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#309: Why Customer Relationships Are Your Farm’s Biggest Asset (Not Your Land)
Episode Summary
The biggest asset on your farm is not your land, your herd, or your equipment — it’s your customer relationships. One loyal customer can be worth $10,000–$20,000 or more over her lifetime, and the farmers who treat those relationships as their most valuable asset sell out faster, raise prices without losing anyone, and stop scrambling for the next customer. In this episode, I do the math with you — and it’s going to change how you look at your farm on a random Wednesday morning.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why the customer who’s bought eggs from you for four years is worth more than your best tractor — with real ‘customer lifetime value’ math you can run on your own farm
- The three reasons most farmers neglect their most profitable asset (including the guilt that stops you from hitting “send”)
- How Sarah sold $100,000 of beef in five days, Brooke sold out 90 flower shares, Valerie 10X’d her farm stand in six months, and Hannah raised prices 70% without losing a single customer
- The difference between nurturing relationships and people-pleasing. They sound similar, but they’re opposite forces
- Three things to do this week, plus one hard thing I want you to stop doing
Key Takeaways:
- The leaky-bucket problem: why chasing new customers keeps you broke
- Never burn a bridge — the rule my coach taught me that I’ve adopted completely
- One email that emptied a freezer of 12 hogs in a few hours
Memorable Quotes
“The woman who’s bought eggs from you every week for four years is worth more than your best tractor.”
FAQ
Q: How do I get customers to keep buying from my farm instead of always finding new ones?
Treat the customers you already have as your farm’s most valuable asset — because they are. Stay in touch weekly by email all year round, even in the off-season, reply personally when they ask questions, and show up in the good times when you’re not selling anything. A customer spending $200 a month for six months a year is worth $7,200 over six years — and more once she refers her friends. Nurture that relationship the way you’d tend your best breeding stock.
Q: Can I raise my farm prices without losing customers?
Yes — if the relationship is strong enough. One of my clients, Hannah, raised her chicken prices 70% and not one customer left, because her customers trusted her and wanted to support her farm. A strong customer relationship absorbs price increases, because the relationship is worth far more to your customer than a few extra dollars a pound. Without that relationship, people will always take the cheaper route.
Q: What’s the best way to market my small farm without spending money on ads?
Stop pouring energy into chasing strangers and start tending the relationships you already have — it’s mostly free. Email your list weekly, send a personal note to a loyal customer, reconnect with someone who’s drifted. My client Sarah stopped scrambling to sell beef a quarter at a time, built relationships with her email list, and sold $100,000 of beef in one five-day launch — no ads.
Q: Why does my farm struggle to make money even though I have great products?
Because nobody taught you that the product isn’t the business — the relationships are. It’s not your fault. Most of us were taught to focus on the land, the animals, and the pretty pictures, and to treat customer relationships like a bonus round. But if you don’t build and nurture those relationships, you’ll struggle to price high enough and sell enough to stay open. Flip your attention to the people who already buy from you, and the profit follows.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- 🩷 Free class, August 17: I’m teaching the single most important coaching skill I use in my own life and with all my clients — especially if you say yes when you want to say no. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/class
- The Profitable Farmer — my program where farmers learn relationship-based marketing that sells out seasons: charlottemsmith.com/mastery
- The Profitable Mindset Podcast — subscribe for weekly farm marketing strategy
About the Host
Charlotte Smith is a farm marketing coach, podcast host, and the founder of The Profitable Farmer. She’s a 5th generation farmer, now supporting the 6th, together. Charlotte coaches approximately 300 farmers per year across the United States and 15 other countries, helping them shift from selling-out-but-broke to genuinely profitable through clear branding and customer-focused marketing.
Connect with Charlotte
Sign up for Farm Marketing Week at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass.
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Today’s episode might catch you off guard a little bit because you may have never thought of your
farm this way. But what I want to share with you is the biggest asset on your farm is not what you
think. Relationships are our biggest asset. They are exponentially more valuable than…
piece of land you have or home or barn or shop or any equipment, tractors,
all of them put together or any of the animals or plants. And it’s not just a theory or something I
like to say. This is after decades of building farms,
decades after teaching farmers how to make money by focusing on relationships and then seeing their
results. I know it may sound like it maybe can’t possibly be true.
