Today starts a three-part series on the podcast where I’m talking about farm burnout,
the different types of farm burnout and how to fix them. And today’s episode is all about how we
built a trap. for ourselves instead of a farm business a profitable farm business that supports us
supports our family instead we built a trap because i hear this all the time and i did this to
myself many years ago on my farm and We’re going to start fixing it today.
So also this week, we started a brand new class full of farmers inside the Profitable Farmer
Mindset and Marketing Coaching Group who are building profitable farms. If you’re wondering if
coaching is for you, you can still meet with us this week at charlottemsmith.com forward slash
strategy. You’ll meet. It’s a free meeting with one of our farm coaches. One of them is…
daughter who you heard from recently on the podcast about all about her farm. They will meet with
you and help you pinpoint the things like three or four things that are standing in the way of you
making money and see if coaching is right for you. So you can meet with us on that link and start
to solve this problem today. uh we’re gonna talk about in the future how it’s not about being the
smartest person in the room it’s about learning the skills to get profitable nobody’s born learning
knowing marketing And also just because you start a farm doesn’t mean you know marketing.
You have to learn it. You got to learn that skill. It’s not like you build your farm and then
people come and buy your products. You have to get your products in front of you. You have to bring
people to your product, whether that’s at the farmer’s market or your drop point or your website or
your home farm stand. You have to learn how to round up the people and bring them there.
It doesn’t work to just build it and think people will find you. A few people will find you at
first, but never enough to make you profitable. So that’s what we are teaching starting this week
inside the Profitable Farmer Coaching Group. And I can’t wait for this group of new farmers to get
profitable. Many of them make their money back that they invested within the first couple weeks.
And they average making… in about 90 days so it’s very exciting for me that by summer these
people are going to be making more money on a consistent basis and have the skill to continue doing
that too so I just want you to know the help is out there all right so today back to our three
-part series this one is close to my heart Because I hear from so many farmers how overwhelmed and
burnout you are. And I lived it too. I was in the thick of it. And I want to save you from some of
the years that I spent spinning my wheels. You know, it was hard on my family, hard on my marriage
before I figured this stuff out. So this series is called From Burnout to Balance,
Creating a Farm Business You Love. And today’s episode, we’re diving into the root.
of the problem why is it that we farmers end up building something that looks like a dream from the
outside people drive by and think oh we’re living the dream life we see other farms on social media
and we think they’re living the dream life but it feels like a trap like we’re imprisoned on the
inside so if you are like me how i was and you wake up at two in the morning wondering Is this all
there is? I wake up and I work my fingers to the bone and then I fall in bed exhausted.
When does the payoff start? If that’s you, let’s get into it. So I want to start by asking you
something that I want you to actually ponder for a minute, okay? Don’t just breeze past it.
And that is, why did you start your farm? Why? Why was it important to you?
For most of us, it was a vision. like feeding your community or offering flowers that bring you joy
to your community for me it was the healing power of raw milk my kids struggled with eczema for six
years all over their body and raw milk healed it and then i lost my source three different farmers
in a row went out of business so i started my oh got my own dairy cow started my own raw milk dairy
and it grew huge very quickly because other people were experiencing the same healing benefits.
So it was a passion project and I started to get burnt out and I solved the problem and now I teach
other farmers how to solve it too. So what was your original why?
Why did you start it? Maybe it was a lifestyle. Maybe you wanted a farm so that your kids could
have the lifestyle, rural lifestyle, if you’re out in the country,
or maybe they could learn responsibility. Maybe you wanted to be your own boss or raise your kids
out of the suburbs. Maybe it was all those things. It was for me, but I’m sure there was a dream in
there somewhere. So what is that dream? And notice that Whatever that dream was,
somewhere between the crop failure, the animals dying,
or the equipment breakdowns, or the terrible weather, or the customers that drive you crazy
sometimes, or the cash flow stress, somewhere that dream starts feeling really,
really far away. And instead of waking up excited, you started waking up exhausted or overwhelmed.
I remember feeling that way when I realized what I built wasn’t what I had dreamed of.
You know, I wanted my I wanted to be able to go riding horses with my kids every day on the farm.
And there was no time for that. So I’d been going full speed for years,
working seven days a week. Sleep was affected. My marriage was affected. I was telling myself that
this was just the season. Like things would slow down. We would make more money in the future.
