Tag: Chickens

Shelley Whitehouse – The Smart Chicken Coop

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Shelley Whitehouse of The Smart Chicken Coop
Shelley Whitehouse of The Smart Chicken Coop

The Smart Chicken Coop

It all started with 3 chickens on a porch, that turned into a side interest in backyard chicken keeping, that grew into a successful online business.

Shelley Whitehouse shares her story about her company, The Smart Chicken Coop as we cover various topics listed below.

Be sure to checkout The Smart Chicken Coops quality products at the link below!

The Smart Chicken Coop – https://thesmartchickencoop.com

Topics Covered

  • It all Started With 3 Chickens On A Porch
  • Craigslist & The Smart Chicken Coop’s First Customers
  • Credibility & Trust, Help Convert to Sales
  • Facebook & Google Advertising Success
  • COVID-19 Effect on Business
  • Life, Caring for Animals & The Value of Homegrown Food
  • Increase In Demand: The Start of DIY Chicken Coop Kits
  • Importance of Business Acumen & Self Discipline
  • Challenge of Developing a Marketing Plan for Nationwide Success
  • The Joy of Providing Value to Others
  • Bad Reviews & Quick Responses
  • Meeting Demand, While Maintaining Our Product Level
  • Advice for New Business Owners
  • A Joy for Indian Runner Ducks
  • The Value of Perseverance In Business

Transcription

Shelley: Just started out as a lifestyle business, do you know what I mean?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

Shelley: I didn’t know that it was going to become so popular. And then of course with COVID, it became ridiculous.

Brian: Yeah.

Shelley: But my husband actually took three months off of work his work, because we couldn’t get everything done, we were working full-time, all of us. We’re working.

It was crazy. It’s crazy, but really fun too, because here are these families who are stuck at home with kids pulling their hair out, and they get to build chicken coops and then get the chickens.

It’s a fun business.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Shelley Whitehouse has quite a varied background. She spent many years performing as a professional orchestra flutist, raced mountain bikes for the heck of it, coached high school sports, raised three kids with her husband, then decided to go back to school to get an MBA.

After several years working as a management consultant, one of Shelley’s side interests, backyard chicken keeping, morphed into a business called, The Smart Chicken Coop, that sells fancy backyard chicken coops nationwide.

Shelley, welcome to the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Shelley: Thank you for having me.

Brian: Absolutely.

So what brought you into Backyard Chickens in the first place?

Shelley: Well, this is a funny story. So as I said in the bio, I was working as a management consultant. My daughter, who was at UC Santa Cruz at the time, decided to stop out of school and move to rural Yucatan. And so she dropped three chickens on my porch en route.

And I hate birds, but what I found is that they were really fun. And people started saying, well, what’s the latest with the chickens?

That turned into, why don’t you do a blog, that turned into me buying chicks to sell in my backyard, to people saying, where’d you get that chicken coop?

Because I had inadvertently one night I ordered 30 checks in the mail and didn’t remember. So at one point, we had 64 chickens in our backyard. And this is just suburban backyard, Orange County, California.

And that grew, it grew because my husband’s an engineer and I had already had some experience with chickens, and we’ve had made a good product that people want to so it grew.

Brian: Wow. That’s incredible.

How did you find your first customers?

Shelley: Well, there’s this thing called Craigslist.

Brian: Yeah.

Shelley: Now the thing about Craigslist is that I was just advertising, come get your baby chicks from me at $4 a pop. And so my first customers actually were the people showing up to get chicks. They saw the chicken coop that we had made and said, where’d you get that chicken coop?

Truly, that is how we got our first customers and inadvertently because they were coming for chicks not because they were coming specifically for a chicken coop.

So Craigslist was a big boon for me, at the beginning.

Brian: So that’s really cool.

So let’s take it to the present day. Where are you getting most of your new customers from right now, for people that find you right off the bat, where are they finding you?

Shelley: My biggest market now, almost my only market anymore is through a Google search.

Well that an Etsy, so we were for quite a number of years selling our coops through a very well-regarded and highly trafficked website called, MyPetChicken.com. And that gives me credibility because they’ve got the credibility.

So they sold my coupes, and then they people would also Google me, and over the years, my SEO ratings have gone up so that I might arrive on the first page on a few search topics.

But most people who are trying to purchase chicken coops are spending a lot of time combing the internet. And so again, it’s a Google search and word of mouth, but it’s nationwide, the 48 contiguous states.

Brian: Fabulous. And you’ve gotten a lot of play off of Etsy, also?

Shelley: Etsy has been wonderful too because it’s another concrete knowable door that people feel comfortable. And so sometimes I find that people will buy directly from Etsy.

Sometimes they’ll see me on Etsy and then look for my website and buy through me directly. Of course, that’s just a crapshoot, whether people want to spend a trifle bit more money for an Etsy, circumstance where they know they’re protected versus a website from some random website, The Smart Chicken Coop, who knows?

Brian: Yeah, that’s interesting, because you’ve used all of these trusted resources, you know, whether it be Craigslist, or MyPetChicken.com or Etsy, or even just google search, you’ve been able to use all those to be able to get exposure.

Have you done anything beyond that in terms of marketing and advertising to pull people in, or have you been doing well, just off that?

Shelley: I have done Facebook ads, and then I’ve done targeted Facebook ads.

The difference is that I learned more and knew how to drill down better. I also, from my MBA program, interestingly, was asked to give my business to one of the students or a group and they came up with plans, which frankly, we’re a little crazy because they were trying to target apartment therapy. Isn’t that what that websites called?

