from mosquito infestation.
And so I was out there with an open cab tractor that doesn't really do much, just losing my mind. I borrowed my buddy's tractor one day. I said, "I need to bush hog but the mosquitoes are killing me and I'm gonna lose my mind. Can I borrow your closed cab tractor?"
And I bush hogged all day with my buddy's tractor, and I was like, I was so happy when I came inside 'cause all those mosquitoes were on the glass trying to eat me and they couldn't get to me. And I was like, "You guy- I got you guys."
Janelle Maiocco: So sanity, it's hard to put a num- a dollar value on sanity, right?
Alex Russell: Yeah.
That was it. And then we had some profit that we had made the year before that we were using as, cash in the bank account to be able to do things, move stuff around. I waited and waited for a good deal. Uh, pr- probably from the day that I borrowed my buddy's tractor to the day I bought the tractor was probably about eight months.
They offered me a really good deal, and [00:19:00] so that's how we made our decision.
It wasn't like I had $60,000 laying around to go do it. It was like, "We're gonna make payments on this and we will survive. But I, for my sanity's sake and for the sake of the business, we gotta do this because I can't unload that many bags of feed by hand anymore or else my, my shoulders are gonna crumble."
So sometimes you need to make financial decisions that will really help your own physical body through the long run. You see, I wanna make it to seven figures, and that's probably gonna happen, I don't know, year eight, nine, 10, something like that. I gotta last a long time.
And so that also will affect your decision-making where you go, you start thinking really long term.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I just had a couple of other podcasts with other Farmers who are closer to that mark, and they will attest to, first of all, you have eight or nine years of learning under your belt, And decision-making and good and bad decisions and how to run it by the numbers and all [00:20:00] of that. But they will say it does get easier, right? Because you're more armed to make better financial decisions. You've figured things out, to make a viable and hopefully growing business. But part of that is scaling and being efficient and effective.
It's interesting 'cause we talk to Farms every single day at Barn2Door. And this isn't meant to be a plug, but it kind of will sound like that, which is like we're, anywhere from 100 to $300 a month or something like that for Barn2Door service, and we are business software for Farmers like you to run their business, right?
And we literally help them manage inventory, all their orders, take in all their transactions, make it easy to pay. Importantly, have a self-serve online store for their buyers to buy anytime and all those things. And we help obviously with marketing and manage logistics, et cetera. Like, you know.
This is all the business pieces that we help with. And nothing makes me more sad than when a Farmer, especially when they're on the cusp of going from five to six figures, who is like, "I j- I can't afford that." It's like you have to invest in your business because this is [00:21:00] just efficiency.
It's like, how does it pay for itself? Tomorrow it'll pay for itself because you just got like 10 hours back a week, it's just all we do is build for Farmer efficiency on the business side, I'm not wrapped in mosquitoes like you are, I know you wake up and people have bought from your online store, like sales are happening, marketing is happening automatically.
You always have your inventory accurate. Like you can't, you have to interface and manage your sales and marketing and logistics some- somehow. And if you're doing all that manually, you are stacking up the hours like nobody's You gotta have tools. You have to have a system.
Alex Russell: Seriously. I get calls from Farmers. I don't know if you know this or not.
I get calls from Farmers they usually listen to the podcast and they somehow find my number somehow, and they will call me and they'll say, " Should I sign up with Barn2Door? is it worth it?" . My number one question that I always lead with is, "Do you wanna do this in the long run?"
Are you serious about this? If you're fiddling around with the idea and farting [00:22:00] around, and "I think I wanna have a hobby Farm, and I wanna grow sunflowers," and all this, and I say, "You shouldn't sign up for Barn2Door. You shouldn't do it." But if you want to sell anywhere from 100,000 to a million-plus dollars of product a year, you have to sign because you are gonna be paying someone a full-time salary to run your orders machine for you if you don't.
Janelle Maiocco: It's a headcount or more. Yes.
Alex Russell: Yeah, or more, or several people.
Janelle Maiocco: Or more. Like, you can either pay for the big wheel on Alex's new tractor, which is what we cost every year, is a fraction of that new tractor, or you can pay for a half or a whole headcount just as you're tr trying to figure out how to manage orders and inventory and do all your marketing and sales and logistics.
You gotta be serious about your business, and that is an investment just like a tractor or a walk-in freezer.
Alex Russell: Yes, exactly. Like if you're serious about it, [00:23:00] you need a tractor. If you're in the protein game, you're gonna need a walk-in freezer.
Anyone who's serious in this game doesn't do it without a walk-in freezer, and anyone serious in this game doesn't do it without e-commerce.
So that's my one way where I split people when they say, "Should I, should I sign up? Should I not?" I'm like, " If you're serious about it, absolutely you should, because this is gonna take your business way further than you can by hand with taking orders over text and email and all this garbage. This is gonna make everything so automatic for you.
