Farming is chalk full of advice on how to grow plants, but there is very little about the business side of farming. True, there are some resources on budgeting/cash flow, marketing, employee management, etc, but the question that has always plagued me is, "Yes, but HOW?" I am so busy with farming that I'd love to be tracking my cash flow, but I can't make myself prioritize the time and effort needed to learn how to do it, create a system, update that system regularly, and use the resulting information to help inform farming decisions! Instead my focus has always been to learn how to decide what to focus my limited time and energy on, which led to the birth of Hippo Camp. Hippo Camp is all well and good, and helps to identify what to work on in the coming season, but it is still missing the how. The "how" has still relied primarily on the individual farmer's ability to create and maintain (and use) systems for carrying out their well laid plans. But as you and I know, well laid plans have a habit of going to you know where in July (or February for you Southern Hemisphere readers). So, how do you carry your plans through a too-busy season? Over the past year we've been trying to answer that question.

Our farm is small, so most of the decision making and planning has fallen to my husband Jake and myself. We plan in the winter and tell the crew the day's plan in the summer. That has worked just fine until baby #1 shook it a bit in 2020. We stabilized then a tough second pregnancy and loss of childcare rendered that system defunct in 2023. Instead I've spent over a year testing different communication systems with my crew, trying to find ways to relay The Plan effectively and succinctly when I can't be present physically.

The result has been threefold:

• expanding on the office-based SOPs I started creating when pregnant in 2020
• creating a system to help employees be more self-directed day to day
• creating a system for Jake and me to keep on top of the farm's daily, weekly, monthly and annual to-do's

The road to creating these resources has been bumpy. Primarily because methods that work for me, or seem like an innovative solution, haven't made sense to my team. Therefore when thinking about other farms or businesses using these resources I've realized that there are three levels of both ability and comfort level when it comes to adopting a new system. People seem to either like to keep things in their heads (and maybe on a few scraps of paper), on paper (in binders perhaps), or electronically. And within each category there are further comfort levels. I, for example, love a complicated cloud-based project planning solution like Monday or ClickUp, but those programs are meant for office-based businesses, so when applied to a farm they need to be able to be translated to paper or word of mouth (unless your team likes to use devices with muddy fingers perhaps). Instead of going fully to the cloud, we've found the right balance to be a mix of electronic (mostly Google Drive) to store data, and paper or white boards to communicate day to day. These are the resources that I will be sharing with Habit Farming. I won't tell you how to use an accounting software, that information exists, but I will give you some ideas for how to carve out time to keep up with reconciling your books, and how to streamline the annual process of collecting the paperwork needed to file your taxes.

Most of these resources exist in some form right now, but are catered to our farm. Over the next 12 months I will be updating them to work for any business, with different resources for different systems styles, and I will roll them out as I am using them for my own work. In the end I hope to have a nice little (or not so little) menu of SOPs, tips and techniques that you can use to make the back end of your business run just a little bit more smoothly. I hope you'll join me, weigh in on resources you use, and help to build this library for the next generation of farmers.

-Taylor

TLDR: I'm creating a set of replicable office-based SOPs for you to use for your business. They'll roll out in real time as I finalize them for our farm, and will (I hope) end in some sort of pretty package that can be shared far and wide.

Achievements and Disappointments at Footprint Farm, 2022 season

Our own lists were much longer than in any year past, I think because we had more voices present. We sat in our greenhouse and I wrote our list on a large piece of craft paper taped to a piece of rigid insulation (it doesn't have to be fancy!). I will add a photo of the list, and some zoomed in photos so that you can see the whole list, but I will call a few out in particular because I have a feeling they will come up in future posts this Winter.

For me, the biggest achievements this year were in working towards some longer term goals around stress reduction. First, we built a new propagation house just steps away from our home. There were a number of achievements on the list that would not have been possible without the new space, and I'm super proud that we went for it because we didn't neeeeeeed a new prop house (we had a little one out in a far field), but our old one was a constant source of stress that was eliminated with this new construction. Also notable were our stellar crew, improved fertility in one of our leanest blocks, staff PTO and SIMPLE IRA plans, using GrownBy for CSA management, and various benefits related to switching over from remay to proteknet for insect exclusion.

