Tag: gardening

David Gilmore – LDS Prepper

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LDS Prepper

David Gilmore, known as the LDS Prepper on YouTube. Posted his first video 10 years ago.

He was inspired by other YouTube prepper channels and wanted to share what he was doing and learning on his journey and preparedness.

Today his channel has over 210,000 subscribers and over 44 million video views.

Please checkout his quality videos and products at his website and YouTube channel, linked below!

Website – https://ldsprepperstore.com/

Youtube Channel – LDSPrepper

Show Notes

  • How LDS Prepper Got Started
  • A Passion for Helping People Be Prepared
  • Value of Building Rapport With Your Customers
  • “Once You Educate Customers, Your Going To Get Sales”
  • Knowing Where Your Customers Congregate – Online / Offline
  • Top Seller – LDS Prepper Premium Micro-Nutrient Mix
  • Mittleider Gardening Course Book
  • What I Like About Having an Online Business in the Prepping Industry
  • Continued Education and Growth for Sustainability is Needed Around The World
  • Personal & Business Goals For The Next Year
  • Other People’s Traffic: Tips for Growing Your Online Youtube Channel / Business

Transcription

David: I found that really I can ship anywhere in the world. And I do so I need to make myself available to the world.

So I started on YouTube.

And then when I make a YouTube video I also put a link on my Facebook profile because I’ve got 5,000 friends, okay, I’ve never met. But however, they feel like they know me because they’ve watched the videos right?

They say this all the time, I feel like I know you, I’ve watched 300 of your videos.

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: David Gilmore, known as the LDS Prepper on YouTube. Posted his first video 10 years ago.

He was inspired by other YouTube prepper channels and wanted to share what he was doing and learning on his journey and preparedness.

Today his channel has over 192,000 subscribers and over 42 million video views.

He has become a true YouTube influencer. His passion has turned from a hobby to a seven figure a year business as an affiliate for preparedness products and producer of his own product. Today he shares his insights with us on how to start an online business with zero capital zero risk and a mobile phone.

David Gilmore, welcome to the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

David: Thank you Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian: Yeah, I really appreciate it.

How did you end up at this point?

How did the whole journey start with you, David?

David: Great question.

I’m really a visual learner. My wife reads lots of books, her nightstand is piled with books and she just goes through the books. And I get to watch a video I get it.

I gotta see physically. Instead of me googling things for answers, I go to YouTube.

I call it YouTube University. And it really helped me out and I am preparedness-minded.

I feel it’s my responsibility as a father and as a husband to provide and protect. I was always looking for solutions and YouTube just seemed like a great place to do that, and I appreciate what others put up.

So I thought, well, maybe I should share some of the things that I’m doing.

First of all, had to come up with a YouTube name.

And I thought okay, well, you know, there’s like New York Prepper and there’s a Southern Prepper, and there’s Texas Prepper.

So how would I identify myself something that would reflect who I am?

And first and foremost, I’m a Christian, I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

So the abbreviation for that is LDS.

And then I’m a provider and protector, and I’m a prepper.

So I just made it LDS Prepper.

So that’s my YouTube channel. And then I bought the domain, LDSPrepper.com, and I just had that foreword to my YouTube channel, I get that created.

Then I had to come up with a logo for the channel.

I thought the best prepper in the world was Noah. So I found a nice image of Noah and the ark, and the rainbow, which is God’s covenant with Noah that he would never flood the earth again.

I created that YouTube channel and then started just making videos of what I was doing.

I posted my first video, I remember this clearly. And I kept refreshing the page to see if anybody was watching it or if anybody subscribed, and I get like one or two subscribers and a couple of views.

Then the next day posted another video and I got two or three views.

Then I posted my third video, and I got to three more subscribers.

Then all sudden I refresh the screen and I had 100 subscribers. And then I came back and refresh the screen and I had two hundred subscribers. I thought, what is going on?

One of the YouTubers that I followed, who’s has a prepper channel had put up a video saying hey, you should go check out this guy’s YouTube channel.

That’s kind of how it all started networking without me knowing that I was networking but somebody else had found my content. That was great.

So I just started sharing that and being videos about being self reliant and so forth.

I just really think it’s a porn to put up really good quality content. I had someone talking to me a couple of weeks ago and they want to be a YouTuber.

They were talking about they need to go to university and take courses on video editing and then they need to buy this $5,000 camera and audio.

I said, No, it’s all about the content.

They really don’t care what the video quality is, as long as it’s visual, it’s the content, does solve a problem?

And so that’s what I really focus on is, what problems am I solving and I then I just video it and put it on my channel.

I really think that high-quality content is the key. That really solves a problem because when people go to YouTube, they’re typing in how-to, and then whatever they’re searching for.

So I was just sharing what I was doing. And I was never on camera.

So it wasn’t about me being on camera, it was more about the message.

I just literally had my camera in my hands. I couldn’t be on camera and that was just filming what I was talking about. So that’s pretty much how I got to where I am I just started posting content, people liked the content. I was interactive with them.

So they post a question or comment, and I always reply.

Even though I wasn’t there and taking, you know, taking personal calls, it was kind of a communication. So it worked out well.

People liked the content, I spent a lot of time editing to make sure that I get rid of all the arms and butts and things like that, that happen when you video and it was just grabbing my cell phone and making recording.

So it worked out well.

Brian: Fabulous. It’s a great way of describing the process.

At what point did you start adding the business elements into it?

David: This is a passion, my passion is to help people get prepared to learn how to grow food as if their life depends on it. Because I really think it will, to my core, I think it will to have clean water more people die every day on the globe from dirty water than everything else combined.

I have videos on that, that have over a million views. And those are about water filtration and how to pick the right water filter and so forth.

What happened was I started getting all these subscribers and all these views. Then I get an email from Google saying, hey, we’d like to put ads on your channel, that okay, well, that’s fine.

So I have the ads on there. But then I’m recommending things that I’m buying and using because I don’t recommend anything unless I personally use it and like it, and then would recommend it.

I’m just putting links on to for other websites, and Amazon and so forth.

Then I thought, Well, why don’t I just become an affiliate?

And so then I became an Amazon affiliate, then I would contact SUN OVEN or the Berkey Water Filter company or whatever. And well, Texas Ready Seeds, right.

Lucinda, right.

So I’m an affiliate for them, I’m getting able to get the best pricing as an affiliate or an authorized dealer, like with Berkey and pass that on to my customers.

That’s how I turn a passion turned into a business is becoming an affiliate. The advantage of being an affiliate is I don’t have to inventory it, don’t have to spend money on inventory. I don’t have to ship it. I don’t take customer calls.

You know, the vendor does all that.

So it worked out great for me, I’ve been doing it been doing this for 10 years.

Well, you can see in my office here in my house on a laptop, and a mobile phone. That’s pretty much my business.

Brian: That’s great. And that’s a really great tip for people that are just starting out and finding ways to be able to keep everything nice and tight and simple, is really the way to go. That’s fabulous.

So you start your YouTube channel, you start getting the business element of it going, at what point did you build yourself a website and and start doing things off of YouTube?

David: That’s a great question.

So I was just referring people to other products, you know, affiliate links, and so forth.

And then I wanted to be able to build a customer list.

If I’m just sending him into Amazon, Amazon’s getting the list, or I’m sending him to some other site they’re getting lists, and I’m not getting a list.

I can’t build that rapport with him or updated with information.

What I started to do was I said, All right, if you want these things, I’m an authorized dealer, just call me on the phone.

Well, that got a little bit of overwhelming.

And I said, All right, so just send me an email.

So now I’m having to do take all these orders and process and send them an invoice.

And so that was just nuts, you just can’t do that because this was just a passion, not a business.

I still was running a business and then I set up a kind of an off brand online store, which was really, I mean, the people were really good, but it was a lot more work than having a Shopify store.

So last year, so I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

Last year, I opened up my Shopify store, and what a difference I would just tell people just go to Shopify, okay, just go to a platform there. You can come, if you don’t know how to do something, you can go to Fiverr and get somebody for $15 to fix it for you or you can go to YouTube and look at the video on how to set up shipping or something like that.

So I set up the Shopify store and put all the products on there and that really made a big difference. Because that platform sooner somebody places an order, they get a confirmation email, when I ship it, they get a confirmation email, when I get the tracking number, they get that email.

Just really good communication.

And I have my personal cell phone number on my website. I’m the one who answers the calls. I don’t have employees answer call. It’s, you know, they have a question I take the call.

They have questions about herbs, I hand the home that my phone to my wife, because she has written five books on herbs. So having the storefront really made having an online store really made a difference. And I don’t have a storefront.

This is all virtual business.

Brian: Hmm.

David: Which is great, because now I’m a pretty big influencer in the preparedness industry market niche. And so I’m asked all the time, I was asked last week, will you come to Boise and do a presentation?

I said no, because there’s going to be 30 or 100 or 150 people there.

I could take that five hours or six hours and reach 30 million people.

Brian: Yeah.

David: Or, you know, I’ve got 192,000 subscribers. And when my wife and I did a video live this last Saturday, we had 2,300 people live on that video, I can’t fit that many people in the library or whatever’s happening.

So I really put everything that I would do in a seminar on my YouTube channel, and then people can watch them at their leisure, they can watch them at 2x speed right now.

But then I’m able to reach people all over the world.

So I was just checking my Shopify stats, and I am shipping to the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, New Zealand, France, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Ireland, India, Romania, Belgium, Sweden, Israel, Philippines, Denmark, Norway, and on and on and on.

I couldn’t do that in a seminar.

But I’ve done lots of seminars and lots of preparedness fairs.

That’s a great way to really hone your message, it’s a great way to make a lot of sales really quickly.

As a tip, this is a really big tip, because I was invited to a lot of preparedness fairs.

And we would always pay for a booth or they would provide a booth, if you’re going to do a trade show or something like that. This is what made us the top vendors at all the trade shows and that is we would always get a 10 by 20 booth, then in 10 feet of that, we would set up chairs and a projector and we’d have a class every hour.

Once we educated the people on the product, whether it’s portable solar generator, or self-defense training, or how to grow garden as your if your life depends on how to pick a water filter.

Once you educate the people on that, you’re going to get sales.

Instead of just standing data booth like we normally do and waiting for people to walk by, you know, we’ve all experienced that set up a schedule.

The whole purpose of us standing at the booth was, hey, in an hour, we’re going to have this class, here’s this class schedule, we would hand out that sheet.

We were packed, and the vendors around us started to seeing what we were doing. And then we go to the next event. And they then they had a 10 by 20.

Booth, as we were just clearing out of everything that we could bring to you know, fit in our trucks to bring to the show, they’re taking everything back home. When they started educating then they were selling all their products.

And so really, really big tip take the time to educate people. That’s what we’re all about. Right is helping, and they will appreciate it. They will trust you. And then they will buy your product because that solves their problem.

Brian: Yeah, that’s amazing advice. That’s really good stuff there.

People I really advise you to go re listen to a lot of just even just what David said, just right there. It’s so valuable.

You talk about starting out on YouTube, and bringing in people that way and it’s still your top area, right, where people are finding you from. And you’ve done stuff in person, like you said at the shows and so forth.

Is there any other place that you found new customers from?

David: Primarily, I found that really I can ship anywhere in the world?

I do so I need to make myself available to the world.

So I started on YouTube, and then when I make a YouTube video I also put a link on my face Facebook profile, because I’ve got 5,000 friends, okay, I’ve never met.

But however, they feel like they know me because they’ve watched the videos.

So there’s really, they say this all the time, I feel like I know you guys watch 300 of your videos. And then, you know you’ve got Rumble or you got these other outlets.

So just think about where do I watch videos?

Where can I put my content?

Because I found that the Facebook group is not the YouTube group.

It’s a completely separate market.

I mean, there’s really very little overlap.

And people on Facebook say, Oh, I don’t want to YouTube and people on YouTube that I would never use Facebook for just think about how many different areas that you can access.

Here’s the key.

You know, we’ve always heard what’s it called?

Other People’s Money, right?

Brian: Yeah, yeah.

David: Okay. No. Other People’s Audience.

Brian: Oh, yeah.

David: Other People’s Audience.

I didn’t have to build an audience. I just went to where the audience was.

And so I started asking myself, I’m a fisherman. I love fishing for salmon. And so my question is, first question of a fisherman is where are the fish?

So you want to fish, where the fish are?

If the fish are on YouTube, then go to YouTube.

If the fish are on Facebook, then go to Facebook.

If the fish are on, you know, wherever, then that’s where you put your content.

And so use other people’s audience.

What is that OPA?

Brian: OPA, Yeah, yeah.

David: And it doesn’t cost you anything. I’m doing all of this at zero advertising cost, literally, without with a mobile phone that I already own and zero advertising, advertising costs. I’m reaching millions of people. Doesn’t cost me a penny.

Brian: Yeah, that’s great, great advice there.

And it’s so interesting watching your YouTube videos, you cover such a wide array of prepping, you know, everything from from gardening to water filtration, everything that you’ve mentioned, what is your top selling product right now?

David: Great question.

By far, it is the product that I manufacture and source myself and that is the LDS Premium Micronutrient Plant Food Mix. And so I’m just looking at my stats here on my Shopify store.

So that is the number one product.

The second is Mittleider Gardening Course Book, which teaches people how to grow food as if the life depends on it.

So in that book, you’ll learn the six laws of plant growth.

And one of those six laws is nutrition.

The micronutrient mix that I make, and source myself and ship is the number one selling product for sure. So I’m looking at the stats here, top product is by far is the micronutrient mix.

What led you to put that together, there was only one source for it on the planet. And I thought I’m trying to teach the world how to grow food.

There’s only one source. And so I thought the recipe to make this is actually in the $25 book, as I’m shipping this book around the world, as I mentioned earlier. And I’m talking to these people, I say, see if you can source this yourself and provide it for Mangolia or the UK or Canada.

So they’re not paying these crazy shipping costs from United States. I’m not in you know, the Lord has provided me enough income that can do what I want.

I don’t need to do this for a living.

I’m doing seven figures a year, so it’s doing well. But if somebody else can do it in Canada, I’d rather have them do it in Canada and make it more affordable, more available to them.

So I’m literally just trying to share that recipe with everybody and make it so it’s not just one source.

So now there are a lot of people doing this and selling it. And so that make it more available for everybody.

That goal of me making more available to everybody by getting the word out as been very rewarding. So I see I’m building my competition, per se.

Because I’m encouraging people to do this themselves. But I feel very gratified in doing that. Because I know I’m helping people grow their own food.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. That’s a great story in the end.

You know, you mentioned books, you mentioned having that book and the and I think you said your your wife had some books on herbs. That how has having having books available.

How has that made a difference in your business?

David: Well, my wife is a Master Gardener Certified Master Gardener.

She’s a Master Herbalist.

She’s a master medical herbalist, and so forth.

As a master gardener, she had over $1,000 worth of gardening books. I mean, she had a library shelves full of gardening books.

Then when we moved from Texas to Idaho, she had me take all those books and take them to Goodwill. And she kept the one $25 book, which is the Mittleider Gardening Course book. Because everything she needs to know was in that $25 book.

She literally donated over $1,000 worth of gardening books.

So having the book on hand, here’s mine. I mean, I obviously can’t see it on a podcast, but I keep it right here by my chair because I refer to it all the time, every word of that book 1,000 and 1,000s of times.

When people call me, they’ll say, David, I’m on page 165, can you help me with this, and then I turned to my book.

Having a book on hand as really, really important. You can get it in a digital form, or you can get a physical form, I would highly recommend regardless what the shipping costs get in physical form, it cost you way more than to print it out in a digital form.

And it’s just much easier for me.

Instead of having to boot up my computer and load a digital, I do have the digital format, but I never use it. I always grabbed the printed book.

And then my wife has taken her years of experience and certification and made reference manuals for medicinal weeds and culinary herbs, and how to grow your own herbs and how to make your own tinctures and so forth.

She actually made those reference manuals for herself. And then people kept asking her for them.

Basically, she was solving a problem for herself, she found that other people had the same problem.

Now she sends it to a printer and hasn’t printed and we ship them all over the world. Having a reference manual, having a book on hand, I think is critical.

I can’t answer every question 24 hours a day, having a book on hand really makes a big difference. They can refer to that whenever they want. So having a book significant, I think very, very important.

Brian: Especially in the field you’re working in, which is all how to, you know, so they’ve got to have more than the just you there. Then obviously they’ve got hours and hours and days worth of video that they can go through but having yeah, having a physical book that makes big difference.

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: Overall, what do you like best about your business or your industry?

David: As I was preparing for this and listening to other podcasts. One of the things that you ask is, you know, what is it you do?

So I had to ask myself, what is it I do?

Because when I talk to people, they say, Well what do you do for a living?

So I just became a pilot or I’m going through the process of becoming one I just bought a gyro plane. And so I now I have a new audience, you know, circle of people physically that I go down into the airport with an error in their, in their group and so forth.

As you get to know each other you date, well what do you do?

And I say and I typically say Well, I’m a marketer, I have a marketing company because I do do advertising for other people. But that is completely aside from what I do online.

Or they’ll tell them and they go, Okay, well that’s interesting.

