Category: News, etc.

Sometimes I have really cool projects that I’m working on. For instance the golf ball cannon we made for Christmas, along with the brass monkey shot holder was about as cool as it gets. Or the hydraulic lift/drop trailer that we made for moving pigs around the farm. Those are fun and exciting projects.

But sometimes you just need to knock something out to get it off the list.

I had this really old GE motor hanging around the shop. I don’t recall what it came off of, but I think it was from my dad’s time. Based on the name plate, and the condition and type of cable attached to it, it’s really old. Like 60s or 70s.

Step 1 was to find out if I’d been keeping this motor around for all these years and it didn’t even work. Luckily I had a cable in the shop already so a quick rewire and test.

It works!

For all the grinding stuff I have in the shop, the one thing I don’t have is a wire wheel. Wire wheels are great for cleaning up rusty metal, or cleaning up uneven surfaces. They don’t remove metal, just polish it, which is perfect for when you are welding something made from scraps and cut offs. Something we do all the time here.

The above is a good example of what we deal with. This is a cutoff from a previous project. It’s perfectly good metal, once all the surface rust is taken off. Normally we’d use a hand held grinder to clean this up for welding. However with a wire wheel, and about 20 seconds of work, it can look like this.

This is really handy when you are putting together quick projects. But despite having two belt grinders, and a bench grinder, I didn’t have a wire wheel grinder. But I did have an old motor that ran 1750 RPMs on 110 volts.

Step 2, after figuring out that the motor worked, was to make a shaft that would extend the short stub from the motor out about 8″ so there is room to work around the wire wheel. That is important when you are trying to clean up all sides of something oddly shaped.

This was a fun little lathe project. A few pieces of scrap metal and some lathe work and we go from scraps to something useful. First I turned down the larger coupling you see on the left. Once I had it the correct size, I broached a keyway so that it could mate to the key on the motor. Then a different piece of metal is turned down to the extension. That’s the shiny bit. Then I TIG welded the two together and turned the extension to final size, truing it up on the lathe in the process.

This end of the shaft had a keyway cut on the mill. That’s the slot you see cut into the end of the shaft on the top. I hand filed a keyway into the wire wheel, attached two locking collars purchased from Agri Supply, and fired it up.

The intent of this project was to get it knocked out quickly. With that in mind, I purchased a stand from Amazon.com. Of course I ended up having to fix the machining mistakes on the stupid thing, plus deal with the fact it was too short (missed that in the description). I also had to redrill the holes in the “universal” mounting plate, because of course they didn’t line up. I could have built a better stand in the time I spent fixing this one but oh well, it’s done now.

I already had a switched outlet at this location so it’s simply walk up, put on safety glasses (wire wheels are scary), and flick the switch for a quick clean up. Easy. Total direct cost, about $15.00 and about 4 hours of labor. Everything else was scrounged around the shop.

The girls have the day off today, which means no cookies. But instead, you have Jeanette working along with Crystal. For those of you who haven’t met her yet, Jeanette is our newest employee and is covering either Wednesday or Friday shifts for us, depending on the schedule. Today is a great opportunity for our regular Saturday customers to get to meet Jeanette and see what a wonderful and knowledgeable person she is.

It’s also a rare day off for the girls so send happy thoughts their way and hope they are enjoying their day off.

We have a lot of family and friends who follow us on this website. So please indulge me while I share something that is pretty much a family story but obviously wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t farm and farm the way we do. Plus folks seem to enjoy more than just pictures of cows so here is some behind the scenes views of what we do on Christmas here at Ninja Cow Farm.

Not long after Wildflower was born, our neighbor Dustin came up with an idea for a Christmas present from him that would be for all the kids. He decided to keep all his pocket change over the year, and then wrap it up as a treasure for the kids. But just giving them a box of coins was kind of boring, so he decided that the kids could find the treasure on a treasure hunt. This was a hugely successful idea as what is better for little kids than having a big pile of loot to sort through, and a fun adventure to go and find the treasure made it all the more special. The fact that is was pennies and nickels mattered not one bit.

