Charlotte Smith - Farm Marketing Mindset

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Charlotte Smith about Farm Marketing Mindset.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Charlotte Smith. Good afternoon, Charlotte, how are you? I'm good, thank you. Good afternoon to you too. Good, so tell me about yourself and what you do.

00:30
That is a big question. So I live in St. Paul, Oregon, and I've been a farm girl my whole life. As a matter of fact, I went away to college and swore I'd never come back. But then I came back 20 years ago because I wanted my kids to have the same lifestyle. And first of all, started kind of a homestead, milk in my own cow to provide milk for my family.

00:56
And as anyone who has a cow knows, one cow provides milk for like 50 families. So I started selling my milk and had a raw milk dairy at an on-farm store. And then that evolved into about 10 years ago, teaching other homesteaders and farmers and now ranchers to market and sell their products too.

01:25
These are expensive endeavors and it's nice to get some money back, either to pay your costs if you're just a homesteader or if you actually want to make a business out of it. I teach farmers how to do that too. So yeah, I'm a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I like to say. Well multi-passionate is a great thing.

01:55
Perferred in Australia last week and I don't know if you know about her but she does sort of the same thing you do but her focus is women over 40 and helping them find what they're good at regarding homesteading to Make money to help support the homestead. I don't know if you know about her. I don't but this You're slightly different than her number one. You're in Oregon not Australia and

02:24
I just was like, I want to see what your take is on how to make this go, I guess. Sure. Well, absolutely you have to be good at it. What I always say is, what are you passionate about? Because if you are milking cows because you think you need to make money and not because you love it, you're going to be very unhappy and unfulfilled. So...

02:52
I always work with my clients to make sure that yes, they're learning to make money and they are making money at something they love. Sometimes it's just a matter of telling them that yes, you have permission to say you don't enjoy it. Sometimes they're making money at things they don't enjoy because they think they need to keep doing it or need to make money. Yes, so I do similar things.

03:20
Figure out what you love and what you're passionate about, and you can make a profit at it. So, yes, and live a very fulfilling life. All right, that's kinda what I thought. That's why I decided to do a podcast, because I really, really do love it. Yeah, that's wonderful. And people love to talk about what they love. So I was like, I love talking to people. People love talking about what they love to do.

03:50
I'm doing homesteading, I bake, I make crafty stuff. Let's go talk to people who are doing the things that I'm doing. And it's almost a year that I've been doing this and I still love it as much as the first one I did the last week of August last year. I hear you, I hear you, I'm the same way. Yep, it's crazy. I was not a podcast listening girl. I've listened to more.

04:15
podcast from other people in the last eight months than I have ever listened to in my entire life. Because I needed to know how other people are doing it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you educated yourself, huh? I had to because I was like I have no idea how to do this. I need help. And that's one of the things that I would say is that if you're going to start a business, do the research.

04:41
go look at what other people are doing, find somebody who's doing what you want to be doing and ask them questions. Yeah, or go intern with them. That's my thing. Before I brought home my first milk cow, I spent a year going and visiting other dairy farmers, observing them, actually sitting next to them, milking with them, and you can do that no matter what it is you're doing on your homestead. As a matter of fact, if you do that, you'll save so much money.

05:10
because you will prevent so many expensive mistakes. Yes, and there are so many expensive mistakes to be made. And I don't want to discourage anyone from homesteading life, but just understand that if you're going to be growing produce or raising animals, mistakes will happen because you can't know what you don't know. Exactly. We learn experientially as humans.

05:40
kills our crop of vegetables only when we kill the crop of vegetables. And go, oh, I wasn't supposed to do that. Or cow or whatever animal it might be too. Yes. And sometimes it's not even anything that you did or have control over. Our garden right now is a huge garden of lovely grasses and weeds, mostly because it rained for a month and a half straight here in Minnesota this spring.

06:09
and the garden has been pretty much stopping wet since then. So we have some things growing that we put in, but they're not doing very well. And if Mother Nature could shut off the tap for a while, it would be really, really appreciated. Mm-hmm. It's been rough here in Minnesota. Oh, no. I don't know what it's been like where you are, but this has been terrible.

06:34
We get a lot of rain six months in the winter. We're a rainforest and then we're kind of a drought in the summer. We really don't get much rain. I live next to a river and I have water rights. So luckily I can keep my grass green all year, but yeah, summer's kind of a drought here where I live. Well, the joke here at the homestead has been that we didn't know that we had been transported to Oregon or Washington state this summer. Right. I was in Minnesota teaching marketing.