Really, when I thought about it. I’m really not a marketer, even though I do some marketing for other people, but I’m really an affiliate marketer because I’m really marketing, most of stuff, I mark it or is from other people.

I mean, we do have my wife’s books, and we do have the micronutrients that I make, but everything else is an affiliate product.

The thing I like about the business model is that I don’t have to inventory, I don’t have to pay for inventory, I don’t have to ship it on customer service calls.

I can’t imagine if I had all those products here, I don’t have a storefront. That means I’m not sitting on a stool somewhere waiting for someone to come in. And I’m taking care of, you know, 50 customers a day, or I’m here, I’m taking care of 1000s of customers a day.

Our orders have, I just looking at it earlier, gone up tenfold from this time last year.

We’re doing 10 times the amount of volume as sales that we were doing last year, this at the same time. And so we’ve already significantly increased.

I think it’s because people are now realizing, Hey, maybe I need I need to grow food as if my life depends on it. And I really don’t know how to do that.

I need kind of a step by step way to do that. And that’s where the Mittleider Gardening Course comes in.

Or maybe my I already have an existing garden, but my garden isn’t really doing very well. It’s not producing well. So maybe I need to get these micronutrient mixes.

What I like about the business, the industry is that first of all, it’s online.

I’m an entrepreneur, which means I’m, I’m willing to work twice as hard for half the amount of money, right?

That’s what definition runners, my days are very, very long, because I’m passionate. And if I weren’t passionate, if this was just about money, I’d stopped this years ago, because I get so many emails a day, and so many phone calls and so many texts saying thank you so much I love you and your wife, you don’t know how you’ve helped our family.

That’s what I love about the business the most that I’m really making a big difference in people’s lives, literally, and helping them provide and protect for the family that I probably couldn’t do if I were just selling, you know, Android accessories, which is fine.

But I certainly wouldn’t be working as hard at that as I am providing the service and products that I that I do now.

So I love that it’s online. I love that I get calls, people say you’re crazy to get calls, I’m helping another human being.

When I get done with that call, I say now the reason why I took this 20 minutes with you this 45 minutes with you is so that you can go help to other people.

You don’t want to be the only one in your neighborhood growing food, you want a community around you growing food, you want a community around you that has portable solar power.

So I’m trying to educate everybody and I’m having to do that on the phone with one person at a time. But on the internet I can do for 1000s of people’s time. So I like that I love YouTube as a platform as a critical part of my business.

Because I’m able to reach so many people at the same time, where I just couldn’t, wouldn’t be enough hours in a day for me to do that one on one. So I love that I love that it’s online, they don’t have stacks of inventory.

I do have a lot of micronutrients in my garage, because I’m literally literally bringing them in sourcing him mixing him.

I’m looking at my security camera here that my employee bagging all the micronutrients right now and it’s in my garage.

So we’re building a 40 by 60 building where we can have a processing and shipping something that’s where I can get my truck in my garage for once. Right?

Brian: Yeah.

David: So it’s exciting. I love that I’m helping people, and I’m able to do it worldwide. I’m helping a lot of people all over. And that’s very gratifying when I go to bed at night.

I know that I’ve helped a lot of people. And I’m not just making money, I’m actually making a difference.

Brian: Hmm. That’s incredible.

So on the flip side, if you could change just one thing about your business, or your industry as a whole, what would it be?

David: Well, I wish there were 1000 people blowing this trumpet on, you know how to grow food.

I’m trying to get there are two Master Mittleider Gardening instructors on the planet. And I’m one of them.

Well, there needs to be 200,000, Master Mittleider Gardening Instructors all over the world. And I’m just trying to get the message out so that everybody can teach somebody else.

So if I could change that, that there would be more people who really are confident in the system and know how to do that.

What I need to change is I need to get a shipping manager because I’m spending so much time in the paperwork processing, you know, tracking you entering tracking numbers and all that interferes with me able to take the time to put up new content.

It interferes with me working on my groundschool for my pilot license. You know money is simply a tool right? That’s right.

If I’m using it correctly, it provides me time and resources for the things that are important. Money isn’t important, but it provides things that are important. So I need more time, I can’t get more time.

So I, that’s why I’m hiring people.

And I need to do the bagging my themselves, I sourced everything, making sure that I get the best quality products, and it’s the right mixture and so forth. But then I can hire my neighborhood kids, and they can bag, right.

So I’m giving them an opportunity to make some money during the summer. But I need to have somebody manage the shipping. It’s hard when you’re one man show.

My wife has these resource manuals, and she’s assembling them herself. That just takes up hundreds of hours to put all those papers together in a binder and in the paper protectors.

I think a hard part about businesses at some point, you need to kind of let go a little bit and say, All right, I need someone else to do this. I’m providing them an income and providing myself more freedom to do other other things.

So I would change that I would build the building. So I can get my car, my truck in my garage, and I would get someone to manage the business more. I never thought 10 years ago, that I’d be where I am today.

At basically zero overhead cost.

Because it’s all free advertising on YouTube as a free platform. And it’s I don’t know, what is $50 a month for Shopify or less?

I don’t I don’t know what it is. But anyway, I would I need to work more on managing gets other people taking care of the day to day things. So I can do less of that.

So long answer.

Brian: Oh that’s great. No, no. It’s it’s a complicated issue.

And when you’re getting to the point where you’re at.

David: Yeah.

I think a lot of business owners start out as a one man shop. And then at some point, they have to realize, Hey, I’ve got to kind of let go of the reins a little bit. Because this is provide a solution for other people.

But now it’s inhibiting me on what I need to be doing in my personal life. And so, yeah, let’s turn this over and may not be as perfect or as good as you right?

It gets the job done and if you’re got a good quality control in place, and the customers happy.

Brian: Absolutely.

And if you can reach more people by doing that, or at least keep your own sanity, which is necessary to be able to continue doing what you do. That’s all worth it.

David: Yeah, I’ve got six videos that I’ve already recorded that I haven’t edited and uploaded yet, because I’m too busy during the day to day stuff.

Brian: Yeah.

David: And that defeats the purpose of me doing what I’m doing. Yes, I’m caught up in the day to day I can’t get more content out.

Brian:‘Yeah, that’s a that’s a common frustration I’ve heard that from a lot of growing, especially online, e-commerce businesses.

David, if we were to talk again, let’s say a year from now, and we were to look back over the last 12 months, what would you say would have had to happen for you to feel happy with your progress both professionally and personally?

David: Id have my private pilot license, I’d be spending at least 10 hours a week flying with my wife and seeing the sights here and God’s great planet. I’d have a production manager or shipping manager in place who could take care of that, I’d be providing an income for them.

I’d have the building built so that the business is running without me being involved in business, if I left for a week to go to somewhere on vacation, or we’re just flying around doing a cross country trip in the gyroplane. And everything was managed without me, I feel good about that.

Because at some point, it would be great if I could just do content.

If I could just spend the time putting out more information helping more people in a personal matter. You know, I wear headset Bluetooth headset all day long, because people are calling me but I’m busy with my hands while I’m talking to them on the phone.

If I could just be focused with them on the phone instead of trying to manage the business, that’d be better.

So I think I know what I need to do. And we’re in the process of doing those things.

So in a year from now, I think we’ll be in a much better position personally and in business.

Brian: That sounds exciting because you know where you want to go. You have a really good idea about how to get there the obstacles that are standing your way.

So that’s that’s really great.

What advice would you have blanket advice besides all the great advice you’ve already provided, but for a business owner that’s out there that’s looking to get started in a similar fashion than you have, what blanket advice would you have for the business owners out there listening?

David: First of all would be used other people’s traffic. So if you’ve got a brick and mortar store, you can still share what you’re doing on other people’s traffic.

Now is that a bonus and bored at a church or a bus station. That’s other people’s traffic, right? It doesn’t cost you anything.

You don’t have to pay for advertising, you really don’t have to pay for advertising. Just think about where people congregating online or offline, and then you just use that space.

All right, that’d be the first thing I recommend is use free traffic sources.

I started out by doing search engine optimization 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and that whole game has changed.

There’s no such thing as free traffic with alright, is not there anymore. That’s a lot a lot of work.

My son does SEO for his his business. He has an online business too. And he’s decided to go that route. And I’m doing YouTube. And he’s saying what I’m doing so now he has a YouTube channel is doing very well on YouTube, too.

Because it’s literally unlimited traffic.

People are looking for a solution, you provide a solution. So find first recommendation is find some free traffic.

And you probably already just think, Where did where do I go?

Okay, where were you know, that’s where I would have to I would market have a product that solves a problem.

Just address the problem in, you know, people don’t care what the cost is, if it really solves their problem, right?

If you need a kidney transplant, are you worried about the cost?

Probably not. Okay, if you need to grow food as if your life depends on it, you’re probably not too worried about the cost.

Be sitting, you know, be reasonable with the cost, but have a product that solves a problem and then help people find the product. But what I found is that with my business, that content is king, you need to have good honest, direct content.

On my videos, I share everything, the failures, the successes, okay?

Be honest, be genuine, be you don’t be phony.

I have a video series where I went off grid for seven days, no water, turn off the water, turn off the gas, turn off the electricity. And it was a complete nightmare.

This great prepper guy, it was a horrible, it was taking cold showers and screaming like a little girl, it was is that the solar panels rent, the battery bank ran out of power within 24 hours. All this stuff that happened and it was it’s on video.

And it’s like this is real, okay, if you don’t do this yourself, you’re going to run into the same problem, you’ve got to practice yourself and this is what happened to me.

I’m supposed to be the quote unquote, “expert” right?

So be real, be genuine, be yourself. Don’t try to be somebody else.

And see, if you’re going to be marketing on YouTube is a great tip, what I would do, because I didn’t know anything about marketing on YouTube, when you make a video before you post a video.

If it’s about growing tomatoes, whatever it is, puppy dog collars, whatever the product is, do a search and find out what other videos are out there.

What are the titles of those videos, because those videos are popping up because of the algorithm.

So you can take a look at the titles of the other videos, incorporate those words into your title. And now all sudden, your video shows up in the recommended videos list because you use the algorithm because you’re using the same words that other people are using.

So I would recommend that.

Another really big tip if you’re marketing online at all, make sure that you’re using the full URL in the description.

So https colon slash slash, I see a lot of people just putting in like LDSPrepperStore.com.

But that isn’t a hyperlink without will make it live on slash slash, okay, it doesn’t work, people aren’t going to want to copy it and paste it and know it just make sure you have the full URL out there.

And then I would also say unfortunately, from experience that you need to brand your product you need to brand your videos.

I have a now a brand on all my videos because people take the content and use it on for themselves. I’ve seen it on TV, I’ve literally seen my YouTube content on three letter alphabet TV stations, okay?

And never asked for the content. Never want, you know, gave me compensation for the content never mentioned me in the content but used my content.

So make sure that you you put a brand logo on your content out there that most of all, just find a passion. If you’re passionate about quilting, then just start putting content out there.

Quilting is a multi million or billion dollar industry and you know who would have known quilting, or whatever it is right?

Just put it out there.

If you’re passionate about it, you will enjoy every minute that you quote unquote work at it. And you know, it’s very rewarding and you help other people find solutions to their problems.

So be passionate about it.

Use other people’s traffic, make sure you brand it. If you’re marketing on YouTube, make sure you’re using other people’s words that other people using in their title.

So get your videos get found and you will climb very, very quickly on the scale of visibility and subscribers and sales at all at no cost.

Brian: Excellent. That is some amazing information there.

Is there anything, any question I did not ask you, David that you’d like to answer?

David: No, you’re excellent host you have great questions.

That’s really, if they want to find more information about my videos, they can just go to LDSPrepper.com.

And my store is LDSPrepperStore.com. If they want to call me my phone number is on my store. And I’m glad to help them with any items they have about preparedness questions, anything I can do to help.

I just kind of feel as we come closer to when the Lord comes back and rains on the earth things are kind of compounding. And I just think the sooner we’re prepared, the better. I’m hear as a resource in any way.

I feel like I’m doing the Lord’s work and he’s taking care of me. So I’m healthy, I’m strong, we have the finances we need. We’re providing other people solutions to their problems. So it’s a great place to be.

Brian: David Gilmore, thanks so much. You’ve definitely been a resource for us here today, the LDS Prepper folks, go and check them out.

David Gilmore, thanks so much for being on the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

David: Thank you very much Brian.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Well, I’m not really sure where to begin.

That was a really good conversation, especially on the business end of things. Quite oftentimes people come in, and they have a very clear understanding about what it is that they do, but not always the clearest understanding of how they went about doing it and why.

And that’s common, that’s not unusual, even at the higher levels.

I’ve heard Richard Branson discuss business. And he has a very difficult time talking about how he did it, or the principles behind it.

He just kind of moved, and things just kind of happened.

And every once in a while he’ll say something that’s profound, but it’s quite accidental.

He actually talks about how the fact that he doesn’t really know how he went about doing things.

I think it’s pretty common for people in the business journey to just kind of move. And every once in a while, you’ll have somebody that can do that very successfully, without having a lot of the major issues that most business owners face.

But most of us face those issues, we face these obstacles that you come up against, and wonder how to get around and through it.

If you don’t have a mentor, if you don’t have a group of people that you depend on, if you don’t have people that can help you sort those things out. Especially if you’re a first generation entrepreneur, it’s difficult to switch your mindset over from the way that most people think into the way a successful business person thinks.

I say all that to say that David has a really solid foundation for how successful business owners think.

There are so many principles he went over, I’m just going to focus on one real quick.

And this is one of those that I’ve heard discussed, mostly on very high level courses that I have bought seminars I’ve been a part of, most people do not discuss these things on the lower levels.

That’s the concept of other people’s attention.

If you can understand how valuable it is to be able to use different sources of advertising, that don’t cost money and be able to team up with other people, places where people are already causing traffic.

That is huge, because we’re all kind of brought up in the mindset that it takes money to make money. And it’s just not true across the board.

Yes, having money is helpful. It’s a great shortcut to be able to purchase advertising from people that are selling basically spaces alongside of traffic, whether it be physical traffic, or virtual traffic.

That’s what advertising is.

People have already named a spot and they’re selling a space in order for you to be able to hopefully get attention from people there. But there are other places there are a million more free areas that you can advertise versus paid areas that you can advertise, like I said, paid areas are a shortcut, but they’re not necessarily the best.

And they’re certainly not the only place you can go other people’s attention. Finding other people that are already getting attention and putting yourself along with them in some way, makes a huge difference.

David was talking about doing this accidentally in the very beginning, when he started getting recommendations for his YouTube channel from other YouTube channels.

That’s fabulous stuff.

What happens when you actually go out there and produce that on your own?

What happens when you team up with people purposefully?

It can happen people do it all the time. I’ve worked with many clients and many friends who have been able to do this, not just in social media, but across the board, it doesn’t matter where you’re at, you can find a way to do what they call joint venture.

You can team up with somebody and do it at no cost or no additional costs to how you’re already running things and be able to get that extra attention. That is huge.

He spends a lot of time talking about that. Go back and re-listen to this podcast for sure.

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.

Bevin Cohen: Small House Farm | The Artisan Herbalist

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Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm
Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm

 

The Artisan Herbalist, by Bevin Cohen
The Artisan Herbalist, by Bevin Cohen

Bevin Cohen is an author, herbalist, seed saver and owner of Small House Farm in Michigan.

Join us as we discuss topics like –

* why homesteading is a life long obsession

* The joy Bevin gets from sharing his knowledge with others

*Bevin’s latest book The Artisan Herbalist

Grab a copy of his latest book & other fine products today – SmallHouseFarm.com

 

  • 1:53 Small House Farm: We Believe in a Simple, Small, Intentional Life
  • 2:48 What Brought Me Into Homesteading: A Life Long Obsession
  • 4:03 From Music Festivals to the Beginning of Small House Farm
  • 5:49 Educational Products to Help You Grow
  • 7:09 Bevin’s Latest Book: The Artisan Herbalist
  • 8:11 From Our Seeds & Their Keepers
  • 9:11 Story Telling & Becoming an Author
  • 12:28 How Book Writing & Speaking Opens Doors for You & Help Others at the Same Time
  • 15:18 Teaching at Events like Mother Earth News Fair
  • 17:43 Gardening & The Power of Curiosity
  • 19:26 Small House Farms Top Sellers
        • Herbal Wellness – Witch Hazel
        • Seeds – Pineapple Ground Cherry’s
        • Books – The Artisan Herbalist
        • Workshop Classes – Seed Saving
  • 21:29 The Joy of Meeting New People at Classes and Workshop Events
  • 23:34 New Book Coming Out in February 2021 with New Society Publishers
            • The Complete Guide to Seed & Nut Oils
  • 25:45 The Secret to Success: Have Fun!
  • 27:15 Where to Contact Bevin and pickup his latest book, The Artisan Herbalist

Transcription

Bevin: I think that with everything in life as business owners or wherever we’re at when we put ourselves out there, challenge ourselves to try something new.

And it’s just that little bit of success can boost that confidence enough to be like, Okay, let’s try that again. Let’s push forward on this, let’s see where we can take this thing. Even if it doesn’t turn out we’ve tried something new, right and we’ve grown as a person because of that.