You need it. You gotta have it." But if you just wanna, if you just wanna have six pigs and you have a pig barbecue once a year with your neighbors, you shouldn't sign up.
Janelle Maiocco: I appreciate that. It is, again, it's that cusp of if we're talking to somebody and they take every single order individually through text, phone, email, Facebook message back and forth multiple times to manage the, you know, to figure out the logistics and everything else, like the time suck on that, like [00:24:00] literally keeps me up at night and it's not even my Farm, it's like, no, let's remove all that office work. It's neat that we can help people get off the ground with their brand and all the basics, but we're also kind of on that other, you know, moving to enterprise side too when people are, you know, they are the big boys if you will and they're ready for, large delivery program or, go beyond unpaid marketing to paid marketing, whatever that might be,
Now one of the things you wrote down as a note, so I wanna ask you about it, is leaving the one-man show behind.
Alex Russell: You gotta do it. I see a lot of Farmers try to force the whole thing on them and probably their spouse to just try to make the whole thing work. you and your spouse can be a very, very powerful team together, and you guys can go pretty far. But there are limits, especially if you have a family and kids and different things going on in your life other than Farming.
Like if you have some kind of social life, some kind of friends, s- church, something like [00:25:00] that, you're not going to wanna dedicate 70 hours a week to this thing, or you're gonna totally go nuts.
You've got to have some help. And I remember listening to one of the latest podcasts you did with Tom Bennett from Bennett Farms, Michigan, and he said something that really inspired me, and he said, "The Farming stuff's pretty easy." this is kinda shocking, but anybody can feed chickens, okay? Once you show them how to move cows, anyone can move cows once they're trained.
This stuff that we do on the Farming side is strenuous but it's not complicated, okay? When you can finally hit the wall where you go, "I don't think I can do this by myself anymore," it's time to hire somebody and time to bring somebody on, stop trying to be the end-all be-all of the business, 'cause you're bottlenecking yourself.
Janelle Maiocco: You're saying exactly the right thing, which is yes, you're gonna work 10, 12 hours a day [00:26:00] for the first few years. That's just how you are. You're an entrepreneur. That's what every entrepreneur in any industry must do, but then that's not a sustainable forever thing. There is what you're saying, Alex, which is there's a tipping point when you've learned enough and you've gotten enough under, sort of in your brain about how to do things, and now you need to think about what's my tipping point?
Now I need to bring in help to do certain things. And from what I'm gathering, You're bringing them in to maybe do the things that are pretty straightforward. I know it's important. Like, nobody's gonna care as much about your business and Farm as you, Alex.
But you can hire people who are passionate about what you do, I loved your notes here. Give them the things that you don't like the most, that are redundant or very easy for them to do successfully, and remember parts of it that you love and make sure you keep doing those.
I love that.
Alex Russell: Yes. Yeah. I am almost finished with a book called "Buy Back Your Time," and he's this big-time deal [00:27:00] businessman, serial entrepreneur type of guy in Canada. Dan Martell. And I cannot tell you how helpful this book has been.
I'm a slow reader, so a book takes me, like, three months. I'm like a three pages a day kinda guy. I'm much more into podcasts
But anyway, I got almost all of these points that I put down for leaving the one-man show behind came out of that book. The most powerful thing was the freedom to hire somebody to do the simple jobs at your business that, one, drive you crazy, and two, anybody could do. So anybody can feed chickens, anybody can feed pigs, anybody can wash eggs, anybody can harvest lettuce. They need, obviously you need to be trained. Everyone needs to be trained on anything. But it doesn't take a ton of skill to do these things. So hire to free up your time. This is why the book's called "Buy Back Your Time."
Freeing up your time so you can kind of restart in your mind [00:28:00] your own role in the business. And now you do the things that, A, only you can do, or B, the things you love doing the most.
You could really love the marketing and sales, so that's what you do now. Um, you could really love, writing the newsletters and talking to the chefs and all those things. That's now your role. So when you can hire a replacement for the things that are easy and you don't like, you get, uh, like this refreshing of your own mental state of your role in the business, and it's, it's pretty exciting.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. I also want to double-click on not every Farmer loves to do marketing and sales. Some Farmers are introverts or they just wanna be left alone, right? That's one of the reasons why we start our own business. And so that's okay. If you don't wanna be at Farmers markets, you-- That-- Then h- hire somebody else to do that for you.
If you would rather [00:29:00] be the one doing the chores of feeding animals because that's life-giving work, then do that. And by the way, while you're doing that, listen to some good podcasts and keep teaching yourself about business, et cetera, right? We try to get people to hire Barn2Door so we can manage their orders and logistics because that's boring grunt work that they, the Farmers should not be doing, right? You shouldn't waste your time. I would rather have all Farms talk to their customers about, "Hey, how's your kid?" How's soccer going?"
Or whatever else, versus like, " can you pay me a check? And I'm gonna chase you down for that payment," or back and forth six times on like, "Where are we gonna meet up so that you can get your steaks?" Like no, don't, don't waste your breath on, on the administrative part of the business with your customers.