The disappointments list, as expected, was quite extensive. It ranged from general annoyances of dead truck batteries or broken bikes to more serious questions of burnout during persistent crew absences (covid sucks). There were a few crop-specific disappointments (Colorado Potato Beetles ate our entire eggplant crop), but for the most part our frustrations revolved around systems (our Wednesday wholesale days have been way too hectic for a few years running), some infrastructure improvements (we have very little storage), and staffing questions (we tried a new staffing schedule this year that didn't end up working for us). None of the disappointments were a surprise to me, I think because we've been doing this for a number of years and we encourage our crew to talk about what's frustrating them. Some of those frustrations we can fix during the season, and (I think, or I hope) it's comforting to know that this bigger process will capture and address ongoing frustrations before they affect us for another year. Unfortunately there are some issues that have popped up in years past, and remain on the list. These are problems that either weren't annoying enough to address, or that we tried to but didn't quite hit the mark. The latter are the problems that are most interesting to me, and are the ones that we focus our efforts on going forward. For this year those issues were around a general cluttered feeling in our tool storage and on-farm CSA pickup area, general team burnout, hectic wholesale days, and cherry tomato trellising and harvest. You can see the whole list in the attached photo, but my bet is that those are the areas of focus that you will be hearing more about as we move through our Hippo Camp process. Please feel free to add your own biggest achievements and disappointments in the comments below!
​

In order to prepare for making that first marketing plan I did a whole lot of research and came across Corinna Bench of My Digital Farmer. Corinna and her family run a very successful 400 member CSA program in Ohio. They boast an impressive retention rate, high community involvement, and a robust online marketing presence. That winter I spent many hours soaking up Corinna's wisdom through her YouTube station, and got a chance to see her speak live at PASA last winter. I found that she particularly excels at creating a profile of your ideal customer, creating a product for that ideal customer, and creating an email marketing plan that serves that customer.

In addition to Corinna's resources, that first plan was influenced by meeting Ellen Polishuk, a badass lady farmer turned farm business advisor. Ellen now runs Plant to Profit, where farmers can attend workshops, receive consulting services, or buy her new book, Start Your Farm. Ellen has a wonderful way of looking at farm finances through a clear and honest lens, and is particularly good at asking hard hitting questions like, "Taylor, WHY are you going to a tiny farmers market than only earns you $200 per week?"

The influence of these two women helped me to create a framework of looking at and understanding customers that was later refined by LEAN techniques from Ben Hartman. I highly recommend learning from all three so that you can find information that pertains to your own goals and priorities, but today I'll share the framework they helped me create.

First of all, when I am thinking about customers, I start with my own goals. My business goals always come back to financial stability because I know I cannot achieve any of my other goals without it, and it's the all important customer who ultimately provides the funds. That means that it's CRUCIAL that you understand your customer. A business owner really needs to understand who their customer is, what motivates them, and how to keep them coming back for more. For me, that "coming back for more" piece is paramount because I really truly dislike traditional marketing. I feel like I'm wasting my time when I make and distribute brochures, I don't think newspaper ads work for us, and I'm not really sure how to use Facebook any more. Instead of drumming up new business I'd rather my current customers come back year after year, and tell their friends about how much they love it. That's why we now focus on creating a product or experience that our customers cannot live without.

Because we were already in business when we were going through this process for the first time, we had some idea of who our customers were. We made a list of individuals who had come back for a second season of our CSA, who visited us regularly at the farmers market, and who we liked working with in wholesale. We looked for common characteristics, then created fake, or "avatar", personalities for our "Ideal Customers". Here's what that looked like:

Farmers Market:
Lucille is an 80 year old woman who lives with her ailing husband in the nearby retirement community. She comes to the farmers market each week for the social experience and to buy a quarter pound of greens, a tomato and a few potatoes. She likes us because we remind her of her grandchildren, and she will usually stay to chat or bring us muffins or her favorite quiche recipe.