But nine times out of 10 it is gonna work out and that’s the beauty of pushing your limits, is we can find that we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit.

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: Bevan Cohen is an author, herbalist, seed saver, and owner of Small House Farm in Michigan. He offers workshops and lectures nationwide on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs, and locally grown food.

Bevin is a freelance writer and videographer whose work has appeared in numerous publications including Mother Earth News, Hobby Farms, Grit magazine, and the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company catalog.

He’s the author of, Saving Our Seeds, and The Artisan Herbalist.

You can learn more about Bevin’s work at www.SmallHouseFarm.com

Bevin Cohen, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Bevin: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian: Great having you here.

Can you give us a little bit more about what it is that you do and how you got to this point in your life?

Bevin: Sure.

So my wife and I own a small homestead business we call Small House Farm, which is more based on the philosophy of living as opposed to the size of our building really, you know, a small house, we believe in simple, small, intentional life.

We grow a majority of our own food here we grow seed crops that we offer commercially. We’ve grown forage a number of herbs that we then craft into a full line of beauty, wellness, and cosmetic products that we also offer via our website.

In my spare time, I guess, I split wood to keep the house warm in the winter, and I do a lot of writing. We’ve published four books in the past four years, and we’ve got another one coming down the pipe and a little bit as well.

So I just like to stay busy. I don’t do well, just sitting around. We’ve always got something exciting going on here at Small House Farm.

Brian: What brought you into this lifestyle of homesteading and then beyond that, actually building a business out of it and teaching people and everything else?

Bevin: Well, you know, how does anybody get anywhere really, I found that the best thing I could do with my life is just getting out of my own way. I’ve been fascinated with plants ever since I was a little boy. I lived with my grandmother in an apartment on the edge of town and we were lucky enough to be right up against what was at the time, hundreds of acres of woods.

Now it’s been developed into housing and that sort of thing. But back then it was endless woods where young guys, we could just run out there and just play all day long.

So I started with this early age, spending so much time out in the woods, learning about the plants around me. And it became a lifelong obsession, that’s really kind of snowballed out of control, very organically, small houses came to me, what we offer commercially is just simply the way that we live.

We decided to share that with the people around us and people really responded well to it. We started offering some educational programs, the co-op in town, health and wellness store not far from here.

People really took to what we were offering and it just kind of took on a life of its own.

Somehow, here we are and the rest is history, I suppose.

Brian: Yeah.

Had you ever owned any other type of business before or is this something that you jumped into naturally?

Bevin: Well, that’s kind of funny. What I could consider a lifetime ago, I used to organize a small Music Festival, very different than what I do now. But there were a lot of overlapping similarities.

We did what we could to give back to the community. All the funds that we would generate through this event, we always donated to a different charity, big brothers and big sisters was one of our big charities that we donated to.

We got to work with artists, creative types, we got to see people that live a slightly different lifestyle than that nine to five job, you know, artists and musicians and those types of folks, we’re kind of coming at the world from a different angle.

That was always inspirational to see that there’s so much more than this world has to offer that we may not realize if we’re just focused on that daily grind, whatever.

The world has everything that we need right at our fingertips, but we’re usually moving so fast that we don’t even have the opportunity to notice it.

Working at the festival with these artists, I came to realize that if I did slow down and look around me, everything I had was already waiting for me there. And that was in a way the impetus for Small House Farm, where we decided, we’d move out to the country, we bought this property. And we thought, let’s try to do something a little more intentional, a little more focused on ourselves and our family.

We have two children now, but at the time, you know, Elijah, my oldest, was just a little baby. And we thought, wouldn’t this just be nice to think about life in a much smaller scale than we had before?

And well, small house, I guess, here we are.

Brian: It’s fabulous.

How long has that journey been, when did you first move out there?

Bevin: I want to say that we’ve been on this property for we’re going on our eighth year.

Brian: Awesome. Wow, that’s great.

You started out as almost like an educational service you had started putting out there. How did that grow into the other pieces to where you have your product?

You have books or everything else, how did that come along?

Bevin: Well, the books were a natural step from the educational process.

The books that we offer, help people learn to do some of the things that we’re doing here out at the fire, you know, the artists an herbalist is going to teach folks how to grow and forage all these different herbs, and then craft them into this full line of love his products very similar to what you can buy from us, certainly.

But at the end of the day, I like to put myself out of business, I would like other folks to be learning how to do all these things on their own. That’s very important to me.

My other book, Saving Our Seeds is a guide to teach you how to grow and gather and collect seeds from 43 different species of crops.

While I do sell seeds from my farm, I think the world would be in a better place if folks just learn how to do these things on their own. So the writing was a natural segue from the teaching, offering the products, it’s just kind of a thing that we just do.

Because people love the things that we offer, we didn’t really mean to get into the business of selling herbal wellness products, that was never really my goal. It just became a thing where so many folks kept asking for it.

So we started going to the farmers market to offer it and there was such a demand for what we offered, we thought well until I can get everybody making their own, I suppose we could provide them with some quality products in the meantime.

Brian: It’s such a cool dichotomy there and how that all fits together.

I was looking through your latest book, Artisan Herbalist and how you lay it all out there you show exactly how a person couldn’t go about doing this themselves. And it’s really great that you can have the final product, or here’s a way for you to do it yourself, which is what you’re all about. It’s what you’re promoting with the homesteading lifestyle. So that’s fabulous.

Bevin: It is all about doing it yourself. There are so many challenges that we face when we decide to start taking these steps in this different lifestyle. And one of them that I find with people, it’s a very common challenge that people seem to have is a lack of time where everybody’s very, very busy.

So as we find the time to maybe alter our lifestyles, even just small baby steps here, they’re where we work to free up that time to learn to do these things on our own.

In the meantime, we still want to have these high-quality, natural products. And you know, Small House Farm kind of fills in that gap.

Brian: Fabulous.

Saving Our Seeds. That was your first book.

Bevin: No, that was my second book.

Brian: Okay, what was your first book?

Bevin: My first book is called, From Our Seeds and Their Keepers: A Collection of Stories. It was out of all the books, it’s actually my favorite just because it was so much fun to write.

It’s as the title says, it’s a collection of stories.

As I’ve traveled about the country, I’ve met gardeners and seed savers, homesteaders, and preppers all these amazing different people. And they all have these fascinating stories to share and these wonderful seeds that they’ve also shared with me.

All of these seeds have a story in them as well.

So I realized along the way, that while it’s fun to sit around and tell these stories, right snapping beans or having a beverage and sharing stories with each other is wonderful stuff. But there’s going to come a time where maybe these stories are forgotten.

Maybe we’re not going to be there to tell the story anymore and too heavy responsibility.

But I kind of picked that up and I said I need to start writing these things down. These stories need to be documented in some way. So we collected these seed stories, as well as the stories of the people that keep the seeds.

They tried to get them all into one place and that is what ended up becoming my first book.

Brian: Now was that on your own impetus that you stepped out to write a book or did someone push you into it or how’d that occur?

Bevin: Well, the story starts with a lady by the name of Sylvia, an older lady that I met down in Kentucky.

Sylvia had this corn story that she was telling me about how her family had grown this corn. The grandfather had grown this corn had been passed down through the generations and we’re trying to trace this history back and fires because I sitting there and talking on the phone and one of the conversations Sylvie says to me, Bevin, I’m so thankful that you’re interested in hearing the stories that I have to tell because my children have already heard them.

They don’t want to hear about it, other people aren’t as interested in corn as you are. I don’t have other people to tell this story to.

These stories that Sylvia was telling me, it was more than just the corn. She would talk about how her father would come home at night and work in the gardens or how they would take their harvest to the mill to have it turned into cornmeal. She started telling me stories about when she was a young girl, when she would get sick, how her mother would go out into the woods, to gather plants to make the medicine from this little corn seed.

So many things came out of this story.

And I realized that if I didn’t write down everything that Sylvia was saying, there was going to be a day that Sophia wasn’t going to be there to tell the story anymore.

That’s all I needed, I realized the significance of the moment that I was in and we started writing the book. It just really, like everything else kind of took on a life of its own. And it manifested itself into, I think it’s just a wonderful collection of tales, is still probably to this day my most popular book.

I just had a gentleman call me yesterday, a guy in San Diego, who had bought the book was fascinated with the stories and wanted to call me and talked about some squash, you know, so the story continues to move, we tell the story.

But then the story has continued to have more chapters added to it.

Brian: That’s beautiful because there are so many people that have those stories that they’re wanting to tell, they have something that they want to get out there.

We’ve got business owners that are listening that want to get down write their first book. Where did you go from there, did you self-publish it, did you find a publisher, how did that happen?

Bevin: The first book was self-published, we did that ourselves, we independently published it here at Small House Farm. And it was really, boy what a learning curve.

That was a whole other thing.

It’s one thing to write a book, it’s another thing to publish and market a book. Right?

That’s a whole different skill set. But you know, it was fun.

At the same time that it was challenging. It was really a process that I enjoyed participating in, I would recommend it to anybody, if you’ve got a story that you think is worth telling, write it down, because you believe in that story. Other people are gonna believe in it, too.

We self-published it, and we put it out there. And just because of the nature of what I do for work, I do a lot of traveling to teach about gardening all over the place, I was able to bring the book with me.

It worked out very well having that book by my side, as I travel, people were very interested.

But publishers kind of picked up that idea to so now the books that we’re putting together, like The Artisan Herbalist, New Society Publishers contacted us, and they wanted us to write this book.

You got to start small and everything grows, just like with any small business. That’s how it is, as long as you believe in what you’re doing and you continue to do that, good things will come from it.

Brian: How would you describe the benefits that you’ve gotten?

You’ve put out three books, obviously, there are benefits tied to it, how would you quantify that?

Bevin: Oh, in so many ways, it is just it opens the doors to new conversations with people. I’ve gotten to meet so many interesting folks that when I go somewhere to teach, I inevitably always learn every time I’m on the road, you know, so it’s really enriched every aspect of what I do.

Being able to take my ideas and find a way to put them into words that other people can appreciate, it’s helped me fine-tune my own thought processes.

What we do here at the farm, it’s really helped me to tweak our operation by understanding it a little bit more, knowing that I’m doing something that is helping other people improve what they’ve already got going on in their life.

That’s awesome. It’s empowering to know that I’m having an impact on other people, just like I mentioned, the gentleman that just called, he was so excited to talk to me, he was so inspired by the book, even just reading a couple of chapters of it, he got a hold of me says you’ve changed the way that I’m looking at things, you’ve changed my perspective on what we’re doing.

And that’s powerful stuff to know, the impact that we can have every time we interact with a customer or client, or anybody in the public. We’re planting seeds, if you will. And those seeds are going to grow into beautiful things.

Brian: That’s really great.

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, nine ways to Amazon proof your business. Let me talk about what we discuss in the first chapter, determine focus. So one of the main ways that you can Amazon proof your business is by determining the focus of your business. And the real problem isn’t that you’re not doing enough, the real problem is, is that you may be doing too many things in too many places.

So one of the things I suggest is decide whether your focus is going to be acquisition, ascension, or monetization. And I go into the details of what that means in this chapter. It’s really the only three ways that you can grow your business. And if you just do that one step of determining focus, you can have a huge change in your entire business. 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: And you’ve connected with all these great organizations and magazines, publishers out there, Mother Earth News and so forth.

I saw that you’ve put classes on for them, and courses. That’s kind of how you were explaining how you started out doing that?

Was that a natural fit for you, have you always kind of consider yourself a teacher? Or was it just being in the music festival industry that you’re kind of outgoing and used to kind of showing people the way?

Bevin: Well, I think that’s what it is, at the music festival, I would go out and I’d like to introduce the bands and stuff. And you know, you go out on a stage and there are 5,000 people out there, you can’t have any stage fright, you get used to public speaking very quickly when you’re in that type of a situation.

I think it made me very comfortable getting in front of groups of people to talk right, I was able to overcome that very quickly. As far as the teaching goes, it just kind of fell into my lap, the first couple of opportunities that I had to go and teach something.

There’s a local community college not far from here. They had a small-scale urban farm program that they were offering. And they were hiring local farmers to come and teach small classes, they’d asked me to come and talk.

So I went to this thing, and I prepped for it, you know, I really prepared for this thing, I felt like I was a little in over my head on what I was doing going to this college to talk to these folks. So I really put a lot of effort into preparing this, you know, get this presentation ready.

I went there, and it was a smashing success. Everybody seemed to really respond well to and I had a lady come up to me. And she asked, Did you go to school to learn about teaching? Or you know, do you have a teaching background?

No, absolutely not. I’m a gardener, and I’m farming over here.

She says, well, the way that you presented the information, it was very well-spoken, very impressive, you’re a natural, you may have found your color.

And I thought oh, you know, that’s laying it out heavy lady, but I appreciate it.

But I thought, you know, it kind of gave me that boost of confidence that I needed to try it again. Let’s go out there and do this one more time. And I think that with everything in life, as business owners, or wherever we’re at when we put ourselves out there challenge ourselves to try something new. And it’s just that little bit of success can boost that confidence enough to be like, Okay, let’s try that, again. Let’s push forward on this, let’s see where we can take this thing.

Even if it doesn’t turn out, we’ve tried something new, right?

And we’ve grown as a person because of that.

But nine times out of 10 it is gonna work out. And that’s the beauty of pushing your limits is we can find that we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.

Brian: Awesome.

Yeah, that’s really great.

Have you noticed characteristics or a certain mindset of people that get the most out of your books and courses and then people that become customers?

Are they newbies to the homesteading lifestyle, or have they people that have been around for a while?

Is there anything common within the people that you’ve met?

Bevin: I think you know, the commonality would be curiosity, people that are interested in trying something new. Some folks that I meet, certainly a great number of the people that I’ve met have been new gardeners, new seed savers, new to working with herbs, whatever it may be, and they’re excited about trying something new.

But I’ve worked with a lot of like, very experienced homesteaders very experienced folks in the industry that have come back and said, You’re coming at this with a different perspective, you’re approaching this subject from a different angle than what I’m used to. And I appreciate that because it helps us.

It’s so easy to fall into a bubble in our thinking. If we stay in the same group of people, and we keep doing the same things, it’s very easy to fall into a set pattern of doing stuff.

But when somebody can interject with this different perspective, this different point of view, helps us see what we’ve been doing in a different way.

So I’ve certainly had some old-school homesteaders that appreciate the angle that we approach them from. I would say that, since the pandemic has happened, that has blown the doors, on trying to choose the demographic for the folks that are in the home setting.

I mean, it seems to be anybody and everybody from all walks of life in some way or another even if their apartment, wants to grow something on their balcony. If they live in a city and they want to forage at the park, whatever it might be.

People from all walks of life are suddenly realizing that there’s a potential to this simpler lifestyle to come back to mother nature, that there’s something special in this moment that we’re in. It’s challenging is that maybe, certainly, it’s full of opportunities.

Brian: What would you say is the most popular service or course or product that you guys provide at Small House Farm, is there one that sticks out that people go bananas over the most?

Bevin: What we do is so diverse, we offer so many different things that it’s kind of hard to pick one so we’re going to break this answer down into subcategories and give us the best sellers in each category, right?

As far as say, the herbal wellness products that we offer via our website number one, hands down is the Witch Hazel that we make. We make a witch hazel, topical astringent from which has like a native shrub that grows out in the woods here that we gather and process from the bark.

And it is hands down the most popular product that we make. It’s unbelievable how people respond to that.

If we’re going to talk about the seeds that we sell this year, the number one selling seeds, for some reason are pineapple brown cherries.

And I can’t put my finger on why that is. It’s pretty common.

You can buy pineapple brown cherry’s from a number of seed sources. It’s not really unique that we offer it, but for some reason, and I mean, by a long shot, it’s the most popular scene that we’ve been selling this year.

It’s easy to grow. It’s very delicious.

I guess we have a nice photo of it on our website. I’m not sure what the appeal is, but boy, it’s really taken off. That one’s been really popular.

As far as books go, of course, The Artisan Herbalist is the number one seller it’s been moving like hotcakes. We’ve just been thrilled with how well-received is been.

We were Amazon’s number one bestseller for a while. But that’s selling new release when it came out. People have really been enjoying the book for sure.

As far as workshops that we offer. Seed saving has been a big one, you know, we do a number of seed saving workshops, people have really been coming back to if they’ve gardened in the past, they want to learn how to save seeds.

But even if they’re new to gardening, they realize the significance of learning how to save their own garden seeds. And that’s a class that I teach almost year-round, it seems like.

Brian: Overall, what would you say you like most about your business and your industry as a whole?

Bevin: I like meeting people, I like spending time with folks. I like to sit down and chat and everybody comes to conversation with them such a different place, different backgrounds, different histories, different religions, different politics, all these different things.

But when we come together, we’re not thinking about any of that we’re thinking about what we have in common, you know, and that’s pretty powerful stuff and I really do enjoy that.

And of everything that we do, that’s always the highlight is just all these wonderful people that I get to meet.

But also sometimes I’ll be out in the woods gathering plants. And I realized that, man, that’s my day at work right here is sitting out in the woods with my kids. And that’s pretty groovy too.