If you live in an apartment then you’re not buying chickens? Why do you think that’s a good thing? Anyway.

So that what that one didn’t work so well. But it was still good to hear, you know, what the youngsters had to say.

The targeted Facebook ads were great. They were better than for me going through just the Google AdWords.

And I don’t know why that’s the case.

But because of COVID. Last year, we actually stopped our ads because our business went through the roof at 400% over the prior year and that we couldn’t keep up.

So we actually pulled our ads last spring.

Brian: That is very interesting. It’s something we’ve seen across the whole realm when it comes to this area.

How else has COVID-19 affected you in your business?

Shelley: One factor that just happened was that my steel supplier called me and said, we’re having real troubles getting steel. So you need to figure out what you need for the whole season.

Well, that’s 1000s and 1000s of dollars worth of supplies that I’m buying, hoping that I’ll have as good a year this year as I did last. But the alternative and it has happened in the past, he can’t get hold of the steel to corrugate for us to make our rubes.

So that’s been a factor.

We’ve also seen not just COVID, but the trade wars. And I think that the steel originally was a trade war thing aside….

Brian: Because of the tarrifs, yeah, yeah.

Shelley: And then the hardware, we source our hardware out of Ohio. And I know that some of their hard work, does come directly from China.

And that, again, we run into challenges that way too.

So being here’s another way, because of COVID. And everybody doing home projects, we’ve been dinged, hardcore by the price of plywood, because everybody’s doing home projects.

Sometimes we’re having to wait weeks to get plywood.

So this year, we’ve been again, very proactive, because if we can’t ship coops, then there are people out there who can’t build their homes for their chickens and we lose credibility.

Brian: Absolutely.

Wow, that is a whole lot happening in a short period of time.

For those of you listening, we’re recording this in March of 2021. So all of these things could possibly change. But we’ve gone through quite a bit in the last year. And a little bit beyond that, especially regarding the tariff situation, which is another thing we’ve heard with other people, the trade wars and so forth.

You touched on this briefly, but who is really your ideal customer, if there was a way to paint that person, what would you say that person is?

Shelley: I find that our number one target audience.

People who have been married for years, let’s say have started a family. They have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, or a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, who want to teach their children where life comes from.

Teach them how to care for animals, teach them the value of homegrown food.

One really neat thing with a homegrown egg versus what you purchase in the store is that store-bought eggs are often quite old and still within the realm of safe. But their yokes are very pale when you grow your own chickens or support them and they grow the eggs are a mustard color, that’s the yolks.

That’s really fun. You can even, if you’re really wanting to go down that route, you can change the various foods that you provide for them. And the yolks do change color slightly.

So we find that to be big. Another time we find chickens being purchased are the kindergarten classes.

So what are those kids five? Yeah, they often will hatch eggs in their classrooms. And then the parents get wrangled into taking care of the chicks.

Then they need a house and we get calls for a while.

Much more common for it to be young families.

The second tier, if you will, is families with teenagers who’ve always wanted to have chickens. They do all the research and put it in front of their parents and say, Look what I found.

That’s our second level of customer, I would say not even 5% of our market is our older folks who don’t have children around people who are retired, want to travel. They don’t want to sit around and take care of chickens.

Brian: Yeah, no, absolutely.

What’s your top-selling product? Or what’s your top-selling coop, which one would it be?

Shelley: Now this is an interesting circumstance.

So we have this really neat, barn-style chicken coop, that we designed to be extremely easy to clean because I was busy doing the management consulting stuff.

And I didn’t have kids at home. But this I think we had one child at home. And we were building those out completely into panels.

So almost like IKEA furniture that we would ship because built this is 112 pounds.

They’re red, they’re very cute Red Barn with a tin roof.

What happened though, especially during this COVID period, is that the demand was so great that we couldn’t keep up, we were at one point now 70 doesn’t seem like a lot, but since these are all hand-built, we were 74 coops behind.

That’s a lot when you’re talking about one person me doing the business aspect, and then Kenny doing all the building.

So what then we did, as we said, we’re no longer painting them, and we’re going to provide what I mentioned at the beginning, and that is these coop kits.

What has morphed is that people love having these coop kits, because they cost the amount that Chinese chicken coop costs. But you’re getting the high quality wood that comes from Oregon and the thought process that goes into it from my husband and me to build the coop.

Brian: That’s great. And then they also get to add in a little piece of themselves into it feel like they’re part of the project. That’s pretty cool.

Shelley: Well, that’s actually a great point.

One thing I’ve also seen as customers, though this is less frequent. The one in particular that sticking into my mind is the mother and father whose 10-year-old daughter or something wanted the chickens. And for her birthday, the 14-year-old son agreed to build the coop for the daughter.

I mentioned that because that’s a theme that comes up.

This is something I want to do with our children so that we can teach them measurement so that we can teach them how to paint how and following through reading directions and getting a finished product that sometimes that’s more.

One of the wildest color combinations that I’ve enjoyed is the Seattle Seahawks colors. It was somebody up in Seattle. It was It is a crazy look at coop, it was pretty, but it was crazy.

So sometimes the elementary schools will purchase them and then they use the school colors. For their coops, somebody had always wanted a pink dollhouse. Never got one. So she painted hers, this was a young couple who didn’t have children, they painted their chicken coop, bright, Pepto Bismol pink.

Brian: Wow. Yeah, very fun, that’s really neat.

So that from a management consultant background. Had you ever owned a business as your management consultant, as a management consultant?

Were you the business owner, or is this your first foray into this realm?