Let, and again, I'm sorry I'm so passionate about this, but like let Barn2Door manage orders and all your payments and it's done. And then focus on building relationships with your customers or doing the other things on the Farm that you, like that project you never get to on [00:30:00] your , it's not just what you're doing on the Farm, it's also what you're doing in the business that you are either going to do yourself or hire to have done for you.
Alex Russell: Yes, absolutely. I love that you mentioned how flexible that is because I'm sure there's a lot of Farmers out there that are like, "I don't wanna do the finances.
I don't wanna do the sales calls. I don't wanna do the marketing. I wanna do the cows. I'm, I'm in it for the cows." So that's great. Reverse it and hire the people to do that stuff for you. It's so freeing to be able to take that leap and say like, "I just get to be the Farmer again," you know?
Instead of having to be the sales and the marketing and the finance guy, and the plumber and the electrician, and the Farmer.
Janelle Maiocco: Yes, but to be fair, it's a business, so you do still need to manage it all. It doesn't ever go away. We have Farmers who are just getting started with delivery or pickups, and it's like, if you're only doing 20 a week, then you should probably do it yourself, right?
But if you wanna go scale beyond that, then like obviously we have delivery partners or [00:31:00] we, we also have an integration with a delivery app where it can help people be efficient. But it's like you need to actually look there for efficiencies, too. I Especially Farmers that are looking to scale, if they start getting into delivery three days a week, they're-- most of them are miserable. So now we offer delivery partners for that reason. Actually let one of the partners that we work with handle that. That's all they do, so they can actually keep it efficient. And because we're a larger entity, we can get, great cost savings for Farmers to opt into that.
But it's just when it's the right size for your business. If you're not there yet, then you gotta be scrappy about that first too, and then build into it. It's an investment. Everything you start is an investment. Like even marketing, you start it and you have to keep investing.
You don't necessarily give anything over 100%. Maybe you give, you know, you either have software do it for you or somebody you hire do it for you, or somebody you're trading for food do it for you.
It's just think of it as giving them 80% of it, 'cause you still need to do the 20% to manage it [00:32:00] prudently as the business owner.
Alex Russell: Absolutely. I'm so glad you said this, 'cause I felt I may have led people to think you can totally give something away to somebody that's working for you.
It's, it's not like that. You are touching every part. As the business owner, you gotta touch every part or stuff really starts to get squirrely. I've seen that on our Farm for sure. So I have somebody managing our Farm store, but I don't just walk away and never look at the Farm store, you know? I make a little touch.
I make sure she has what she needs. I'll go get what she needs and set her up for success, and then she's in charge of it, and then she can take it. But I do, I mean, every, every week I g- I gotta touch every part, the delivery part, the Farm store part, the Farmers market part. I've got my fingers in all of it because, you know, it's just your brand that's going out there.
You wanna make sure that it's going the [00:33:00] direction that you want it to go. I put there, um, y- it's like you're just steering a ship at this point, or you can't be the person doing the sails and the, I don't know, parts of a ship, unfortunately. The anchor They can't have one person running a a, a massive ship, okay? But someone's gotta steer and someone's gotta make the big decisions on where stuff goes. And so that then that becomes your role.
Janelle Maiocco: And you make better decisions with information.
So you want information from every part of your business. We actually decided to take on a few interns for the summer here at Barn2Door, which is really fun. And I was explaining these are college students who are studying business and marketing, right? And I was explaining to them that the different departments that they'll be helping, and how we also literally build software for all those departments for Farmers.
And I'm like, "So it doesn't matter what business you are, maybe logistics is certainly something that we think about for Farming, like maybe that's extra for some businesses. But you have sales, you have marketing, you have operations, finance, HR, [00:34:00] you have success, which in any case for anybody would be like the training and, the insurance of your customers having, you know, it's customer experience, engagement, all those things.
In our case, we have engineering, software engineering, and product as well. And you can hire half-time people, full-time hire software, I have a lot of Farms that they'll say, "Hey, look, if you, if you're at the Farmer market all day, you know, you'll get X credit," or, "I'll give you your free CSA."
You know, whatever it is, right? You can trade, you can barter. But like you, you look across the department, sales, marketing, logistics, inventory, order management, you know, finances, operations, you know, the actual Farming work, and you're like, "Okay, where is the best use of my time? And then what people or software
"Am I gonna hire to do these better and more efficiently and I don't get to do it all at once?"
Alex Russell: Yeah. I love it. That's so great. we will totally, limit our own business if we try to do everything ourselves. And I love the intern thing. We do an internship every summer, and it makes a pretty big [00:35:00] difference in our operation.
Like we need a lot of grass to get cut during the summertime, and we got a lot of eggs to wash, and we got stuff, and so we offer a volunteer internship. Farmers know summertime's pretty crazy. It's just like no matter what you do, there's stuff changes every day, things happen, grass is growing, plants are growing, things are being harvested at, rocket speed, and you need a lot of help in the summertime.