It would get better. This hustle was going to pay off. I know now that there is no better place in
the future if you don’t learn the skill to create it today. So a profitable future will not show up
unless you’re creating a profitable today. So anyway, before I figured that out though,
I just felt like I was in a trap. I was trapped by my farm and I didn’t create it on purpose.
It also, it wasn’t. Because I didn’t work hard enough. Actually, the trap was,
now I know, because I worked too hard, I had built a business that couldn’t function without me
present in it every day. And that meant I wasn’t free. I wasn’t the boss,
for sure. I wasn’t the leader. I was an employee of my own farm. So that’s where I want to start
today because I think that’s the invisible thing that nobody talks about when they talk about farm
burnout. We often think it’s physically exhausting. That’s why we’re burnt out,
like long days. And long days certainly are part of the picture. If you heard my daughter on the
podcast, she worked all last summer with her arm in a cast. We work through injuries. We work
through illness. Like on my dairy, cow’s got to be milked twice a day, no matter if you have the
flu or you’re sick or your kid is sick or anything, right? You have to work.
through illness. You have to work when it’s too hot and too cold and when you haven’t slept enough.
The physical grind is real and I am certainly not minimizing it but what I know from both my
experience in my own life and working with now thousands of farmers for over a decade,
physical exhaustion is just one of the three types of burnout. that happen consistently and
regularly to farmers. If you only address the physical piece, you will still end up back in the
same place physically exhausted if you try to just address that piece. If you think, oh,
I just need to work fewer hours, you will not fix the problem. So let’s talk about all three types
of burnout. So the first, like we said, physical burnout. It’s easy to recognize that.
Work in too many hours. There’s no systems. Everything is manual. Your body is tired in a way that
sleep doesn’t even fix. Like you get eight hours and you’re still exhausted. I used to feel that
way. Hopefully that, I’m sure you can relate. I hate that this is a common trait of farmers,
but that’s why we’re here. We’re going to fix it. The second is mental burnout. This is sneakier.
This is that decision fatigue. It’s what happens when you have too many moving parts, too many
products, too many sales channels, too many customer relationships to manage, too many customers.
doing different things, special circumstances. You’re wearing too many hats.
Your brain is constantly spinning, switching gears, solving problems, reacting,
trying to please everybody with all the things. And by afternoon or the end of the day,
you can’t think clearly. You are done. It’s from pure mental exhaustion.
You’re making decisions from this place of exhaustion, not wisdom. This is the mental burnout.
And then the third type of burnout, and again, we’re fixing these in these next three episodes too.
This one hurts, and this is the emotional burnout. This is when you’re working harder than almost
anyone you know, and yet… still feel like you’re not getting ahead.
It seems like other farms around you are doing great. You’re comparing yourself to them. You’re the
only one. Why can’t you figure it out? You’re feeling like something is fundamentally wrong with
you because, and I know this because I lived this, because if I could just work a little harder or
a little smarter, surely it would click, right? But emotional burnout is the one that makes you
question. whether you should even be doing this at all this is why farmers give up in the end
because they can’t figure this one out and please know this is what we’re working on every day in
the profitable farmer in our coaching calls the emotional burnout will do you in and burnout
doesn’t just make you tired it has a hidden cost that is destroying your business here’s what i
mean when you’re burned out Your creativity shuts down.
You cannot be creative. And creativity, the ability to think differently to solve the problems
you’re faced with on your farm every single minute of every day, the ability to see opportunities
and perspective, that comes from creativity. That is what drives profit.
And when you’re in survival mode, you can’t access that. Your creativity is shot.
You can’t make good decisions. When you’re burned out, you make desperate pricing decisions.
Too many farmers are not making money they they’re just breaking even and they’re making these
decisions from a place of burnout so they’ll drop their prices because they’re scared maybe scared
of losing customers or scared of not selling enough but not selling enough or selling a lot when
you’re just breaking even is a money losing venture you’re still losing money or when you’re in
this place of burnout you say yes to customer requests that you should say no to or you take on
products or markets or sales outlets sales channels that don’t actually serve you and make your
money because you’re chasing cash instead of strategy and profit And when you’re burned out,
you can’t see these things. You also can’t get to your marketing when you’re burned out. I can’t
tell you how many farmers I’ve talked to every single day when they join the profitable farmer the
first day. They’re like, I am struggling to make sales and I don’t have time for marketing.