CSA:
Jennifer is a 35 year old mom of two kids aged 5 and 7. She has a full time job as a marketing consultant and her husband John is a full time builder of high efficiency homes. Though they both work full time, they manage to keep both kids in a full schedule of sports, music recitals, and play dates. They has a large social circle of families with kids the same age, their extended families live nearby, and their social life revolves around cooking and eating meals with friends. They are also very conscious of their food choices, buy locally when possible, and are willing to spend more of their budget on food than what's standard today.

Wholesale:
Steve was a chef at a high end restaurant in Burlington and has since started his own restaurant in a smaller town nearby. He's in his mid thirties, enthusiastic about high quality ingredients, and changes his menu with the seasons. His restaurant is doing well, and he has started to request weekly deliveries of salad greens, wants to talk about specific varieties of bell pepper for next season, and insists he pay each invoice upon delivery.

We then took these avatars and created the perfect farm for each of them to buy from. Lucille got her sweet young couple with affordable prices and time to chat. Jennifer got a CSA with pickup hours that fit her kids' school and social schedules, easy to use ingredients, and loved it even more because all her friends were members as well. Steve got a farm that prioritized him and his menu. He got first dibs on the first heirloom tomatoes of the year, he felt he could ask the farmers to change up the greens mix because he wanted something sturdy that could be dressed without wilting, and he got produce that was consistently clean and ready to prep, which saved him a ton of time (and money) in the kitchen.

After dreaming up ideal farms for each ideal customer, we realized that our favorite customers went hand in hand with our own ideal farm. We then took a hard look at our customer list and prioritized them. This felt weird, but it became apparent that we just weren't the right fit for some of our existing wholesale customers, and our website description of our CSA needed to answer questions that our "Jennifers" might be asking, and gently turn away customers who would not thoroughly enjoy a CSA experience with our farm.

Once we knew what our farm could look like, we went directly to a handful of customers who matched our avatars most closely and asked them specific questions like, what's your ideal pick up time? Is it important to you that the greens are triple washed? Have we ever given you something that you were unhappy with? We also made an effort to chat one on one with these people at pickups and deliveries so that we could get a better idea of what they liked (and didn't) about the product we were providing. After time we have learned the phrases that our ideal customers use to describe our product, and we use that language on our website. We hear "fresh", "clean", "nutrient dense", "friendly", "educational", "consistent", and we make an effort to continue to provide those things.

This process is slow, and takes a minute to get used to, but I'm convinced that if you create your ideal farm, and that farm happens to be the ideal farm for your customer, you've got something pretty special in the works.

Feel free to ask questions or specifics about this process! We've been working on it for years, and it's a work in progress, so there's much more to write and think about than what's on this page.

​Good luck!

​Let's start with a review of where we've been in the planning process. First, we sat down with our farm teams and made lists of everything that felt like an Achievement, and everything that felt like a Disappointment from the previous season. We took the list of Disappointments and turned it into action items for the coming season through a "stop doing, keep doing, start doing" exercise. We then put dollar amounts to those action items in the form of an investments list. We also used those items to help design goals for the coming season, goals that included aspirations for financial earnings, production improvements, and system refinements. We then took those goals, investments, and real numbers about how much money we as owners need to earn from the business and created an ideal budget for the year. With that gross number in mind we looked to a marketing plan, which created a roadmap for how to reach our aspirational earnings goal. If the plan felt unrealistic we adjusted the budget by removing investments, reducing personal income, adjusting systems to reduce expenses, or increasing production or markets to create new revenue streams. Now that we're confident in who we are selling to, why we are selling to them, and what they'd like to be buying, we are ready for Step 7, our crop plan.

If you are in your first three years of farming, a crop plan can feel incredibly daunting. We used a number of books and online resources to create our first plans.