And there's a lot of college and high school kids out there that are actually interested in Farming now so we've been doing our internship for, I don't know, four or five years now, and we got, we got it all covered this I would definitely encourage people to look into some kind of informal internship, especially as a Farm business and you're getting started, you're year three, four, five or whatever, and you're like, "I just really need someone to help me harvest lettuce and in the veg during the week."
I can almost guarantee you, if you reached out [00:36:00] to your customers. I just reach out during, in my newsletter directly to my customer base, and it's a college student that's coming home for summer, and they love getting experience like that.
You can write them a letter of recommendation afterwards, but I don't pay them. I just, they just come and work for free, and they can do all those extra jobs that pop up only during the summer
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. I love that. Thank you. It's a good reminder to folks out there to get help sometimes in very clever ways that doesn't cost you a lot, if you can be creative on some of the things, right, like unpaid interns or, you know, leasing land versus buying it, like you're always looking for the cost savings, but you also will need to invest in things just to be efficient. I loved your note of saying you can be your own bottleneck.
It's actually sometimes asking the right questions at this stage that can make a difference, what am I doing too much of that's really inefficient, like order management or picking [00:37:00] lettuce for six hours a day, so I think asking how you're your own bottleneck is a good way for people to begin to appreciate, if they speed up certain processes or chores or things in their business, they actually unblock their own business to be more successful
I for sure have two more things to talk about, and I, 'cause I know this is like an endless conversation, right? Like you can talk for hours about like what it means to shift a gear from entrepreneur to business owner or from hobby to hobby to business Farmer. But I saw there's one thing that is really interesting here, ' cause I know when you get to this point, like you said at the beginning, you're figuring out products, right? That's a big deal. But one of the notes that you put down here that is an important part of this part of the business, is with all that you've learned, now you're starting to put the math together on your business.
And one of the things that looks like a goal that you spent time thinking about was how do I have inventory year-round? How do I make my inventory work for me, the Farmer, and the [00:38:00] revenue and profit that I need? So what changes did you make, Alex, over the years? If you have an example or just some advice for folks who are like, "I need to sell longer,", or, "I need to change products.
I need to even like stop doing one product and start doing another." What is your advice here?
Alex Russell: Yeah. Obviously this is gonna be a lot more difficult for my veg- family, it may just be some greens and stuff you can store long term.
Janelle Maiocco: I have an answer for that. we talk to produce Farmers often I'm not even kidding, to do pre-sales for CSA going into the spring, like through the holidays. Like, people will give it as a gift. they'll do marketing of their CSA, and then you have a certain number of them only so they can sell out.
Even though it doesn't start till April or May, they can sell them through the holidays what are you gonna buy somebody who has everything? Local Farm food, and so we have had Farmers, especially like fruit and produce, start selling during the holidays and into like January, February to pre-sell for the CSA, and [00:39:00] literally sell almost, s- in some cases sell out, but like tons of pre-sales.
And especially if you allow for upfront payment, they're pulling cash through the holidays. We could digress forever about, you know, preserves and dried herbs and all the things that look like gifts for the holidays. So anyway, there is some response to that, but you go all in on protein, go.
Alex Russell: Yeah. That was great. I was not thinking of those amazing options, so that's, that's really cool. So Charlie, my three-year-old, graduated from, preschool today, and so we were trying to figure out what kind of gift do we get the teachers? And, Natalie looks at me and she goes, " There's no better gift than the gift of fresh Farm meat." so both of the teachers for Charlie's 3K class got, uh, a big old bag of meat each, and I was like, " It's great. They don't need Starbucks. They need meat."
They need food, you know? They need nourishment. so that was great. I, I've never thought about giving someone a vegetable CSA for Christmas. I [00:40:00] think that's like the, one of the most brilliant ideas ever. So as far as on the protein space, what we've done to make sure that we have the inventory year-round, obviously cows and pigs, pretty easy to do year-round.
They don't really care about the cold. they're fine in the heat. They don't love the heat, but they're fine. So the main thing we did was try to make sure that we had a consistent buying schedule of buying the animals, 'cause our Farm's not big enough to do the farrowing and all the calving and have all these moms, being a grass-fed Farm.
So we buy calves and we buy yearlings, and we make sure that we're buying them with the year ahead that they are gonna be harvested. So this is a problem. So soon as your business grows, you actually get in, and you're working on your profitability, you can have the cash flow on hand to be able to buy what you need and think six months ahead, 10 months ahead, a year and a half [00:41:00] ahead, and start saying, "What do I need to buy now so that I'm okay in 2027?"
And that's a way different mindset than like, "I'm gonna buy some cows, and we're gonna harvest them and see how it goes." And it's kind of cute, you know? This is now, we're a serious business. We got things coming in, and we got things going out, and we need to make sure that we're always thinking ahead to what's going on.