OK, and we fix that the first week in the program. You learn the time management strategy I teach
that finds you tend to tell. 10 to 20 hours every single week, farmers report.
You finally have time for marketing. Not because we got rid of everything in your life and on the
farm, but because you learned how to clear up the mental stress that’s in the way of marketing and
creating time. You find 10 to 20 hours, life calms down and you find time for marketing.
So, but for right now, Many people, many farmers just report they don’t have time for marketing.
It takes, it goes on the back burner. But here’s the thing. That is the money making.
thing when you learn marketing or you might think, well, I’ve done marketing. It doesn’t work.
Well, you haven’t learned the skill. That’s just a skill gap. And you can learn that when you learn
to market in the way I teach. That’s the thing that brings you more customers who will pay more
money, will pay higher prices and more time. Okay. The very thing you don’t have time for is the
thing that will give you time, customers, money, and profit because you’re too busy doing
everything else because you’re in this cycle of burnout and it just feeds itself.
It’s a downward spiral. So yes, burnout is a real thing, but let’s dive into what’s…
it because if we just treat the symptoms like if you do take a vacation or you go away for a day or
a weekend or maybe you do hire some help or maybe you do cut back on hours and you don’t address
the root cause you’re going to be right back here you’re gonna say well wait I hired help and I
took a vacation I’m still burnt out because we didn’t address the root cause so let’s be sure
that’s why we’re here that’s what we’re gonna do right now and so Root cause number one,
this is that you’ve created a job for yourself, not a farm business.
All right. And this is something I see all over the place before farmers start working with me in
the coaching program. They are running a job. They’ve created a big job for themselves.
And lots of times we don’t even realize the difference between creating a job.
and a business but a job is when you’re engaged in the everyday work and nobody is leading the
business making money making decisions so i started to see this i started to see a couple years in
that i was doing the farm work and the labor and so that’s why we weren’t making enough profit it’s
why we weren’t making a living farming yet we turned this around and we got there but that’s when i
realized i’m just waking up milking cows at 5 a.m and 5 p.m and doing everything else in between
so let me give you a checklist to see if you’ve created a job for yourself So here’s,
I’m just going to go through a series of questions for you. So imagine, can you take a day off
without things falling apart? Or is it that the moment you step away,
something goes wrong and can’t, nobody knows how to fix it or something gets missed or you’re
afraid something will get missed or a customer is unhappy and no one knows how to fix it because
everything runs through you. So is that how it is on your farm? That’s evidence you’ve got a job
for yourself and you’re not leading a farm business. Or here’s another one in the checklist.
Your income depends entirely on your physical presence.
For instance, if you get sick or get injured or go away,
sales stop, revenue stops or slows way down because the farm needs you there to function.
Like, do you have to be, are you the one going to the farmer’s markets every week?
And if you don’t go to the farmer’s market, there’s nobody to go and you don’t make sales. So
that’s evidence you’ve created a job for yourself. You’re not yet being the leader of your farm,
but we teach you how to do that. So again, I don’t want you to get… heartbroken as you’re going
through this checklist and feel defeated. I don’t want you to feel defeated like you’ve done it all
wrong. No, this is where a lot of farmers, this is the turning point farmers get to,
including me. We get to the turning point where we realize this checklist applies to us.
Only then can we turn it around. So if you’re recognizing or connecting with these things I’m
reading off here, it’s okay. There’s help for you. Another thing on the checklist is,
are you the bottleneck for every decision? Do every decisions have to run through you?
Anyone who’s working on the farm or even your family, your spouse,
your kids, does every decision? in your family and on the farm run through you.
People can’t move forward without checking with you first. Every question comes to you. Every
problem comes to you. That’s evidence you’ve got a job. You haven’t created a farm where you’re
leading it, a profitable farm. And we could turn that around. So here’s another one.
You work harder and harder every year, but you make the same money or less money.
Or you’re breaking even, you’re making no money, there’s no money left because you’re working more,
but there’s no leverage in how you’re working. You’re just adding more hours to the equation.
So this is a job. You’ve created a job. Many of us do it at first and you’ve got a choice now.
This is where many farmers go out of business because they can’t handle it or you can learn the
skill of turning it around. And it’s great that you actually started out by doing all the jobs
because then you’ve got the ability to train someone else to do them. You’ve got the wisdom.
