Category: News, etc.

You’ve asked for it. We’ve got it. Lee’s Produce will be here this Saturday to display and sell fresh produce at the farm.

We’ve been working with Lee’s for years. They were the first farm where we ever picked up produce. If you’ve been here for a tour and heard the story about how we received two five gallon buckets that very first day, the blonde lady in the picture above is who I received it from. (Hi Lynn!)

We’ve always enjoyed a special relationship with Lee’s and when we wanted to have someone out to offer fresh produce, Lee’s is who we called. The picture above is from our open barn day in May. With our pet the piggy event this Saturday (which will be smaller, I promise!) we are having Lee’s back out.

For our regulars, that means you can get a taste of what we have coming in the future with fresh produce for sale here at the farm (yes we’ve heard you!). We aren’t quite there yet on doing it full time, but the success of days like tomorrow is how we judge what we are doing next so if you want your produce and meat in the same place, stop by and do a bit of shopping.

And now the rest of our results from the past two weekends.

5. Out of the groups we saw, I think we’ll get some repeat customers, which is what this whole thing is about. If we advertise to 3000 people, we see 100. If we see 100, we see 20 again at least once. Of those 20, 2 become regulars. It’s the old sales funnel. It doesn’t change. We worked hard all day and probably gained 2-3 regulars. That’s a win in an operation our size.

6. For all the increased business and extra people, I didn’t work any harder than normal. I only gave eight tours. One every hour, with an hour break at lunch. This is what efficiency feels like. Same work, more results.

Not everything can be good though. What didn’t work with our test?

1. Spork wasn’t here. And the girls were not here during the afternoon. Erin came up and covered for us from lunch till 4 (Thanks Erin!!). SWMBO came and covered from 4-5 (Thanks Darlin’). Crystal wanted off to go to the beach and I had to tell her no, for which I felt bad. Staffing was an issue but really had nothing to do with our experiment.
2. It was feast or famine in the store. Between tour groups we’d have some regulars but on occasion we’d be empty and the girls would get bored. Then a tour would return and 20 people would be in the store and it would be crazy. People would have to wait to check out. Regulars couldn’t get in. We need a way to smooth it out some in the store.
3. We had a person with limited mobility. Giving a riding tour and walking tour at the same time is cumbersome. I got lucky and we were able to cram all three groups into the Gator. We cannot rely on that to happen in the future.
4. We need better signage for groups. People didn’t know where to go, or where to meet. “Tour starts here” or something would be helpful.
5. We had people try to take their own tours. They didn’t know better. They just saw groups walking around so they thought it was ok. We need signage that says “No unescorted customers beyond this point” or something similar. Also, I probably need to create a sign of rules to post somewhere. Hot wires are hot. Pigs bite. Don’t walk behind cows. Hands and feet inside the Gator at all times. Ask questions. Unsupervised children will be given a piglet and an espresso. That kind of stuff.
6. We had one group that was a handful of moms and a bunch of young kids. It just so happened that all three groups were a mom and 3-4 kids. That’s a tough tour group. The kids are loud and semi out of control. On the Gator I tend to drive a lot more and talk a lot less. But walking I couldn’t keep the motion up and they got bored and loud. It was doable for me. For Spork, it may be tougher.

So all in all, our test went well. We didn’t really spend that much money on advertising and we were able to move the needle in the store. We spent about $620 in lost revenue for not charging for tours. Figure another $80 in adverting (it wasn’t that much) just to make it a round number of $700 total cost. Over the two weekends, we definitely moved the top line needle more than that cost. That doesn’t translate into bottom line dollars of equal value but over the long term, if we picked up 4-5 new repeat customers then we should make our money back on what we spent. That’s about as good as it gets. What does that mean going forward. At this point I’m not sure I know. I think this will have to be part of a discussion where we see what we want to do. Until then, we are having a pig petting party this weekend which is a completely different experiment. But more on that, in the next post.

I mentioned before about our testing this weekend vs. last weekend. We’d hoped to get a good comparison between the 15 tours we had booked last weekend and what we would have this weekend. We currently have 19 tours booked for this weekend with a few spots still open. This is a perfect comparison between this weekend and last so thank you to all the folks who are coming and making this a great weekend for us. Now my experiments will be complete! Ha ha ha.. Oops. Sorry.

We do have a few spots left open. Mostly in the early morning and the late afternoon. If anyone wants to still get in, there is time. All the tours will be given by yours truly as Spork will be off camping with his cousin and Uncle.