Brian: That’s awesome. On the other hand, if you can change one thing about your business or industry, what would it be?

Bevin: Yeah, that’s such a good question. And I don’t know if I have a good answer for you really, you know, I’ve tried to think about that.

One thing that I have the challenges us here at Small House Farm, is the seasons.

In the wintertime, it’s very difficult for us to do much of anything, because we’re not growing without harvesting. Sometimes travel can even be limited. But now, there’s something positive to be said about the natural cycle of the seasons. Even from a gardening standpoint, that cold, cold winter is really going to help keep the bug populations down the insect populations.

There are pluses to that as well, so I couldn’t choose that.

So I thought, well, what about the wacky weather that we have? That can be very challenging out here on the farm, when I’ve got all my ducks in a row here counting on the seed harvest to get me through and the gardens flooded?

That’s certainly a challenge too.

But at the same time, that’s kind of part of the fun of it all, are these unexpected challenges that we have to learn to overcome.

So if I could change one thing about my business, there’s nothing I would change. I have no answer for you Brian, I love it all.

Brian: That’s a great answer.

If we were to talk again, a year from now if we had you back on the show, what would you say would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with your progress both professionally and personally?

Bevin: Well, I’ve got a new book coming out next year. This is, you’re gonna hear it here first folks, this is the worldwide announcement, I suppose.

I’ve got a new book coming out from New Society Publishers, February of 22.

The Complete Guide to Seed & Nut Oils.

It’s all about growing and forging seeds and nuts specifically for oil extraction. That’s another thing that we do at Small House Farm, we extract seed into oil, we use it as ingredients and our wellness products, as well as offer, you know, just the oil for culinary purposes as well.

And so for me to be super satisfied, 12 months from now, I want that book to come out as a smashing success. I want people to get their hands on it and really, really enjoy and make use of it. That’s the thing. It’s fun to read a book and enjoy it. But I want people to use these books to take this knowledge and make the world a better place.

Brian: What would you say are the obstacles standing in your way of getting there?

Bevin: Right now the greatest obstacle that I have is that most places have had to close down. And we don’t know if they’re going to be able to stay open. That’s kind of where I’m at, right?

So this is kind of a tricky place to even have an opinion in this world right now, what we want to say about how that works, but regardless, we all have different approaches to what we think the solution may be and we may not agree with each others solutions.

But we all have the same end goal. We all want the world to get back to where it once was, so we can all spend time together in person again, right?

But you asked me what my favorite thing about the business was, and my favorite thing is spending time with people. And for all of 2020, I wasn’t even allowed to, you know, we did a lot of virtual stuff and I guess that’s very nice.

We should be blessed that we have this opportunity to meet this virtual wonderland, certainly. But is that the stage during a meal with somebody and shake hands with people.

So for me, the greatest challenge that I have is the challenge that the whole world is facing, it’s possibly the greatest challenge that we’re all facing, as people, as business owners over we want to look at things. That is our greatest challenge, isn’t it?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

You’ve been on this journey for eight years on this particular half of it, this Small House Farm journey.

What advice would you have blanket advice out there for other business owners that want to take their passion and turn it into something that can make a difference, but it’s also sustainable?

Bevin: Yeah, to make sure you’re having fun, you know, and that might seem cliche, I suppose. But that’s what it is.

Obviously, you got to think about the bottom line and you got to think about marketing and you got to think about all these different things. And that certainly comes into play.

But none of that matters if you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing.

It’s all about pleasure, right?

We’re lucky if we get to hang out on this planet, 60, 70 years, that’s all you get, right? And then you’re done.

You want to enjoy it. You want to enjoy what you’re doing, if you believe in what you’re doing as a small business owner if you truly enjoy that, and maybe it’s not even considered work, even it is more challenging times.

That passion, that pleasure that you have, your customers will pick up on that. They’ll feed from that.

You’ll be able to bring that pleasure and translate into something that they’re going to want to exchange for Federal Reserve Notes, I suppose.

But at the end of the day, all that matters is that you enjoy what you’re doing and everyone else enjoys what they’re doing. We can find a way to kind of overlap that pleasure.

Brian: Fabulous. Yeah, that’s, that’s great. Thanks, Bevin.

I think you have a positive perspective but you also keep things nice and light. I really appreciate that. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer?

Bevin: Where can people get a copy of my new book The Artisan Herbalist? h

Brian: There we go.

Bevin: And if anybody’s interested in that they can get copies via my website, SmallHouseFarm.com. It’s also available on Bookshop, Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Brian: Awesome. Also, where could listeners who are interested in everything else that you talked about, where can they find out more about you and Small House Farm?

Bevin: So the website definitely the central hub for all things Small House Farm, which is again, SmallHouseFarm.com.

But folks can also connect with us via our Instagram, or Facebook page, which is also Small House Farm on our YouTube channel. For folks that are visual learners, we have a YouTube channel, you can find also under Small House Farm, where you can spend time with us out in the gardens or foraging making maple syrup.

Any of the adventures that happen here at the homestead are going to find their way to YouTube. And that’s a great community for us to connect to that as well.

Brian: This has been a great talk I can’t wait to see more from you. I can’t wait to see this new book coming out and be able to look over your other stuff coming out.

Thanks so much for being on The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Bevin: Thank you so much for having me, what fun.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Bevin was a lot of fun to chat with. He has a lot of great ideas, and just his whole energy about him was just fun to be around and inspiring.

I think I’d say that the most about this conversation was very inspiring in terms of if you know you’re doing things right, if you can’t come up with a single thing that you’d like to change about your business, and the industry that you’re working in, it’s a good thing.

It just seems like he’s in a really great place and moving in a really great direction.

I want to point out something that you might be able to use in your business, two major things.

First thing, the teaching factor that Bevin has built into his business from the very beginning. It started out as a process of teaching and most of us don’t start businesses that way.

Most of us start businesses from a different direction and then we grow into a teaching factor. We eventually may write a book or we eventually may put on a course or speak at an event regarding what it is that we do and train other people how to do it.

But he went the other way around where he began teaching. And then that grew into a product source and a website and all these other things.

I think it’s a huge factor in how happy he’s been in building his business.

That comes to the second point.

What he mentioned at the very end about having a good time is so imperative to your business, because if you aren’t having a good time, nothing else seems to matter.

It’s not that it’s the most important thing, it is a factor that is necessary for doing the most important things in your business. If you want to get a message out there, if you want to get a product out, there is a service out there.

You have to be having fun in order to sustain that business growth had to handle the ups and the downs, the goods and the bads that come along with running a business.

Those factors, I think really make a big difference and it’s something we can all learn from.

Also looking at how he structured his books, and how he structures his courses and workshops that you could find online.

Be sure and check that out because I think everybody can learn a lot from Bevin Cohen.

I really appreciate having him on the show.

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.

Dyan Twining – Roost & Root

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Dyan Twining - Roost & Root
Dyan Twining – Roost & Root
RoostandRoot.com
RoostandRoot.com

Dyan and her husband Montie co-founded Roost & Root to help you, “Find your inner farmer.”

Join us for a fun conversation as Dyan talks about the companies journey from building their first 20 chicken coops to the amazing ride they’ve had serving and building relationships with customers from coast to coast.

Be sure to checkout their quality Cedar Chicken Coops and Gardening products as well!

➡️ Call Today – (877) 741-2667

➡️ https://roostandroot.com/​

Transcription

Dyan: Hearing from customers because I do talk to a lot of them after the sale. Like there’s always like a driver who’s like, “I’m gonna get chickens,” and then there’s other spouse a lot of times he’s kind of like, “okay, not super excited about this, but whatever.”

And I hear from the other spouse that’s not super excited and like, had no idea I would love having chickens.

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: Dyan Twining co-founded Roost and Root in 2013, with her husband Montie, their passion and slogan is, “find your inner farmer.”

At Roost and Root, they manufacture high quality backyard farm and garden lifestyle products that help fulfill that slogan.

She enjoys keeping chickens and gardening as well as deep sea fishing and running.

Dyan, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Dyan: Hi, thank you for having me.

Brian: Yeah, it’s great having you here.

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

Dyan: So together with my husband, we run Roost and Root, like you said, we are manufacturing company based out of Dripping Springs, Texas.

So we’re a little bit west of downtown Austin, and we have a manufacturing facility where we we started in 2013 manufacturing and selling chicken coops primarily chicken coops.

In 2020, we actually changed our name to Roost and Root. We used to be Urban Coop Company. But we sold our coops through the years and we kept getting a lot of customers saying, you know, “what else you guys going to build?”

They liked our products. They liked the quality, and what goes hand in hand with backyard coops, and its gardening products.

So we changed our name to Roost and Root, to kind of reflect both of our interests.

Brian: Fabulous.

So what led you into the business to begin with?

Dyan: So my husband is a builder and an entrepreneur and we moved to a piece of property in Texas, and I got some chickens, and I could never find a chicken coop that functioned like I wanted it to.

I wanted it to be easy to clean, I wanted it to be easy to take care of the chickens, give them food, give them water.

So Montie being a builder, I said, “you need to build some chicken coops.”

Well, a little bit more to that.

Montie was a builder, had a commercial construction company at the time, and did a big project for a company and we are leaving to go to town for Thanksgiving.

We drive through the drive thru of this Starbucks that he had helped to build. And we were still waiting to get paid for the work that had been done.

And we’re thinking this whole working for someone else is not so much fun.

So as we’re driving, we’re talking and I say, “you really need to build cute chicken coops, I think if you build cute chicken coops people buy them.”

He’s like, “no, that’s kind of a dumb idea.”

But I had chickens, I had friends who would come here and they say, you know, oh, I want to keep chickens.”

I’m like, “well, you should do it.”

And they’re like, “but I don’t even know how to get started, jow do I get a chicken coop?”

And I said, “well, you should have your husband build you one because that’s what I did.”

And they’re like, “my husband can’t build me a chicken coop.”

And so it just kind of sparked the idea that maybe there was something because we are close to Austin, we’re probably a suburb more than our own little town anymore.

More and more neighborhoods are popping up.

We don’t live in a neighborhood, we live on a piece of property.

So you know, when you live on a pretty big piece of property, you can kind of have whatever in your yard, it doesn’t have to look pretty, it can just be functional.

But if you live in a normal suburban or urban setting, and you only have so much space in your yard, and you decide you want to take up some of that space with a chicken coop that you’re going to have to stare at all the time you want it to look nice.

You want it to add to the beauty of your yard not necessarily, you know, take away.

That’s when I said, “you know, you need to build chicken coops and they need to be cute.”

He’s like, well, “that’s kind of a dumb idea.”

But he humored me and I came up with a bunch of drawings, and the first 10 or so were ugly. And I didn’t like them. And I said, “no, keep trying keep trying.”

Finally he hit on what is our backyard coop.

And I said, “okay, people, I think will buy that, we should build some.”

And I said, “well build me one, and I’ll try it.”

And he said, “well, if I’m going to build one, I’m going to build 20.”

I said, “okay,” and so he built 20.

And we just tried it to see what would happen.

We put them on Craigslist, and they sold out within about a week, kind of realize that we had something, we knew that if we wanted to make it a business that supported our family, that it needed to be something beyond Craigslist, it couldn’t be just a local thing or a regional thing.

We needed to be able to build something that we could ship and sell nationally.

So we worked with the shipping companies to come up with box sizes, and, I mean there’s so much to it that we really didn’t know at first what all was involved in it.

But the initial design was something that is within about a quarter of an inch of the max size that you can ship in a box through like a ground shipment company UPS, FedEx.

So that’s kind of how it started.

At first, it was very small. It was Montie and I, are kids, and we had an employee and kind of grown from there.

Brian: Fabulous.

So from the business perspective, you found your first customers on Craigslist. Where did you go from there?

Dyan: When we decided that it was probably going to work and that it needed to be national. You know, really our main source of advertising is Google AdWords pay per click advertising.

It’s a double edged sword, let me tell ya.

We are finding though, as we’ve been in business now eight years, that one thing that we had that was a very gratifying, but very surprising is we have a lot of repeat customers, upwards of 20, 30%.

Like who knew people needed multiple chicken coops, but they do and we’re certainly grateful.

And it was really gratifying to us to the folks that work in the shop, when somebody that we’ve sent something to comes back and, you know, parts with their treasure and get another one.

But our source of advertising initially was Google AdWords, some social media advertising, we’re working really hard to morph it into something that will less corporate, less Google, right?

Brian: Oh, I understand. So that’s great.

Where are you finding most of your newest customers from nowadays?

Dyan: We’ve sold into all 50 states, believe it or not, it’s a really interesting kind of phenomenon to us anyways, that the major group of customers is that upper north east part of the United States.

Think that, from what we could figure out, is that they like cedarwood.

All of our products are made out of cedar, that’s all we build with, which is a really high quality material, it lasts a long time.

It does well and cold climates, warm climates, wet climates, dry climates, that’s kind of our big customer base.

But we also sell a lot to the west coast, pretty good idea who our customers are, but we sell to all kinds of people, but typically suburban urban folks who are interested in turning off the TV and getting out of the house.

You know, we’d like to talk about it in the office and our meetings that we’re trying to sell like an experience and not just a chicken coop or a greenhouse or garden product.

But somebody that gets people outside and gets people starting to think about where you know, the typical person can’t have a cow or whatever it might be, you know, you might not be able to source all of the food on your table.

But you could put a dozen eggs in your refrigerator and some tomatoes and it’s a really gratifying thing that people have responded really well to, you know, put down your phone and go take care of something outside and do double duty, you get some exercise, you get off the TVs get off the couch and you get something for it.

Brian: Absolutely, that’s great stuff.

With all those new customers or they mainly find you through your standard places, your PPC and your social medias or anywhere else that they’re that they’re coming in contact with you for the first time?

Dyan: Certainly a lot of word of mouth.

As our customer base builds, there’s a lot more word of mouth.

If we do a little bit of print advertising First, I think print advertising is going away. But probably a combination of those PPC, and this last year, we really dove deep into trying to create content that’s helpful. Social media content, YouTube content.

I mean, that’s really a focus for us going forward is, you know, obviously, we’re here to support the people that work for us and earn a living.

But we also want people to, you know, it does us no good to sell something to somebody. If they don’t like what they purchased from us. It does us no good. They don’t tell people they worse, say something bad.

And so we really want to have a focus on making sure that before the sale, people know what they’re getting into.

Then after the sale, making sure that they feel supported, that their questions are answered that they feel confident in what it is that they’ve purchased, whether it’s a chicken coop, or greenhouse or garden beds, whatever it might be.

Brian: Tell me more about that. What is your after sale?

What’s the process is you offer some type of, you know, ongoing customer service, right?

Have you guys run that?

Dyan: Okay, so, that’s a really interesting.

When you’re really small, you do like every job that there is, I mean, I’ve packaged coops, I’ve built coops, and there’s this kind of a small group of us.

We’ve done every job as an owner, one of the privileges that you get in addition to some of the headaches that you get from owning your own business, that one of the privileges as you bring people on, you get to choose what jobs you keep, and what jobs you give to other people.

I love talking to customers on the telephone. So my main job is answering the telephone customer support and and we find that it’s really helpful because I get that feedback loop.

I’m sitting really close to my husband who does the majority of the design work and I can tell him I’ve talked to 20 people in the last week that are like I don’t really like whatever it is or I really would like that’s usually how it is I get enough people saying you guys should sell whatever and I mean I could turn and tell him, “hey, we should consider creating this,” or whatever it might be, whatever product it is.

So we try and plaster our phone number everywhere we want people to reach out to us and if it’s not me the answers the phone it’s actually my oldest daughter who answers the telephone part time so she can stay home with her twins.

But it’s just such an important role or job and the company curse I think it’s probably the most important but I’m sure some of the other folks in the company would think differently.

But it’s all works together right but customer support it’s critical before and it’s critical after because again, it doesn’t stop once you sell it to somebody because you want somebody to like what it is that they purchase.

You want them to love it you want it to love it so much that they tell their friends learn to love it so much that they buy another one and when I was training my daughter to answer the telephone, I’m like, “we are not about get the sale at all costs.”

If you are talking to somebody and they’re like, “I just don’t know if this is gonna work for me whatever it might be,” you know talk to them and you might at the end of the conversation be like, “you know what, this is probably not going to work for you.”

I think people appreciate that and I think people value that and so they may not purchase from you but somebody else that they might tell that it is the right product for them might purchase from you as far as after the sale.

So our chicken coop number one, that the very first one that the family came and picked it up from us that purchased it off Craigslist, they still have the chicken coop, I still keep in touch with them.

And they have moved three times with their chicken coop and chicken coop number 20.

So the last of the original batch we actually sold to a military family that they’ve moved with their coop 11 times and every time they set it up!

They send me a picture and they keep in touch.

I have lots of customers that reach out to me after the sale.

You know my chicken looks funny, or ongoing questions because I think that’s part of them enjoying their coop is getting their questions answered.

There’s so much chicken information out there that sometimes it can be overwhelming and a little daunting. I think that there’s a certain segment of the chicken world that don’t try and make it complicated but chickens don’t have to be complicated and they don’t have to be scary.