The first few years, the kids were way little so the entire event consisted of a treasure map created by Uncle Dustin, and a treasure “hidden” right behind the house, under a bush, etc. You know, kind of like an Easter egg hunt where the eggs are pretty much just laying on the grass so the little kids can just walk up and find them? Yeah, like that.

The treasure maps were a thing of beauty though. Dustin has an art background and he’d draw them, scorch the edges, have funny sayings on them, etc. They really were over the top. To this day, I believe every single map is hanging in one or the other kids rooms for every year we’ve done this.

Like most things, the event grows over time. In 2016, the kids had gotten old enough that we felt that the adventure could get a little more, say, challenging. I checked in with SWMBO, who is in charge of safety and the kids well being (I’d dangle them by their ankles over alligators, safely of course but you know, dads and whatnot.)  She was ok with ramping things up!

Dustin and I set about building some items for the adventure that were beyond the norm. I went in the shop and built a grappling hook, and Dustin and I built a fire trough from some metal channel and a model rocket igniter we had laying around. Dustin turned his treasure map into a treasure journal and we turned the simple Christmas adventure into an hour long trek around the farm.

To give you some idea of what I am talking about, here is the family video we sent out to our friends and family from 2016.

Last years adventure was a huge hit. The kids were scared, excited, and had a grand time marching around the farm following clues and tackling the challenges. The Christmas adventure has now become a solid part of our tradition and a welcome part of Christmas day.

The way we schedule Christmas is to split it into three parts. One, we get up and open stockings and a couple of presents. Wildflower and I would start at 5am. SWMBO would start at 9am. We compromise and start about 7:30am. Then usually about 9am or so, we pause Christmas and Spork and I go and feed the animals. There are no days off on a farm.

When we get back, we meet Uncle Dustin, usually at our front door, and he delivers the Christmas map/book/journal/clue/whatever. Then the entire family treks off on our adventure for an hour or so.

When we get back, we get something to eat, then continue with the rest of our Christmas. It ends up taking nearly all day and we move at a very sedate pace, opening a few presents and letting the kids play with them before we move on. At this point, I cannot imagine a more enjoyable Christmas day, unless maybe it was this.

Since last year went so well, SWMBO allowed that we could step up the level of difficulty again for the kids this year. Instead of small fires, we were thinking explosions and whatnot. Several nights of planning (read drinking) went into this years plans and both Dustin and I spent several days working on projects. And the result? Well, before you can watch the video, I need to explain a few things.

One, I need to explain who Bill is. I don’t know how it started. At some point Spork was doing something, and I made the comment about his older brother. I’m always messing with the kids, telling them things that aren’t true, mainly as a source of humor to them and to me, but also for a lesson on occasion. For example, how many times have you witnessed a parent scold children who were misbehaving in public? When my kids get rowdy in public, assuming I’m not the ring leader of the misbehaving (it happens) then I’ll say in a bad stage whisper, “Hey, we are in public. Remember to pretend you are normal!” Being home schooled they are very aware that we are different from “normal” people. They smile, quiet down, and behave for at least several minutes. It gets the point across, but with some self-deprecating humor instead of a red faced parent yelling.

So back to Spork misbehaving. Spork looks at me innocently and asks, “Older brother?”

“Oh yes, your older brother…..Bill.”

Now my oldest brother was named Bill, maybe that’s where the name came from. Who knows why I picked that name, it was just random.

“I have an older brother?”

“Oh yes. Had actually. He’s not…..here…anymore. And he was bad. Actually he was doing just what you were doing just now…and that was the end of him. That’s why we don’t talk about him anymore.” A smile to let him know I’m kidding. And a crazy look in my eye to make him question if I actually was.

Message delivered.

Over the years, Bill has been killed in numerous way. Not cleaning up your room, dating girls, giving your mother lip, hitting your sister. Every way you can imagine, Bill has met his untimely demise. It has become a running joke over the years and Bill quickly became like Kenny. You know, this guy?

