FREE Event:
Farm Marketing Week – June 2026
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Picture this. You’re selling beef and pork and chicken and eggs and vegetables and flowers. You’re at three farmers markets, running a farm stand, trying to sell online, posting on every platform you’ve ever heard of, and somehow also squeezing in a farm stay and a few consulting calls. Your head is spinning. Your chest gets tight just thinking about the week ahead. And despite doing ALL the things, you still aren’t paying yourself.

Here’s what I finally had to admit after 17 years in this industry: more products, more channels, and more hustle are not the answer. They’re the problem. I call it the complexity trap. And it’s the third root cause of farm burnout nobody warns you about, because everyone’s too busy telling you to add another revenue stream.

But here’s what nobody tells you: the most profitable farms I’ve worked with over the last 13 years didn’t get profitable because they did everything. They got exceptionally good at ONE signature product, ONE dream customer, and ONE strong marketing channel, and they built depth before they built breadth. Simple scales. Complex fails. Simplifying isn’t shrinking. It’s the most strategic move you can make.

This episode is the final part of the From Burnout to Balance series, and it’s the one that ties everything together. I’m breaking down the Four Pillars framework that turns an overwhelming farm into a business that actually serves your life. Plus, there’s a full 90-day plan you can start THIS week.

I include how to identify your signature product and dream customer, how to build the email marketing foundation that’s 3,600 times more profitable than social media, how to price for profit instead of chasing volume, and how to finally build the boundaries that protect your weekends, your family, and your sanity.

If you’re the farmer selling 13 things across seven channels and still not making a paycheck, this is for you. If you’ve started to dread the farm you built with your own two hands, this is for you. Walk away from this episode with a clear 90-day roadmap to simplify, systematize, and finally step off the hamster wheel.

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Price for Profit – Free 6-Day Pricing Course – If you’ve never actually run the math to see whether your prices are paying you a real salary AND covering every expense, start here. Includes the exact spreadsheets that show you the truth in minutes. Grab it at charlottemsmith.com/priceforprofit.
• Farm Marketing Week + The Profitable Farmer Masterclass – One week of free live trainings in June covering The Power of One, branding, and the marketing foundation that gets farmers finally paid. This is also the only time The Profitable Farmer coaching program opens this summer. Save your seat at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass.

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Key Takeaways from this Episode:

Simple Scales, Complex Fails

Adding more products and more sales channels feels like growth, but it’s diluting your energy, your marketing, and your margins. The profitable path is depth before breadth: one signature product, one dream customer, one marketing channel done exceptionally well. You can always add more later from a place of profit instead of desperation.

Your Email List Is the Only Audience You Actually Own

Social media algorithms decide who sees you. Platforms change, accounts get flagged, and suddenly your audience is gone. Email is 3,600 times more profitable because every person on that list said yes to hearing from you. Build the relationship first, make the offer later. That’s the difference between marketing that feels pushy and marketing that feels like service.

Boundaries Are the Fourth Pillar, Not the Reward

You can build a perfectly structured farm business and still wreck your life with it if you skip this one. Delegation, hiring help (even a house cleaner counts), and protecting your weekends aren’t luxuries you earn someday after the work is “done.” They’re the foundation that makes sustainable success possible in the first place.

Click HERE and Let’s Meet!
Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer Marketing Coaching Program can break you out of marketing misery.