Shelley: Well, I did not own my own business, I worked for a consulting firm.

But when I was a professional flutist, I was my own boss, as a freelance musician. We work to get money any way we can. So I was a contractor.

What that means is that a good example is when you go to an East or service and they’ve got an orchestra sitting in the church, all of a sudden, somebody has to hire and manage those musicians.

That was one of the things that I did.

I also taught junior college I had a flute studio teaching junior college students, I was the person who was responsible for putting together orchestras for actual concert stages.

So I have had, for many, many years, the document the business acumen, in order to survive as a freelance musician, many people do. I just happened to be more business-oriented than many.

Brian: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Commercial Break: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I wanted to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible?

Most people don’t, and if not, the real question is why, and what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways To Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Let me talk about what we discuss in chapter six, the sixth way, which is to offer ongoing, what does that mean?

Well, what it means is don’t just have products that are one time uses, find a way to offer some type of ongoing value to your clients, even if you can’t offer it yourself.

Even if you don’t specifically offer a service that goes on and on, find someone else who does and team up with them. Find a way to turn what you do into some form of subscription or membership and get your stuff out there more often.

Allow them a chance to get to know like and trust you via a product or service. This is a way that you can completely take Amazon’s idea and twist it into something directly for your own Amazon Prime’s a major deal in the success behind amazon.com.

You can get it to work for you, even if you just work on a local level. But I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business, basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com.

So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: What would you say is your biggest surprise going into this style of business, looking back over it?

Shelley: Do you remember when the internet was vaguely new?

I’m not talking back into the 90s, I’m talking in the 2000s or something. And it was a fabulous commercial, where the person listed something on the internet, and they were sitting at their computer and the phone rang and rang and rang.

They just, all they did was make it and they will come basically through the internet.

It didn’t happen that way.

I was surprised, I thought oh, I just need to put it up on the internet and I’m going to end up having my phone ringing off the hook.

Not true.

There is a lot of work that goes into internet marketing that’s necessary to develop a marketing plan that successful for a business that you’re trying to service nationwide.

That was a big shock to me.

And that’s not something one learns in school, maybe in MBA program.

Now you could learn internet marketing, I’m sure you can. I was there in the mid 2000s and so it was still just more the traditional marketing plan and it is actually not really applicable anymore.

Brian: That’s a great point. Really great point.

Overall, what do you like best about your business and the industry that you’re in?

Shelley: I was just telling the gentleman who helps me so I for various reasons, no longer actually do the building of the coops. I rely on Kenneth down at a different location.

And sometimes there’s a disconnect between putting all these parts together, putting them in a big 45-pound box, and shipping them off.

What he doesn’t see are all the emails that come to me because I’m the business person, where the people say, Oh, this is the most fun thing we’ve done. It’s so great to get up in the morning and get to the chickens. You’ve made such a great product.

I told him just yesterday, I’m going to start forwarding you those messages.

It’s such a joy to provide in a little way joy for others, that in and of itself as price their chickens for heaven’s sakes, who cares, but you know what, they’re fun.

I would never have told you eight years ago, nine years ago that I would make a statement like that, but they’ve got little personalities, they follow you around. They’re just fun. Yeah, they’re fun.

Brian: It’s great.

On the other hand, if you could change one thing about your business and or your industry, what would it be?

Shelley: Bad reviews.

That is one of the big drawbacks to internet businesses.

I had a friend of mine who runs a winery, and she has it was a Yelp review that came through that was very bad. And it was because she or her co-worker or something asked for the gentleman to wear a mask.

He didn’t want to wear the mask so he trashed her company.

And I have had on two occasions, one not too long ago and on Etsy.

In fact, gentlemen, who must not be able to read directions, all that?

Well, when he and I had been communicating back and forth, I was saying, you know, I let me help you because it shouldn’t have cost you $200 to buy those pieces up at Home Depot, it’s a $30 purchase, something must be incorrect.

He ended up writing a review saying that I had not responded, I have an email trail showing nine responses to him, and that it was a horrible product. And it’s there, you know, I didn’t. And I was so upset, I didn’t respond. That was my mistake.

Once I finally came to feel comfortable with it, the time and pass for me to respond to the review and it’s just there permanently.

And that’s a shame. I mean, everybody faces that anybody who’s working, even whether it’s an internet-based or restaurants, for instance, if you get a bad review, it’s really, really hard to you just hope that people read through it and see all the other good reviews and go, that was a one-off.

Brian: Yeah, well, it’s like you said, it’s not just online business, it’s all business has the ability to collect those reviews. And if you can’t respond quickly enough and be able to spend it in a good way, it’s really difficult. So I completely understand that.

If you and I were to meet, like, let’s say we had you back on the show, like a year from now. And we were to look back over the past 12 months at everything that had happened.

What would you say would have had to have happened for you to feel happy and secure about your progress both professionally and personally?

Shelley: I believe that we have tackled the delay that we found last year, not being able to provide to our customers in a timely manner.

I mean, we had it all written all overlook, we’re so far behind, because of demand, we’re running six weeks behind.

I believe we’ve got a handle on that this year.

So that would be my number one marker, can we meet demand, maintaining our product level, which is a given. That’s why it took us so long to provide. And if we are meeting demand, can we go back to offering to the customers, what we call our ready-built coop that is painted that has a lot more of the manufacturing done by us.

It makes it more expensive for people but a lot of people don’t want to do a DIY, and those people no longer have the opportunity.

Well, we now are providing somewhere in the middle on an unpainted version. So it’s still built out. They put their own paint on because painting takes along.