07:03
to a group of farmers in April. And the day I left, it snowed. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm never gonna move to Minnesota. It snows in April. Yep, Prince had a song, or has a song, called Sometimes It Snows in April, and he was not wrong. Yes, oh my gosh, you're right. How funny. Yeah, that boy grew up here. I think he knew what he was talking about. Yeah. Okay, so, you have a course.

07:33
that you offer. And I can't remember if it's a free course or a paid for course. So tell me about the course. I have lots of free courses and one paid course. So yeah, what I love to do is, my family farm when I grew up, when I was a teenager went bankrupt. We lost everything except the clothes on our back. Our house was sold.

08:00
in the bankruptcy sale, the farmland, the equipment, you know, we lost everything, put the clothes on our backs. So that has stayed with me in my whole life. And I saw a lot of other farmers at that time do the same thing. And now today, now that I've started my farm back in 2009, I've seen so many farmers go out of business. So my passion in life is to make sure that every farmer.

08:30
everywhere knows they don't have to live in poverty and they can make money on their farm if they learn the skill, the money-making skills. And for me, I teach marketing and I teach farmers how to make money. It's what my website says because as we know, this is just so expensive. No matter what size you are, even if you just have backyard chickens, it's going to be

08:59
feed them and take care of them. So I offer all sorts of free courses that just help you get started. If you've never thought of marketing your products before, I have a free email marketing course that gives you the basics so you can set up your foundation. I have a free pricing course called Price for Profit. I just took all the expenses on my farm and I created some

09:29
Excel spreadsheets and made it so that you can plug your numbers in. You plug in your expenses and it spits out a number of what you should be charging for your products and most farmers are shocked. And when I say farmers, I'm talking about farmers, homesteaders, ranchers, anyone trying to make money selling a product direct to consumer. They're usually shocked. So I love people to have that awareness.

09:57
They're wondering like, why do I never have any money left at the end of the year? And yet we sold, we're selling more and more every year, but there's no more money left and many times it comes down to, they just aren't charging enough. And so I love that exercise and, um, I can share with you where they can find that free course if you want. Sure. Good. You can, you can email it out, but they can go to Charlotte M Smith.

10:25
dot com forward slash price for profit, all one word, price for profit. And it's just a six day course. So I'll get an email every day with the spreadsheets and it'll really open their eyes to why they're working so hard for not much return. And so, so that's kind of the, the free things really help you get your foundational things set up with email marketing and pricing.

10:53
And then my paid course, what happens is once you know what to charge, what's going to happen is you're going to feel really guilty charging that much. You're going to feel really scared increasing your price. You're going to think you're going to lose people. So that's where then I do my, what I sell, what I have for sale is my course called farm marketing mastery. And that is beginning through advanced marketing training. So, and coaching. And that's where once you know what you need to charge.

11:24
We help you figure out number one, is that what you love doing? And then coaching you and working with you through the year to make sure you're learning exactly how to market that one thing, price it for profit, and then build consistent sales with loyal customers that come back time and time again. So, that's kind of it. My free things are an introduction. And then my paid courses where you learn to be a very confident

11:54
farm marketer and actually start to make money at what you're doing, which helps you in so many areas. Yeah, because most people who start a business are not fluent in marketing or sales. Marketing sales are a whole different career than the thing that we're starting. I was lucky enough to have some marketing background because I worked for a friend for six years.

12:24
She was a PR and marketing company. And I had no idea how much I actually learned from her until we moved here four years ago and we're like, oh, we're gonna do a farm to market garden and we're gonna do a farm stand on the property and we're gonna do the farmer's markets and we're gonna sell produce. And my husband was like, so how do we get the word out? And I was like, I got you covered, honey. Nice. Yep, because it was in my brain from working with her and she is...

12:54
still my friend and I love her and I love her more now because she taught me all these things that I didn't even know I was learning by osmosis. So it worked out fantastically. So here's the thing with the spreadsheet thing and showing people what they should be charging for their product. That is a thing we have trouble with sometimes too.

13:23
tons of tomatoes and people wanted tomatoes for canning. And I told my husband, I said, you could probably be charging a dollar to two dollars more per pound this year than you did last year because there's a demand, there's a higher demand for them. And he was like, yeah, but with inflation, I don't wanna do that, it feels like taking advantage. And I was like, it's your garden, it's your baby, it's your tomatoes, you sell them for the price you wanna sell them for.

13:52
And it's bugged me since because on one hand, he's right. Money was very tight for people last year. And we live in a small town. And we were very thankful that people wanted to buy our tomatoes. On the other hand, we could have charged more than the year before. So the whole pricing thing gets real uncomfortable for people. So what should we have done maybe in that situation? Yes. Well, the...