Today is part three of the From Burnout to Balance series I’ve had on the Profitable Mindset
podcast. Today’s episode is titled Simple Scales, Complex Fails.
The four pillars of a farm business that actually work. And you’re going to get to a plan,
a 90 day plan starting today at the end of this episode to help you on this.
So I’m Charlotte Smith, and I’ve been so excited to bring you this whole series,
but especially this final episode, because today is where we bring it all together.
And so if you missed episodes one and two, they were just the last two weeks right before today’s
episode came out. And thanks for being here. It’s not always easy to sit and And listen to
solutions that you think maybe you don’t have time for and that may be hard to hear.
Like in one of the episodes I talked about how you’re running a job instead of a business. It can
be hard to hear that. Or we talked about last time the lies that we tell ourselves that farmers are
supposed to endure. Things like… are supposed to be broke. And so it can be hard to hear that
some people think the opposite is true and are actually having success from doing that and from
believing that. So we’ve been going deep in all these episodes. And today I’ll give you the
practical framework that brings it all together. We’re going to cover the third and final root
cause of farm. burnout. And I know this one can be so relieving when people finally see and hear it
because it’s one that we can fix today. I’m also going to walk you through the four pillars
framework for building a farm business that actually serves you instead of overwhelms you.
Okay. And also you’ll get that 90 day plan that you could start on this week. All right.
So First of all, let’s talk about root cause number three of burnout.
And that is the complexity trap. And let’s talk about this for a second.
How many different products or services are you selling?
Okay. Just think about that. Look at your farm in your mind’s eye. What are all the different
things you’re selling? How many different sales channels are you working? All right.
Lots of farmers come to me and they’re selling 13 different things. They’re selling meat and pork
and chicken and beef and eggs and vegetables and flowers and farm tours and classes. And they’re
selling beef by the cut and beef by the quarter. Those are different products too.
And they’re selling, maybe they have a farm stay and maybe they’re doing a little consulting on the
side for farmers. Okay. And then how many different sales channels? I want you to count all of
these. Are you only selling out of a farm stand on your farm and that’s it? Or do you have a farm
stand? Do you go to farmer’s markets? Do you go to more than one? Are you trying to sell online?
Maybe you’re doing pop-up events.
Maybe you’re selling to restaurants. Maybe you’re selling at a co-op. Maybe you’re trying to sell
on social media. Like think of all these things. What are all the different things you’re selling?
And how many platforms are you posting on to try to reach customers? And how many different
customer conversations in all the different places are you trying to manage simultaneously? All
right. I just want you to think about that and notice. How does that mental picture make you feel?
Because it feels a little overwhelming or makes your chest a little tight.
That is the complexity trap. That’s what I call it. Here’s the thing. Most farmers add complexity
gradually. They start out raising or growing one thing. But then they think,
huh, we didn’t make enough money at that one thing. So we’re going to add a second. Boy,
customers asked us for this, so we’re going to add that. And then this farmer’s market doesn’t seem
to be doing so well, so we’re going to add another farmer’s market. Our farm stand is not doing so
well, so we’re going to add this channel or that channel or go to that platform that that person
mentioned. So we start out with the one thing, but we just keep adding more because we think that’s
the one thing that’s going to move the needle. and finally make us money. What it does is it adds a
lot to our to-do list, but it does not add any more money. It takes away time and it usually takes
away more money from you. So before you know it, you’re managing five or 10 or 15 products across
two or four or seven platforms, sales channels,
and your head is spinning constantly just trying to keep up. And I understand why this happens.
The logic, it’s not true, but the logic we think is more products equal more sales,
more revenue streams, more security, more money. And we think more channels,
more sales channels, more sales outlets means more customers, more money. So we think adding more
means more money, but that is not true. And I know this from working with thousands of farmers
over, the last 13 years, complexity will drive you on the ground.
It’ll make you, it’ll make you broke eventually. It’ll make you give up. So what happens is more
products means more complexity in your workday. There’s more transition time to go back and forth.
Everything is diluted. Your energy is diluted. Your marketing is diluted.
There’s more inventory. There’s more things to track. There’s more decisions to make. You just
can’t keep up. More sales channels means more effort that needs to be put into marketing,
more customer service, more tech management on the back end,
more different groups of people to try to understand and speak to. And all of that multiplies
together to create a mental load that is enormous. and overwhelming.
And pretty soon farmers are spread so thin that nothing gets the attention it deserves. And if
you’re listening and this is you, please don’t beat yourself up because this is probably every
farmer when I meet them. All right. Pretty soon, even your customers don’t even know what it is you