So I’d say that would be my number one thing can we meet demand in a timely manner?

And then even, can we go back to providing painted chicken coops for people because they love them.

And I’ve got my pet chickens asking for them. It’s scary. I don’t want to over-commit.

And personally, I think we’re in a transition period right now where my husband and I have actually moved 400 miles north.

My manager is now the only person, the primary person doing the chicken coops and I’m doing the business from afar. So, personally, if that works, I’ll just feel great that I’ve provided more work for him and then he needs to hire people.

So it’s like providing a means to make money for people and to support themselves.

Brian: Fabulous.

What advice would you have as both a management consultant and the business owner for people who are looking to have a business thrive like, Smart Chicken Coop has?

Shelley: When I started in earnest, and that took me two years or so to get to that point.

Now mind you, I haven’t actually told you this but I’ve been a management consultants in years.

The coop business took off. The management consultant business got tanked by the drop in the economy several years ago…and I was ready to be done.

My point, though, is that it took me longer than it should have to set up the name of the business. I didn’t understand the search engine optimization.

So my most I think important advice is that, sure it’s great to get your feet wet but I had to change my name that this business was originally a shell format.

And in meeting with somebody who specializes in optimizing the internet business, said that no one’s going to search for a shell format, it doesn’t mean anything you have to have, you know, something that people will search for chicken coop, The Smart Chicken Coop, and that’s how that name came about.

So that’s one thing.

The second thing that I didn’t do, and somebody who said, you really need to sign up on these certain websites, which I don’t remember anymore, where newscasters and people like you can go and say, I need an expert who can tell me about chicken coops.

I was so early in the game, and I didn’t do it.

That’s credibility and free opportunity for advertising that I did not capitalize on, because I was just….this started out as a lifestyle business.

Do you know what I mean?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

Shelley: I didn’t know that it was going to become so popular. And then of course, with COVID, it became ridiculous.

Brian: Yeah.

Shelley: But my husband actually took three months off of work his work, because we couldn’t fulfill, we were working full time. All of us were working. It was crazy.

It’s crazy, but really fun, too. Because here are these families who are stuck at home with kids pulling their hair out, and they get to build chicken coops and then get the chickens and it was neat. It’s a fun business.

Brian: Very cool. And that’s really great advice.

I really appreciate the time you spent with me here, Shelley.

Is there anything I did not ask you that you’d like to answer?

Shelley: This is completely going to come out of left field.

But don’t just consider chickens.

My favorite fowl right now is Indian runner ducks.

Google them, they look like wine bottles with legs. And they are total characters.

I just love them.

They’re called the clowns of the garden.

I think too in terms of from a business standpoint, rather than just chickens. I wanted to say that this is not a smooth sailing process. I’m going to take us back to my saying I thought if I put it out in the world, they will come. That’s not true.

And slogging through it, going through the ups and downs are necessary.

I think that the businesses that don’t thrive are ones that don’t have the people running them that have the bandwidth to take hits and say, okay, that’s a setback, what can I do differently? How can I move forward?

Brian: Awesome.

That’s a really good point and something that people really need to pay attention to and you you’ve had so many great points throughout this whole conversation.

I recommend everyone go back and relisten to this.

What could a listener do, who wants to find out more about, Smart Chicken Coops?

Shelley: Go to TheSmartChickenCoop.com

Brian: Fabulous. Hey, thanks so much, Shelley Whitehouse for being on the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Shelley: Thank you for having me.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Had a lot of fun talking with Shelley, she provided a whole lot of great little tidbits lessons principles that come along with business ownership, and I wanted to point out a few for you.

But it’s definitely worth re listening to that whole concept of the build it and they will come myth that almost all entrepreneurs come into, you know, to some way or another, she had it when it came to internet marketing, she figured, hey, you put a website out there, people are going to find it.

And anybody that’s done any form of ecommerce, in modern day know that that’s just not true. It takes a whole lot to get attention online, let alone any other form of traditional business.

I love how she began on Craigslist, and then move from there and was able to build credibility and trust by teaming up with My Pet Chicken. And she noticed that she said specifically that it’s a credibility thing. And that’s when I hear credibility.

I know that’s trust.

More importantly, it’s a trust transfer that happens. So if you can team up with somebody that your market considers a trusted source, if you can team up with them. This is a great way to be able to introduce you to new audiences, and she did it.

I’m not sure if she realized what she was doing at the time. But she knows now how important that was to their growth, being able to go from there and jump and just be able to use mainly Google search and Etsy as sources of traffic. That’s pretty amazing.

She has a very clear cut avatar, and avatar is the term that people use for ideal prospect for your business, the ideal customer.

If you listen to go back and listen to how distinct and very specific she is about the type of person that gets one of her coops. It’s very, very interesting. Very, very good.

That’s so important to have if you have that, you know where to advertise where not to advertise what your messaging should be, when it comes to all of your marketing and sales. Very important.

I love having Shelly on and I really can’t wait to see what’s going to happen in the future.

Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas. I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.

Tom Watkins – Murray McMurray Hatchery

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Tom Watkins - Murray McMurray Hatchery
Tom Watkins – Murray McMurray Hatchery
Murray McMurray Hatchery
Murray McMurray Hatchery

Specializing in heritage and rare breed chickens for small backyard flocks and homesteading family’s.

Join us as we talk with Tom Watkins from Murray McMurray Hatchery about life and times working in a long-time owned family company and just how does it work to have live animals shipped to customers doors!

For more about Murray McMurray Hatchery and what they have to offer, please checkout their website below!