However, I can mention Bill, and the kids get the point quickly. Better straighten up. Well after all of our planning, we thought that this year’s adventure should be the search for their long lost brother Bill.

Also, being the mean ogre that I am, I’ve made it very clear that I don’t like our dog Ruby. I try to give her away constantly to customers, threaten to eat her, you know, the normal stuff. In the second part of our adventure, Spork has to shoot a target with a rifle, which explodes. What isn’t explained in the video is that we’d put an effigy of Ruby in a cage. She could only be “released” by a shot on target, which of course Spork had to perform.

Except the target was an explosive that blew Ruby up. That’s why you see The Princess carrying around a stuffed dog for the rest of the video. That was the blown and up and rescued Ruby dog. When we got home, and Christmas was over, the girls raided my boo boo box and had a few days of pretend vet hospital time getting the stuffed dog back to full health. I’m happy to say the stuffed dog has made a full recovery and now resides in Wildflower’s expansive collection of stuffed animals, living the high life.

One item that I routinely get requests for is fresh produce in our store. I’ve always politely explained that produce just isn’t our business and we are not set up for it.

We have brought produce here on occasion, for special events and we have had pretty good sales. But we don’t have enough foot traffic here day to day to sustain a good selection of fresh produce, such as what a grocery store or a farmers market maintains.

However, I had a thought in 2017 of something that we could do instead that I think would work. What about being a drop point for a produce farms CSA program? That would allow us to bring in fresh produce for people weekly. It would also help the selling farmer because rather than having to man a booth or drive to multiple addresses, they can just drop off our customers CSA boxes that morning, and we’ll handle the distribution during our store hours. We won’t make anything on it, but it is a value add to the customers. Where we’ll make our money (we need to be sustainable too) is in securing our customers coming to our store weekly. That should mean less trips to Food Lion and more purchases from what we do sell. So it’s a win-win-win.

I’ve reached out to a few people, but one has already gotten back to me with information on her CSA program for 2018. Chickadee Farms in Clayton. Chickadee is exactly what and who we are trying to help when we take on new partnerships. They are small, family run, and concerned about sustainability both for the environment and for their operation. They are obviously local and believe in the local movement. And important to a CSA, they are experienced enough to reliably produce quality produce weekly, but not so big they don’t need our help.

Jennifer has already announced our farm as a drop point for their 2018 CSA program to her existing customers. She has also sent me over a flyer for me to send out to our customers. She only has so many slots available for CSA customers, so the signups are on a first come, first serve basis. Take a look at her website, her reviews, and then her information at the below link about the CSA.

Chickadee CSA info 2018

Your agreement is directly with Jennifer at Chickadee so there is nothing for you to do through me other than say hello when you are picking up your fresh spring veggies!

I hope you find this opportunity valuable. We are trying to respond to customer requests in a way that works for everyone involved.

I already mentioned that I was going to talk about my shop projects this week, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about what the difference between winter and summer farming is. This is a farm blog after all.

Summer time farming is busy. Our brood cows have to be moved to our leased farm (Hi David and Tamara!) along with the calves. That means that we need to check fencing, test hot wires, make repairs, and routinely check on the cows.

Here on our farm, the cows have to be moved to a fresh paddock every single day. That means setting up and taking down temporary paddocks so the cows always have fresh grass, and the grass has 30-90 days rest in between grazings.

Produce is coming out of our ears and we are constantly running around picking up produce, sorting produce, hauling off cardboard, pallets, totes, etc. Everything is high volume. Thrown in the occasional repairs, sick animals, etc and things can get hectic.

In the winter, things are different. All the cows come home to our farm and live in one big herd. We dry off our milk cows so milking is over for a bit. We no longer setup and take down paddocks as the cows are now on hay and produce. Yes we now have to deliver hay daily but that just takes a few minutes. Produce drops by probably 75% and we are basically scrounging from day to day for enough to feed.

In the store, Thanksgiving and Christmas are pretty busy, usually our biggest volume months of the year. We are a specialty store so it’s kind of like going to church on Christmas. In June, you can sit pretty much where you want in church, except that one good seat where that old guy always claims as his own! Jerk. Oops, did that come out loud?