are known for. Okay. So it just, it’s a downward spiral. So just remember This phrase,
I say it a lot in my marketing, in my programs, simple scales,
which means grows, and complex fails. It’ll drive you out of business.
The most successful farm businesses I see in my program didn’t get profitable because they did
everything. They became profitable. Meaning they’re able to pay themselves a paycheck and have
money left over because they got exceptionally good at marketing one thing, one signature product,
one core customer, one strong marketing channel. And they built depth in that and they proved to
themselves they could sell it over and over again at a profit before they built breadth. Here’s the
really freeing part of this. Simplifying isn’t giving up. It’s not shrinking. It’s actually the
most strategic thing you can do in your business. When you have fewer products,
you can market each one more powerfully. And your marketing is so diluted when you try to talk
about two things or more. two or more ways to buy. So when you have just one channel you sell,
your one signature product, you’re very consistent. People get to know your very clear brand and
you start making money. It’s easier to build relationships. People feel connected to you.
When they feel connected to you, they trust from you. I mean, they trust you. And when they trust
you, they buy from you and they will pay whatever price you need to charge to be sustainable.
And sustainable includes profit. All right. So what simplicity actually looks like in practice is
this. I first met a farm and this is not just one farmer, but I was working with this one farmer
who was like many of you trying to do everything. He was selling beef and pork and chicken and eggs
and had a small vegetable operation. They were selling at three farmers markets and online and had
one restaurant account and they were exhausted. And when we looked at their numbers and we really
dug in on a coaching call, we found that one product stood out. Their pasture raised beef was
driving most of the sales and most of the profit and they loved it.
All right. That’s the trifecta there. Because if you don’t love it,
if you don’t love the one thing you’re doing, you’ll create a business that you dread waking up to
every day.
they were raising was taking a lot of time and a lot of money with very little return but they
thought they had to do it to keep customers coming so we worked through this in a coaching call
they decided to simplify and focus on one product and when they they got strategic about their
brand which means who they were selling to and what problem they solve they built a list of
dedicated, loyal customers who came back time and time again, season after season,
and they stopped chasing everything else. What happened is their sales increased consistently.
They were finally able to keep some for themselves after about 13 years of farming.
They were finally able to pay themselves and have money left over. And their working hours
decreased. For the first time in years, they actually felt like they were running a farm business
instead of the farm running them. All right. Now you might be tempted to think,
or you might find yourself thinking that you can’t cut products or you think, but I need the
variety. People will leave if I don’t have variety or I can’t leave this market or that market or
that platform or that sales channel. What if I lose customers? And I get it. We have those fears,
but those fears aren’t truth. We prove them not to be true time and time again in The Profitable
Farmer, in my coaching program. We coach on these things and they don’t actually happen. Customers
don’t leave when you learn the skill of relationship building that I teach.
When you build a relationship with your customers and they trust you, they will buy from you even
though you have to cut back to one thing sold in one way at a higher price. And let me offer you
this. You can always add products back once you have developed that strong foundation.
Once your signature product is selling like gangbusters because you learned the skill of marketing
versus just trying what you see others doing online. Your customer base is solid.
Your systems are built. Then you can expand again later from a place of profit,
not desperation. This is the opposite of what most farmers do.
They start scattered because they’re not making enough money in one thing because they didn’t learn
how to market it because we didn’t know. We didn’t know we were needing to learn marketing and that
it’s a learned skill we got to invest in learning. We didn’t know that. So we feel scattered that
we’re not making enough sales or enough money. And we add all these things to find our way to
focus. And what I’m saying is we got to flip. that. We got to start out focused,
learn the skill of being profitable with one product and paying yourself on one product.
That is the system that actually works. Then you can grow. Then you can add things later.
All right. So let’s talk about the email marketing foundation.
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking or telling yourself is you tried email, it doesn’t
work. Well, You got to learn the skill of it. That’s just a skill gap. It’s okay. If you’re sending
emails and they don’t work, that is just an indicator that you haven’t learned how to do it in a
way that’s productive and useful and makes you money. So you can think that email is outdated or
everything goes to spam or it’s not as exciting as Instagram. It doesn’t feel as immediate as
social media. But I’m going to say something that surprises a lot of people, and that is email
marketing, and this is a research-backed number, is 3,600 times more profitable than social media