And now, we talked about last time, I have my hog partnership now with another guy that's raising all of our hogs for us, and that's been really, really great to be able to hand that off. Then you get into poultry, and this is kind of when in the winter, poultry gets sticky.
Broilers especially, even way down south where we are, they do not love December and January and February. It's pretty cold. They're pretty fragile. So what we decided to do was we actually ended up buying a second walk-in freezer So that we can super [00:42:00] boost our inventory in the fall and calculate how many broilers am I gonna sell for December, January, February.
And then if I can get chicks in March, okay, that's eight more weeks. So I need to stock up enough broilers from December to April Once you get it going, it doesn't break your mind, but when you first have this kind of discussion with yourself, you're like, "I can't believe I'm thinking about a chicken a year from now that I'm gonna sell and I gotta buy it today and schedule my hatch date for, September something, so that in November I'm harvesting the bird that I'm gonna sell in, in April."
And you just, you start thinking differently about things.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you, first of all, I kept thinking when you said, "I bought eight cows," I'm like, "So what you're saying is buy two cows every quarter," right?
Like buy two, three months later, buy two more, three months later, buy two more. And pigs, same thing. Chickens, I love that you mentioned [00:43:00] seasonality because there are some places where people can have chickens year-round. That's awesome. But if you can't and you offer that and you wanna continue to offer it year-round because you wanna keep all of those customers on the hook, loyal to you, buying from you, filling their table from you and from your Farm, not somebody else, I love that you said, "Plan for that.
Buy another freezer." It's, that's just beautiful. It's amazing. And then there's eggs. There you go.
Alex Russell: So with the eggs, we all know that egg-laying hens slow down in the wintertime. And because of the way it takes, you know, six months for a baby chick to lay its first egg, it's not like you can just kind of boost your egg number, your chicken numbers in the winter like you can with broilers and screw around with that.
You have to figure something else out. So a lot of Farmers have a tough decision to make on whether they're gonna do artificial lighting or not. This is kind of a controversial subject, like the big poultry houses, [00:44:00] they all use artificial lighting because they know chickens slow down in the wintertime and they want to keep them going year-round.
So they, you know, so they will actually just put lights on all night long and, and that will really stress the birds out, but it will keep them laying And I know I'm gonna make some enemies here, but we have decided to do artificial lighting with our chickens on a timer. And so when we start losing daylight sometime in Sep- late September, October, we will start running artificial lighting for just to get us till about 9:00 PM at night, then the lights go off.
So we've noticed that if you can get these laying hens 14-ish hours a day of sunlight or a mixture of sunlight and artificial light, then those l- ladies keep laying for you throughout the winter, and your egg numbers may shrink a little bit, but they will stay up a lot more. It's one of those [00:45:00] decisions that you make.
You, like, you wanna give your chickens the winter off, you know? When you have 20 of them and you have names for all of them and it's really cute, you think, "I just wanna give you guys the winter off. You can stop laying," and they will pretty much stop laying in the winter. as a business, you gotta make some, some tough decisions like that, where you're like, "Okay, we have animal welfare that we're balancing here.
We have our business profitability that we're balancing here. Maybe we can find a nice middle ground." And so what we decided was we're not gonna keep the lights on all night long and get the maximum a- amount of eggs out of these girls, but we do need to make sure that they're paying for themselves
Janelle Maiocco: You're like, " I'm not a mean person," but what did you do? You sat down with the girls and you're like, "Okay, look, I-- you know, it's a hard conversation. It's not gonna be Alaska. Okay? It could've been Alaska. It's not gonna be Alaska. We're gonna give you California. You're gonna have light until 9:00."
Oh my goodness. But Alaska would just be [00:46:00] mean, 'cause you-- there's no night, there's no nighttime there, right?
Alex Russell: You don't really get the winter off, okay? I don't get the winter off, you don't get the winter off. So I apologize anyone listening that I made you mad. Um that's the decision that we have, that we have made to do some partial artificial lighting for our layers.
But it really keeps the egg numbers up all winter long, and your customers wanna keep eating eggs all winter long as well.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you're balancing, the welfare of the animals and what is natural for them, right? Also, I don't know that they have chickens up in Alaska who are in the year-round sunlight.
I can't even... Who knows? But we know that in the big eggs situation where there is 24/7 lighting, it's horrible for the birds on top of everything else. The people that are expecting product year-round and, which is a whole 'nother conversation about what's fair and unfair.
I should not be eating strawberries in December. It's such an interesting rich conversation, which I really appreciate. Another funny example of this is like we talk a lot about [00:47:00] supporting Farmers who don't do GMO, who have animals in their natural environment and, you know, care for the soil, the animals, everything
So it's, it's just a very honest conversation with doing what's best for the animals and being a, an ethical person inside of your business practices, being transparent with your customers, right, about that. I appreciate you bringing that up.