But if you don’t make that shift, you will do yourself in. You’ll go out of business because this
is unsustainable and unscalable. So just know that this is a skill set problem.
It’s not a you problem. You’re not the problem. You just haven’t learned the skill yet. You’ve got
to learn the skill. of shifting from employee of this farm you built to true business owner that’s
a mindset shift first then you’ll be able to create the systems to solve that so let me walk
through what that looks like an employee mindset if you’ve created a job for yourself you think
something like i gotta do everything But the business owner mindset asks,
what can only I do? I only do the things only I can do.
And then you build systems and you delegate or eliminate everything else. And you do this on a
small farm. You don’t have to have a big farm to get to this point. Some people think, well, when
my farm’s bigger, I’ll do that. No, when you grow bigger, you’re going to take all these problems
with you and only they get bigger. So on the teeniest, tiniest farm. You’ve got to learn how to
build systems and it’s a skill and make sure you’re doing only the jobs you can do.
And here’s something that is really powerful and it is the mindset around pricing.
So if you’re the employee, if you’ve created a job for yourself, you’re often notice if you’re
telling yourself this, like my customers won’t pay more than this. People in my area won’t pay
more. Instead, And that’s what’s keeping, that thought is keeping you stuck as an employee.
That thought is keeping you stuck. It’s not a fact. It’s just something you’re telling yourself
that’s keeping you stuck. My customers won’t pay more or people in our area won’t pay more. That’s
one of the first mindsets we shift inside the profitable farmer in a coaching call.
You can shift that in just a few minutes of coaching. If you have a belief your customers or the
people in your area won’t pay more, you’re going to keep this job.
on your farm instead of becoming the leader and you will continue to burn out. The business owner
mindset asks, how do I teach my customers? How do I teach the people in my area the value of what
I’m offering? That’s branding. That’s what you learn the very first week in The Profitable Farmer.
What problem you solve for people and how to communicate it to them. That is the skill to learn
that will solve for your overwhelm and burnout. Okay,
it’s a completely different question than how do I get people to pay more? And it leads to
completely different results. You won’t build a profitable farm unless you shift to that.
How do I teach people the value of what I’m offering? How do I learn the skill of teaching people
the value of what I’m offering? That’s what we do every week. That’s your brand. So one of the
things that makes these shifts hard is… haven’t been trained to think this way. Nobody sat us
down when we were starting out and said, hey, here’s the difference between creating a job for
yourself and being the leader of the business. We just started farming. I brought home a cow and
started milking and giving it to people and trying to get money for it. Okay, we just started
working. And then we kept working more and more because we thought that was a path to success. I
think it’s such a similar path we all take. But here’s what I want you to take away from this
episode. The profitable farmers in the Profitable Farmer Coaching Program,
and again, thousands over the years now, they are the ones who make money,
make profit, and have a calm… fulfilling life they’re not working the most hours out laboring
they’ve built systems gotten the coaching program and built their systems they’ve built farms that
can function with or without their constant physical presence and you can do that too even on a
very small farm the sooner you learn this skill on the smallest farm the sooner you will get to
profit All right. So let’s talk about the first practical step here.
I want to give you some solutions to this. I want you to make a list. So I want you to walk away
with some actions that will move you towards solving this. So I don’t just want to talk ideas at
you. I want to leave every episode with something actionable that will move your farm ahead.
So here’s the first step. I want you to make a list. This list can be the titled something like the
only I can do this or the, the business, the farm business leader list.
Okay. These are, we’re going to make a list of only things you can do. So get a piece of paper and
I want you to make two columns and the column on the left, write down everything you do on the
farm. I mean everything. If you are going to the store and picking up supplies,
if you are taking cows to the butcher, if you are slaughtering,
processing chickens, if you are picking flowers, making bouquets, planting seeds,
building the fence. Write everything you’re doing. If you’re writing marketing, if you’re posting
on social media, if you are texting customers, if you are deciding what to grow,
when, what to order, you’re doing the bookkeeping, maybe you’re feeding animals, harvesting,
packing orders, just all the endless things that you might be doing, write it down.
At first, for the first month, I did all of that. I was lucky in that I had sort of…
three little kids at home forced me to hire help right away because I did all of these things the
first month and realized, uh-oh, I can’t do this. So I want you to just brain dump everything you
do into the left-hand column on your piece of paper. And then look at that list. And for each item
that you wrote down on the left side of this in the first column, ask yourself,
could someone do this with proper training and clear systems? Could this be?
documented, delegated, or eventually automated. And then put a check mark next to everything that
is a yes. And I know some farmers will come to me and they’ll say, nope, I just cannot train
someone to milk cows like I can. I just cannot train someone to harvest the beans like I can.