marketing. Here’s why. Social media, you’re at the mercy of the algorithm. The platform decides who
sees your posts, and it’s certainly not all your followers. If you have,
for even numbers’ sake, 1,000 followers, and you post something, maybe a few dozen of them will
see it, or 100 or 200. And if the platform goes down,
or if your account gets flagged, or the algorithm changes, and this happens all the time, your
audience is gone. You can’t reach them. You don’t own them. You can’t reach all of them in one day
and tell them you have something for sale. Your email list is the opposite. You own it.
This is why it’s the foundation. Every single person on that list has actively said, yes, I want to
hear from you. They’re not scrolling past you on accident. They open an email because your name was
in the send line because they know it’s coming from you and they feel this connection and they
trust you because you’ve learned the skill of writing in a way that does that. So then what happens
is email lets you build that relationship when you learn how to do it.
properly. And you’ve got to build a relationship before you can make a sale. You might make a
random sale here and there. But relationship building is why people buy.
Because you’ve done relationship building. They trust you once you’ve done that. And when they
trust you, they buy from them. So in email, then you can go ahead and educate and teach,
inform about all the things that are of interest to them. You can tell them stories. You can
inspire them. take them behind the scenes. Then what happens is when you announce something for
sale, they’re not being sold to. They don’t feel like they’re being sold to. They’re hearing from
someone they trust. And again, they’re only going to buy from you when they trust you. And when
they trust you, it’s easy for them to buy from you and they don’t question your price. That’s the
difference between marketing that feels pushy and marketing that feels like you’re serving.
That’s what I teach you to do. I teach farmers how to serve their customers through marketing,
by building trust. You show up consistently, like every week or two weeks,
you give value, you build a real relationship, and then you sell your product. Whatever that
signature product is in that sequence, build the relationship first, then offer something for sale
later. So serve and then make an offer to help them with your product.
That’s what we’re doing here. Marketing is serving first. And then it’s making an offer to help
them, to serve them with your product. That’s what makes email marketing so incredibly powerful.
If you’ve heard the interviews of my clients on the podcast, they’re making two times,
five times, 10 times, a hundred times more sales than ever before because they learn and implement
the foundation of email marketing. Okay, so this is the one marketing channel I recommend you build
first before anything else. All right, so now let’s get into the four pillars framework.
This is what I’ve been building toward these last three episodes. And it’s what ties the mindset
work and the systems together into something you can actually implement. So these pillars are going
to form your foundation. And let’s go through each one. Pillar number one is brand.
Clarity over confusion. You got to have a clear brand. A clear brand is who you help and how your
product solves their problem. That’s it. That’s your brand. It’s not colors.
It’s not fonts. It’s not logos. It’s not website. That’s not your brand. It’s not everyone who
cares about food or local families. It is a specific person that you have in mind that you are
serving. and helping them solve their problems or reach their goals with your products. So in my
program, you get 35 questions that will help you figure out what your brand is. But let’s start
with a few here. What do your customers care about? Like what drove them to buy your products?
What did they want to feel? Or what change were they looking for in their life when they decided to
buy your product? And you learn that by asking them. When you know that person deeply,
everything else gets easier. Your marketing actually writes itself. And I show you how to do that.
People buy your products and they’ll happily pay the price you need to charge when you learn this
skill of branding in the way I teach. And then your signature product, your best,
most profitable product that you love to sell, that becomes the anchor of your brand.
Everything else supports it. But you’ve got to have a very clear brand that people instantly
recognize no matter how small your farm is. A lot of people think, oh, when we get bigger, we’ll do
a brand. No, you can start this from day one. And the questions I give my clients will help you
know immediately what your brand is. So again, to make money on your farm, to pay yourself,
to have a little money left over, for sure cover all the expenses, this is the first step. All
right, pillar number two is systems. Over hustle. All right.
This is where we take everything I talked about in episode one and make it operational. Building
email marketing systems that run consistently. Creating communication templates like email
templates. I give my clients email templates, but you can create your own. So you’re not writing
your emails or your marketing from scratch every week. Set up production systems that don’t require
your constant physical presence for every detail. So the goal here is to create a business that
makes sales even when you’re not working and for sure not overworking. And I’m not talking about
passive income. That’s not what we’re building here, but systems that make you more money with less
effort. That’s what a true scale is. A lot of farmers will scale, which means they create more
product and it’s more work. But a true scale is more product, less work,