14:21
What you're describing is very real. We take it very personally, like it's our responsibility to help people's budgets. But what I see, and remember, I work with, I see big scale. I work with 300 farmers a year of all different sizes, backyards, you know, quarter acre, one acre, three acre, five, 10, a hundred, 10,000 acres. So I have a vast.

14:49
experience over 10 years of thousands and thousands of farmers. And the thing is, if you don't decide to charge a sustainable price, at some point, your husband and or you will say, this is too much work for the money. I'd really like to just go to the beach more this summer. Let's just stop selling tomatoes altogether. And now you've left your community hanging.

15:16
Many of them would rather pay a dollar or two more per pound and have you there to five and 10 years later. So when farmers, and it's a skill, it's a learned skill to be able to charge a sustainable price and what I mean by sustainable is you make enough money that you want to be around. You can prioritize farming over everything else because you're making

15:41
a profit, it makes it worth the work and you're there to serve your community long-term. If you're not charging enough, it's unsustainable, which means you won't be able to sustain it for years. You won't want to do it to five and 10 years from now because of the effort involved for the return. So it's a mindset shift. It's purely a mindset shift. And once you get that, you realize that your community wants to support you.

16:10
in being sustainable. They're like, yes, we're happy to pay one or $2 more or $5 more per pound, whatever it takes for you to be fair to yourselves and for it to make sure that you're going to be here in the years to come. So that's it in a nutshell, there's a lot more to it, but it's just shifting how you think about it. Okay, well.

16:36
In my husband's defense, he's a very sweet man and he really does want to help the community so I can totally see where he was coming from. But I'm going to share this particular discussion with him sometime in the next two weeks and be like next summer we need to figure it out. We need to start in January and figure out what your time is worth, what the product is worth, and what you think you want to make for what you're doing.

17:04
instead of, I'm afraid that people will starve if we don't feed them our tomatoes. Yes, and people will not starve, period. That's an unproductive, unuseful thought that is just not true. They want garden fresh tomatoes and they're happy to prioritize them. I prioritize farm fresh food for my family. Two of my kids have moved out. I have one left at home. Me too.

17:33
Feeding, okay. So feeding this large family, I prioritized farm fresh food, which meant there were lots of things we didn't do. We didn't go to Disneyland. We went to, we drove to go camping or we drove to the beach. We didn't take expensive trips because of the way it was important to me to prioritize food. Everybody will choose who wants to prioritize farm fresh food. We'll do so and we'll adjust their budgets to do so.

18:03
And something I say to people like your husband, like maybe he decides tomatoes are his charity and he is going to keep the price low because that's how he gives back to his community and it's not affecting him financially and he doesn't mind growing and harvesting and putting all the time and maybe that's his charity. But then you, you've got a little bit different mindset and this is why I have a coaching program.

18:32
the farm marketing mastery where we coach for a year, because a lot of times the partners working in the homestead or on the farm together are of a different mindset. So your mindset is more like, if we're going to work this hard, we're going to make money at it. Now, I put those words in your mouth. And he's of the mindset, if I charge more than I'm not helping people, I want to help people. So you've got two different mindsets here.

19:02
What will it take to get you on the same page? Or do you just want to focus on what you're going to produce to make money and let him have his charity, let him give away, like for instance, I had a raw milk dairy and a huge garden. I never charged for my vegetables, but my best customers spent hundreds of dollars with us every month, hundreds or maybe even, you know, thousands, which is thousands by the end of the year.

19:31
I would give them tomatoes. They would get a bucket of tomatoes every week when they came during tomato season. I could have charged, but that was my charity. I made money on my raw milk dairy and the tomatoes were kind of a bonus or a free gift. So you can set it up any way you want, but at a certain point, if he says, whoa, this is just too much work. I need help. I can't do it all myself.

19:59
But I'm not paying any money. I can't even pay a high school kid to come help me out. Well, then, you know, maybe he's ready to shift his mindset, but any, any way you want to do it is fine as long as you figure out how's it working for our family, our household, for our values. But no, it's absolutely not your responsibility to give people cheap tomatoes because they will, they will take them and run.

20:27
Well, the good news and bad news this year is that we don't really have any extra tomatoes. So this summer is a wash. We're not even going to worry about it because I can barely get a tomato from my own salad out of the garden this year. It's so sad. Hopefully Mother Nature will be kinder to us next year. Hopefully. Have had some cucumbers though. They've been great. Oh, good. I know. I've just been eating lemon cucumbers like crazy because we have so many all of a sudden.