Like how can customer relationships be worth more than the physical land you have? But I’ve been
teaching relationship-based marketing to farmers for over 13 years now.
I’ve mentioned this here and there consistently. And today I have more farmers than ever building
more success faster than ever because of the ones who went before them because They’re focused on
building and nurturing their customer relationships. As a matter of fact, if you don’t learn to
build and nurture your customer relationships, you will struggle to ever price high enough and sell
enough to make money and then eventually close down. I know this because I see it right and left
all the time. So let’s dive in how you can do this more and how you can do it better.
Okay. So I’ve talked to you about emailing your customers. And I’ve talked about telling your
story. I’ve talked about knowing who is your ideal customer, how to show up consistently, how to
treat people like humans instead of just a name on a list. And all of that’s true.
And all of that works. But underneath all of it, you’ve got to hold this belief in order to make it
all work. You got to do the mindset work around it or your strategy won’t work.
And the mindset work, the belief you’ve got to hold is the relationships you build with your
customers are the single most valuable asset on your farm. Again, not the land or your herd or your
flower fields, the relationships. And once you really see that, once you see that the woman who’s
bought eggs from you every week for four years is worth more than your best tractor, everything
about how you market, changes, how you sell changes, how you show up on a Tuesday morning changes
when you don’t feel like sending the email. It all changes and that’s what we’re going to get into
today. So stay with me because this reframe is going to shift how you look at your farm.
All right. So if you haven’t met me yet, I’m Charlotte Smith. I’m the host of the Profitable
Mindset Podcast because mindset is everything. If you want to build a profitable farm,
if you want to have a fulfilling life. Mindset is where it starts. If you’re new here,
I help farmers make money so you can pay yourself and stop feeling like you’re constantly
scrambling for the next customer or the next dollar. And today I’ll walk you through why
relationships are the asset that counts. I’ll have some examples,
some specific farmers that I’ve worked with whose businesses prove this, and that’ll help you
believe it. And then how this changes what you do this week, including I’m going to give you a hard
thing that I want you to stop doing. Also, I’ve got a free class where I am now teaching the
coaching skills that help you shift your mindset. Finally, I’m teaching the skills you can coach
yourself. That free class is going to be in August and it’s at charlottemsmith.com forward slash
class. And I’m going to teach you the single most important coaching skill I use in my own life and
with all my clients on that day. So be sure to sign up there. I’ll talk more a little bit about
that at the end. So let me start today by telling you what I believe about relationships,
including the one with yourself being the asset. I want you to feel it the way I did.
And the idea is this. On our farms, most people, most of us at first, don’t see ourselves as the
asset. They see themselves as the worker, the one grinding away, the one that’s costing money.
We see our employees as costing us money. When we should be shifting to seeing them as the asset,
we see us as the one who has to earn our pay every single day. So then what happens is when we see
ourselves that way, we run ourselves into the ground to try to prove that we deserve the money or
deserve the customers or deserve a rest or time off or even deserve the price that our products
warrant us charging. And the shift I made that finally made my farm profitable and my life
fulfilling and calm and peaceful and I have so much more time and amazing relationships was to see
myself. and my farm and everyone around me as assets, meaning things of tremendous value,
things worth protecting, things worth investing in, things that grow with time,
not shrink, things that become more and more valuable, not depreciate. Be aware if you are
triggered at all and you’re tempted to interpret this as, well, being the asset means being
entitled or arrogant. Like if I’m the asset, if I call myself the asset, then I must be walking
around thinking I’m better than everyone else. But no, actually the opposite is true.
When you truly see yourself as an asset, you also start seeing everyone around you as more valuable
and as an asset too. Your spouse, your kids, your employees, your customers,
your local hardware store, your suppliers. You see everyone as an asset.