Murray McMurray Hatchery – https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html

Transcription

Brian: Thomas Watkins is vice president and McMurry Hatchery.

He’s been working at the hatch for eight years. No previous chicken experience but now he’s something of a chicken expert. McMurray Hatchery is a family owned small business, but they just happen to hatch a lot of chicks.

They specialize in heritage and rare breed chickens for the small backyard flocks and homesteading families. Thomas Watkins, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Tom: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Brian: So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do?

Tom: Like you said, I’m the vice president here. It sounds impressive. It really isn’t.

That’s part of being a small family company.

You might get a big title, but I’m still the plumber. I do a lot of building maintenance.

Number one is we have chickens.

And with that, we raise our own breeder flocks and take care of all the chickens. We hatch the eggs.

So here we have large commercial incubators and we hatch out about 150 to 200,000 chicks a week and ship them all across the United States. So primarily to small backyard flocks.

We don’t really do anything commercially for that. So it’s just people want chickens, you know, a couple of laying hens in the backyard or to produce their own meat or eggs.

Yeah, you kind of wear a lot of hats.

Brian: So you said you didn’t have previous chicken experience.

How did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?

Tom: I married into it, you would say. My father in law is the president of McMurray Hatchery. So McMurray Hatchery has been around for a little over 100 years now.

All right here in Webster City, Iowa. So we’re in the heart of Iowa. And while the McMurray’s are all gone, went through Murray McMurray and his sons John and Charles and then his grandson Murray MacMurray took over and he had two business partners.

And those two retired and it was my father in law Bud Wood and said eight years ago, I came on with really no intention of being any management plan just to kind of help around and work my way up, you’d say, oh, pretty quickly.

It’s, you know, helps when your father in law is the boss, but you just kind of jump in with everybody. We’re really lucky, we have a lot of great help. Because it’s all hands on deck when you deal with live animals.

So we work really hard when you need to work. And then, you know, take time off later.

Brian: Yeah.

Tom: Oh, absolutely. Yeah I don’t know and now, you just answered enough questions, you can be your own chicken expert.

Brian: Good deal well, and it fits into the crowd that you’re playing into, because it’s what they’re all attempting to do, right. They they’re going from quite possibly not knowing anything about chickens to raising them and so forth.

Tom: Exactly. Like I said, I’m living proof of what happens because I never knew people had chickens in their backyards. And then so we got chickens and went from a few, and then you go from having chickens and they are the gateway animal to other, you know, hobby farming. You get a goat, or you get small cow. You move to an acreage, like so.

Yeah, I’ve done everything exactly that any of our customers are going to do or try to do.

Brian: I imagine there’s a whole lot of customers that have been with you for quite a while, having a over 100 year old company, you’ve got a lot of background there.

Tom: Yeah, so we get calls from people who’ve been ordering since the 70s. You know, the 60s and we have primarily with catalogs, prior to the internet, so, like, they look forward to their catalog in the mail.

Instead of the people still do we still do a really good catalog in the old timers and people who don’t typically get catalogs now they’re interested in that kind of stuff.

So yeah, it’s tapered off you know, there was a kind of a lull in there when supermarket said you know, cheap eggs and stuff like that, where were the business wasn’t that great booming for what we were doing.

There’s the old timers and now we’ve got a really big crowd of people who want to get back into being sustainable. And know where your food comes from take care of themselves. That’s exciting. I really like that part.

Brian: So for people that aren’t aware that you can even buy chickens through the mail.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that process works?

Tom: Yeah, primarily new orders come in online now that the internet rules everything. But we still do catalog sales, you can get requests to catalog and order through the catalog.

We have 110 varieties of chickens, 30 varieties of ducks and geese, 15 different pheasants, you know quail, swans different profiles stuff.

So we’re kind of a one stop shop for small farms, even backyard flocks, it’s anything you’d want. Our typical order is less than 20 birds that’s going down. So we’re really still a lot of small orders and people get one Rhode Island red one black cross are a lot of colorful birds because there might be an urban or suburban lot and it starts with that they want to know where your food comes from, you know, raising chickens is really easy.

And it’s very quick turnaround. It takes about six months to raise a chicken to get eggs.

That’s a really fast as far as any animals go, turnaround for reward. So it’s really neat to see people go through the cycle and they get the birds and they get their eggs, and they’re just through the roof. You know, you get a fresh egg and there’s nothing tastes quite like a fresh egg.

So it’s great for kids. It’s really good for learn about the lifecycle of different things. We do a lot of schools, that they’ll hatch eggs and then they might just take home chickens and say, Hey Mom, guess what I brought home? So that’s unique too.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

How are you able to send birds through the mail? How’s that work?

Tom: We’ve been doing it a long time, actually, even before there were airplanes we’d send through the railroads, the railroads carried the mail. And we had really good success doing that.

In the 1960s, when airlines started carrying the commercial air, the chickens were right with it. The chick in an egg develops out of the white of it, and the yolk is a food sack.

And so right before the chick hatches out of the egg, it envelops the yolk. So it kind of pulls it through a belly button and into its stomach.

And so that provides a chick with three days worth of food and water. They don’t need to eat or drink for the first three days. They could but they don’t have to.

So that’s why we’re able to ship day old chicks. And then without really any very special accommodations where it’s harder to ship older chicks because they do need that food and water constantly. Yeah day old chicks right through the the post office.

Brian: That’s, that’s so cool. I remember the first time I had heard about that, and it blew me away.

How were you finding new people?

Because it’s such a very niche audience that you’re going after?

What’s the main way that you’re getting or finding new people?