But you get on Google and you start reading and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what do they get into?”

And so they call me and I’m like, “okay, let’s talk about your concerns, whatever they might be.”

And they usually end up once we get off the telephone, “oh, thank you. I really appreciate it.” Because I’m not an alarmist, when it comes to chickens, chickens are easy to keep. They really are.

Lots of after sales support lots of after customer support.

Brian: It’s really funny you talk about that. I’ve mentioned it on the show before my wife is in the process.

Actually, it’s been well over a year that she’s been in the process of working her way up to getting chickens, and I completely understand all the confusion over complications of the process.

Dyan: Yeah, you know, I actually had a customer, tell me one time, she says, sort of like, when you are getting ready to have your very first baby, you’re like, “oh, my gosh, I need to get this and I have to get this, and what happens if this happens?”

And she says, and then you realize, by the time you’ve had four kids that really you need like a car seat and some diapers.

That’s a little bit like what chickens are, you know, they need a safe place to sleep, food and water. And beyond that, you can make it extra if you want. But you don’t have to.

Absolutely have her a call me. lol.

Brian: Yeah, I will! lol

So who would you say is the ideal client for Roost and Root?

If you had to describe that person, who would that be?

Dyan: I think there’s a couple of groups that we sell to but like, in our head when we’re designing something, or we’re marketing something, our target customer is 30 to 50 it’s 50/50 males, females it is you know, we used to think oh, chickens are a girl thing and or, oh, chickens are a boy thing.

50/50, that’s kind of proven out over the years, they just probably due to rules and regulations, what have you they live in a single family home, although we do have some chicken coops and some really interesting places.

But you know, so those middle years, usually they have kids, they have pets and other pets. They have nice yards that they want to keep looking nice, but they want to do something different they want to have some chickens get some eggs, use your chickens is sort of natural pest control.

So that I would say that’s kind of the majority.

Now there’s another group that kind of recently retired group that that is a little bit older age demographic, that they’ve got a little bit of time on their hands, you know, they’re kind of interested in puttering around and want to get a few chickens and have good memories of feeding chickens when they were a little kid at their grandma’s farm or what have you.

And so I guess those are kind of our two like target groups.

Brian: Oh, that’s great, perfect way to describe it.

That’s, yeah, really cool that thought pattern that people are going through that’s very interesting.

What are your top selling products right now?

Dyan: Our top selling chicken coop is our Round-Top Stand-Up.

It’s just a great easy to keep clean. The coop it holds six chickens, which is a really good number for people when they’re just starting out, not too few that you’re like, “what am I doing this for, I’m not getting enough eggs.”

But not so many that you’re overwhelmed by the prospect.

So definitely the Stand Up.

And then we recently introduced a greenhouse or Slant Roof Greenhouse. And we suspected that it would be popular, I don’t think we knew that it was going to be as popular as it is.

But people are really responding.

It’s been for sale for like two weeks, but people are buying it and really like it.

Brian: That’s great.

Overall, what do you like best about your business and your industry?

Dyan: This was kind of surprising to us at first when we started it without we don’t want to have employees there just a headache. And let’s see what we could do without having so many employees.

But kind of as we’ve been in business, and as we’ve grown and added employees, I would say that that’s one of the aspects that I really enjoy is having employees and I guess working with them to create a good product that people like.

My husband describes it as chicken coops and gardening products, you know, it’s adding to the world like you’re doing no harm to the world.

With these products like you’re doing, not necessarily good, I mean we’re all here to earn a living for our families but your way out into the world in a positive way.

So I think that that was one of the aspects that was kind of surprising to us is just that it was that it’s enjoyable to have employees and we have incredible employees that really want to put out a quality product.

We have a really generous return policy.

And we do it on purpose, partly because, you know, it’s a little bit weird to buy something that’s pretty expensive, sight unseen.

We do we have this really generous return policy in the eight years we’ve been in business. I bet you we’ve had 10 chicken coops returned.

Brian: Wow.

Dyan: Total, you could probably name the people that have returned chicken coops.

And when those chicken coops come back, it hurts everybody’s feelings.

They’re like, “what in the world, how could they not like it?”

You know, poured our heart and soul in getting this shipped out to them. And so that’s just a gratifying aspect.

And then just hearing from customers, because I do talk to a lot of them after the sale.

A lot of times one spouse is gung ho, there’s always like a driver who’s like, “I’m gonna get chickens!” And then there’s other spouse, a lot of times, he’s kind of like, “okay, not super excited about this, but whatever.”

And I hear from the other spouse that’s not super excited.

And then like, had no idea I would love having chickens, or I enjoy them so much more than I ever thought.

That’s really gratifying to, again, you’re kind of doing something that adds positivity, not negativity.

Brian: Awesome. That’s so cool. So cool to hear.

Commercial Break: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I want 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. I’m going to talk about the second way, which is called being consistent.

I covered this all in chapter two. And I’m not talking about being consistent in a very generic way, I’m talking about specifically being consistent in your communications with your customers, not just customers you’re looking to have but customers you’ve already had, and getting them to know like, and trust you. Now, you could be doing this through paid advertising.

But you could also be doing it organically through social media, via videos, via blog posts via podcast like this, getting out there so that people can get to know like, and trust you so that when they do become customers, they don’t just become customers that enjoy and love your products or services they know like and trust you as a person that’s a value they can’t get from big companies.

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: On the flip side of that, if there was one thing that you could change about either your business specifically or your industry as a whole, what would it be?

Dyan: Wow, the world sort of lives and dies by the internet, gosh, you could have an unhappy customer that, you know, for whatever reason, is unhappy.

And they could do a lot of damage to you.

They could just go multiple places and write bad things about you. That lives forever.

You know, when it’s pre-internet, somebody had a bad experience. You know, they tell their neighbor and a couple of people and it kind of died there.

But somebody has a bad experience with you for whatever reason. It is there forever and you really have to work hard to overcome that.

Certainly, that’s the toughest thing.

And you know, we live and die by reviews and a bad review.

Again, just like I returned chicken coop. They hurt all of our feelings.

Our shop managers like, “I didn’t sleep last night thinking about that guy who left us a four star review.”

Brian: That is it for sure.

Well, it sounds like you’re doing a lot of great preventative measures, having the return policy and everything else to to try and keep that from occurring.

That sounds good in that direction.

If we were to talk again and say like a year from now, and we were to look back over the past 12 months and everything that had happened, what would have had to have happened for you to feel happy with your progress both professionally and in business or personally and in business?

Dyan: That’s a really good question.

Um, 2020 was a crazy year for us.

So we’re in 2021, we launched the greenhouse, and that’s like our major product launch for this year, from kind of conception to getting it to market is about 1,500 hours of design, prototyping, testing, all of that kind of stuff.

So we’re kind of coming off of that in 2021.

And we’ve kind of committed to sort of doubling down on the products that we are currently selling our current product offering.

We’d like to spend the next year really refining our assembly instructions, refining our website, increasing content, the things that we’re proposing for the next year probably aren’t super exciting.

But for us, they add to the whole experience of it all and to customer satisfaction.

So really, the next 12 months for us is just really doing what we do, well, even better.

That is our focus for 2021.

So in 12 months, if we look back, we’re like, you know, we had lots of customers who are happy with us. Obviously, we have to sell things for all of us to put our kids through college and several people have in babies, that kind of thing, you know, that work here, we got to do all of that.

But that’s a given right, every business has to sell stuff to be able to stay in business.

But we really just want to focus on what we’ve been doing, and just get even better take it up a notch.

Again, we were so small for some many years that Montie designed the products wrote the instructions, that kind of thing that now that we’ve got some other heads in it, that we could feel like we could do a better job at giving people a better experience.

Brian: In building on that customer experience over the next year, besides just the everyday things that come along with life and having a good size work family there.

What other obstacles are standing in your way of getting there, would you say?

Dyan: I would say one of the obstacles…and this is not my area really is, How do we tell people, How do we get the word out about our company, that is not pay per click?

It is like, it’s tough for us.

It’s a little bit like crack cocaine is how my husband describes it, got to do it, but then you do it, you got to do more and more and more.

And that is an obstacle because those pay per click costs. We’ve put people in business, and we’ve driven prices up through our success. So that’s definitely one obstacle.

You know, another big obstacle that we’re facing is material availability.

We’re committed to using high quality materials and the costs have gone up like crazy.

We’re hoping they come down, but whoever really lowers their prices, right?

I mean, that’s not really a common thing that you see happen.

And another obstacle is labor availability.

It’s a tight labor market out there. We’re having a tough time hiring.

We have a very competitive wage. We have a good work environment.

We feed everybody on Thursdays, lunch.

I mean, why wouldn’t they want to come work here, but we’re having a tough time finding people.

Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, when we have very little turnover, so we’re trying to add to our staff, and it’s just kind of the economic situation out there is making it tough to find people.

Brian: Absolutely.

And besides the things you already mentioned, how else has the whole COVID-19 thing that’s been happening for the past year?

We’re recording this in March of 2021, so how has that affected your business?

Dyan: So very positively in that we had an incredible 2020.

I think that couple things kind of came together. At the very beginning of the COVID scare people. There were some worry about just food supply chains, kind of in combination with people who were like, wait a minute, I am so dependent on my grocery store for every aspect of my food.

What can I do to maybe be a little less dependent on them, combined with the fact that people aren’t traveling and so they are home and wanting to get outside.

I mean, it just was this really interesting set of circumstances that led us to have a really good year as far as sales, that it was a good year for us.

That now then there’s on the flip side been some of the challenges that I think probably everybody’s experience.

Shipping is a mess.

Sometimes, you know, just the shipping companies are fairly overwhelmed.

We’re all ordering stuff that gets sent to us that, you know, you probably used to be more sort of locally distributed kind of things.

Materials availability has been tough, probably, in part because some shipping issues and other issues going into it.

And like I said that the labor issue, I think that there’s jobs out there, there’s just some disincentives for people to work, unfortunately.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

So you’ve been in business for over eight years now. What advice would you have to other business owners that would like to start a business similar to yours?

Dyan: Be prepared to do every job.

I really do think, though, that that has been part of our success is that I am not asking anybody that works out in the shop to do something that I haven’t done.

You know, I’ll tell you one of the toughest parts of our business is putting the parts in either the crate or box the sounds so simple, people look at me, they’re like, “I don’t get why you’re telling me this is hard.”

But making sure that the correct parts are in the box in a way that they’re going to show up, not damaged, so that they’re all the correct parts.

And if you’ve ever bought anything that you had to put together, you got halfway through the project and realize you didn’t have all of the parts, you know that frustration.

But that is a really tough job.

There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of parts to it.

And so that was my job for a long time. So now I know I have a lot of grace for the person who the people who are out in the shop doing that job.

So I’m having a familiarity with all of the different aspects that go into what it is you’re trying to do, I think really helps that as you grow.

If we had started out with outsourcing, let’s say answering the telephones.

Not that that was even a possibility when we started right like I need, you do what you got to do. But I need, let’s just say, you know, you outsource some part of it, we certainly wouldn’t have had the ideas that we have, some of the products that we’ve come out with that have ended up being really good sellers.

We wouldn’t have an idea of who to market to and who to sell to.

So definitely just being hands on is critical and just valuing a customer.

I know, I put myself in customers position, if I paid this amount of money for something, how would I want it to function?

How would I want it to arrive to me?

How would I want the communication to be?

That kind of thing, so just think it goes beyond sort of the customer’s always right, because I think it’s more that the customer is it?

I mean, without him, you wouldn’t be here.

And then on the flip side, you know, Montie, always, he teases me because, you know I’m talking to customers, and they’re asking me different things.

And I’m like, “sure, we can do that, sure, we could do that.”

And he’s like, “you write the checks that then the production shop has to cash.”

And I’m like, “Yes.”

That’s the other thing to realize, too, when you’re sort of starting a business, that everybody’s integral to getting your product out there.

Without customers, you have nobody to sell stuff to, without our production shop. Or maybe even worse, a production shop that doesn’t care, or doesn’t do a good job.

We would have unhappy customers, without you know, the design team, we’d have nothing to sell them.

No one particular aspect is more important than the other.

Brian: That’s a really important idea to convey.

So yeah, that’s really great.

What could a listener do, who’s interested in finding out more about Roost and Root?

Dyan: Certainly started our website, RoostandRoute.com.

Take a look through there.

We have a extensive blog section that we try and put informative information out there.

And certainly that’s a good place to start but then on every page on the website is our phone number. And call, we encourage people to call and have a human conversation person to person about what it is you’re trying to do what what you kind of want to accomplish, what your budget is, what your worries are.

I would encourage people to call.

Brian: Alright, well, Dyan, I could tell why you’re in charge of customer service there.

Dyan: Lol, because I can talk alot.

Brian: No, it’s great. It’s you’re very clear and you get straight to the point.

It’s a lot of great information.

I know, I’m going to be relisting to this and I encourage all of our listeners to go back over this because there’s a lot of great meat on the bone there.

Dyan Twining of Roost and Root, thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: It was really great sitting and talking with Dyan.

Roost and Root, is certainly an interesting concept, because not only…we didn’t even gets to talk that much about the combination between gardening and chickens, which is actually very common.

If you’ve heard some of our earlier episodes where we discussed it, it is a growing trend for people not to just get into chickens that have never had them before.

Same people to also have gardens.

I know that’s the case in my family, there’s a lot of great stuff that Dyan brought up a few of them that I wanted to point out.

One is her discussing without using this actual term, but there’s a term out there by a marketing expert named Dean Jackson and he calls it the before, during and after unit.

What that is, is the customer experience.

And anybody that has a business can break up their business into before, meaning that everything that happens before they’ve done any business with you, it’s a certain aspect of marketing that most of us focus on is is how do you get them to get here.

That’s the before unit.

And then during, is all the people who are current customers or recent customers.

And that’s, what are you doing in communication with them during that period of time?

And then you’ve got the after unit, which are people that were customers previously?

How are you remarketing to them?

How are you communicating with them?

What other options do they have after they’ve been a customer and her discussing that customer experience really brought forth that idea in my mind, and you can hear her talk about each of those pieces, and how they’re looking to enhance each piece, which is really cool.

I love how she talked about real briefly about not making a sale at all cost.

Getting to the point to where you’re confident enough in your products that you can say, “this isn’t necessarily for you.”

That’s really a powerful statement.

And it’s brings up that idea from Miracle on 34th Street.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that when Macy’s was directing people to go to Kimball’s and then vice versa. And people started offering their competitors, their so called competitors as a different option for the customer.

And without being corny about it, it actually is a very useful tool.

For one thing, it shows that you’re confident about what you’re selling, and you’re not trying to shove it down their throats.

And that’s a really cool thing that your customer service can provide, or your sales staff can provide. That’s really important.

All in all, Roost and Root is a really cool company, I look forward to seeing more of the content that they put out there.

She talked about their growing content marketing, and in looking for more ways to tell people about their business versus just using PPC, you know, pay per click over and over and over again.

It’s an easy way of doing it but it does tie you in and make you dependent so that was a great point.

And it was really great meeting Dyan, and I can’t wait to see what they’re doing 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.

Shannie McCabe – Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds | Rareseeds.com

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Shannie McCabe – Rareseeds.com

 

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – Rareseeds.com

 

Shannie McCabe joins us to talk about what it’s like to be garden educator and catalog writer for Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

See what Baker Creek has to offer today and be sure to pickup a catalog! – https://www.rareseeds.com

Also, checkout Shannie’s terrific videos on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCToFIe32MeC-P8Z4Uptax_w

Transcription

Shannie: I was introduced to Baker Creek, and I thought wow, I love this catalog. This is the most beautiful, fascinating catalog. The stories behind these heirlooms are phenomenal.

As a market farmer I made sure to grow Baker Creek varieties because I wanted something that was like colorful and interesting to engage passers by at the farmers market.

I wanted something more interesting to stand out.

I had subscribed to the email newsletter for Baker Creek, and that’s where I saw a email saying they were hiring. So I responded and I moved to the Missouri Ozarks when I was in my early 20s, to a co-garden manager.

And then I started reading the catalog and the rest is history.

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: Shannie McCabe studied environmental horticulture and sustainable agriculture at University of Rhode Island and has worked on farms growing organic veggies and flowers for a decade.

She has been the farm manager for Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, and is currently a garden educator and catalog writer for the company.

She has traveled internationally for Baker Creek, searching for rare and unusual heirloom seeds to offer in the award winning Baker Creek catalog.

Shannie McCabe, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Shannie: Thank you for having me.

Brian: Yeah, why don’t you let everyone know a little bit more about what it is that you do.

Shannie: Sure, yeah.

So basically, I teach gardening skills. I’m really really obsessed with heirloom seeds, and with gardening and market farming, and in all manner of small farming, gardening, permaculture, growing and homesteading, and then how we use those heirlooms in the kitchen and for crafts and such.

So I’m just really obsessed with heirlooms and all the different forms. I was formerly a co garden manager with a couple other people, I helped to write the seed catalog, we’ve got a few different writers on the catalog these days.

But I read the catalog, I helped to write content for our YouTube page.

Our YouTube channel is called, Rareseeds.