You stop treating people like they’re disposable in some ways because you understand that every
single one of them holds value in your life and your business. more value and a bigger payoff too
than any physical asset you have. Even, I share this from experience,
your relationships are more valuable than any bank account you have. They’re worth exponentially
more than anything you have in the bank. Yes, the most important of these people assets are your
customers. Your customer relationship. Because if everyone around you is an asset,
then the relationship you have with each of them, that’s the container. That’s the thing that
either grows or dies. It’s the thing that pays you back for years or the thing that dries up
because you neglect it. In today’s world, how we’re set up. People will not pay your prices unless
you have a relationship with them, or at least very few. They’ll find, they’ll take a cheaper
route. They’ll order it on Amazon to be delivered for less money unless you have a relationship
with them. And then money is no object. They’ll pay you anything. Now, perhaps this is a new idea.
You may have not heard this before. I get told all the time by listeners that my perspective is
unique and new and they haven’t heard it before. And of course this is. No one ever taught you that
your relationships are your biggest asset. No one sat you down at the start of your farm and said,
you know what’s going to make you profitable? Not your land, not your animals, not your flowers,
not the perfect logo. It’s the people who buy from you. come back and tell their friends,
those relationships. Nobody told us that. Instead, we’re taught to focus on the product,
on our land, grow the best food, raise the best animals, talk about our regenerative farms,
post the pretty pictures, show up at market, hope enough people buy. And I did it too.
I get it. The first few years, I thought the cows, the pigs,
and the chickens were the business. Then a couple of years in, I realized, that my relationship
with the people who bought our milk and meat were the business. And if I did not nurture them
consistently daily, I wouldn’t make money. The relationship with them was actually what kept the
lights on. Nobody told me this. No one has probably told you that either. So please,
before we go any further, if any part of you feels like… oh my gosh, I’ve been doing it wrong for
years. Let it go. You didn’t know. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just weren’t given the
perspective I’m giving you now and how crucial it is. So let me define what an asset is.
An asset is something that holds value. And even more than that,
a good asset is something that grows and pays you back and appreciates in value over time.
An asset, you invest in it. You protect it. You tend to it.
And it pays you back season after season after season. You already know what certain assets look
like on the farm, like your best breeding stock. You feed her well. You watch her health closely.
You protect her. You invest in her because you know she’s going to produce for you for years.
So she’s an asset and you treat her like one. Now I want you to hold a picture in your head of your
best customer. Not just a random person, faceless people walk up to your farm stand,
but think of your best customer, the person who’s been buying eggs or flowers from you all season
for years. The woman who takes a CSA share every single season and posts about it on Facebook.
Or the couple who buys a quarter beef from you every fall, and maybe they bring you a bottle of
wine when they come pick it up. What is that relationship worth? Let’s do a little math.
So every farm is different. So, you know, take this all with a grain of salt and you can adjust for
your specific scenario. In my program, I have farmers doing small amounts of business as a side
job, you know, maybe they’re making a few thousand, 10,000 a year, all the way up to farmers doing
millions and millions and millions of dollars in sales per year. And it’s the same,
no matter if you have a little flower stand out by the road. or millions of dollars, or anything in
between, the customer relationships are what’s going to make your farm profitable.
All right? So imagine that customer, the one you wish everyone was like. Let’s say your best
customer spends, oh. $200 a month with you during the season.
Now just apply that to your own, apply your own farm to that if it’s smaller or larger.
This customer, let’s just say she spends $200 a month with you during the season or maybe your year
round. But if you’re seasonal, let’s say $200 a month for six months, that’s $1,200 a year.
Over six years, that’s $7,200 from one person. And when you treat your relationships with
customers as your best, most important asset, they do buy from you for years.
Our customers would stay with us for five or 10 years on the farm, only stopping because maybe they
moved away or their kids all moved out or something. So then that one customer,
your favorite customer, worth that $7,200 in her lifetime,
she’s also told, three friends about you who also buy from you.
She told a lot more friends, but three of those buy from you. So now that customer relationship is
worth $12,000, $15,000, $20,000, maybe more.
And it’s still growing. That single relationship is worth more than any individual animal on your
farm. And you have the potential for hundreds of them If you tend to them,
that is an asset, a massive appreciating compounding asset.
And most farmers I meet are neglecting this idea of relationships as assets.