Anyway, try going to Church on Christmas. People you swear have never sat foot in the place are there, with their entire extended family. There is no room in the parking lot. It’s like tourist season. That’s kind of what it’s like for us. We have customers we only see once or twice a year, and always at the holidays. During the year they eat grocery store meat, but when family comes into town, they bring out the good stuff, our stuff. We love all of our customers so we are thankful for whenever they come.

But then January hits. All the tourist customers go back to Food Lion. A lot of our regulars get their credit card bill and die of shock. They go on New Years diets both for food and for spending. So we go from our busiest time of year, to our slowest time of year in the store. January and February are SLOW in the store, definitely the worst months of the year, like 1/2 the volume of December and it happens like turning off a light switch. Stepping back from the details it’s actually rather interesting to see how people behave as a group and how events and holidays have such a profound affect on people behaviors and patterns.

So as farmers, we can either freak out that things have come off the rails, or we can find the good in the patterns. For me, the opportunity is to take advantage of these slow times. These are the times where we’ve expanded the store, looked back at what we’ve done and what is changed, and planned on what is to come.

But for this year, it’s time for getting into the shop and getting some projects done. One of the first projects for this winter, besides cleaning up and organizing, was getting ready for Christmas by making  a cannon.

What, you don’t make cannons for your Christmas adventures? What kind of normal life do you live? This is the secret project I referenced a few weeks ago with a picture of some brass in the lathe. That brass was converted into a working golf ball cannon, which was just one part of the overall Christmas adventure put on by our neighbor, Dustin, every year for the kids. Darling Wifey is working on a video of this years event currently so I’ll post it when she’s satisfied.

And of course we had to build a shot holder to go along with the cannon.

Here is a test shot on the range to hold you over till the actual video comes out.

 

Have you ever noticed that when you see a cool old car that’s been beautifully restored, it was from some old guy in the midwest? Like North Dakota? Or upper Michigan? Ever wonder why that is? It’s because after the snow is blown, the sidewalk salted, and the wife and kids made busy, the men disappear into their garage/basement/shed/etc and tinker away the cold and dark hours of winter.

Here in North Carolina, we don’t really have the same thing going on. Heck wasn’t it 70 degrees a few days ago? I’ve been surfing in February many times. Sometimes it was cold, but sometimes it was shorts weather out of the water. We have it made compared to those hardy souls in the frozen midwest.

These past few years, I’ve spent a lot of my winter months in my office, working on year end paperwork, creating the website, doing posts and newsletters to all you fine folks. But this year, I decided I was going to do something different. No, scratch that, this year I was going to do something I used to do. This winter I was going to spend more time in my shop, like my cold cousins do during their winter time. No I’m not restoring a classic car, I’ve already been there and done that. What I’m doing is piddling.

You see, I enjoy just being in my shop, knocking out little projects. And there are SO MANY projects to be done on a farm. Often these projects aren’t able to be tackled because they ought to be done, or it would be nice if they were done, but they don’t HAVE to be done. That means they languish while actual farm work is tackled daily. Or maybe we go to the piano recital, or I get my flying credentials freshened up, or play airsoft with Spork and his friends. Basically all the other stuff that happens in life takes priority, as it should.

But this winter, it has purposefully been focusing on getting into the shop and working on projects. Shop projects. I’ve already been hard at work these past few weeks trying to get some projects tackled, completed, and off the to do list. Some of them have been there for 5 years or more. I haven’t been posting pictures or details of these projects because, well, they aren’t fuzzy animals or funny farming stories. What that means is there really hasn’t been much to post. However, I’m going to rectify that this week. I’m going to take some pics and tell you folks about what I am actually working on so you can see what else goes on on a farm. We’ll interject some cute critter stuff here and there and of course talk about farming as well, but be prepared for a little variety this week.

And now our final part in this series

Events work

We showed in 2017 that we can produce large events here on the farm. We can get thousands of people on and off the farm with relatively little trouble. We have also demonstrated that we have a desirable location, being only 15 minutes from downtown Raleigh.