Then making Facebook videos and Instagram videos, and basically just getting out into the garden and into the kitchen with various heirloom varieties and educating about them.

Brian: That’s fabulous. So can you tell people who may be new to the gardening scene, especially what what heirloom seeds are and how they’re different from from the typical seeds?

Shannie: Sure, yeah. heirloom seeds are open pollinated varieties.

That means that they have been saved and passed down from generation to generation. They’re not hybrids, they’re not f1 hybrid, they have open pollination, which means their seeds can be reliably saved, year after year.

Typically, heirloom seeds have a history or a story, there’s some significance to how they came about whether they were passed along through generations within a family or they’re notably grown in a specific region, or they were bred for some specific use.

But typically, heirlooms have a story.

Some people define heirlooms as being 50 years or older. Although that definition isn’t consistent across the board at Baker Creek, we don’t really follow the 50 years rule, because there are some really fantastic open pollinated varieties that have been created in the last few years.

And we would really like to highlight and give reverence to that breeding work because it’s really something fantastic.

For all intents and purposes of a seed saver, and it is an heirloom seed, I mean, we can reliably save the seeds year after year, we’re going to get approximately the same crop as long as we prevent cross pollination if there’s a threat of that.

To go on to the biology side just a little bit. Basically, when you have a hybrid variety, that means it was cross bred more recently, and the genes haven’t been stabilized.

So basically, if you have a hybrid tomato and you try to save the seeds of that tomato, what you plant the next season, the fruits may not actually look anything like the fruit that you’ve saved the seed from because the genetics have not been stabilized and it’s a new cross.

Hybrids typically do have something called hybrid vigor, where, because it is a new genetic cross, sometimes the plants will yield higher or they will have more disease resistance and a bit more vigor and strength.

But heirlooms have really incredible depth of flavor.

Because most of the time, what is most often the trait that is selected for an heirloom breeding is flavor. So heirlooms are typically more flavorful.

They’re densely nutritious, they don’t yield as pie. Typically, that’s not always the case. But typically they don’t have as high of yield. And the thing about heirlooms is they’re typically a little more regionally adapted.

So you may find this the most perfect tomato that grows so beautifully, and a certain part of Oregon, but if you try to grow it in Florida might not do so well.

A lot of times heirlooms can also be regionally adapted, then there are also heirlooms out there that are more broadly adapted to growing in a wider range, but typically more regionally adapted.

Brian: Oh, that’s great. That’s great.

What can you tell us about yourself about how you ended up here?

How did you end up working with Baker Creek?

Shannie: I grew up on a three by seven mile island off the coast of Rhode Island called, Block Island and grew up on a farm and I didn’t have the opportunity to travel very much.

When I was young, I was really, really fascinated by the people that came to the island that I lived on for tourism. And to work in the tourism industry out there.

I met a lot of people from all over the world.

I was always really fascinated by cultural exchange, mostly through food, I was just really fascinated by the different kinds of foods that people ate, because I did have a pretty narrow, like small worldview because I was from a small town. I was always as a kid fascinated by other cultures and just thought it was really interesting to like, learn about other people’s languages and their history. And just to take a deep dive into what it’s like to live somewhere, you know, that’s not a three by seven mile island.

That was kind of the first interest in heirloom type stories.

Then I worked on a local historic farm that’s located on Block Island. I used to help pick basil flowers and harvest pumpkins and pick cherry tomatoes when I was a kid.

That was kind of like when I was bit by the farming bug and I was really, really loved that.

I went off to college and I studied environmental horticulture and sustainable agriculture.

Through college, I had some work study jobs, working at the greenhouses, and was really actually still standing is really beautiful, old glass greenhouse that I got to work in.

That was really fun.

And I also had a job at the Agricultural Experiment Station.

So I got to work on the small farm there. After college, I just was doing market farming and working on farms. And I was introduced to Baker Creek.

I thought, wow, I love this catalog. This is the most beautiful, fascinating catalog. The stories behind these heirlooms are phenomenal.

So as a market farmer, I made sure to grow Baker Creek varieties because I wanted something that was like colorful, and interesting to engage passers by at the farmers market.

I wanted something more interesting to stand out.

I had subscribed to the email newsletter for Baker Creek. And that’s where I saw a email saying they were hiring.

So I responded and I moved to the Missouri Ozarks when I was in my early 20s to the co-garden manager. And then I started writing the catalog and the rest is history.

Brian: Wow. That’s fabulous.

That’s really great.

So talk a little more about the catalog. Because I’m not sure if those in the audience if you’ve come across the Baker Creek catalog yet or not, but it really is an amazing thing.

Most catalogs you have out there just whole home but the Baker Creek catalog really is something amazing.

Let’s talk a little bit about that and how you got in a position of writing for it.

Shannie: Right, so the the basic free catalog is, it’s the Rareseed catalog.

And then we have the Whole Seed catalog, we actually offer two catalogs, one is free.

One is more like a coffee table book. It’s like 400 plus pages of articles and recipes and stories.

And it’s really something that doesn’t actually have an expiration date.

You could keep it around for years and years. It’s more like a collector’s item.

So we have a book that you can purchase.

And then of course we always will have the free catalog. You can order those on our website rareseeds.com by the way if you’re interested in getting yourself a catalog this winter.

I’m going to take you back a little bit to explain the catalog because there’s a story behind it. It’s really cool.

The owner and founder of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, his name is Jere Gettle. And Jere grew up, his parents were kind of homesteaders they did farming and homesteading, few different states and they lived in Oregon and Montana and also the Missouri Ozarks where the company is located today.

Throughout his childhood, Jere was always fascinated by his family’s seed catalog collection. They had this really comprehensive collection of old antique seed catalogs.

And Jere was really fascinated by this.

He also was kind of catching the tail end of the hay day of the seed catalogs. So he was still getting them old Burpee seed catalog and Gambler’s and there’s a few others that may be Livingston.

He would order all these seed catalogs and he would just revel in the beauty of these heirloom seeds. He thought they were really fascinating.

And he also happened to notice that there was quite a decline in the number of seeds available, the number of varieties available and the the number of seed companies, small seed companies that were out there.

This was no coincidence, Jere was growing up in the 80s. And that was around the time that the seed industry in America was really consolidating to be just a few mega seed corporations and big seed houses.

A lot of the regionally specific small family owned seed companies have fallen by the wayside because they had just kind of lost the battle to the giant companies.

So he had a lot of this selja and love for the 1800s, 1900s seed catalogs, where there was a lot of showmanship, there were really beautiful lithograph plate illustrations, there were really amazing photos, lots of customer testimonials, and just just really fascinating kind of eye catching catalogs, he had noticed that they had become a little bit more bland, and not as exciting.

So he understood that some of the best times that a gardener has in the garden are actually in the winter, when you’re planning your garden for the next season.

That’s a really nice time for us gardeners, it’s cold outside, you can’t quite get out there just yet. But you’re just dreaming up your garden for the next season, you’re circling items and you’re just full of hope and wonderment about what you’re going to grow in this subsequent season.

So Jere really understood how important that part of gardening is, he made a catalog that reflected his love of going through the seed catalog and enjoying that process itself.

He put a lot of time into his seed descriptions and he really made sure to have colorful, engaging photos. And to really just embrace the experience of sitting down with your seat catalog, just kind of having a renaissance of that experience.

People really responded, people were really fascinated by somebody who brought kind of an old timey approach to the seed catalog.

It wasn’t all, you know, cut and dried business, it was more about something that’s beautiful to look at, and enjoyable to read and has a lot more back history and rich information than some of the seed companies have been doing.

So that’s kind of how he started designing his seed catalog. And each year it’s become bigger, and more colorful and more exuberant.

And I’m really grateful to get to contribute to that catalog.

I do help to write stories and to mostly I write descriptions. We have an amazing writer named Michelle Johnson, who’s writing a lot of the stories.

Also, Bevan Cohen has been helping to write the stories and write description.

So we’ve been all working together to make this really beautiful catalog, of course, our amazing photographer, Laura Stilson. She’s been taking fantastic photos for years now and really bringing excitement to the to the photos.

And Jere Gettle takes a lot of the photos and writes a lot of the content as well.

Brian: That’s really cool to hear kind of the background there. Because you could tell there’s, there’s quite a bit of a story he just went leafing through that you have such a broad job description.

Can you give us an idea of what a typical day would be or what the type of things that you would do on a daily basis?

Shannie: I will start my day going out into the garden and getting ideas for what I could teach viewers about in regards to how to garden better or how to use heirloom seeds.

So for instance, I will go out and notice that I have a bunch of beautiful blue butterfly pea flowers in bloom, and I will film myself harvesting them and then I’ll film myself dehydrating them and making them into powder.

And then I’ll say, oh, why don’t I make a recipe that people might want to try out.

And so I’ll maybe think of a recipe and film myself making it and take some photos throughout. Send that along to our editor and she will put it out on our social media pages on our YouTube.

You kinda have to fill in the gaps when you’re working with crops that people are generally not familiar with.

You have to do a lot of educating on the back end to get people to understand how are used. Otherwise, you know, you just don’t know what to do with these things.

So it’s good to put them into practice and to show people how they’re used in a practical sense.

So lots of video creation.

During catalog season, I will be writing descriptions like mad. I also always attend the National Heirloom Expo, which is an annual event that we put on at Baker Creek.

I usually go as a speaker and I helped to set the event up as well.

That is in Santa Rosa, California at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

And it’s usually the first week in September.

Brian: Great. Oh, fabulous.

For the average consumer out there that’s interested in heirloom seeds.

What makes Baker Creek different?

Why would they come to Baker creeks website or get a hold of one of their catalogs?

Shannie: There are a lot of reasons.

But I would say the educational side of it, we offer over 1,200 varieties in our catalog.

And you can find a lot of really rare stuff really arcane varieties that you may not find elsewhere, we always try to educate as much as possible as to the the uses of these varieties.

If you want to make homemade paprika, you can find the exact, you know, paprika, pepper, and then we’re probably going to even show you how to make paprika from those peppers.

So I think that we have a lot of comprehensive information on the history of these heirlooms and also how they’re used, it’s super special to get to find a seed company that is going to give you that much information.

And it’s not going to be a one liner description, it’s going to be in depth, and you’re probably going to come away with a lot of inspiration for creative work.

Brian: Awesome.

Commercial: 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, nine ways to Amazon proof your business. Let me talk about what we discuss in the first chapter, determine focus. So one of the main ways that you can Amazon proof your business is by determining the focus of your business. And the real problem isn’t that you’re not doing enough, the real problem is, is that you may be doing too many things in too many places.

So one of the things I suggest is decide whether your focus is going to be acquisition, ascension, or monetization. And I go into the details of what that means in this chapter. It’s really the only three ways that you can grow your business. And if you just do that one step of determining focus, you can have a huge change in your entire business. 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: So what do you like best from your perspective about your business and or your industry as a whole?

Shannie: Oh, good question.

This is from a personal sense, going back to how I grew up on a small farm on a small island, I really liked the idea that we can learn so much about other cultures that we may not get to see in person through exchanging heirloom seeds.

I really do think that heirloom seeds are a great connector and an equalizer. It’s like it’s an excellent way to realize that we may be from different parts of the globe.

But we have similar uses similar gardening practices, similar uses for crops. And I think it’s just an incredible way to educate yourself about a different culture and to share.

It’s also an incredible way to open up your worldview.

So yeah, I just I like the exchange of information and knowledge. I like the opening of one’s worldview. I like the cultural representation, getting a real tangible experience of how someone else grows and cooks and eats.

Brian: Yeah, awesome.

On the flip side of that, if you could change one thing about your business or industry, what would it be?

Shannie: Now let me say this, there are a growing number of really amazing regionally adapted seed companies and we often work with not always but we do like to work with those seed companies to offer varieties if they, you know, come up with a variety and they want to sell it through Baker Creek.

I think one thing that I really love about the industry and I just would love to see more of is basically just working together to promote each other.

Brian: That’s great. That’s something you don’t always see in a lot of industry. So that’s cool.

Shannie: Yeah, we do really well in it, the whole industry…I think the industry as a whole does a good job of working together in a harmonious way. And like a really, like, just boost each other up. But if we could do it even more, that would be even better.

Brian: Great.

If you and I were to talk like, say, a year from now, and we had you back on the show, something like that. And we were to look back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with your progress in your life in your business?

Shannie: Huh, I’m going to try to really do a lot of work during this time of pandemic. So I really do in 12 months, if I were to check back in, I would hope that I would have gotten just an incredible amount of content created in the next year, connecting more with our customers and really finding out what are people up to in their gardens and what do they want to learn more about.

I would love to just get a good idea of what people want to learn about and make sure I really tailor it to people.

COVID seen so many people, so many brand spanking new gardeners, people that are just getting their fingernails dirty for the first time because they’ve been cooped up at home.

And I love to know that there’s a silver lining to the lockdown thing that people are getting out and starting to garden for the first time.

So in the next 12 months, if Baker Creek and I can help Baker Creek create a bunch more content to help brand spankin new gardeners and veteran gardeners alike to really get out and do more growing and to get to really hone those skills. I think that would be really fantastic.

Brian: All right. What are the obstacles Do you see that are staying in your way of getting there?

Shannie: The biggest obstacle I see for people getting out and gardening is that there’s there can be depending on where you live, a scarcity of available farm and gardening space.

I myself don’t garden, I can’t garden, my house, I don’t have a big enough yard.

So I garden at a community garden, and I think that people are going to have to maybe look outside the box for opportunities to grow their own food.

Because I think that one of the biggest challenges we face is not having enough space for gardening and farming. So community gardens are definitely going to be important for that.

Brian: You had mentioned that you had moved in the past year, and then we’ve gone through this situation.

For those listening, we’re recording this in November of 20.

So we’ve gone through this covid-19 pandemic, and we’ve have all these other things happening at the same time elections and everything else.

A lot of craziness happening this year. How has that affected you and and Baker Creek as a whole?

Shannie: Well, it may be a very politically divisive time. But people have definitely, we’ve seen a massive uptick in interest in gardening. Our pre-orders of our catalogs are the highest, you know they’ve ever been our sales are really, really improving.

And that’s just because more and more people are gardening for the first time. So overall, the pandemic has mostly encouraged more people to garden.

So that’s been good.

But one thing that’s been tricky is that I know that when the pandemic first hit there were shortages of seed just because people hadn’t anticipated how quickly people would buy up seeds.

When you make a seed order for the season, you anticipate a certain percentage of growth. But then COVID was unprecedented.

And a lot of people’s reaction to COVID was to just buy up a ton of heirloom seeds. This happened during y2k as well. It did cause a temporary shortage and seeds.

But I think a lot of farmers just upped the ante and planted more for their seed crops this year. So hopefully we will not be looking at as many shortages this year.

Brian: Well, that’s good. And so but other than that everything has been relatively stable. On your end, you guys have been able to handle the crisis and not to have…I mean, obviously with the uptick in sales. That’s great.

Shannie: Yeah, it’s been it’s tricky, because safety is a number one priority. I don’t work at the flagship where they pick the seeds, but I do know that they’ve been super careful about social distancing and following guidelines and keeping people safe and not sick.

That’s been a top priority.

And I don’t believe they’ve had any outbreaks or anything. Knock on wood.

We’ve had to ask our customers to be patient with us because we have been operating especially when the pandemic first really ramped up and people were in a lot of places we’re really closed down.

We weren’t able to go at full speed ahead, but now things are pretty low. Hold out, we kind of have a system figured out for social distancing. So we don’t expect to be having any issues.

Brian: It’s really good to hear from your perspective from being in this position for a while and understanding it. What advice would you have for someone that be interested in getting into the same field?

Shannie: You have to be obsessed with the topic.

You have to be really, really, really obsessed that I’m obsessed.

I annoy people with how much I want to talk about plants gardening, farming and heirloom seeds. And so if you’re not like annoyingly obsessed, you got to be passionate you really do so that’s my advice is to just like dive in headfirst love it, come at it with all your heart.

That translates, I’ve noticed people are really really receptive to anything that’s just genuine and if you know your stuff, if you know your stuff, you’re giving people good information.

And I guess I’m this is I’m speaking to being an educator, as an educator, doing online, you know, education for gardening, doing informative videos, you’re real, you’re genuine and you’re coming up with really good information that you do know firsthand.

It’s not second and you didn’t Google it, but you know, firsthand, that translates really well. That’s what people really want to see like you can be the goofiest person, you can be totally deadpan and dry, you can actually have any delivery that you want it just as long as you are yourself.

It actually doesn’t…I’ve totally noticed it really doesn’t matter.

There’s someone out there who wants to watch somebody deadpan explain something when be really concise, and curt, there’s other people that want to watch somebody completely go off the walls and ramble.

There are some people like that some people like a rambler, like I can be a rambler, but really, the determining factor is if you’re passionate, and if you’re knowledgeable, and just being real.

Brian: That’s awesome. That’s really good advice.

So what did I not ask you, what question did I not ask you that you’d like to answer?

Shannie: My making a plug for studying horticulture professionally.

I think that being self taught and learning yourself is a fantastic and an a fantastic way to go about becoming a horticulturist or farmer or gardener fine gardener educator.