People get the last of their energy and attention, but as the most important asset,
they should get the bulk of your energy and attention. Instead, they’re breaking their backs,
chasing something that’s worth not very much.
promoting different things on their farm, trying to bring in brand new strangers, trying to place
ads, spending lots of money on ads to bring in strangers who’ve never heard of them, or just doing
all the things that cost money except relationship building, which is mostly free.
I teach you all the strategies to make that efficient and do it for very little money.
That is the payoff. So let me help you make this more real using examples from my clients,
the farmers here in the program. So Brooke, she’s a flower farm. When she first learned from me how
to set up and run the tech to help her treat her relationships as the most important asset,
she sold out her tulip CSA and made, this is maybe her third year of business,
$18,500 in one week. That blew her mind, selling flowers. After a A couple more years implementing
what I teach, not running ads, not chasing strangers, but investing,
using the relationship building process I teach, attracting people who wanted that relationship,
connecting with them. Today, she makes more than double that in one week when she sells out her 90
flower shares all in five days. Not because she has the best website or the best flowers or the
best farming practices. but because she learned how to treat her customers like the most important
thing on her farm, and they paid her back. We trade value for value.
In this society, we’ve agreed that, hey, I have this thing you want,
flowers, meat, milk, eggs. And you have this thing I want, money. We trade that and everybody’s
happy when you nurture the relationships. Sarah, she raises beef. She used to sell her cows one at
a time all year long, always scrambling. She’d sell a half here, a quarter there.
It was constant hustling. Then now she learned the strategy I teach. She builds a relationship.
She does one five-day launch. She sells $100,000 of beef in five days. Where did that $100,000
come from? her customers, her list, the people she spent time with me learning how to build a
relationship with through her email marketing. Another example, it’s not just one person.
These are dozens of people all the time in my Profitable Farmer coaching program.
Valerie 10X’d her farm stand sales in six months, not by finding 10 times as many strangers,
but by turning the people who came once into people who came back and were loyal.
She converted transactions into relationships and the relationships compounded her sales and
profit. Hannah raised her chicken prices 70% and her customers…
blink. If you raise your prices by 70% without a relationship, deeply built relationship,
you will lose your customers. Her customers kept buying, didn’t blink, nobody left. Why?
Because the relationship was so strong that a few extra dollars didn’t matter.
They trusted her. They wanted to support her farm. They valued her because she valued them and they
felt it. That’s what a strong asset does. It absorbs, they absorb price increases because the
relationship is worth far more than the monetary transaction. Emily 6X her sales using same
strategy, same story. It’s not a magic new market. It was learning to tend to the relationship she
already had. I could go on and on and on. Okay. Lastly,
I’ll include my own daughter. I’m so proud of her. Hayden started her flower farm. And because she
hangs around with me, she knows relationships are her best asset. And I’ve watched her build and
connect and deepen her relationship with every person she meets. She made more in the month of May
this year than she did all last year because of that nurturing, consistent nurturing of her
customer base. All right. There’s, okay, last one. I said that was it,
but one more. There’s a farmer in our program who emptied her freezer of 12 hogs with one email
within a few hours. These are an email with relationships with people.
She’d already built the relationship. That freezer had been full for months. She needed the space.
The stress had been eating at her. One email. 12 hogs gone within a few hours.
You see the pattern? Every single one of these wins came from the same asset,
not a tractor, not a fancy website, not because they live in a certain part of the country or they
had a viral social media post. Every single one of these farmers and the farmers in my program,
it’s the relationships that are making them money. I want to hear you, hear me on this that I could
tell you 50 more of these stories today. I hear them every week from farmers in the program. The
pattern is not an exception. This is what happens when you learn the mindset coaching and marketing
skills I teach. Okay. So if this is so obviously the asset,
why do so many farmers neglect it? Well, three reasons. The first reason.
is that we’ve been trained to think marketing means constantly getting new customers and convincing
them to buy. That’s been the whole game in a lot of farmers’ heads. So we pour every drop of energy
into that, trying to find new customers, trying to convince them to buy. The farmer’s market that
drains the life out of us every weekend or the Instagram posts that nobody sees or an ad that’s not
getting paying customers or a flyer. We’re just chasing. customers.