more money. Most farmers are not doing that. But in the profitable farmer, when they build their
marketing foundation, they learn to do that. All right. Systems make you more money,
less effort, and you don’t have to be constantly in the middle of everything. All right.
Next is pillar three. And this is a premium price over selling volume at a low price.
So a lot of farmers I meet, they say, oh, we just need to sell more, but they already aren’t making
money. If you aren’t making a profit at what you’re currently selling and paying yourself,
you’re actually going to make less money if you produce more of it and you’re going to lose more
money. So you got to have, make sure your price is right. I have a free pricing course. And that is
at, if you’re interested, charlottemsmith.com forward slash price for profit, all one word.
Whenever I mention the free pricing course, I want to make sure you know it is there. It’s a six
day course with spreadsheets so that you can become aware immediately of if your price is able to
pay you a salary and have money left over and pay all the expenses. Okay,
so pricing is really crucial. And this is the practical application of everything I talked about
last week in part two, value-based pricing. Not the lowest price you can get away with charging,
but the price that reflects the quality and the value of what you’re offering that you have learned
how to communicate. That’s the skill we teach. And that gives you enough profit to thrive.
Again, it’s a learned skill to number one, learn the value of what you’re offering.
How are your products helping people? And number two, how to communicate that value in your
marketing so they’ll pay your price without question. You’ve got to learn this. It’s part of the
marketing foundation. So here’s the math. Just know if you chase low or lots of volume selling lots
of product, but your prices aren’t up, your profit margin isn’t up there,
you’ll always work harder and longer hours for less money and you’ll continue the burnout.
Or you can learn, because it’s a learned skill, to serve fewer customers at higher prices with a
profit and have the time and energy to serve them beautifully. The second model is not just more
profitable. It’s sustainable. It builds loyalty. It builds your clear brand. The customers who are
looking for the solutions your product offers, they’re not buying on price.
And I’m not saying that they’re rich people. I’m saying they value. I have sacrificed for the last
25 years to be able to buy 100% farm fresh food. I’ve sacrificed vacations and lifestyle to be
able to afford it. That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t buy based on price. I buy based on,
is this food going to make me and my family healthy? And those are the customers you are looking
for, people who prioritize the value of your products, no matter what their income is.
We had a lot of customers on our farm who are single income, where husband is a teacher.
And we all know that teachers in our country don’t make a lot of money, but they were willing to
prioritize farm fresh food. which in the products are more expensive or farm fresh flowers,
not just food, flowers, farm stays, tours, classes, all of what we produce and sell has to be more
money than the grocery store, just because there’s no economy of scale. And you will learn how to
find customers who prioritize that. And they are around you everywhere in your community.
All right. And then the last pillar, number four is growth over grind. And this pillar,
I think it’s the least attention and it’s so important because you can build a perfectly structured
business, but kind of destroy your life with it if you don’t build this pillar.
And what I mean by growth over grind is you’ve got to establish your boundaries,
your non- negotiables? What are those things? What are the boundaries that protect your health,
your family, your sanity, your days? What does a sustainable workday look like for you?
What are you not willing to sacrifice anymore? For me, I had to learn how to not,
I was not willing to give up my weekends. I was not willing, it started out, I was not willing to
sacrifice Sundays. And then it was, I was not willing to sacrifice my weekends anymore. This is
going to mean building your delegation and hiring framework, no matter how small you are.
A lot of my coaching with brand new small farms is they need help and it ends up they hire a house
cleaner. Like that might be where it starts or someone to do the yard work so they can get out on
the farm. Or maybe it is farm employees. My daughter’s in her second year of farming and she’s got
employees hired this year and they all come on Thursdays and work. So you’ve got to learn to
delegate and hire and price in a way that supports that. And these are all learned skills.
So identify the things that you need support with. Be willing to invest in that support,
even if it’s not completely comfortable. It’s never going to be comfortable at first. If you
haven’t done it before, everything new is uncomfortable and that’s okay. And this is something I
coach on inside the profitable farmer regularly. Someone knows they need support,
but they can’t quite decide to hire or they don’t think they deserve it or they feel guilty raising
their prices. So they keep on overworking. But pillar number four means solving for this.
Otherwise you’ll be burned out. So you can get coached and learn to create these sales systems that
help you reach more people. And make more money and keep more money and pay yourself and have less
work on your part so that your income is not solely dependent on you doing all the work on the farm
and in the house. This is how you get off the hamster wheel. All four of these pillars put