My favorites are, in no particular order:
Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers by Frederic Theriault and Daniel Brisebois
Sustainable Market Farming by Pam Dawling (dates for Southern growers)
The LEAN Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables by Ben Hartman
The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier
The Year-Round Hoophouse by Pam Dawling
Storey's Guide to Growing Organic Vegetables & Herbs for Market by Keith Stewart
Growing For Market (a monthly publication)
Anything from Eliot Coleman (depending on what resources you're looking for. IE Winter growing etc)
Johnny's Selected Seeds Growers Resource Library

I will say that each of the above resources is just that, a resource. They should not be viewed as plans that can be carbon copied to another farm to achieve equal success. I repeat, you cannot (unless you are incredibly lucky) photocopy one of the crop plans or growing methods from these resources and expect identical results. Instead choose one or two that follow farms in similar growing regions or with similar growing styles and use that information as a starting point.

In order to create a new crop plan, or to adjust a previous plan, start with your marketing plan. Look for specific crop needs and specific dates that those crops are needed. For example, we usually grow head lettuce for a summer camp. The camp needs 150 heads of lettuce each week from mid July until September. I will plug 150 lettuce heads into my crop plan for the second week in July, then use the DTM (dates to maturity) from the seed catalogue to count back to see when I should start the seeds. (Don't forget to account for time in the greenhouse if transplanting!) I always add 5-25% extra to my seed number to account for loss so that I'll be sure to have 150 when the time comes. In our first few seasons we did this exercise with each customer and each crop that we thought they would buy. Of course, these were complete shots in the dark at first, but the goal was to have something on paper. As the seasons went on we were serious about keeping track of our actual DTM (because some times of year it's more or less days than the package says), our actual number of lost plants (so that we could adjust down from 25% loss if needed), actual yields, and customers' actual preferences. After doing this for a few years you will eventually have a plan that needs annual tweaking rather than an annual overhaul. It's a slog at first, but it will happen!

Once the crop plan is finished, the next steps flow much more quickly. Step 8 is a fertility plan, which can range from "add compost to each bed" to a carefully concocted mixture of amendments, adjusted by crop. This part is super personal because it depends on your personal preferences re fertilizers, and what you have access to in your area. We took soil tests to our local university extension office and came up with our first fertility plan with a researcher there. We have a fairly complicated plan that is catered to each plant family and is dependent on what field we are planting into. This level of detail is not necessary! We started more simply (compost and a general 5-4-3 organic fertilizer), then got more complicated as we learned our soils and crop needs. We also called up our local fertilizer company and asked them to make a base mix for us so that we weren't mixing so many ingredients for each crop.

The next step is to revisit your Disappointments list and see if there are any systems that you can talk or walk through and improve. Ben Hartman's LEAN farming books are great resources for this (linked above). You'll get the best return for your efforts if you start looking at your washing and packing processes. More resources on wash/pack efficiencies can be found at UVM Extension's website. You can even find a walk through of our farm there! it's a few years old, but gives a good overview of how we set things up.

The last few steps put your plan into action, and calendarize your plan so that you don't forget all your great ideas when the season gets going. First we create our ideal weekly schedule. That might look like: Monday work day, Tuesday harvest and CSA, Wednesday wholesale harvest and deliver, Thursday harvest and CSA, Friday workday, Saturday farmers market. We then use that weekly schedule to determine how many people hours we need and on what days, then write out job descriptions, and start the hiring process if need be.

Lastly we get out a calendar and write in important dates (taxes due, first farmers market, first day of the aforementioned summer camp, etc). We also write in goal review days, dates that parts of certain projects should be done, and budget review days. Of course, this is an ideal calendar, but putting dates in now helps our future selves remember what we set out to do this year.

That just about sums it up, my friends! Drop questions in the comments and let's chat more!

Back in December, when Habit Farming was new and exciting and full of possibilities, I had a year-long plan to roll out new resources, tips, tricks, and even a small in-person business planning conference. Then, as we all know, the 2020 season kicked our collective butts and all plans for anything outside of keeping the farm running went right out the window. In addition to feeling wiped out for most of the summer, this has also been an incredibly emotional year. I'm not sure if it's the pregnancy hormones (I'm 8 months pregnant at the moment), or the Instagram trolls (of course they came out of the woodwork this year), or the nightmarish state of the world, but I've nearly called it quits more than a handful of times since April. I'm not sure about you, but I feel like I no longer understand how to operate in the world, I'm questioning everything I thought was a certainty, and I'm deeply concerned about the future. The only thing that has kept me going, and the reason I'm back on here today, is the plan Jake and I made for the farm during last winter's Hippo Camp.