Personally, I did choose the route of going to college for it and getting a degree. And I really don’t regret it because I learned a lot from a lot of really knowledgeable professionals and I got a really in depth education that did span a lot of different topics.

And so if you whether you choose formal education, or you choose to do it hands on, I really recommend that people make sure to be really comprehensive with the way they educate themselves.

If you’re going to be interested in farming, deep diving deep into the biology, the soil health, the environmental impact, but also the social impact the supply chain, understanding every facet is really important.

If you’re not going to pursue higher education in the field, then make sure to meet people in all different parts of the industry.

People that are doing sales, people that are growing themselves, people that work in with the environment in the after effects of agricultural runoff having first hand perspective or second hand I guess you’d be getting the firsthand perspective on from professionals and all those different fields is going to be tremendously helpful.

So whether you do it go into classes and getting you know sitting through lectures and guest speakers from all those industries, or just pounding the pavement and being outgoing and meeting those people.

But definitely giving yourself a well rounded perspective of what it’s like to work the land and be a farmer or gardener.

Brian: I think is really helpful. Really good.

I think that’s a common question that people would have about that.

What could listeners do if they’re interested in finding out more about Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds?

Shannie: Yeah, check us out on our website, Rareseeds.com.

You can find us on YouTube, our channel name is, Rareseeds.

You can find us on Facebook where we’re Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

You can find us on Instagram where we’re Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

Yep try the site, try Facebook, try Instagram, try YouTube, we have a Twitter even which I’m sure is probably Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I don’t do Twitter but I think that’s what it is.

So yeah, check us out online that’s the best way and our website is, Rareseeds.com.

And you can find our catalog we can get our catalog mailed to you if you check out our site, Rareseeds.com and just click the free catalog tab or go all the way and order the whole seed catalog and you’re going to get them.

The most incredible seed catalog experience of your life.

Brian: That’s great. And thanks so much for spending time with Shannie McCabe, from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Shannie: Thanks so much for your time, take care.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: You know I really appreciate the time that Shannie spent with us talking about Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. It’s an amazing company.

And it’s one of those that you can see how you can stand out in really a crowded marketplace and one of these areas that everybody is talking about heirloom seeds, and is selling this kind of that kind, but they’re able to do it in such a different way that allows them to stand out.

Shannie herself is one of those standout pieces to the puzzle, to have people on your team that have a passion that have a background that want to learn more, that even at a distance, they could be such an asset to your organization.

It’s really good to listen to this interview with that in mind, because I kept going back to in my mind is what an amazing person she is how it’s really great to keep your eyes open for those type of people, the type of people that you know can go on a podcast and represent your company like Shannie has here.

So that’s the big takeaway. I think with this interview and there’s a whole lot of other nuggets in there that she passed along to us really appreciate the time she spent with us on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

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.

Petra Page-Mann – Fruition Seeds

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Petra Page-Mann – Fruition Seeds

In our opinion, Petra Page-Mann is one of the top communicators in the self reliance and DIY organic gardening fields.

Join us for a terrific conversation on why personality marketing and quality education can help differentiate you from big corporate companies. As well as some heart felt thoughts on current events in America today.

Head over to Fruition Seeds for helpful tips on gardening and be sure to grab some organic seeds to start growing now! – https://www.fruitionseeds.com/

Transcription

Brian: Petra Page-Mann is the co-founder and storyteller at Fruition Seeds. Growing up in her father’s garden, Petra believes each seed and each of us is in the world to change the world. Her passion, curiosity, love of food and love of people led her all over the world studying seed, song and culture worth celebrating.

In 2012 she co-founded Fruition Seeds with her beloved partner Matthew, to share the seeds, knowledge and inspiration gardeners crave to amplify our individual as well as collective abundance in our short seasons.

Petra, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Petra: Why thank you, my friend. It’s a joy to join you.

Brian: Awesome.

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

Petra: I really like to eat and I’ve been fortunate enough to eat a lot of wonderful things and somehow it just keeps happening and so I am to share all of those seeds and all of these meals with all the people so we can all keep growing.

I grew up in my father’s garden here in the Finger Lakes of Western New York. And if you’d asked a little seven year old Petra, what she loves to do, I wouldn’t have told you gardening.

I also wouldn’t have told you brushing my teeth. It was just something that we did.

And I took seed saving for granted as well.

Now, if you want to sow some seeds, you should save some right?

So I’ll profoundly be so grateful for that gift that my father gave me my entire life. And as I, you know, became a teenager and became more aware of the world around me and really just deeply concerned by the patterns that I was seeing.

I realized that agriculture was kind of this intersection of a lot of my passions of being outside of eating but I’ve also like soils and justice, and all of these wonderful things and seeds are kind of the seed of it all right?

And seeds are this just epic metaphor to me of just the growth of the potential the capacity to adapt and change, and kind of that like gift of our ancestors and how we can become good ancestors.

So I spent over a decade working in kind of the organic seed world, working on farms and also for seed companies. I’ve worked for some of the smallest seed companies in the world, also one of the largest. And it really galvanized me to know decentralization is so important.

You know, there are oaks all over so many continents, right. But there are so many different genus species. So many subspecies and the Oaks that we have on this ridge above me, are distinctly different even within that subspecies from five miles down in down in the valley.

So we must do the same thing as humans, with our economies, with our businesses, with our hearts with how we communicate and organize.

And so our centralized, highly commodified seed system, food system, you know, it’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is exploit the marginalized people that have been so profoundly exploited for generations for millennia.

Part of what that looks like is decentralizing and really taking care of, you know, thinking locally, thinking globally. But how we started Fruition Seeds and 2012 to kind of respond to our immediate inspiration and also just necessity of creating regionally adapted seeds for short seasons and sharing them widely.

There are so many I used to when I grew up in my father’s garden, I thought our season was too short for watermelons, and that we couldn’t grow peanuts. And turns out, we can totally grow watermelons. And we can totally go peanuts, but we can’t grow most of those varieties. Most of those varieties are developed from peanuts for down south, and for watermelons for California.

Basically, if you live in the Central Valley of California, all of the seeds in the world are regionally adapted for you.

But if you don’t live in the Central Valley of California, you’re probably going to grow up in New York State thinking that you have to short a season for watermelon. And so I’m really motivated for people, especially the little people growing gardens these days to realize that they can totally grow watermelon.

They can totally grow just about anything they want, of course, outside of papayas and of course there are exceptions. But it’s amazing to me, what are the constraints that I thought of as a child 30, 40 years ago, it’s simply they don’t need to be constraints. And so we have dedicated our lives, among other things, mountain biking, dancing, making sure we all have these privileges in the process.

Brian: Absolutely, Oh, that’s fabulous. That’s great.

So you went out you started Fruition Seeds. How did that happen?

Tell us a little bit about that journey when you first started.

Petra: Yeah, I mean, every seed has its own journey, right? For me, I’ve been dreaming for seven years actively, actively passively about starting a business and starting specifically a seed company focused on regional adaptation.

But it wasn’t and you know, I’m a very kind of theoretic, spontaneous kind of creator. And so for me, it’s a like, what are the skills and how do I orient myself inner compass to do this work rather than what’s my you know 40 page business plan.

How do I get my lawyers and our ducks in a row.

So for me it was very heart centered and just like what are the both the hard and soft. The soft being the real skills of developing the relationships and the connections and interconnections that are going to be crucial to moving this forward.

And so then when I met Matthew Goldfarb my partner in life and business and love all the above, he has been in ag for several decades and he has an MBA as well. Business had been a four letter word for me prior to meeting Matthew and one of the many reasons I fell in love with him is that he helps me to see that this is actually right and like marketing too, had been this epic four letter word to me, and Seth Godin, among other people just really cracked open the concept of marketing, and helps me see that there’s so much greater capacity for it.

And in fact, marketing has just changed. How are we being changemakers in the world, and business is just another way to frame a vehicle, right? It’s just another way to house a seed so that it can take root. So yeah, Matthew has so many skills and it was really, it was honestly quite challenging Brian because I was like, am I falling in love with you because I’m falling in love with you the human, or am I falling in love with you because you’re obviously the best business partner I could fathom?

Existential crises ensued. And they only can continue to unfold in new and exciting, terrifying ways.

But all told. He’s an amazing partner and business and marketing, as well as seeds are profound.

Transformative ways to understand ourselves in the world. And if we’re hanging on to, you know, if the seed just insists on staying a seed, it’s never going to fruit, it’s never going to make more seeds.

In the same way, when I recognized that my conception of what business was, was not serving me was not serving the world there. Were not going to be more little girls growing watermelons. So fine. We can change this.

So yeah, other people meet each other. And nine months later, 10 months later, there’s like little person in the world. And Matthew and I met 10 months later, we signed an LLC. And Fruition Seeds was born, if you will.

When people ask us if we have children, we say yes and great, great, great grandchildren.

And you can eat them. If we think they have a sense of humor, which I know you do. Here we go.

So that’s a tiny snapshot.

Brian: That’s fabulous. That’s great. So you guys got everything started. And so many of the things that you were dealing with were the things I think so many people, especially in this space deal with, when they get into that frame.

It’s like how do you take the spirit of where I’m coming from and work it into this this box that I see business as you know, this very confining thing or marketing, you put it beautifully there.

How do you find your first customers?

Petra: You know, there’s a lot to be said, for community. I feel really fortunate because I grew up in this little town in upstate New York in the Finger Lakes.

Our first customer I mean, I gave away I don’t even know how many thousands of packets of seeds that I had saved sometimes for a couple decades.

And then I like made my own packages, you know, just like calendars and other fun things that I like cut out and like scotch tape to make little seed packets. And I like I love to draw.

So I had all these like feudalisms of seeds and like, characters of them. So there’s a lot of hilarious seed packets out there in the world. So I gave away thousands of seed packets to all of my friends and in our community and just well beyond so many rippling iterations out.

I’ve been dreaming about it for years and kind of actively I’m a very passionate person and also an extrovert. So I’m like, what are you thinking about? Here’s what I’m thinking about.

What are you thinking about? Let’s think about these things together.

So it was no surprise to people that Fruition Seeds came into existence. People had been watching me for years, and had been investing in me honestly, for years prior even though I lived in many other places when I would come back to Naples and 25 years ago if you had told me that I would ever live in this town of 2,000, so lily white, and fill in the blank, I would have said, I have prospects, thank you very much.

But turns out…and we don’t all have the profound privilege, which I see and I will continue to see in greater depth for the rest of my days. The profound privilege that it is to come from a place that has relatively intact ecology, and a deep social network and safety net.

The land that we farm on was given to us. No, we couldn’t have rented we tried and we certainly couldn’t have afforded land and just people who knew we were out in the fields farming all day long.

We literally they’d be so many times Laurn would call and be like, I know you’re still working and you probably didn’t eat lunch and it’s well past dinner and the grill is full of beautiful things come on over right now. So so many, so many people, how did I find my first customers?

Just being a part of this community and investing in them and they investing in me for years and honestly, decades, just laid that foundation so that by the time it came to the point where, you know, we had a Kickstarter to, I had $15,000 saved, Matthew also put in $15,000, we raised $35,000 on a Kickstarter, that kind of went crazy.

I mean, not crazy, crazy, but I mean, our goal was $10,000. And it was just amazing to see the word of mouth is such an amazing thing and it’s the slow way to grow a business, right.

It’s the expensive way to grow a business, but I think it’s kind of the only way that actually matters because instead of cutting corners, and just like buying up an email list, and it’s like using those corners as actual connection points to leverage real human needs and risks, respond to them.

If you know Seth Godin, I’m totally Seth Godin junkie, and he has this wonderful, like, what is your smallest viable audience and serve them. And if you’re not serving the smallest viable audience, then probably you’re serving no one, and they’re gonna know that.

We started small and we’re still super small, and I have no, fruition has no ambition of being a High Mowing or a Johnny’s, which are small seed companies in the realm of Seed Company’s. And our goal is to just simply, first and foremost, to feed ourselves and our family.

There’s eight of us here at Fruition Seeds full time. And if we’re not taking care of that pot of people, then you know, we can’t take care of the world. But beyond that, it’s making sure that the people who are sowing our seeds are also surrounded by abundance not only by those seeds, but knowing that they’re not alone in their gardens and that we’re sharing resources and kindred connection with them.

So yes, that was a long drawn out, but first customers for sure was just like this community that I call home being like, wow, Petra actually did it!

Brian: No, that’s awesome. That’s great.

You talked about taking that first big plunge where you put in some money, he put in some money. And you did that Kickstarter. What do you think it was that made that Kickstarter go viral, for lack of a better word? I mean, what made that go further than you expected it?

Did you have a video on there that connected with people? I mean, what was it do you think?

Petra: You know, I don’t exactly know, I would love to ask, it’s a fun question for all of our folks that contributed, I mean, certainly there’s a video and it’s awful.

I literally can’t watch it. And I don’t know, you know, I whether it’s instagram igtv or like our YouTube channel. Our website, FruitionSeeds.com is full of videos, like I’ve made thousands. And like now it’s like wow, Petra, you’re like really natural on video, how do you do it?

I’m like, hours and years of abject pain!

That Kickstarter video was the first video we ever made. It’s just, it’s so it’s like, watch it and I’m like, Oh my gosh, my teeth are getting pulled out of my mouth. Which makes it pretty priceless, right?

But i think that a large piece of it um, Monsanto. So this is 2012, or really 2013. It was, was early 2013 is when the Kickstarter went live and Monsanto and like Glyphosate and all of this and GMOs were kind of really becoming a very public mainstream conversation.

I think a lot of it between like, right, I’m so white, and I’m blonde. I’m a woman and I’m kind of cute and charismatic. So I have all of those things going for me even if I’m really awkward on a video, you’re like, Oh, that’s a cute little girl and she is doing something that means we have an alternative to GMOs great.

Things like Monsanto honestly, has given us a profound advantage in the marketplace. And even though it’s not a like, I can’t tell you, like, so many people and I wouldn’t claim to fully understand GMOs either.

But there’s a great, great misunderstandings around what genetic modification is and isn’t. It’s created a lot of fear in people, that fear we could leverage to be like, yeah, it sucks. You don’t actually have to know that.

The core foundation, we we should think of other alternatives. to write, Okay, we’ve got one, 1,500 of them, really.

So yeah, I think between our community and word of mouth just spreading and having some level of just social grace in kind of, you know, a very modern contemporary America paired with Monsanto, kind of coming into its own as the face of big food, and just industrialism and corporate colonial commodity at its worst. All those things combined really profoundly to set us up for thing like, oh good, where have you been all our lives?

Brian: That’s fabulous. So you’ve done a whole lot of video, like you were saying.

Would you say that’s the main driver for new people finding you right now? Or is there other places that new people are finding you, obviously, via social media and your videos and so forth?

Petra: Yeah, I that’s another wonderful question.

And I definitely am not an analytics person. But yes, so many people find us through our videos, without doubt. I mean, at any given social post, if it’s just a still image, it gets x reach and videos, you know, it’s that much more compelling to watch a person in a video.

So right now, both Instagram and Facebook are really just like amplifying those videos. And at some point that might change, it’ll easily get 10x with a video. There’s a lot of incentive for sure to just be generating that content.

It’s just that much more compelling, right?

Because then you get to actually have a general experience of me and so many people when they meet me, they’re like, oh my god, I feel like I already know you.

And I’m like, well, you do. So many people are like, wow, you actually act like you do on your videos. I’m like, I’m not an actress. I can’t act.

But I can be myself. And that is the genius of the 21st century and I think the opportunity that we have as changemakers as marketers and like the best possible sense, because these big corporations and even mid scaling corporations, they can’t be human.

They’re trying so hard, but they can’t. And so what we have is great and I’m so grateful that I put myself through all of the torture.

I just can’t recommend to all of your listeners being like, yeah, that’s nice that she’s gone through that process. I don’t really like…it’s painful. It’s awful. It’s awful, but do it because it’s so real.

People will connect to you 1,000 times more deeply, a thousand, thousand times.

For me it was directly related to my self confidence as well. And so I think there’s a lot to unpack about how we hide and why we hide. As people who know that the system is not broken. It’s doing what it was, deliberately designed to do which is keep the power in power, and disenfranchise and actively exploit the rest of us, us using our voices and learning to share those voices in as many ways as possible, is so important.

And video isn’t for all of us. Maybe you paint, like so whatever it is, whatever way but keep challenging yourself like comfort is a quality way to maintain status quo. And to not be the change that you want to see in the world. So yeah, finding that discomfort and the joy in that. Just that trick.

Brian: Absolutely. That’s great advice. Very important.

You mentioned previously that you’re playing toward a very small market, small group of people and you don’t need to go too big. You can stay within that. How would you describe your ideal customer person that just comes across you and says, ah, this is what I’m looking for?

Petra: Yeah. So the person that is like, whoa, she’s really excited and like, passionate in a really fun way, and then it’s like, oh, and she’s telling me amazing things that I never thought of, or I thought about, but she just lays it out in a totally different ways.

So like the combination of joy, but like, oh, wait a minute, there’s some serious wisdom being spread. And not just about, like, let’s talk about cucumbers and downy mildew. Let’s talk about how social justice and ecological justice and language justice and how those pieces come out in our work so that we’re bringing our whole selves.