together. And it’s not by working less at first, but it’s by working smarter and building
infrastructure that we’ve talked about in these four pillars that creates more results, more money.
with less of your personal energy. These are all learned skills. Okay. Most farmers I meet,
including me the first couple of years, we are on hamster wheels and we can’t figure out how to get
off because it’s a learned skill to get off. You’re not going to get off the hamster wheel unless
you invest in learning it. We don’t just learn these things on our own. I’ve learned myself the
hard way. And then of course, with working with so many farmers. Okay. So I promised a 90 day plan.
Here it is. It’s doable. Commit to it. And if you implement it,
you’ll look back in 90 days and not recognize your business. And this is similar to what we do
inside the profitable farmer. We build the foundation in month one. And that’s what I recommend you
do. So your only job in month one is to get really clear. Weeks one and two, define your dream
customer and your signature product. This is what we do in module one of our marketing training.
I give you questions and walk you through exactly how to decide through exercises and also
questions, decide who’s your ideal customer and what is your signature product. What’s going to be
the easiest for you to sell that you love and make the most profit on? You can’t skip this step.
You can’t go straight to tactics without this clarity. Otherwise, your marketing won’t work.
It’ll be a waste of time. So write this out in these first couple weeks. Write out a profile. Keep
it in a Google Doc.
Who is your dream customer? Describe them. Give them a name. Know their life values.
What are their worries in life? Why do they buy your product? What does it do for them? How does it
make them feel? What does that mean to them to be able to use it,
have it on their counter, feed their family, take it home? What does all that mean to them?
And then choose your signature product that helps them fulfill those values and things they talk
about. And that is how you will build your whole brand around that. All right, then weeks three and
four, set up the basics of email marketing. Choose a platform. There are lots of free ones to
start. Don’t use the free ones that are offered with your website. That’s not going to build you a
foundation. You’ll have to change it very shortly. So choose an email marketing platform,
any of them, just not the ones with the website. All right, there are good options that are free or
at different budgets. And then create your freebie. What are you going to give away? When people
enter their email on your website, what are you going to give away? Keeping in mind, no one wants
to sign up for… Enter your email below and get our weekly newsletter. Nobody wants another
newsletter. All right. So make sure that it’s a guide that serves their need,
helps them solve their problem. All right. And you only learn that by asking them. Okay.
Month two, systems, week five and six, you are creating, and again,
this coincides with what we do inside the Profitable Farmer. Weeks five and six, you create your
ideal customer templates. welcome emails, follow-up emails,
a weekly or bi-weekly email newsletter in the way I teach that’s profitable.
You’re just building this template once and then it’ll be easy to repeat as needed.
Usually most people can start out sending
farm newsletter every two weeks, but it’s great to work your way up to once a week. And this builds
a relationship with your customers, a relationship of trust. I remember people only buy from you
when they trust you. Consistent communication is what does that. And then week seven and eight,
you’re going to batch your marketing emails and your social media posts. So if you have two hours
on a Saturday to work on marketing and that’s it, you’re going to write one or two or three emails
and get them scheduled. You can get those scheduled ahead of time with your email marketing
software. So then you start to be more efficient and you’ve designated time for these things.
And during the week, you can be so free mentally because you know, oh, my marketing’s covered.
I’m going to tackle that in that two hour focus time on Saturday or whatever day it was that you
planned that. And then month three, days 60 to 90,
you’re going to scale weeks nine and 10. You’re launching, I teach the five-day sales launch in
the Profitable Farmer. So you’re running a five-day sales launch, relaunching your signature
product with a profitable price, one that pays you a salary and you have money left over.
You got your dream customer defined. Your email list is started. Your value is clearly articulated
in your marketing. Now you go out and sell and confidence will come later. You sell with courage.
It’s hard. It’s hard to send marketing emails at first. Call on your courage. You will get
confident later. And then the last couple of weeks, you’re building your delegation framework.
All right. So remember episode part, part one was the only I can do this list.
So start to create systems for all the things that don’t have to be you.
That’s you building the foundation for help. And it doesn’t have to be on the farm. It could be
help on the farm, but it also could be, oh, I have a house cleaner that comes in every two weeks
and cleans the toilets, the bathrooms, sweeps and mops the floors, wipes off the counters,
whatever that might be. Whatever that is for you, build your delegation framework. This is your
foundation that’s going to serve you. Okay, so that’s our… 90 day plan, four pillars,
three months. You will have a very different life on the other side if you wake up every day and
intentionally plan on this. And so let’s talk about that as I wrap up.
And that is a daily practice because a plan without daily practice is like planting the seed,