If you were following along last year you may remember that Hippo Camp is our annual two person business planning retreat. We rent an Airbnb, bring all of our important paperwork and the season's records, and we follow a step by step review of the season and use it to make a plan for the coming year. This focused, intentional time helps cut through the noise of what we feel like we "should" do with the farm, and helps us define what we need or want to do, based on our own values and philosophies. After this year's planning process we determined that in order to meet our personal goals of more sanity, less working hours, and getting ready for a baby, we needed to hit a financial goal of around $200,000 gross income. That number is huge for us, but it came out of very real discussions of increased labor needed (so we could work less), investments to make (better tools meant working less), and the desire to bring one of our employees on as a manager (to replace me in the field once I wasn't able to do as much of the physical work), which meant a raise and increased hours year-round. In order to meet that financial goal we knew we had to hit other goals such as CSA membership numbers, increasing production efficiencies, etc. As April hit and markets closed, these goals drove us to pivot (don't you hate that word by now?) early, increasing CSA membership by double, pulling out of our farmers market, and opening an online store. We also hired additional staff to accommodate new CSA packaging needs, applied for grants to help with the increased costs, and hit our $200,000 goal in mid September. Of course, due to seriously increased costs this season, that $200,000 isn't going to net us as much as we thought, but those goals helped us make moves early on and gave us direction when we needed it most.

I'm not sure what next year is going to look like. I'm not sure what next week is going to look like. Heck, because of covid exposures, lately we aren't even really sure who's going to show up to work each day. What I do know is that we are going to take the lessons learned this season, we're going to hole up at some point this winter (maybe not at an Airbnb, but we'll hire a farm sitter so that we can stay-cation and not worry about farm chores), we're going to set goals and intentions for 2021, and we're going to keep plugging along despite the world outside our fields. I also know that this process helped give me direction through a whole lot of anxiety, it pulled me out of what could have been a much longer and more worrisome spout of depression, and even though I'd probably rather curl up under a blanket for the next six months, I'm feeling like sharing the process, and working through it with you, is more important now than ever.

Going forward I'm excited to announce that I'm working on turning the previously planned Hippo Camp conference into several pre-recorded videos that will be released later this winter. This is in collaboration with friends at Johnny's Selected Seeds, and should help walk you through the review and plan process with time for live discussion and Q&A when the videos are released. I'm super excited about it and grateful to Johnny's for encouraging me to get back on the proverbial horse. We'll give you more details as they arrive. If you just can't wait to get started, most of the steps are still on the blog, and feel free to ask any questions either in the comments or by email. I'll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible!

Sending you all as much love and encouragement that I can squeeze into a blog post.

​Farm on.

​Taylor

If you've been following along this past winter you'll know that Jake and I are big planners. As of February 1 we felt like we had solid financial, marketing, production, and distribution plans in place. We were going to conferences, I was researching employee handbooks in order to give ours a facelift, and we were nearly ready to start the season. Then, of course, everything changed. In mid February we found out that we're (if all goes well) expecting a baby in early November. Days later we both went down with the worst sickness (flu? COVID? we don't know) that either of us have ever experienced. We quarantined ourselves in our house because the virus with a capital V was just entering the US and there weren't tests available in Vermont at the time. Right as we were feeling better our state started shutting down. That means that we've been self-quarantined for six weeks now, I've never met my OB (baby doctor) in real life, and like most of you we've been forced to re-imagine our entire business.

To be fair, in comparison to many, we are doing totally fine right now. I do feel like I'm living a weird dream in which I'm pregnant in the middle of a pandemic, starving and emotional but unable to get to the Fruity Pebbles I've been craving. Other than that we're busy, healthy, have plenty of food and toilet paper, and really truly feel like an essential piece of our community. That said, I feel heavy a responsibility to my crew, my customers, my family, my friends, to Jake, and to myself, and it sometimes feels quite overwhelming. I haven't felt up to writing here, or sharing too much online because I've felt so uncertain and so under prepared.