And meanwhile, the people who already know us and love us and have already given us their money,
they go weeks or months without hearing from us. The bucket is leaking out the bottom faster than
we can fill it at the top. I survey my customers every single year or the farmers in my program.
the farmers who are not in my program the farmers farmers who are on my email list but have not
learned this and they say the same thing i will get 200 replies that say i’m constantly stressed
about finding new customers almost nobody writes in that they’re stressed about losing the
customers they already have unless it’s a price increase And when you have a relationship with
them, you don’t lose the customers you already have. So this tells me where their attention is
going. And like I said, it’s the wrong end of the bucket. They’re focused on the top when they
should be focused on filling the holes, patching the holes at the bottom of the bucket. The second
reason we focus on this is a lot of people feel guilty. So I teach you how to nurture relationships
through email marketing and they’ll… me, well, I don’t want to do that because then I’m bothering
people if I email or text them. So they sit down to write, for instance,
create an email, and they start second guessing. Like, who am I to send them an email?
Who am I to tell them to buy or come out to the farm store? What if they unsubscribe?
What if they roll their eyes? What if I don’t have anything interesting to say? So then they don’t
send it. And the asset, their relationship just dries up. Not because anything went wrong,
but because you stopped watering it. You stopped nurturing it when you stopped communicating. So
we’ll come back to this in a minute. It’s one of the biggest things I want to help you unlearn. And
also I have something at the end of this episode specifically to help with this. So stay with me.
But the third reason is what we already named. Nobody ever taught you. that relationships are the
number one asset. You were taught the product on your farm or your farming practices or a website
or something else was the business itself. So you spent all your energy on the product perhaps and
treated the relationships like a bonus round if you had time. But today I want you to flip that.
I want you to imagine relationships are your biggest asset.
Then what changes? Think of everything. Let me help you with this. Okay. The first thing that’s
going to change is when you think relationships are the biggest asset, the only way you’re going to
make money is by having them. You will start investing in that asset instead of ignoring it. And
investing doesn’t mean spending money. It means attention. It doesn’t mean a lot of time.
It just means attention in the right way, like a follow-up email or remembering that Susan’s
daughter is heading to college and asking her about it. Or it’s a handwritten note tucked in a box.
Or it’s an extra half dozen eggs slipped in for one of your really loyal customers who’s been with
you for a long time just because. That’s not you being generous and losing money.
That’s you fertilizing an asset that’s going to feed your family for the next decade.
So Sarah, back to Sarah selling beef, she didn’t make $100,000 in a week because she got lucky.
She learned how to nurture the relationship with her customers. And then in one week,
she asked her people to buy and they showed up. The second thing that changes when you start
believing your relationships are your biggest asset is you start protecting the asset. This is a
big one. My coach taught me a rule that I’ve adopted completely in my business.
And I want this for you too. Never burn a bridge. ever, no matter how frustrated you get.
Here’s where you need some mindset coaching. Because here’s what happens on a farm. Maybe a
customer gets grumpy about something, an order’s late, or you ran out, or a wholesale account falls
through and doesn’t return your call, or a restaurant ghosts you after a sample delivery.
And the moment you experience this, You want to just walk away.
You build resentment or you want to fire off an angry message or complain or write them off.
Don’t contact them again or vent about them to other people. And I get it. I used to be this way
too. But when, but I retrained myself, like I used to be this way.
It doesn’t, it’s not a personality trait. You can learn how to look at people differently. That’s
where the mindset coaching piece comes in. When you truly see relationships as assets,
as something worth tens of thousands of dollars over time. you protect it.