Tom: It’s not hard to find. If you wear a McMurray t-shirt around, someone’s going to come up to you and go, I got chicks from there.

My parents got chicks from there. It’s a very old timey thing.

Brian: Yeah.

Tom: You know, where people had farms, they have chickens. Some of the new people are, they’re just reminiscing about the you know, going off to grandpa’s farm and that chickens running around and every major metropolitan city, you’re allowed chickens, like most of them, I think it’s 93% of them. You’re allowed some backyard chickens.

They’re buried on how many you can have if it’s ten or six or five or something like that. But so we do a lot of travel quite a bit. So we’ll do trade shows.

We’ll do Mother Earth News Fairs.

Brian: Yeah.

Tom: We’ll do some gardening stuff. Because a lot of people who do gardening, even urban or backyard gardening are interested in birds.

It’s kind of a funny correlation, because everyone who has chickens gardens, but not everybody who gardens has chickens.

Brian: Yeah that’s true, that’s really wild.

Tom: We do stuff like that, um, Homesteaders of America, one of the things I’m really excited about is kind of that growth in that new homesteading movement, I feel like people are getting back to out of the cities and back to the farms or even on small plots of land where they can they can do these things for themselves and take care of themselves.

Brian: Are you seeing a growth this year, with the COVID-19 and everything else and people kind of returning to preparedness and homesteading?

Tom: Absolutely. I think anybody can attest to that, that that’s, anytime there’s a shortage of or the question of the shortage, we will see spikes actually when the we can tailor it by the stock market too. If the stock market goes down, then we actually have better sales.

That’s a comfort thing, you know, and during World War 2 it was recommended that every family member have two chickens, because they provided for your own necessity.

So you can provide eggs for your family. It’s little things.

Brian: Yeah.

Tom: It could be the price eggs in the grocery store. Price of chicken doesn’t affect too much. But those things will see new customers come looking for the route going right to the source.

Brian: That makes sense.

You certainly have a name in the industry. Do you have people that come across you randomly online?

Do you guys do any form of online advertising or anything of that?

Tom: Oh, yeah, you have to, we did it for a while. So like 2015 and 2016, we were sold a minimum of six weeks out like you couldn’t get a bird for six weeks for two entire years.

So we kind of scaled back on on the advertising we did.

I think that kind of beat us in the butt later on down the road, you know, 17 and 18. But the traditional advertising stuff you advertise on Google AdWords and things like that.

We do advertise in certain magazines, Backyard Chickens, Hobby Farms, you know, the things that correlate well to exactly what you guys are.

Brian: Yeah.

Tom: People will want to take care of themselves and be more sustainable. People want to be off grid chickens are number one on the list of things you need.

So if you think you’re going to be able to have a long term success, chickens are very easy to do that with lots of different types of stuff.

Brian: What’s your top selling product?

What is the top breed?

What’s the main thing that you see the most of going out?

Tom: Chicken owners are kind of traditionally split between egg layers and broilers, so your broilers are your meat chickens are number one on chicken is the broiler.

It’s a Cornish Cross, or Cornish X Rock, that’s far and away the number one bird we sell people are going to home butcher their own their own meat, it’s a really great way to do it.

You know, it’s not factory farmed in the worst possible conditions, you have full control of the life of these birds. And so you give them a better existence, even a shorter existence.

Then down from that it’s our best egg layers. So we have a Red Star Chickens a really nice brown egg layer.

The Pearl Leghorn, which is industry standard white eggs, that’s at the store, you’re gonna get at the grocery store. Really the things that are gonna lay the most eggs.

And then you know, we could go down and then it’s more fun birds, we do have, like I said 110 varieties of chickens, we get a lot of orders that are one of this, I want a really good egg layer, but then I want a pretty bird too.

So Barred Rocks, Bard Plymouth Rocks are American breed, they’re very traditional, they would have been on everybody’s farm 50 years ago, those are really popular.

Brian: Oh that’s fabulous.

We had Frank Hyman on the show last year, who wrote Hentopia, where he talks about how to build your own coops and everything.

So my wife’s in the middle of building a chicken coop. And she’s a gardener, and now she’s adding in the chickens. And so she was going through your website couldn’t believe all the different breeds and everything on there.

There’s so many different ones, just great pictures online, it’s really cool. I really want everyone to go check that out.

You’ve been involved for eight years. What do you like best about this business and your industry as a whole?

Tom: Like I said, I travel a lot and I get to meet a lot of people. I love talking to people. I love talking about that, you know, that they visited their grandfather’s farm in the 50s and 60s, or, you know, their kids are getting into chickens now and just the stories that people have to tell.

I hate to say the good old days, because that’s tuff to beat, you know, internet and air conditioning. But it is a simpler time. And people have really good memories of those, you know, going out and doing the chores. Might have to clean out the chicken coop and stuff.

But I get to meet a lot of people, I really love doing that. I love that.

I also do work with all the chickens, um, I breed different lines and stuff as well.

One of the things I like to think about, it’s like, alright, I’m gonna be here for 20 to 25 years, my kids will take over hopefully, but I can affect, you know, the genetic lineages of these chickens for another hundred years, like I could, if I wanted to select for a certain color or a certain variety that you can really improve upon what you have just by the different parent lines and things you can do.

So that’s kind of a really daunting, but really exciting thing that I like to do.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

Tom: You can, you’re gonna affect the long-term chicken owners.

Brian: It’s a great perspective and something I think most people don’t even take into account when they’re thinking about being involved in a business like this.

So now if you can change one thing about your business, what would that one thing be?