Last week Jake and I decided that we'd had enough of the uncertainty and took a whole day to revisit the goals and priorities we set out in this year's Hippo Camp. Our priorities have always been to first provide for ourselves (financially and emotionally), then our employees, then our community. The rationale being that we can't serve our community if our crew is struggling, and we can't support our crew if we are struggling. The clearest way for us to meet those goals has been through a budgeting process that supports first the income that we need to make in order to pay ourselves and our employees, then builds up from there. That number has already been set for this season, so we had something to start working with. As we looked at that number, and considered the current state of markets and restaurants, we wondered if that goal was still realistic. We went back and looked at how much money we absolutely positively had to make in order to pay our bills and keep our crew employed, compared that number to how we think our markets are going to be affected this year, and realized we had some hard decisions to make.

First of all, one of our income streams comes from a farmers market that is usually slammin busy (for a small Vermont market) from mid-May through mid-October. In order to meet our original financial goal we needed to average $2k per market to make it work. That number has typically only been possible when the market is popular, bustling, and we can hardly keep up with the line. So we asked ourselves: can we still hit a $2k average with one of the alternative market styles we've seen popping up on the West Coast and in New York? Would we be able to uphold our commitment to keeping ourselves and our crew healthy at one of those markets? The answer to both was no, which was why we emailed our market manager right away to give her the news. Within hours we got calls and emails from a local organization asking us to reconsider and help keep markets open, the rationale being that the community needs a safer way to shop than the grocery store, and that EBT shoppers need a way to buy. We hold the community in our top three values, but because we put ourselves and our employees above our community we held firm. We also felt that we could solve the grocery store and EBT problem without asking the community to form crowds at a market or putting ourselves at risk. Instead we decided to ask our community what would serve them best, and heard back that they wanted food that they could trust. Food that only our crew had touched. With that input we  decided to increase our CSA by double and offer no-contact pickup or delivery in twice the locations as usual. We'd also add an online store so that people could increase the size of their weekly CSA, or order a la carte if they didn't want a CSA. If CSA sign ups continue the way they've gone all month, and if we can pull off packing 150+ orders per week, then our numbers might work out.

This past Friday, a week after we made the decision to leave the market, our governor closed all Vermont farmers markets for the Summer, allowing for some modification if it felt safe. Our particular market decided to close its doors for 2020, and will not be looking to try modification or online sales.

We certainly don't have this season figured out. We're trying to balance the safety of CSA members who have cancer, heart disease, immune deficiencies, and asthma while not crossing the line into paranoia. We're trying to protect this unborn baby from a risk that, without more time and research, is still unknown. In the past week I've found so much power and confidence in using values that were established in a time of clarity to inform impossible decisions in a time of crisis. If I can get my hands on some Fruity Pebbles my life just might start to feel more manageable.

Now that we have a plan and are back on our feet I hope to start writing more regularly. As always, let me know if and how I can help. I really, deeply, hope that you all are making it through without too much hardship.

Farm on.

This step relies on the idea of the Pareto Principle (according to Wikipedia this principle is also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity). It means that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business it means that 80% of our sales typically come from 20% of our customers. Follow the steps below to determine who those 20% are, how to give them "sticky fingers", and how to prioritize them without offending the other 80% of your customers.

In this step you will need
Your "ideal farm" description if you have one
Any numbers on your customers that you have (wholesale sales records, CSA evaluations, etc)
If you like drawing you can grab some fun pens for this step
Paper or a blank word document

The goal of this step
To identify your target customers, set your prices, and identify marketing priorities for the year.

Time needed
60 + minutes (more if you're doing this for the first time)

Process
First, remember that you've already imagined your Ideal Farm. That's the farm that you are going to describe below. If your business is newer and doesn't quite match your ideal yet, that's ok. This is what you are working towards. If you've been in business for a while, try to answer the questions truthfully to the business that you want to run, not the one you think you should because of your customers. It's entirely possible that you may go through this process and realize that the customers you are trying to please aren't your 20%. That's ok too. That's what happened to us the first time we did this exercise.