So what does that mean for 2018? I think events need to become a larger part of what we do. It is a natural fit for our advertising model. It’s something we can spool up for, have a big day, and then go back to our normal farming lifestyle. It’s something where we can choose the dates we are willing to be occupied and the days where we are already engaged. Events work for us.

So what do we need to do to have more events? First, we need an event coordinator. I don’t like putting on events. I don’t mean the event day itself, those are kind of fun. I don’t like all the logistics, the phone calls, the last minute changes, etc. If it is up to me to coordinate all that, we aren’t going to do events. Plus I’m married to a German by heritage, GE trained project manager. SWMBO is a force of nature. But because of that, my event planning skills have atrophied to the point of non-existence. That’s saying something since I’ve actually been President of two organizations that put on six figure events as their major event of the year. I do have pretty good experience, but that is all gone now.

In the past we’ve done some events in conjunction with other people who did events for a living. I think a partnership where we work with someone more formally would work. That’s a to do for 2018. If you know of anyone, please send them my way. People like that are always looking for venues and I’ve certainly turned enough of them down in the past. Now I need to hook up with them.

What kind of events? Maybe weddings? Corporate events?

We did a beer and BBQ tasting event here once and that worked well. I don’t know, it will probably depend on who we work with.

Also, Lucy did a good job of spooling up the events we had in 2017. I think we can have some farm only events that are smaller but maybe more frequent. Maybe a few in the spring, and a few in the fall. Something to keep the farming thing going and out front because that is what we do primarily.

One last thought on events. If you’ve been here, you know that we primarily run this farm for the education of our kids. The Princess is not far from turning twelve, which means before I can blink she’ll be sixteen. When she’s sixteen, she’ll probably leave my employment and go get a job somewhere else. However, if we start doing events, then should would have four years of event planning experience when she’s sixteen. Definitely not as the primary, but certainly exposure to the process and experience with what it takes to be successful. When she starts working elsewhere, she can work her other job until we have an event day, then take the day off to help with the event. It lets her have her primary W2 pay for gas job, but also continue building her experience as an event planner.

Plus the three girls in the store on Saturdays is going to get old at some point. Eventually Wildflower needs to move up to cashier so where does The Princess work then? Events maybe?

Fast forward two more years. Do you think an eighteen year old with six years of event planning experience, and nine years of cashier experience is employable? Does she have something more on her college application than “played soccer?” A parents primary job is to work themselves out of a job. I’d say this plan could work.

Facilities

Lastly, we need to continue to improve our facilities here.

With the reduction in pig numbers in 2017, we are finally able to limit and hopefully in 2018 eliminate the hog smell from our pig paddocks. I turned down event opportunities in 2017 because I wasn’t comfortable with the smell. Come spring we’ll begin our first full paddock rotation since 2015, as we have multiple paddocks now laying fallow. Once we start the spring rotation, we can continue with our rotation program going forward and once that starts, that should be the end of the hog smell. It’s 99% gone now, I’m just looking for the last 1%. This was always the plan originally, but things didn’t work out as planned.

We added a second road on and off the farm in 2017. Since we have a one lane road it’s a bit difficult to have people egress when the traffic is flowing in. We make it work, and work well, but a second road and dedicated exit is preferable. It will need additional work in 2018 to make it usable by cars, but at least it’s usable by trucks and tractors at this point.

Lastly, we need to look at building another building here on the farm. I already have the spot picked, as well as the general plan for what we’ll build. What I haven’t done is decided that this is indeed the plan going forward. I also haven’t gotten quotes from builders so there is still quite a bit to do on that front. But it’s in the concept stage. Hopefully we’ll break ground in late 2018 or 2019.

All in all, 2017 was a very good year. Once again I am very thankful to all of our customers and supporters. For a small business, every single customer, referral, review, etc is critical.