Tom: Right now we’re our kind of our biggest limitation is we do go through the United States Post Office. So if you’re following in the news that has been an issue chickens are, they get special handles and they get priority handling, we don’t have big issues.

But I would like to see a different way to do that, too. We go all across the United States, every week, you know, we hit all 50 states. We could get there in a more timely effective manner, it typically takes two days, two to three days to deliver chickens and they are live animal. And so if we could speed that up, even to the fact that you were not really allowed to ship express or overnight.

Even to allow that that kind of delivery service for for live animals, I think would go along base in in for in for the industry and for the animals themselves.

So that’s one of the things I also am working on.

Brian: Absolutely.

So if we were to talk again, say like a year from now, and we were to look back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happen between now and then for you to feel happy with the progress in your business in your life?

Tom: You know, if we can go through 12 months, and I have all employees that are healthy, and we have birds that are healthy, and we’re still able to ship chickens, I’m going to be through the roof.

There’s so much uncertainty going around with COVID-19. That’s where we’re at.

You know, keeping workplace open is very difficult. Especially in an industry where we’re not able to isolate, we’re not really able to work from home. You work with the live animal like and there are no off days, there’s not an ability to just be gone or to have time off, keep the wheels going.

We’ve been around a long time and I don’t foresee that changing. So we can weather a lot of storms. And we have obviously a couple of world wars. But there’s a lot of things, you know, I’m pretty easy to please.

Brian: Well, that’s great. What advice would you have to other business owners that are looking to be involved in a business like this?

I know you didn’t start it. Everyone involved there kind of grew into it. What advice would you have to someone who’s either getting involved with a stable heritage business like this or that starting from scratch?

Tom: So with the rise in the poultry industry, not in poultry, like the backyard flock movement, there’s a big influx of hatcheries, like boutique hatcheries. It’s just people who say, I’m gonna I can raise birds, like, my birds lay an egg, I can collect that and you buy a little incubator, and you can hatch them and sell them, you sell them on Craigslist, or you sell them on Facebook, or pretty easy to put up a website and do that stuff.

It’s a very small industry too, even for players and I’ve been around a long time, like we’re pretty big, but we’re also very small. And it’s the same with all of the other hatcheries.

There’s five or six hatcheries comparable size, you know, and then you start getting into the Tyson’s and things we’re talkingma couple 10s of millions birds.

That’s a different, different world. But we all know, everybody, like I know every counterpart in every other hatchery we’ve met. And so even if you’re just starting out, and you want to get into this, it’s a big industry, there’s lots of room for people.

But reach out and talk to somebody like I’m available, call me up, I’ll help. The more that we work together, the more power our industry has like, and the more we can work together, the more we can lobby the post office to give us better shipping. So you know, I don’t want to fight anybody. I want to work with everybody. Everyone’s got a specialty, everyone fits in somewhere.

Let’s figure out how to make it work together. I think that’s a great attitude. And something that’s too often forgotten in dentists that we’re all against each other when actually if we just find our spots, there’s room for everyone.

Like I said, 93% of metropolitan areas allow chickens, let’s get to 100. And we work together and we can we can get there that you’re talking 300 and 50 million people in United States and only 4% of those have chickens.

We’ve even thought about chickens, even knew you could do chickens. So yeah, that leaves a lot of space.

Brian: A whole nother line of conversation there. But I’m just curious, did you ever raise any type of animals growing up? Did you grow up around animals?

Tom: I grew up in a very small town about 200 people. So I was very rural. But we lived in town, all the 200 people I did farm work, you know, I work with cattle. We did grow crops, mowed a lot of lawns and stuff like that.

Brian: Well, you’ve heard a lot of stories from people that have just started out of nowhere, and started started doing chickens. Do you see a huge value in…..well, I mean you mentioned like children growing up around it.

Tom: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Brian: You were able to see the life cycle and everything.

But what what else have you seen as far as that goes? What value do you think that that really gets back home when when someone brings chickens home to raise?

Tom: Like said they’re super easy to raise, they we literally wrote a book called, Chickens In Five Minutes A Day. That’s all it takes to raise chickens, you get them, they need a little more care on the front end. But on the back end food, clean water, pickup eggs, like they have enough space to just be really happy.

They can take care of pests around the house, eat lots of bugs, lots of spiders. They’re beautiful, you know, chickens are absolutely beautiful.

Their yard art is moving art. And that’s where we come in, we have a lot of varieties that are just really pretty.

You know, I have four kids too. And like they’re great chores for my children like, six and seven year old. They take the scraps out from dinner, they feed the chickens, I get the eggs like they get they have chores to do, they have responsibility and they like doing it because they like chickens are neat. Chickens and kids go hand in hand.

If you don’t have kids, chickens are still great. It doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s not complicated. You don’t need a complicated setup.

You know, if you had a cow, you’re committed to infrastructure, you’re committed to a you’re committed to high expensive stuff. Usually chickens eat half a pound of food a day gets four ounces and gets a third pound. 50 pound bag of feed is several months worth of food for chickens. Six months of the year cost to $14 to feed a chicken. So that’s pretty low costs for and you’re gonna get eggs out of the deal, eventually. Egg a day.

Brian: Yeah, no that’s really, really cool. And it’s a great, great message to have out there. That’s really neat. You said you have a have a book. It’s called, Chickens In Five Minutes A Day.

Tom: Yeah, I have to rewrite that that’s on my to do lists. We had it published probably 10 years ago. And we didn’t do enough reprints that it went of out of print. So that’s on my to do list is to rewrite our book.