Ok here we go!

Get some paper and answer the following questions:
(I'll give some fictitious examples to get you thinking)

1. Define what your business does, and what's important to it
   This could be a mission statement, a list of adjectives that describe your farm, etc
   ex: Our farm grows things for salads. We grow enough carrots, beets, radishes, cucumbers, salad greens and micro greens to supply a salad CSA, a farmers market, and 5 local restaurants.
   Be very specific. Try to stay away from flowery language. Get down to the real core of what it is you do at your farm. Only add in buzz words if they are really important to you. Buzz words being: fresh, organic, healthy, nutritious, local, etc etc etc.
   
   
2. Describe your product
   What do you produce? What does it look like? Feel like? Pretend you're telling your mom.
   ex: We sell boxes of salad mixes. We have four types, and they look like ones you'd get in the grocery store. We also grow salad toppings. We sell a CSA, which means we basically give people a salad kit every week, all year long. We also sell all that stuff at the farmers market. At the market we sell the pre-boxed greens mixes and we lay out all the toppings like you'd see at a normal farmers market.
   Again, be specific. What is it that you do that makes your product unique?
   
   
3. Define your typical customer
   Ok, put your effort in here folks. Close your eyes, and think of your typical customer. What do they look like? What do they value? What is their home life like? Draw a picture of them, name them, make this person as real as you can. If there is a real life person to model after then use them as inspiration. Do this for each of your sales streams.
   ex: Farmers Market: Our typical customer is a mom in her 30s. She seems pretty healthy, and I know she eats epic salads for lunch most days. She is one of those special people who meal preps and cuts up all her salad toppings on Sunday, right after coming home from the market. She is pretty well-off I think, or maybe she values food enough to pay more for the good stuff. Either way she doesn't seem to mind about prices. She has a husband and two kids, and I don't think they really eat the salads, but she buys extra carrots and cucumbers to put in the kids' lunches. She really values consistency because she's such a planner and it throws her off when we are out of something that she usually buys. What does she value? Well I'm not sure if she cares that our vegetables are organic, but she is anti-plastic.
   Get as full of a picture of this person as you can. Have they ever given you feedback? Compliments? What did they say? With wholesale customers, how do they like to communicate? When have you struggled with them, why? Have fun with it!
   
   
4. Define your Ideal Customer
   Most of us have multiple types of typical customers, but let's drill down deeper here. Who is spending the most money at your business? Look for customers who regularly spend over $40 at the farmers market. What do they have in common? Which restaurant had the highest sales last year? You may think you know your ideal customer, but this step often surprises me. Go through and highlight the people who are actually making you money. Are they the adorable grandma who brings you hand written recipes every week, but requests "just a handful of greens this week please"? Or are they the busy foodie mom who breezes through every week, fills her reusable tote bag as full as she can, then waits patiently as your antiquated credit card reader tries and fails to read her shiny new chip card? We all love our farmers market grandmas (mine's name is Gail), but in this step we're highlighting chip card mom.
   
   
5. Refine your product
   Now let's look at our product again. How do we get chip card mom to buy more veg? How do we get her to tell her friends about us? Remember, we aren't forgetting about our farmers market grandmas, we're just tweaking to make ourselves more attractive to the big spenders. Look again at what your big spenders value. Can you modify your product to make them happier?
   ex: Hmm. The salad eating mom hates plastic, she tells me that all the time, and she often asks if our clamshells can be recycled. I wonder if she'd prefer compostable boxes? What if we set it up like a salad bar instead, with boxes of greens and tongs so she can bring her own bags if she wants? How many other customers care about plastic? Maybe we can be like a lower plastic using farm? We could say that on our website even.
   We're creating sticky fingers here, people. That's when someone grabs your kale one week and it was so dang good that they have to get their mitts on it again next week. What makes shopping with you enjoyable to them? Do you need to bite the bullet and upgrade your chip reader so that people can pay with their watch? What if you emailed all of your chef customers and asked them if your delivery schedule works for them? They might appreciate it.
   