Even when you’re annoyed, you can absolutely be honest. And the coaching skills I teach in the
Profitable Mindset Academy will help you do this. You’ll learn to say with compassion and
confidence, something like, you know, if they’re crossed a boundary, like, hey, this didn’t work
for me and here’s why. But you stay kind. You stay in integrity. You leave the door open because
you genuinely never know when that customer or vendor comes back around,
or maybe the restaurant hires a new chef who wants to feature local farms. So you’ve got to take
care of these things. You got to protect your relationships. I’ve watched more farm relationships
get burned in the heat of the moment than I can count. And I’m so glad I offer a coaching program
where we work to preserve relationships, even within the family, with your spouse, with your in
-laws, with the neighbor farmer, coaching on these things. all the time. We’ve got to preserve all
the relationships around us. So it’s a wonderful skill to have to learn to deal with difficult
customers. A lot of people struggle with relationship building and maintaining relationships
because they just aren’t good at dealing with the difficulties and the challenges that come up.
So you learn how to do those things and it’s magic. Relationships become so much more fulfilling.
And the third thing that changes is that the guilt you might feel starts to dissolve.
Because if you truly believe the relationship is the asset and you know your product is solving
their problem and helping them reach goals because you walked through the branding portion of the
program, then sending the email isn’t bothering them. It’s nurturing and serving the asset.
It’s showing up for a relationship that both of you signed up for. You wouldn’t feel guilty
checking on your best breeding cow or your dalutubers in the basement that are being stored.
You don’t feel guilty checking on them and nurturing them. So stop feeling guilty checking in on
your best customers. You’re not interrupting your day. They look forward to it. You are doing your
job as the steward of the most valuable thing on your farm. and continuing to serve them,
which is why they came to you in the first place. You have something that is helping them solve
problems and reach goals, and you’ve got to nurture that. Let me tell you what this actually looks
like, say on a random Wednesday morning, because I don’t want this to just stay in your head. I
want you to be able to implement it. When you believe relationships are your biggest asset, here’s
what changes. You send the weekly email all year round, even when you feel like you don’t have
anything to say, because staying in touch is the whole point. Your relationship needs to hear from
you. You reply to the customer who has a weird question about your beef,
even though it’s a busy Wednesday and you’re behind. Because again, that reply is an investment in
the relationship. And that relationship… You know, if you’ve done the math, it’s worth $10,000,
$20,000, $50,000. It’s what’s keeping your family legacy going. Or you add the personal note.
You remember their name. You ask about their kid. You send a just thinking of you card or email or
text. And then you stop letting your best customers hear from you only when you have something to
sell. But instead, you show up in the good times too. So you’re not asking them to buy anything in
the times you don’t have product to sell. You’re just being human with them.
So we got to nurture those relationships year round, once a week, year round, even if you’re a very
seasonal farm. And then what happens is you can raise your prices when you need to,
because you trust the asset will absorb it because they feel deeply connected to you.
And again, this isn’t theory. This is what my farmers are telling me. every single week in our
program. Wow, I raised my prices and not one person left. Or I raised my prices and out of 100
customers, three people left. They want to support you because the relationship is worth more to
your customer too than the three or five or eight extra dollars a pound.
And so when you stop, what happens is you stop chasing the wrong people. You stop overworking.
And running around to farmer’s markets that drain you and don’t convert to enough sales. You stop
trying to be everywhere on social media. You focus your limited energy on the asset that’s already
producing. You’re building relationships with the people already in your community. All right?
This is deeply profitable over time. I mean, it’s all the profit. All your profit will come from
these relationships. All right. So I want to make sure I always give you something that’s helpful.
So here’s what you can do this week. First, make a list. Just write down your most loyal customers,
the people who’ve bought from you again and again, just their names. And then I want you to
actually like envision them and let it land that these are your assets.
These people love you and want to support you. And that’s everything.
bank account or inheritance you might get. Not the land, not your equipment, but the list of names
of these real people. These people are the ones that are building your farm with you.
Second, make it a goal this week to reconnect with one person,
one relationship that has quieted down somehow. Somebody who used to buy and just drifted.
Not a big production. You don’t have to send them flowers or anything, but just give them a real
warm human message. Like, hey, I was thinking about you. How’s your family?
Or I was thinking of you. Strawberries are in season this week. We’d love to see you. That’s it.