20:56
Yeah, we don't have so many but the cucumbers that are coming in are great because who knew cucumbers actually love rain? They love water. Mm-hmm kind of like watermelons love water. Yeah watermelons without water Okay, so now that we said all that I have a couple questions for you if I can pick your brain a little bit since you're here course, we built a heated winter greenhouse this May

21:26
I applied for a grant for it and we got the grant. And so the grant covered the cost of building the heated winter greenhouse. Very exciting. Now, the plan for that greenhouse was to, thank God, have it built by the time they wanted us to have it built, which we did, and then use it for growing some stuff during the summer in there as well.

21:51
Thank God we have it because that's where a lot of what we're eating is coming from because again the garden is so. So this could not have been better timing. I'm so thrilled that we had this happen in May. The plan for this winter is to grow anything that doesn't need to be pollinated like leafy greens like beets, radishes, things like that and to be able to offer a fresh produce.

22:20
during the winter because Minnesota, you know, there really isn't a whole lot of local fresh produce happening because it's snow covered and ice. So how can I, like I have a couple of months before we start the fall garden. So how can I get the word out about us doing this? Because I'd like to kind of jump on it in the next three, four weeks and just let people know what we're doing.

22:49
So do I put it on Facebook? Do I put it on the Nextdoor app? Do I send emails to people? What's the smartest way to do this? So the foundation I teach applies to no matter what you're doing. And that is you've got to have an email list. The only legal way to let people know you have something to say by email is if you have an email.

23:18
email marketing software provider. You can't just take your Gmail account or your Yahoo, or I have people still on America Online AOL and send an email that's set to blind copy 20 or 50 people and say, hey, we've got fresh lettuce for sale this winter. If you're selling some, if you're sending an email to sell something, no matter how small you are, you've got to use an email software.

23:47
email marketing service. And those can be free or cheap. And so that's my free email course. That's at charlottemsmith.com forward slash free email course, I believe. It's pretty straightforward. And it'll teach you how to set that up. And then what happens is then you do use all these other places.

24:14
social media, of course, wherever you go, you're funneling people to your email list. And then you just email them once a week. You just keep up with, hey, we've got you, take them on your journey. If you're not going to have anything for sale in your greenhouse until say October or November, December, whatever, it's still not too early to start connecting with them. Now people buy from you because they trust you and they trust you when you communicate with them regularly, like in a weekly email.

24:44
So you can just take them on your journey of we got the grant, we built the greenhouse. This is what we're doing this week. By the time you have something to sell, they will be so happy to pay you money to buy from you. So yeah, you start now, your email list is your foundation and you use all the other places you mentioned to funnel them to get on that email list. And that's what I teach step by step, very simple step by step.

25:13
in the farm marketing mastery program. Everyone thinks like, oh, let's just jump on Instagram and Facebook and tell people we have stuff for sale. Well, there's algorithms on there that prevent your followers from seeing those posts as soon as you start saying you have things for sale. So the workaround is you funnel them to your email list and you let them know you have things for sale there. So that's my like year long teaching. Well,

25:42
It takes about six weeks to learn that, and I just told you what I could in like 10 sentences. So know that this is very, very brief, but that will be your foundation. And the sooner you start building an email list, the better. Okay. Well, I have a website for our business, and I have it set up so people can subscribe to the website. And then I have an email program.

26:11
along with my hosting that takes all those emails and when I do a post or a blog post or whatever on my website, it goes out to all the email people that have signed up. Is that the same thing or is it different? Yeah, it is. Is your email software through your website? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so that's, I don't recommend that. It's lacking. So just throwing out some. There's MailChimp.

26:41
There's MailerLite, there's Flowdesk, there's so many email marketing software providers, just choose one. But you don't want the one that's provided with the website because it's not robust. It's, it does not have the features that you need for marketing. And yes, even if you're just a homestead, you're selling not very many, you know, things through the winter, it doesn't matter your size.

27:11
It will be so much more efficient. So just choose an outside provider, any one of those I mentioned or other. And then you'll just take your subscribers you've already got with the website and transfer them to there and start emailing out of there. Then you will have so much more data you'll be able to track and you'll be able to improve your marketing because of that.

27:41
Okay, I thought it wasn't the same, but I just wanted to make sure. Yeah. Okay, awesome. All right, so I don't know what else to ask you because I've been looking at your Facebook page for days trying to figure out questions and I'm like, I'm so out of my depth on this. I don't even know what to ask this woman. That's okay. I have a free training coming up in September. I don't know if you've attended any of the free trainings, but you will learn so much.

28:12
And so, you know, again, that, I think that sign up is charlottemsmith.com forward slash masterclass. And that is farm marketing masterclass, three essential steps to building a profitable farm. There's three things you've got or three pillars. So that's in September, and you'll learn a ton, anyone who goes to that, no matter what size you are, farm.