Alex Russell: Yeah.
There's another simple controversy that I'll keep brief, but it's the one of do you raise Cornish Cross hens because they've been genetically selected to grow really, really fast, or do you go with, a Freedom Ranger type of bird? I was lucky enough to train under Joel Salatin, he would do a lot of, uh, Farm tours, and I would get to drive the tractor for the hay wagon. So I'd go out there, and I would get to listen to Joel do his spiel every month, and it was, like, really an inspiring thing for me to get to see speaking to, like, hundreds of people in the middle of a pasture.
And the one thing that he kept saying over and over again, this is one of his famous phrases, he [00:48:00] says, . "You can be a nudist and you can be a Buddhist, but you cannot be a nudist Buddhist. It's just too weird." So he's, in reference to you can raise chickens outdoors or you can raise a heritage style chicken, but when you try to do everything as perfect as possible, and you raise the heritage chicken in, on the pasture, and you try to do all the organic and the corn-free and the soy-free and the wheat-free, and you try to do everything that's the most niche chicken you've ever seen, your chicken becomes $50 apiece.
And you just can't really do that as a small local Farm. You can maybe have that be your niche, that that's all you do, and you can really blow it up, and it's really difficult but still possible. But for most people, the Cornish Cross chicken is what your customers want, and it's a proven [00:49:00] model that works on pasture, and it's gonna be something that can replicate super easily.
And sometimes in Farming, we just need a win. We need something that's kind of easy to replicate, that our people are gonna love and is still super healthy. So that's another-- We do Cornish Cross, but it's, it's a, it's another controversy that's interesting.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. It's, um... And we will exit this conversation because we've already run out of time.
But, having, now that we have Farmers all across the country serving different markets, I will say there are absolutely Farmers with $50 chicken and $30 gallon raw milk $15 eggs, whatnot. they do quote-unquote, "all, all of the things," to ensure the, you know, the Olympian quality, which we all adore,
but until the supply and demand are there, we're on that path. I will say probably a good business lens to that is what will the market bear?
Our famous Tom Bennett will always say, " if you're selling out, you're not priced high enough." So you have to find out how far your prices can go and [00:50:00] sort of do the opposite.
Like, you might have started with really expensive eggs and you're like, "Oh my goodness, I'm paying $8 and only selling them for five." And then you, sort of reverse engineered it, Alex, where you're like, "Okay, let's start at the bottom and build the cost and then see what the market will buy." And you've discovered the market indeed actually will buy your $13 dozen eggs, which is not what you thought out of the gate.
So you have to push the ceiling of the price to the point where you start losing customers and don't sell out And continue to differentiate on all of those quality inputs that people are craving and willing to pay for.
But it does matter what market you serve, who else is in the market, you know, who you're competing against, et cetera, right? If you go into an urban center or suburban, you're gonna get a higher price. so you just have to push it. But you have to, differentiate, be the local sustainable regenerative option, and then keep pushing it up until you don't sell out, and then you've probably found about where the [00:51:00] ceiling is
Alex Russell: y- yeah. And this is one of those things that we noticed as we switched from hobby Farmer, if you will, to a real entrepreneur, business person, Farmer combo.
Somewhere around 250K, I had to make this decision where I noticed that a lot of people were asking for soy-free, corn-free eggs. And I was like, " I think there's enough demand for it. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think there's enough demand for really, really high-end eggs that are $13 a dozen, and I think they're gonna pay for it."
Once a year, I'll have someone ask me if we can do organic feed for our And I'll be like, " Yeah, but the pork chops are gonna be about $40 a pound, and you probably don't wanna pay that, do you?" And they're like, "No, I don't really wanna pay that." I was like, "Yeah, pigs eat a lot of food, okay?
They eat a lot more food than chickens do, so y- we can't do fancy feed for the pigs or else the cost is gonna be so high that the market can't bear that." But for me, in my context, I had enough competitors that were [00:52:00] already doing a more standard pasture-raised egg, and I just kept getting every week, someone would ask me, "Can you do soy-free?
Can you do corn-free?" I, there was like, " Okay. I-- this is a business decision. I think we're gonna go for it." And man, it's really, really paid off. Um, so that, that's like one of those things where I started off with you gotta understand what your customer wants, and you don't really know until you get in there and you start talking to them and you have those conversations and then they go, "All right.
I think they would pay that much." $13 a dozen's really high, but I think that they're gonna do it. Every weekend I'll get about one person going, "Why are these eggs so expensive?" and then I get to have a really cool conversation with them.
But then the other 30 people that come in the store that weekend go, "I'll take two of those please," 'cause they already know why they are expensive and how the quality matches so it, it, it's been a great way to kind of niche down a little bit for us and differentiate, but there's some things we just won't differentiate on.
We're not gonna do organic [00:53:00] pork, We don't do heritage turkeys for the same reason.