You’re helping them. You’re helping them reach a goal and solve a problem. You’re not selling,
you’re just tending to them in the relationship. You’d be amazed at how many relationships warm
right back up and come back to life the moment you nurture them again. Third,
I’d like you to consider send the email, send an email or send the one you’ve been sitting on,
but send one. In general, the one that’s been in your draft for weeks or you’ve been thinking about
sending, but you didn’t want to bother anyone, just send it. And when that guilty voice pipes up in
your head, answer it, address it, say, hey, I’m not bothering anyone.
I am nurturing my most valuable asset. They want to hear from me because you are.
That’s what’s happening. All right, so here’s what’s going to get in your way of doing all this.
If you’re like most farmers, I know, and if you’re like me, a people pleaser,
you say yes when you want to say no, or you take the late pickup that inconveniences your whole
day, or you give a discount because you felt guilty or obligated, or do a wholesale order at a
price that doesn’t work for you because you didn’t want to disappoint. I could go on and on and on
or delivering to customer who’s been rude to you because you don’t want to make it awkward. So I’m
not, when I say build relationships, I’m not talking about being a doormat. All right.
But I think that’s how I used to be. I even called it a doormat because I was people pleasing.
But here’s the thing. People pleasing is not the same as tending your relationships. They may sound
similar, but they’re opposite forces. Nurturing a relationship is investing in an asset.
It’s saying yes to what serves both of you. People pleasing is burning the asset,
yours and theirs. saying yes when you wish you could say no. So it’s the opposite.
People-pleasing is not nurturing a relationship. It’s teaching your customers to expect things
from you that you cannot sustain. And you will eventually resent that relationship.
So just know that you can’t tend an asset. You can’t nurture a relationship if…
are bitter or resentful, all right? You can’t show up warmly for them. I know this intimately
because I’ve done it. For years, I would say yes to customer requests out of obligation, whether it
was like they wanted to come by on a Sunday, my only day off, or they wanted a special order and I
felt obligated. So it wasn’t nurturing the relationship at all. Instead,
it was kind of nurturing my resentment toward them. So the most valuable thing on your farm,
is your relationships and learning how to treat them in a way where you both win where you feel
sustained and fulfilled because when you say yes to something it’s in a way that serves them so if
you struggle with feeling obligated feeling guilty worried about raising your prices I have this
free training coming up on August 17th, and it’s about how to stop people pleasing.
If you’ve said yes to things that you wish you’d said no to, if you’d agreed to things,
if you’ve signed up for things, if you don’t know how to say no, come join me August 17th.
It’s short. It’s practical. It’s specifically for you. It walks you through exactly what to say and
how to say it. If a customer asks you for something that you really don’t want to do, or someone
tries to squeeze you on price or get the family discount, all right? Or if your brain is saying,
say no, say no, but your mouth says yes, because you cannot build the biggest asset on your farm,
these relationships. You cannot do that if you’re setting yourself on fire. trying to keep everyone
else happy. So sign up for that class. It’s at charlottemsmith.com forward slash class.
The link will be in the show notes. It’s free. Love to see you and share most powerful coaching
skill I know, the foundational skill. And I’m doing all this because I am going to start teaching
the coaching skills so you can learn to coach yourself, be your own coach. And that program,
Profitable Mindset Academy, starts up in August. All right. And this free training will give you a
taste of that so that instead of calling on outside help all the time,
you will have the coaching skills right in your hand, in your head to keep yourself sharp all the
time and know how to say no without guilt or confidently say no instead of building resentment.
All these things are going to help support you with whatever you want to do in life. All right.
Relationships are everything. That’s kind of the summary of today. And it’s a learned skill. Most
people don’t know how to treat relationships right and protect themselves at the same time.
You have to do both. It doesn’t mean letting everyone walk all over you. So you’ve got to learn how
to do that. It’s a learned skill. We don’t learn these things in school or anywhere else. So I
teach them and I love if I help one woman today. feel better about herself and be a little more
confident about doing what she knows she needs to do, then I’ve done my work. So just know I love
sharing this work with you. It has changed my life. And I know these coaching skills are going to
change your life too. All right, that’s it. I will see you in the next episode. I hope you’re
having a wonderful summer and I hope you see you in that free training as well. Take care.