Don’t forget, we have baby piglets on the ground just born. Those are the actual piglets in the picture above.

We don’t have the slightest clue what we are doing. This whole farm store thing is a lemonade stand that has grown out of hand. Yes we’ve grown it on purpose but not according to any plan as I would recognize it. There were no pro formas, no budgets, no market studies. We’ve not done an ROI on our investments and we do not have a 10 year plan for capital expenditures.

That’s all the stuff I did in my past. Now we are just winging it. You see, I’ve never done retail. I don’t like advertising, either consuming it, or purchasing it. All my previous customer experience was business to business. Selling $500,000 worth of something one time to someone has a different sales cycle than selling them a chocolate milk for their kid to consume on the spot. And frankly, that is part of the appeal for me.

Plus there is the whole “kids learning a trade/skill” and giving people like Miguel, Vicente, and Hilliary a job. Plus the kids having a job is important. And then there is the Mrs. and her shopping habits and our diets, etc. All in all, we have a myriad of reasons for WHY we are doing what we do. None of which mean we know WHAT we are doing. That’s a big difference!

So a few weekends ago, we had an Open Barn Day. It was a combination of an amazing success and a failure. Through a combination of social media, word of mouth, and plain old posters around town, we had over 2000 people to our farm. That is simply amazing. Staggering actually. With those 2000 people however, we only had 207 transactions in the store. Now a normal Saturday has 30-40 transactions so that’s roughly 6x a normal Saturday. Amazing! But we only had 10% of the people who attended come through the store. That’s bad. Also of the 2000+ people, we only captured contact information on a few. There were no sign-up sheets, no newsletter sign-ups, etc. That means that the next time we have an event, they won’t know about it. That’s bad. We did great at marketing the event, but terrible at capturing that success either in revenue or future marketing abilities.

This past Saturday, we did a different kind of event. We offered free tours but with our normal scheduling system and our normal one on one tours. We also had SWMBO here doing samples (our vendor got sick last minute). Spork and I were booked from 8am to 5pm solid. That’s 15 bookings. We had three no shows (grr!) so we ended up with 13 tours we conducted. Of those 13 tours, plus our normal Saturday walk-in traffic, we did 40 transactions. That’s on the top end of what a normal Saturday would be like. BUT, it was a holiday weekend. Many of our regulars were not in town. So that’s actually a good Saturday when it would have otherwise been a bust. So that’s good.

We also had 31 items sold that I can directly attribute to SWMBO’s samples, or nearly one item per transaction. We sold out of a few items that she was sampling so that’s about as good as it gets. Samples work.

So, we are looking at this past weekend as a manageable success. Nothing dramatic, not crazy busy, but very steady throughout the day. We did have some folks who wanted to come for a tour who couldn’t get in this past weekend. That’s bad. But of the folks who came, we captured their information and showed them a good time. That’s good. We also left enough capacity in the store that our regulars could get in and out without any trouble. That’s good. BUT we need to do more business than we did. So there is more to do.

So this Saturday, we are going to try this again. We are going to do the free tours thing again, which will be announced with more fanfare later. We are also going to have a vendor here cooking samples of our meats with his awesome sauce. I’m going to market our weekend exactly like I did this past weekend. Same budget, same source. That will give us a good comparison from last weekend to this weekend.

We are also going to try multiple tour availability in one time slot. By that I mean we are going to book more than one family per tour with one tour group leader, something we’ve not done before. We experimented with that late in the day yesterday and nobody seemed to mind at all. In fact, the seemed to expect it. This will allow some more folks through the system with the same amount of manpower. And with it not being a holiday weekend, we should have a good comparison this weekend to last weekend.

If we can get our regulars back in town from the beach, plus new folks coming for tours, maybe we can break the 50 transaction barrier. That would make us 25% better than last weekend. And with multiple slots per tour, maybe we can get a little better still. We’ll see. I’m making this up as I go along.

Just a quick note, we are full up on tours for this Saturday. We have plenty of capacity in the store for those that just want to stop by and go shopping. There is no need for an appointment to shop so stop by anytime between 8-5 tomorrow.

We may have a last minute cancellation for a tour tomorrow but for now we have no more tours available.

We will be doing more events in the coming weeks (June 3, 17th, and 24th), so feel free to book another Saturday and get on the schedule for one of those days. No details yet as to what we’ll be doing, but we know we are doing something!

As a reminder, you can always change your booking so it’s better to book early and get your place reserved.