Janelle Maiocco: We want Farmers that are pushing the envelope on high quality, right? if your market bears it, awesome, because the more markets that bear it and the more people that demand high quality, the more that we can normalize that and it will actually over time bring down the cost of the inputs, which is amazing.
So thank you to all the customers buying from Alex his amazing eggs, cause that's a good thing for everybody. I know we're gonna run out of time, but I really wanted to ask one thing because you and I have talked about this s- at some point, but I think it's been a, a minute, when you are starting as a Farm, you say yes to every customer. and there's a lot of Farms we talk to that are early in their Farming career that are afraid to say no to customers, right? And then there becomes a point where you realize that, you know, like two out of 100 customers take 80% of your time.
Where you have to almost feel empowered to fire a customer. And I don't mean fire, I mean be willing to let them walk away and go be somebody headache if they're the one customer that lives 100 miles away and nobody else, and everybody else lives in the opposite direction in a nice little delivery [00:54:00] loop, let them go 'cause they're wasting too much of your time.
So can you give some advice to Farmers out there?
Alex Russell: Yeah. Yeah. You already said it beautifully, but you're making me think of the last book that I read, which would've been six months ago.
Mike Michalowicz, "The Pumpkin Plan." this is one of my favorite books I've read on business because he talks about knowing which customers to fire and which ones to focus in on. Basically it talks about how, how to grow a giant pumpkin, for the fair is to get rid of everything else on the plant.
Every other flower you pluck, you get rid of, and you focus on the main thing. this book was really awesome for me because I started off, like you said, saying yes to everyone. you know, you want a delivery an hour away, I guess I'll do it. You want, your, your ribeyes cut like this when I cut the rest of them like that?
Okay, I guess I'll try to get the butcher do just two ribeyes like
Janelle Maiocco: Well, and you're learning. You're learning. You don't know yet what you don't know as a new Farmer. You need to say yes to everything, arguably.
Alex Russell: Yeah. You got 20 [00:55:00] bucks in your bank account and you're like, "They'll buy the ribeyes if I cut them this way.
So finally, once you hit this 60 to 120 mark, you can start saying no to that kind of stuff, and I can't tell you how good it feels. You can... If someone wants, a bone-in, skin-on chicken breast, you can actually tell them no, and it's like the best thing ever. I don't need to try to do one thing for you 'cause you're probably not even gonna show up anyway on the pickup I'm kind of hardcore about it. I won't even let people customize a quarter cow or a half cow. I will make that customer, if they want to do their own cut sheet and, and talk about every steak, how thick to do each thing, and what kind of weird cuts they want, I'll make them buy the whole cow.
And I'm like, "If you wanna take all 500 pounds, you can do it. You can do your own cut sheet." our CSA subscription is a Farmer's choice. You get what I give you, and that is so [00:56:00] relieving to not have to, obey every request that my customers have. and I have customers that will say like, "Hey, can I skip the eggs this week?"
Or something like that, and if they're a close buddy of mine, I may say yeah. But I have said no plenty of times. If we've got 60 CSAs going out this week, imagine being a veggie Farmer and someone says, "Oh, I don't eat nightshades."
Janelle Maiocco: No They create so much work. Farmers create so much work for themselves if they start to customize every box.
Yeah, we, preach, you know, Farmer's choice, and frankly, the customers-- It ironically works very well because 9 out of 10 people, that's why you have to lose the one, 9 out of 10 customers are like, "Great, I don't have to make any more decisions. Give me the box. You're the Farmer. You know what you're doing."
And they're like, "Great, done. In fact, can I subscribe and not think about it ever again, and you'll just automatically charge my credit card?" Right? So it's-- I agree 100%. we do the same thing with the cut sheets where we advise Farmers, 'cause we see it across all the data and Farmers quarter, half, whole animals, where if somebody wants to customize, you actually charge them a premium.
Like, whereas , if you're doing [00:57:00] quarters or halves, you're like, "Here, you can choose A, B or custom," and custom is, you know, 50 or $100 more So that's another way to think about it, 'cause it's your time. it's more of your time and, and/or more time for your butcher, right?
Alex Russell: We do one thing that is probably our third controversy and probably the last one I should mention, we do offer a custom subscription, and I don't know, I don't even know how you feel about this, but it's a feature on Barn2Door that I love using.
Janelle Maiocco: Are they in the private store? So they still subscribe in your online store, Do they pay the $100 to get access to your private store?
Alex Russell: No, they just, it's a subscription that I have on recurring. Just turn it on for them.
Janelle Maiocco: You just turn it for them only. Yep. Well, no, I think honestly the whole point of our private store, so just for everybody listening in case we're confusing you by what we're talking about, Barn2Door is, you know, we built among other things that online store e-commerce for Farmers to offer directly to their customers.
And so if you go to, Alex's store, you'll see everything he has for [00:58:00] sale for the consumer. If you buy wholesale from Alex, you'll log in as a wholesale buyer, you'll see only the wholesale pricing and units. And then if he gives you special access, there's essentially a private section to his store or a different pricing or whatever else, and he chooses who gets to see that or be in there.