28:41
will learn so much from that class. You'll see yourself in that class. I already do. Yeah, good, good, good. Yeah, the thing that I didn't realize when we moved here is that my husband would want to make this his job. And we tried that last summer. It really did not work. And so he ended up finding a jobby job in November last year again.

29:10
And he was out of work for about eight months. We had savings, nobody died, no one starved, everything was okay, but he ended up having to get a job that's off the farm again. And if he could make it so that he could just have the homestead, the farm, be his job, he would. But I didn't know how to make it go any more than it went. He certainly didn't know. So.

29:35
I am really glad that I found you because I'm going to go take some of your free classes and see what we can do to make it more workable to make this his job. Yeah. So it's interesting you just said that because he did not have a mindset of making money even though he wanted it to be his job. He then did not charge enough for his tomatoes. So see, he's got...

30:05
He's got, on the one hand, he wants it to be his job, but on the other hand, he's not willing to charge what it takes to make it his job. So he could totally, and this is what I tell farmers all the time, you can absolutely make it your job if you shift your mindset. It's a business, which means a business has profit left over after you pay the expenses and after we pay your husband's salary so he can replace his job salary.

30:34
there's still leftover money. Uh-huh. So, but that's a mindset. Rather than if your mindset is, I am responsible for getting people cheap food, cheap tomatoes, he's not going to replace his day job. So and that is one, what I just described is one of the most common mindset shifts that people join my program to make. They're in the same position you are. Like, ah, we're not making any money.

31:01
Why not? Oh, I feel guilty charging what I'm supposed to for my meat. Well, that's okay. Except that you told me you want this to be your day job, right? So you've got, everyone's got to work to make that mental shift to running a business if they want a business. Now it's okay if they don't, but like you expressed, your husband wanted it to be his business. So he can do that. And if he gets his part of his brain on board, that will help.

31:31
support him in charging what he needs to charge for that profitable business. Definitely. And I'm going to tell one more little story and then I won't take up any more of your time. When I started this podcast last year, I didn't think it would go anywhere. I didn't think it would do anything. I was like, I'm going to try a podcast. Why not? And it just became monetized Monday morning this week. And

32:00
I now have ads on my podcast. My podcast has been the cleanest podcast ever. No music, it's all just information. I loved it. And now I listen to them because I have to listen to them before I share them. And the ads are there and I'm like, oh, it's got ads. It sounds terrible. It's not as clean. It's not as lovely as it was. And I'm like, but I need to make money. And so I'm sorry listeners, I have to make money to continue to do the podcast. I have spent almost a year doing this.

32:29
for free and I have to make money too. So that's where I'm at with the, I would really like it to be this, but it has to make money too. Absolutely. Yeah, and this is just, you know, private aside coaching is you have a huge opportunity to create some kind of online course and you mentioned that on your podcast and that's how you make money.

32:57
instead of ads if you want, or you can stick with ads, except that you apologize for them. It makes me think maybe you aren't happy about the ads being there. That's what so many farmers and homesteaders are doing is they're doing their sale. They're selling their tomatoes, and then they're teaching a class on how to can tomatoes, or they're selling eBooks on how to can tomatoes, or how to grow tomatoes, or how to...

33:25
have, you know, or they're selling seeds or whatever. So you could add that to your podcast and that, because podcasts are not free to produce and, and it takes money out of the pocket and as well as your time. So you could sell your online courses and every homestead or listening could come up with something they could sell. Cause many of them have podcasts or YouTube channels or something you can sell.

33:55
things like that on there. Just mention it. You know, hey, and if you want to learn how to raise your own tomatoes like we did, get my ebook, How to Raise the World's Most Delicious Tomatoes. $5.99, $50 for my online class, whatever it might be. So anyway, another thing you can do to help pay for it. Yes. There is a huge market for selling educational information right now.

34:23
And that's a terrible way of saying it, but I think, you know what I mean? It's people want to learn. I think since COVID happened, people have become more aware of what they're doing and why they're doing it. And a lot of people are just hungry for information on how to change whatever that means for them. Yeah. So, but anyway, Charlotte, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. And I didn't really.

34:53
expect you to help me as much as you have, but in helping me, I'm sure you help the listeners too. I love helping and it's fun. I want every homesteader farmer to know you can make money. You don't have to go in the hole. You can at least cover your expenses. So I'm happy to help you. And yes, definitely others will be struggling with these same things we talked about. So I'm glad you're out there sharing all this information.

35:18
I am trying so hard to get everything out there I can get out there in the time that I have to allotted to me. All right. Thanks Charlotte. Have a great afternoon. Thank you.