6. Define your product for the coming year
   Finally, list out your three sales channels again, and the products you sell to each market. Define them in price, timing, quantity, means of communication, and anything else you can think of. Be specific. These numbers are going into your crop plan.
   ex: Farmers market: 1 market, May - October. Same quantity of salad mix as last year, but in bulk this time. Increase the number of cucumbers and carrots by 20% because I'm going to focus on selling more things that can double as salad toppings and items for kids' lunches. I'm going to upgrade my signage and make sure it's obvious that we're switching to bulk greens. I'll charge an extra $0.10 if someone wants a bag, but I'll make them available. I should also have a photo of our farm crew next to the solar panels to show how eco-conscious we are. I'll upgrade our card reader and put a sign right at the register to people know they can easily use all sorts of payments. We're going to make sure we overproduce greens by 5% so that we will absolutely always have enough for the whole 6 hour market every week.
   
7. Highlight and put on the to-do list
   Go back through once more and highlight anything that jumps out at you. Do you need to chat with wholesale customers over the winter? Do you need to upgrade your farmers market table cloths? Make a to-do list with those items and put the list with your business planning paperwork. We'll use it when we get to the calendar step. Nice job!
   

Final thoughts:

The steps above require that you pay attention to your customers, and that can take time. I have a document called "things people say" that I keep in my google drive and on my phone. I try to notice what words people use to describe our produce and their experience as our customers. I drive my social media posts towards those words, or phrases. I notice when people struggle with our CSA set up or website and I quickly make changes to make things easier. I also try to learn peoples names.

A final, final thought about providing a consistent customer experience, which comes from the book The E-Myth. In the book the author relates a story of going to get a haircut. Please enjoy it below. I think it's a good lesson.

"I went to a barber who, in our first meeting, gave me one of the best haircuts I had ever had. He was a master with the scissors and used them exclusively, never resorting to electric shears as so many others do. Before cutting my hair, he insisted on washing it, explaining that the washing made cutting easier. During the haircut, one of his assistants kept my cup of coffee fresh. In all, the experience was delightful, so I made an appointment to return. When I returned, however, everything had changed. Instead of using the scissors exclusively, he used the shears about 50 percent of the time. He not only didn’t wash my hair but never even mentioned it. The assistant did bring me a cup of coffee, but only once, never to return. Nonetheless, the haircut was again excellent.

Several weeks later, I returned for a third appointment. This time, the barber did wash my hair, but after cutting it, preliminary to a final trim. This time he again used the scissors exclusively, but, unlike the first two times, no coffee was served, although he did ask if I would like a glass of wine. At first I thought it might be the assistant’s day off, but she soon appeared, busily working with the inventory near the front of the shop. As I left, something in me decided not to go back. It certainly wasn’t the haircut—he did an excellent job. It wasn’t the barber. He was pleasant, affable, seemed to know his business. It was something more essential than that. There was absolutely no consistency to the experience. The expectations created at the first meeting were violated at each subsequent visit. I wasn’t sure what to expect. And something in me wanted to be sure. I wanted an experience I could repeat by making the choice to return. The unpredictability said nothing about the barber, other than that he was constantly—and arbitrarily —changing my experience for me. He was in control of my experience, not I. And he demonstrated little sensitivity to the impact of his behavior on me. He was running the business for him, not for me. And by doing so, he was depriving me of the experience of making a decision to patronize his business for my own reasons, whatever they might have been. It didn’t matter what I wanted. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed the sound of the scissors and somehow equated them with a professional haircut. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed being waited on by his assistant. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed the experience of having my hair washed before he set to work and that I actually believed it would improve the quality of the haircut. I would have been embarrassed to ask for these things, let alone to give my reasons for wanting them. They were all so totally emotional, so illogical. How could I have explained them, or justified them, without appearing to be a boob? What the barber did was to give me a delightful experience and then take it away."