And we did that intentionally because, there's just unique circumstances like say there's three or four different variations of your main subscription. You're still not creating work for yourself if it's just a handful.
But the people can go into that custom store and choose a more customized like option that you've already pr- essentially preloaded for them to still subscribe and pay for, but you're not creating work by offering that to everyone, Cause it, it's a number of variations. So you're still trying to maximize your efficiency while accommodating simple requests.
Other Farmers will use the private store, as a add-on opportunity. So if you subscribe to my CSA, you automatically get access to these extra [00:59:00] items that are only for my CSA subscribers, like eggs or bacon or all the yummies that are high demand. So it's meant to be leveraged as a marketing opportunity or in your case, to accommodate some requests that make sense still for you as a Farmer, and you're not getting cute about Cause you know that you can even scale some of those options, while not creating a headache for yourself. So, no, I, I mean, I appreciate there's many different instances where that opportunity to offer a s- I don't know, what do you call it? This special section of your store or private access back room, you know, where they get the special stuff.
And from a marketing perspective, it's really neat for you as a Farmer to be giving accommodations or special treatment or to put, you know, your highest demand items as a reward for your best customers. it's just a neat marketing opportunity, so I appreciate that.
Alex Russell: Yeah, I, wish that everybody just wanted the regular box, and I'm sure if we were bigger, we could, we could start [01:00:00] to keep niching down and lowering the customizations. Being in that, you know, the, the entrepreneur phase, the business person phase, I'm still saying yes to some requests, not all requests reasonable requests,
Janelle Maiocco: well, Farmer's Choice is awesome because most of our Farms do that. They're like, "You're gonna get a combination of these things each week." And it sounds like you've just expanded that to some, additional options, which makes a ton of sense.
We're nearing the end here, so any final bits of advice, for people to shift their thinking and shift their gear from going from becoming a Farmer to becoming a business owner of a Farm?
Alex Russell: Yeah. I think my best advice is to keep learning. if you haven't listened to the rest of these podcasts on "The Independent Farmer" podcast, I just find them to be so rich. The one you did with Phil recently was so, so informative and, I just loved how he said you gotta do marketing every [01:01:00] day and it's part of your chores.
That's, that kind of stuff will reshift the way you see this because it's hard to have a clear perspective of your business when you're inside of it, you know? And so when you can learn more from other people outside of your business, then it will really help you get clarity on how to do this thing.
'Cause a lot of us kind of feel like we're winging it. And so the more you learn, the better it is. So listen to as many podcasts on business and on Farming as you can. Read business books, listen to lectures, and try to just be a sponge of information on how, especially once you're in this phase, this, this kind of 250K to a million in, in annual revenue, you are becoming a business person and you probably, if you're like me, you've never run a business before.
And [01:02:00] so you're, you're learning how to walk and you're learning how to run. And so if you can have some coaches out there, business mentors or any kind of information that you can glean from people who have, are ahead of you in the race, then, uh, please, please do that.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I-- you know enough to be dangerous at this stage, right?
Uh, but I would say a very important thing is to start doing things well and profitable, but also keep experimenting, right? You have to keep trying things. That's-- You're learning real time, right? What's working, what's not. Look at what's not working. Look what is working. Listen to your customers, and start to get good at business, And making those decisions. So yeah, there's, there's a lot to learn. It's never perfect. You'll never stop learning, but you'll slowly build a sustainable, profitable, repeatable, scalable business, one brick at a time or one product line at a time, through the various bits of wisdom. And you're not gonna do it overnight.
It's a process. but it's exciting when you start to get things right or you get to say no, and maybe [01:03:00] you even get a new tractor like Alex did. Who knows? It's good stuff.
Alex Russell: Or like when you look at the, when you look at the P&L and you, you're in the black and for like the first time and you're like, "Oh my gosh, we did it.
We did it. We sold things for a profit. This is crazy." it's so fun. Yeah. Celebrate it.
Janelle Maiocco: Celebrate. Celebrate the wins, 'cause you know the other stuff's coming.
I wanna extend my thanks to Alex for joining us on this week's podcast episode. You can check out more and follow Chuck Town Acres on his Instagram. It's @chucktownacres. South Carolina, don't forget, look for the mosquitoes.
Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of Independent Farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help Farmers make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro. We literally talk every day to Farmers, look at data on Farmers selling profitably.
And Farmers working with Barn2Door can go to office hours, talk to human beings every single day, talk to Farmers like Alex multiple times a week. not just Alex. We have a fleet of amazing Farmers who are highly successful in all [01:04:00] stages. we exist to support Farmers like Alex and all of you. If you're an Independent Farmer just getting started or interested in selling direct, or if you wanna simplify your business or build up your local customer base, please visit barn2door.com/learn-more.
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