but not watering it. All right. There are small, consistent habits that make these things work.
So I like a morning mindset routine. If you wake up in anxiety, like a lot of us do thinking,
I got to get to all this. You got to take about 10 minutes before you open your phone, before you
check email, before anything else, take 10 minutes to get in a useful and…
productive frame of mind. And if you’re full of anxiety or like, I have to get to work,
that’s going to be unuseful and unproductive. So take 10 minutes and just remind yourself of your
dream customer, how you serve them, how your products help her solve her problems,
how your products help her reach her goals, what your values are, what you appreciate about your
farm, what you appreciate about your business, about your life, what you’re grateful for,
Ask yourself, how can I help serve one customer today? And then do it.
For me, sometimes that’s, oh, I can serve one customer today by sending a thank you note to that
person that helped me out last week. Or to that, for me, it was a recent podcast guest.
Send them a thank you note. Or maybe you listen to a short something that fills your head with
possibility instead of scarcity. Okay, just 10 minutes. That’s it. The other thing you got to do is
an end of day review. This is the evaluation I teach my clients.
What worked today? What didn’t work today? And what’s the one most important thing I can focus on
tomorrow? 15 minutes of reflection at the end of every day will make you so efficient.
All right. So then one hour a week. In addition to the 10 minutes a day,
the end of day, one hour a week, work on your business, not in it. Look at your numbers.
Look at your sales. Look at your profits. Are there profits?
Look at your expenses. Look at your, how many emails you sent? How many people opened it? Evaluate
your marketing. Plan your communication. Make strategic decisions from a clear head instead of just
reacting. Okay, so make sure there’s one hour a week. where you’re looking at all your numbers in
your business. And then once a month, do a financial check-in and a life balance check-in.
All right, look at your numbers and your life. Is the business growing? Is the farm okay?
Do you still love the farm? Where do you need more support? This kind of check-in once a month
makes you aware of whether you’re building a… you actually love or do you dread it?
Because if you dread your farm today, there’s no future place where you’re going to love it. The
only way you’re going to love your farm tomorrow or next year is if you learn to love it today.
And lots of times getting out from overwhelm is the key to that. So these practices seem small,
but I promise you the farmers who do them consistently are the ones who make progress and become
profitable. All right. So now let me bring the whole series home. Over the last three episodes,
let’s see. Episode number one, we talked about how you can end up building a trap instead of a farm
business. And you’re instead just running a job. You’re the bottleneck.
You’re losing yourself in the day-to-day. And we talked about how to start shifting that with the
business owner mindset and the only I can do this list.
Episode two was all about the good farmer lies. the beliefs keeping you undercharging and
overworking and feeling guilty and how to shift that. Today was the complexity trap and the relief
of simplicity and the four pillars framework. All right, here’s what I want to leave you with.
Your farm is supposed to serve your life. not consume it. And 17 years ago,
I thought and believed exhaustion was the price of farming. I thought struggling was what made you
a real farmer. I thought wanting balance was something I could get to someday after I’d worked hard
enough and long enough and proven to someone. But today I know better. Balance is not the reward
for someday success. It’s the foundation you must create. that creates sustainable success.
You can’t farm well and love your family well and show up as your best self when you’re running on
empty. Okay. So just know that the farmers who are thriving now, who are profitable and present and
proud of what they’ve built, they’ve made a choice. They’ve decided burnout was not part of the
requirement of farming. All right. So Just know that,
that there is hope. They learn different skills. They learned how to think differently and they
built things differently. And you can do this too. It’s all a learned skill. I want to share just
one testimonial from my client, Sarah. She said she always felt, she’s in the profitable farmer,
has now been in there a few years. She said, I always felt guilty taking people’s money in the
past. We increased our price by 25% this year.
In the past, we increased our beef price by 25 cents a pound.
And this year it was 25% a pound. And people still bought from me without blinking.
She said that one mindset shift that I feel confident. that my product is helping people will make
us an extra $30,000 this year. No extra work, no extra animals, just the courage to charge what my
product is actually worth. So if you’re ready to go deeper on this, you want help,
you want some support making these shifts, we will be opening the Profitable Farmer again one more,
only one time this summer. It’s only opening once. in June, in summer. And I have farm marketing
week going on that whole week. That is where I give free trainings every day. I go live.
I’m teaching the power of one. I’m teaching about branding. You’re going to learn a ton for free
and consider if the profitable farmer coaching program will work for you. And you could sign up for
that at charlottemsmith.com forward slash masterclass. So we’ll see you there in June.
And I hope you’re having a great spring. Take care.