I’m also thankful for all of our employees, both Miguel and Vicente as well as all the girls in the store.
Lastly I am thankful for all of our partner farmers. While the large percentage of what we sell is meat from our farm, we have a lot of partner farms that we proudly represent in our store. I don’t want to be in the chicken business (Hi Christy!) or the honey business (Hi Jennifer!) or any of the other businesses that we represent by carrying these products. I’d prefer to be good at what I do, and help lift up other farmers who are good at what they do.

We look forward to seeing you in 2018 where we already have some new opportunities that we’ll be announcing shortly so stay tuned.

 

This is a continuation of our series on results from 2017 and plans for 2018

We are not a grocery store.

Last year, we made an effort to turn our meat store into a bit of a grocery store. That effort certainly hasn’t been a bust, but it hasn’t been the success we had hoped either.

People come here for meat. Meat that is ethically and sustainably raised. Maybe they get some salad dressing, maybe a rub for their roast, but by and large they stock up on meat, look around vaguely, and are out the door. While some things are now on continuous reorder like our cheeses and our chips and salsa, we still have the initial orders from summer of some of our products sitting here. That’s enough to last about 30 minutes on pig day. Six months later, we’ve sold maybe two or three. At the same time, we’ve sold thousands of pounds of meat.

So does this mean we are going to drop all non-meat items from the store? Oh heavens no. The reason we pick the things we do is because we eat it in our own kitchen, first and foremost. We don’t sell things we don’t like and use. Also, we have some items that are definitely popular so those will stay as well. But we are phasing out some items, and will be much slower to bring in new items in the future. In 2017, we were effectively wide open on bringing in new stuff if it met the criteria. In 2018, we’ll simply be more selective.

No need to expand again anytime soon

It seems that each year we’ve expanded the store in some way. In 2018, I don’t see the need to expand. If anything, we may have a touch too much shelf space as it is. What we could do is a better job of merchandising the products we have in the store. Put simply, items that are displayed at eye level move well. Items that are displayed at knee level may as well be invisible. We have a lot of knee level shelves and not enough eye level shelves. Something to look at going forward.

Matching production to sales makes life much easier.

When we sold off 80% of our pork, it was like we suddenly went on vacation. Just running a 50 cow and 40 pig operation was peanuts compared to the 135 pig and a 50 cow operation. We are actually getting ahead on the to do list, rather than constantly being behind. I’m not sure that 40 pigs on the ground isn’t too many and I’ll take a harder look at that going into 2018. We may drop back to 30.

Despite such a drastic reduction in pork production, we are still more than stocked up in the store. Customers have no idea we’ve reduced our headcount based on the freezers. Reducing our pork production has been the single biggest positive step we’ve taken in 2017. I know it was a good idea because now I wish we’d done it in 2016.

And for the rest, see our last post in this series.

And now, part 2 of what we learned in 2017, and where we are going in 2018.

Word of mouth matters

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who walk in the door and say, “My friend said I HAVE to come and see your farm!” There is no better validation of your work than having someone recommend you to a friend. It shows a trust that the original customer places in you, that you will live up to their billing and not make them look stupid by recommending you. We take that trust seriously and really appreciate every one of our recommendations. I try to find out who the customer was if I can and thank them personally but things have grown to a point where I cannot do that much anymore, which I don’t like.

What has been interesting is that these word of mouth referrals may come in more than a year later. “Well duh, of course it takes a while for someone to come for the first time.” But when the person comes in, we find they live in Eagle Ridge which is literally next door. That means they’ve been driving past us for over a year, with a referral from a trusted friend rolling around in their head, and yet they took a year to stop in. Nothing exactly wrong there, but certainly an opportunity.

Always recruit new customers

This one seems to be the opposite of our focus/no advertising philosophy. I’ve heard it said, and our experience validates it, that 90% of your customers will be gone in 2 years in this industry. They move, change jobs, change shopping habits, go on a new diet, go off of the new diet. Whatever. That means to be viable, you have to ALWAYS be gaining new customers. This is the opposite of my previous industry where I had customers who’d done business with my father in the 60s and who I still did business with when I sold out.