Brian: Good, well we look forward to seeing that.

Tom: Yeah.

Brian: So I’ve asked you a bunch of questions. What am I not asked you that you like to answer?

Tom: Pretty good questions.

How do we fit into what your guys are trying to do?

What’s the overall message you’re trying to send?

Brian: We tend to talk about just the business side of self reliance. So we talk to a lot of businesses that either play toward that specifically from the products they produce, or they play toward in their entire infrastructure.

So we’re just happy to have you here and talk about it from a perspective of having this really solid, historic background and the whole thing, and while at the same time encouraging other people to be productive. So we really, really found this interesting.

Tom: Yeah. One thing that I didn’t touch on but, outside of eggs, getting baby chicks, like their industry and of themselves. If you go to farmers market, you know, there’s someone selling fresh eggs and they could be anywhere from $2 to $12 depending on where you’re at. And you know, what type of breed they’ve got, how there’s some really super dark chocolate eggs, there’s blue eggs, there’s green eggs, you know, white eggs.

A lot of people don’t know that eggs come in different colors.

So that’s a business people do, especially if that’s from not just a off grid or self sustainable people, you’re gonna have a flock to produce for yourself and to sustain. To keep regenerating your birds, you hatch eggs, you get more chickens, you raise them up.

But that’s a source of income to my grandmother, that was grocery money was the chicken egg money. We’re still there, it’s just more of a specialty market.

Farm fresh eggs are, I don’t know, anybody who has too many farm fresh eggs. There’s someone looking for them, and they’re looking and you can sell them at a premium.

People care about how their birds are raised, and nobody wants to see, you know, the factory farms. So if you can, look in your backyard, and they can see the chickens running around the chickens are happy.

Then that commands its own premium when you go to market with these eggs. Like that’s a business perspective to this as well. And it’s the same with meat.

So that’s eggs, but it depends on your state, but you’re allowed to produce so many birds and home butcher. There’s a lot different some regulations there.

But it’s pretty easy to look into for yourself. You can raise your own broilers your own, raise your own chicken meat. It’s very easy to do my family wheats, my two brothers came and we did about 300 birds between us and half a day.

So we filled everybody’s freezers full of chicken, we have a year’s worth of chicken like fabulous for for half a day’s worth of work.

Wait, I knew how those birds are raised because I did it. So there’s no we don’t have issues with that you’re going to have on somebody’s shed somewhere. But yeah.

Brian: Peace of mind is really helpful.

Tom: Yeah. And so that’s another business side of things. You can and it depends on your state and how many you can do at a time. The US you can look at the USDA, and they’ll give you a definitive answer some states, I think it’s less than 1,000, which is quite a few birds. There’s business opportunities here for people as well.

Brian: So that’s great. So what could a listener do if they want to find out more about McMurray Hatchery and everything you guys provide?

Tom: You can go on the website and the website’s a really cool resource. We have a catalog. We’ll mail out catalogs to people if you don’t have internet or you’re not big on online shopping. So we’ve produced a catalog since 1919.

It’s changed a few times but it’s really cool thing.

McMurrayHatchery.com. Like I said, we have breed photos, breed profiles, you’ll see the full selection of everything that we do.

We’re on YouTube, you can see some videos we’ve done on YouTube or Facebook. All of the social medias, you can tweet us.

Brian: Well Thomas Watkins is the Vice President of McMurray Hatchery. Thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Tom: Yeah, thank you very much.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: That was really cool meeting up with Thomas here and finding out the perspective of somebody who married in to kind of a legacy business, like this hatchery.

And at the same time, they’re still small enough that he can say, Hey, I’m still the plumber, you know, I’m still doing a lot of the work that no one else wants to do, I do whatever needs to get done. That’s cool.

That’s really neat that there’s something really neat and inspiring about that.

I like when talking with Thomas about their ideal customer, how he basically says it’s just people who want chickens, you know, and it’s almost more of who isn’t his customer.

I like how he framed that, because he’s they’re not looking to just retail out to large chicken farms or hatching operations, they’re looking for the backyard person, they’re looking for the person that’s starting from scratch, they’re looking for a person with a small group of chickens, or is just starting out in the chicken world.

That’s really a specific niche and something that is cool to see somebody taking on. And really being unapologetic about it.

He says that catalogs still exist. They’ve got physical paper catalogs. And this is something I’ve discussed quite a lot on my daily show, Brian J. Pombo Live, when we’re discussing the fact that a lot of these older mediums haven’t died away, they’ve just taken on competition with online versions or with digital versions.

And so you’re still have a lot of paper catalogs out there. In fact, I came across an Amazon.com paper catalog that they sent out for people that they knew had children, I think it’s for people in their prime program that have children, and it was a special children’s toys catalog, specifically for Amazon.com.

You can’t get more online than that yet, they’re using paper catalogs, there is a value in using some of the older mediums even more valuable now than in years past when it was the only medium.

It’s something to keep an eye on when you hear people that use that, see why they’re using it and how it could be valuable how these analog versions of the same things that we see on a regular basis online, how the analog version, it has a value unto itself.

It’s interesting.

It’s cool that Thomas and his company have been able to take on this rise in sustainability like he discussed and how homesteading is back on track and growing in popularity, especially with all of the happenings of 2020 the COVID situation and everything else.

People are looking to be more self reliant, they’re looking to have more stability in their life. The fact that they’re able to profit off of that after providing this service for so long.

And now really being on top of it and being able to handle this this rush of new customers. I think that’s really great to see and I wish Thomas all the best can’t wait to see what they have coming up in the future.