I had a farmer once I was coaching and he said, well, my employee gets 50% of the green beans and
I get… 97% of the green beans in a row. So that’s something to consider.
And you might think, therefore, I have to be the one harvesting. Well, that’s unsustainable. So you
will learn how to turn that into an automated system. And the sooner you start on your very small
farm, the better. So anyway, make sure you’re putting a check mark to everything that you think can
be taught or trained or delegated or maybe even eliminated. And then the things that are left,
the ones you cannot check, those are the only I can do this item.
Make sure you don’t put marketing in the checklist. So some people think marketing and they check
it off like they can delegate it. No one else. That is the money making skill. That’s the one thing
you can’t pass off to someone else. Okay. Only you can learn and create your brand and then sell
it. Once you’ve done that successfully for a few years, you might be able to train someone to do
some of the tasks in marketing down the road years from now. But the money-making task of
marketing, that is the one thing you cannot delegate or create a system that someone else can do.
That is the money-making skill the farmer has to do, the farm owner. You are still a farmer.
Even if you are not out picking flowers, you’re not out milking the cows, you’re still a farmer.
Please know that. Some people think, well, I’m not a farmer if I’m not out hoeing the weeds or
building the fence. Yes, you are. That’s a belief. That’s a mindset that’ll make you broke. So
anyway, go back to that list. Make sure that the things you have not checked, the only I can do
this items are things like big strategic decisions or your vision,
creating the vision or key relationships. You’re the only person that can build relationships in
the way you do. The things that will make people pay the prices you are going to have to charge or
things that genuinely require your specific knowledge and judgment. So there are certainly
decisions some people can make, but maybe there’s others that do need to be higher level decisions
run through you. But here’s what happens when I do this exercise with farmers.
Usually about 75 to 80% of what ends up on their list could have been done by someone else or
handled by a system. But we’re just doing it ourselves because we never stop to ask the question.
So this exercise is going to help you become aware of all the things you’re doing that.
could be passed off and need to be passed off very soon if you want to build a sustainable farm
business. Now, I’m also not saying that you need to go hire a bunch of people tomorrow. What I’m
saying is we’re identifying what belongs to you and only you and start thinking about how to build
support around everything else. This is where you start to feel free from that trap you’ve created.
All right. So that’s the main exercise for today. We talked about the reality of farm burnout,
not just physical exhaustion, but the mental and emotional layers that are actually the things that
people can’t take and end up going out of business for. So we dug into the hidden cost of burnout,
how it kills your creativity, which is the one thing that makes you money. And then we talked about
the first real root cause,
business. You’re the bottleneck. You’re the employee of your own farm. And we talked about what it
looks like to start shifting that. That’s where you make that list. The only I can do this list.
So this is where so much of the exhaustion cycle starts with farmers.
And it’s also where we start to break that cycle and get out of that trap.
So I’m excited for this series. Next week is part two. We’re going to go even deeper into something
that is more sneaky than the systems problem. We’re going to talk about the beliefs,
the mindset that keeps you stuck. So mindset traps are the things that cause you to not charge
enough, um, charge so that you’re just barely breaking even or not paying yourself.
Or if you still can’t, uh, you don’t pay yourself and then have 30% leftover.
Okay. It’s a mindset trap. Uh, mindset traps cause you to overwork, feel guilty about wanting to
make money and live a balanced life, all these things. Okay. So that’s what we’re going to dive
into next week. So I’ll see you then. And again, I’ve always got a free training coming up where we
dive deeper into all these topics. That is at charlottemsmith.com forward slash masterclass.
So I give so much free, valuable education here that helps farmers start to turn things around.
And then when you’re ready for more, the Profitable Farmer is our year-long marketing and mindset
coaching program. That’s where farmers are having profit and fulfilling lives.
you’ve never imagined. You’ve heard many of them on the podcast each week.
I’ve got a few, a couple episodes coming up where I interviewed a couple of my clients that are so
inspiring. I can’t wait for you to listen to them. But in the meantime, thanks for being here
today. And I will see you next week in part two of this series. Take care.