The realization that most of your customers will leave despite your best efforts almost makes you think that customers should be viewed as disposable. I mean, why bend over backwards if they are going to be gone shortly anyway, right? Ahh, not so fast Grasshopper (anybody know what that’s from), that’s the Wall Street in you.

No, you have to treat your customers like gold because your reputation is what keeps bringing in new customers. Plus after three years of this, we are starting to see customers 2.0. Originally they showed up on a new diet/plan/etc, bought for a few months, then disappeared for a year or so. Now, three years in, we are starting to see some of those customers come back for round two (Hi Drew!). They are even more passionate this time than the last and they immediately get back to business rather than sampling and testing you out because at this point, we are a known product.

No, you have to treat customers as well as you can, because they are what this business is about. That rule never changes in business if you are in a real business.

Continued in part 3.

I hope you are not reading this with a hangover. Or if you are, it was totally worth it.

How did it get to be 2018 already?

January 15th marks three years since I sold my company and started farming full time. We went from people who had absolutely no idea about what we were doing in the retail business, to people that three years later, still have no idea what we are doing in the retail business.

That’s not actually true. We have learned a few things along the way.

But before we get to what we’ve learned, let me say a bit about what our results were for 2017.

Results

In 2015, our first full year in business, we didn’t do much business for a “real” business. What we did do was about double what we’d done as a part-time business in 2014 so that was encouraging.

In 2016, we signed up with Groupon (a mistake) and used them to really boost our brand. It cost us a ton of money and earned us our only bad review we’ve ever had from a customer. For these numbers, I’m not tracking Groupon related sales as they are not sustainable or native. So for 2016, we grew about 135% (roughly, I’m doing this from memory). Phenomenal growth but again we were coming off of a pretty low number. Really 2016 was our first “real” year in business.

For 2017, again disregarding Groupon, we have grown 29% in sales. This is with us turning down opportunities for the last half of the year, and reducing our hog numbers significantly. Of course, part of those numbers were the actual sales of the hogs but since we sold them for pennies on the dollar to make our head count change, they actually don’t account for very much of our sales.

29% growth in a business is very strong and something I hope we can repeat next year. We certainly have the opportunities, we just have to capitalize on them. More about those later in this series.

We had a budget for sales in 2016 and I was watching it down to the last customer yesterday because it was that close. And the results? After a year of sales, we surpassed our annual budget with the second to last customer of the day! We were only $160.66 over our annual budget! It was that close! As my old controller Doug would say, that’s not a well run business, that masterful budgeting (guess who prepared the budgets back then).

99% of our sales is through our little store on the farm and is handled by our girls, both my daughters, as well as Lucy, Jeanette, and Crystal. A big thanks to all the girls for their hard work.

And of course, a huge thanks to our customers, without whom none of this would be possible!

So now onto our lessons learned from

Reviews and web results matter

Ok, this isn’t exactly a revelation, especially to someone who picks his lunch typically by Yelp. However when we started, I made the conscious decision that we were not going to advertise, except on Eatwild. Every other opportunity to advertise that has come in, and there are lots, has been denied. Some make lots of sense, some are relatively inexpensive, but all are told no.

Why? Because you can’t get anywhere by not being focused. And our focus was on good service, good products, and online presence from the beginning. That seems easier to say now that we are ranking first page on people’s Google searches, ranking higher than people who have had a store front at the farmers market for years. But when we started, I had a website with a couple of posts, no budget, and no magic trick to get us ranked. Staying focused works. And part of staying focused is saying no to opportunities that are good, but distracting.

One thing that I have joined was Nextdoor.com. I heard from someone that we had people talking about us (in a good way) on Nextdoor. I’d never heard of it so I decided I better find out what it is and what is going on. I’d say it’s like Facebook but for your neighbors. I’ve found it to be a useful website if for nothing other than I cannot believe the number of lost pets that have been returned through Nextdoor. Simply amazing. I really enjoy talking to neighbors instead of the whole world like you do on Facebook. Oh, and we do get customers from there so it does have business value.

More in the next post on what we learned, and where we are going for 2018.