We’re not just thinking like soil carbon is important, but like, whoa, if we’re not hungry, that’s because there are other people actively hungry on this planet. And let’s make sure that we’re feeding them and so like weaving all of those pieces together.

So the ideal customer, I don’t I think of them as just community because customers so transactional. But the ideal person that that we’re speaking to and it’s I mean, we’re like singing to the choir but also trying to be gentle in it for sure. But very invitational to be like, these are conversations that are so critical and so interwoven and I loved like a post pandemic and then like the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and people are like well wait wait wait wait seeds, why are seeds now political? And it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I haven’t been doing my work clearly because let’s have a conversation.

So I love that the person that is going to just see us and instantly be hungry for what we’re sharing is hungry for justice, as well as fabulous lettuce and the, you know, earliest ripening watermelon that they can find. Yeah, I could go on and I will attempt keep myself under wraps.

Brian: No problem. No, we love this.

You mentioned COVID and all the things that have happened since the beginning of this year, we’re recording this in July of 2020, tell me a little bit about how that’s affected your business, your life, maybe what you’re talking about in your videos, everything else. How does that play into everything?

Petra: Oh, there are so many. Can we have the next hour to just talk about this? So many things? Where do I even begin I’ll begin with a fun one.

We have these things called seeds and we put them in packets. And the latex that closes the packets only lasts about a year. And so we have this 12 by 12 volts of seeds essentially frozen and like millions of seeds inside right, so we have way more than one year seed supply in our lives. But because the latex only last year we only have so many packets.

And it’s mid March, and people are losing their minds and realizing a lot of things among them that spending time in their gardens might be a really therapeutic, delicious, essential way to spend time not just a hobby, but in fact, deep sustenance and resilience.

We’re selling like 10 x seeds compared to what we had projected. And so as the seed packets are flying off the shelves, we’re like, oh, yeah, we’ve got plenty of seeds. We’re running out of packets.

In the meantime, our printer is not printing, they’re not able to function at the time. So we were able to find 25,000 blank seed packets.

There was about 10 seconds where my heart just sank and was so deflated and sad where I was like, I can’t imagine and if you haven’t seen our packets, the kind of beautiful they have an original painting on them from our friend Elizabeth.

Also a beautiful color photo for our farm and just lots of great growing info. And they’re just they’re kind of, I know every mother has beautiful and brilliant babies, and I’m no exception, but they’re really beautiful.

So the thought of putting our seeds in blank packets was just kind of devastating to me. And then it was only about 10 seconds later that I was like, wait a minute, we have so many amazing friends who are incredible artists who all of a sudden are like, wow, what do we do in this moment?

We paid dozens of artists to create original works of art on all of these packets, and they’re just outrageous. There’s printmakers, and watercolor, pen and ink and all of all across the board and they’re just so beautiful.

It’s the moment we inhabit, right it was like this uh, here’s the blank slate what no one would have wanted this. No one wants a blank packet of have seeds. But all of a sudden, it’s ours to create and breathe life into and to collaborate on, we couldn’t have done that alone.

It was just this community and paying them to do this too, right?

Artists are just like farmers there’s just like so many changemakers in our culture is not expected to be paid for their gifts and contributions. It was a really small and yet really large exercise in how do we make lemons into lemonade? And how do we pivot and make this a beautiful culture we’re celebrating?

Yeah, so that’s, that’s one element. And certainly we’ve been really fortunate in that people are more hungry for what we’re sharing more than ever. There’s a lot of businesses including fellow farmers that we know and love who are not having that experience. And we have many friends who end businesses we know and love who are no longer in existence. Even been a few months into the pandemic. So it’s, it’s been a really humbling time to be sure.

Brian: Absolutely.

What do you like best on the bright side of things…what do you like best about your business and your industry as a whole? The community that you’ve built up, what do you like best about it?

Petra: I can’t do it alone. And of course, I wouldn’t want to, but I literally cannot. There’s that interdependence of just, you can’t grow a garden without just being so integrated into it.

It doesn’t grow itself, right. And we don’t grow ourselves, we grow each other. The thing that I love about it is, you know as a whole, certainly the conventional chemical seed industry is just like any other industry.

The organic seed industry is super collaborative. It’s a really tight knit, awesome community where I can call up all kinds of people from all kinds of companies and ask all kinds of questions, whether it’s a growing question like in the fields, whether it’s numbers in the books on all kinds of friends, we’re just like, we know that there’s this pie and it’s just getting bigger, the more that we all collaborate with each other.

And then just in terms of community, it’s such a joy to share what we love with people we love, whether it’s the physical seeds themselves, or the knowledge of how to grow them of how to seed save, you know, like, I’m happy to give people fish, but I’d much rather teach them to fish and I love that we get to do it all. And that it’s just this beautiful wheel of give and I get to I learned so much from our community, and people reach out to us and want to collaborate with us in all kinds of amazing ways all the time.

I love that it’s so collaborative and interdependent. And just, there’s the sense of collective generation and regeneration that we’re all in this together.

That being said, there’s still so many ways right that colonialism makes us and I love you know, Rowen White, when I first heard her say a few years ago, we are all indigenous souls with imperial minds.

We all have these, juicy, yummy dreams of collectiveness and cooperation. And yet we are have all of these trappings of what it is to monetize. And it’s definitely a daily struggle to see and hold all of those parts of myself.

But also a great joy to see all of it exists and it’s all there and the more courage we have to name them and see where they’re coming from, then we can start to make different choices that might actually begin to dismantle these systems of oppression and ourselves so that we can truly be even more collaborative.

Brian: If there’s one thing that you can change about your industry, your community, what would it be?

Petra: Leaning into that transparency. Into the transparency of collectiveness more so that we would actually hold ourselves accountable in love with those collaborations. And so this is something I really can’t stand about our personal like social media feed and our website, it’s just really, we sought out people quite regularly but I just want to be doing it all the time.

Because we don’t do this work alone, we can’t do this work alone. And we have this culture right of rugged individualism and I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I invented bootstraps, bull crap!

No.

And yet, you know, like seed companies have this facade of really a century and a half ago, they really were generating growing the seeds that they were sharing and now just see companies are purveyors. Right, you don’t walk into Trader Joe’s and say, wow, thanks for your Joe’s, what a beautiful farm you have out back!

No, you know, they’re a great purveyor distributor, whatever it is that they think you’ll buy. And so mostly companies are that way too. And they haven’t really changed their marketing because it’s just not sexy to say I’m a middleman or a middle woman.

Even though we grow 70% of the seeds that we share on our farm, there’s 30% of our seeds that we’re getting from all kinds of amazing seed growers in our buyer region and a few beyond.

I want to be telling their stories more. So, what I would change in us, which we’re actively working on and changing in the industry, which I have no control over except myself and hoping that any modicum of success that we experience will just inspire seeing that someone else is actually doing it and well and so I’m hoping to be that change. Just to celebrate our interconnectedness way more, because it’s way too easy to be like, yes, isn’t this amazing, this Fruition Seeds that we’ve built?

No.

It’s the farthest thing from Matthew and I, and the eight of us that are working here full time, like the radiating ripples of that and but you would never see it. And we don’t live in a culture that celebrates that level of transparency. We don’t know how to, we don’t know how to share the mic. Long to be challenging myself so that we can as an industry and as a culture, not only share the mic, but be like, oh, right, I stole the mic to begin with.

Or like, okay, it was our ancestors. Okay, this is a 2,000 year old construct is crumbling. So how about we just get rid of it all together and just sing some songs with five part harmonies, okay, I’m in sharing the mic.

Brian: I love that. So great analogy.

If you and I were to get back together, let’s say in a year and we had you back on the show, and we look back over the last 12 months, over everything that you’ve done and experienced with Fruition Seeds, what would have had to have happened in both your business and your personal life for you to look back and really feel happy about it?

Petra: What a delicious question. Um, I am really grateful that our team here at Fruition is really diving deep into how are we colonized and colonizing?

How are we exploiting, extracting, hurting, harming and being harmed by the system?

How can we begin to shift internally in ourselves internally in our organization?

And we’ve been sharing these conversations just in little ways. I mean for years and years actively for the last few months of what does this actually look like. It’s very internal work that you wouldn’t see necessarily in our on social media or like our email list. Shameless plug.

We have a beautiful organic garden email every week with video tutorials and how tos. It’s really fun, beautiful, pithy, gorgeous. So hop on in, I’d love to share it with you.

So you wouldn’t necessarily see that internal work that we’re doing. I think of it as like, we’re in this chrysalis stage, which I mean, Seth Godin says, it’s always the interim.

So I think we’re always iterating, we’re always in that chrysalis stage. We’re always the caterpillar, we’re always the butterfly. But really we’re in a really deep process right now of how do we reorganize and including, like, what does employee ownership look like?

Doing that internal work, so that we can do our work in the world better, externally, that will be subtle.

So a year from now looking back, I’ll be really happy if we’re continuing to do this work, and really challenging ourselves to find those growing edges and not just stay comfortable.

It’s a really dangerous thing to, to be too comfortable, especially as owners, you know, and even though you know, it’s not like Fruition Seeds is a huge business. It’s not like we’ve accumulated like, wealth in a more classic sense, but it’s still ours, right?

And so like, I want everyone….I think ownership is one of the pieces that we’re really needing to attend to in this time. And like, we own this land now. And we’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, this is indigenous land that like if someone sells you a stolen cow, it’s still a solid cow.

I’ll be really happy if we continue to do this internal work, so that we can begin to share it more fully with our community, wider community. So we can begin t do this as a wider culture.

Brian: What obstacles standing in your way of getting there?

Petra: It’s just a lot of time. It’s a lot of discomfort. And also a lot of just people have been trying to decolonize indigenous people have been trying to get us, like, vaguely see them. And like 400 years of slavery, like there have been a lot of people trying to get us to look, see pay attention.

But it’s still, it’s still so easy, especially as white people with a certain with all the privileges that we have. It’s really easy to just stay comfortable in the status quo that we benefit from the system of us not having these really hard conversations, and especially if we’re paying all of our staff to have these conversations, like it’s a lot of money.

It’s putting your money where your mouth is, and it’s a lie, and it’s feel so liberating to be investing in each other in this way. So we are, yeah, we’re constantly the seeds that were planting in ourselves.

Just an analogy that I always remind myself when I’m constantly like, wait a minute, am I really the person for this job?

Right, if you want a tomato, you plant this tomato seed that looks nothing like a tomato. And then it sprouts and it’s this little thing with like green leaves that are kind of hairy and you’re like, I wanted tomato that like I can put on my sandwich.

But you’re like, okay, I get there’s a process. So you’re reading and you’re watering and pruning and trellising and you’re like, what is this, come on, and the whole thing, right when you finally get to the tomato is that it’s not a tomato the entire time. That’s never not been a tomato.

I’ve never not been the person to do this work, but I also can’t just stop and say, okay, I made it. I’m comfortable. You all eat your sandwiches now.

So I’m, yeah, there’s a fun little tangent. But I love remembering. That is the work that we have to do. Just continuing to weed ourselves and maybe I want a tomato, maybe it turns out I’m a cantaloupe. And then I have to get over the fact that when I was actually attached to, in growing myself growing into myself.

Like if you had told me also 10 years ago, almost when we started Fruition that I would be spending a lot of time on the computer and making videos.

I’d been like, wait a minute, I am a farmer. I grow seeds. I wouldn’t always want to be the dream that we’re dreaming of, and being open to whatever it is that our communities are asking of us that our inner is sparking in us. I forget your question, Brian. I’m sure it was a lovely one.

Brian: It’s ok, I think you answered it. (laughs)

Main thing was about obstacles that are standing in your way.

Petra: Oh, yeah.

Brian: Achieving what you want to in the next year.

Petra: Just being afraid of the work totally and not wanting to pay the money that it’s going to take, not wanting to take the time that it’s going to take.

Because it’s uncomfortable to doing this work, it means that you have to change.

We’ve all been benefiting from the system. And that’s Lauren Cordelia growing culture. When he said I heard him a few months ago, say for the first time, that first time he said it, but the first time I heard it, if you’re not hungry, it’s because other people are hungry.

That means that we have to all be more hungry and be willing to eat less whatever that looks like in that metaphor, right?

So it looks like discomfort and being willing to lean into that and be fed by other things beyond the benefits of exploitation and privilege. That we have been socialized to think we are superior enough to just accept wholesale that we have what we have because we’ve worked hard the whole meritocracy or like fill in the blank narrative. But beginning to say, maybe I can, you know, Anand Giridharadas’ says, we We can be told to do more good but not less harm.

And when we’re actually doing this hard work of decolonizing ourselves, we’re doing more good by actively doing less harm. And that means a lot of discomfort. So yeah, that’s the biggest obstacle is just wanting to be comfortable, because there’s so many other things that we want to be doing and sharing and thinking and feeling oh, and not working all the time.

Think about all these challenging things all the time.

But not giving it the obstacle is not giving into the comforts of the benefits of our privileges.

Brian: You’ve weaved in a short period of time a story transformation, really a story of your life and all our lives and how that fits into the whole. Very cool stuff. And we can go on for hours, I’m sure. Is there any questions I didn’t ask that you’d like to answer?

Petra: Hmm, what a fun question. Whatever it is that you are afraid to deliver on, just deliver.

It’s not going to be perfect. The messiness is part of the project, the weeds are part of the garden. I see so many people and it’s part of our culture, this attachment to perfection, especially in an age of social media. And I just would love everyone to have the courage to be themselves and to love themselves and to share themselves and to know that sharing especially the sharing of those imperfections of those vulnerabilities, is the greatest gift that you can give the world and likely one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

Brian: Amazing message Petra, thank you so much. What could listeners do if they want to find out more about Fruition Seeds?

Petra: Yeah, hop on social media. We’re on Instagram. We’re on Facebook. FruitionSeeds.com is our home. We’re actually creating a new website as we speak.

When I say we, I definitely don’t mean me. I’m like, ww..what?

But we have an amazing team of local creators. And we’re creating this incredible website that is honestly very much based on Patagonia’s website where they just sweet seamlessly weave in content and products. Yeah, sure, you want carrot seed. We got guaranteed, but like you want to learn how to grow carrots way better? Yeah, it’s not easy, isn’t it?

So like making sure that our content and just so we’re giving you the fish we’re teaching you how to fish all on this beautiful website so that’ll be coming in the fall FruitionSeeds.com.

But of course we have a website now and I tell everyone, I’m like, we’re redoing our website. They’re like, why it’s so beautiful. And I’m like, just you wait.

Certainly we have a farm. And certainly in this pandemic moment, we are devastated to not be opening our farm to humans beyond our pod. But we have lots and lots of events on farm events. One of my favorites is our watermelon party every year.

We go hundreds of organic watermelons just for the seed inside. And so every year we have our watermelon and the dahlias is harty, we also grow thousands of dahlias, are one of the only purveyors of organic Dahlia tubers in the world.

So we have all these dahlias that are going crazy as we’re eating all these watermelons, as watermelon in the dahlias and it’s just all you can eat all day long and all these people come and it’s just delicious.

It’s hilarious.

You can work on your accuracy, as well as distance if you want to spit seeds. So we have lots of great events on the farm. Post-pandemic I hope to share the farm with any and all and we do lots of formal tours as well.

And I do you know tons of speaking whether it’s, you know, school groups or universities garden clubs, book clubs I love to share my passion so don’t hesitate to reach out in any and all of these capacities I love to collaborate as well.

But certainly Instagram I think is probably the most fun way to hang out with Fruition Seeds on a daily interactive engaging basis. So yeah, you’ll find us surprised surprised that Fruition Seeds.

Brian: Petra Page-Mann with Fruition Seeds, thank you so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Petra: Brian, my huge privilege. Thank you for all that you do and all that you share. It’s sends shivers down my spine and I can’t wait for next time.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Wow, Petra is really something else isn’t she?

There’s a whole lot more here to unpack. So I think it’s worth relisting to. But let me just bring up a couple ideas that popped in my head. First thing is she’s got this genuine spirit about her that I think everyone can learn from.

You just see how enthusiastic she is that enthusiasm is just it’s infectious. But that comes from being genuine, and who you’re hearing is who she is. And if you go and you watch her videos, you’re gonna see the same person.

Like she said, if you’re going to meet her in real life, I believe you’ll meet the same person with a you’re sending videos out, or whether you’re writing emails, or whether you’re doing podcast interviews.

It’s the same thing.

You’re putting that out there and people can sense that you are who you say you are. That’s really cool.

Another thing she has is just a fearlessness about how she runs her business, which is really neat.

That doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of regret in her in her voice with all the things that she’s done, I’m sure she’s made mistakes and everything else. But no regret in-terms of the big steps, in-terms of the major moves that she’s making seems to have a very high level of confidence.

The third thing is, I really find it interesting that you have this seed company, but that she has wrapped it around a philosophy and really making it more of a movement or a state of mind, if you will.

You want to talk about something that catches fire with people.

Now it will completely push away people from their thoughts on organic food or anything else, but it will draw toward her everyone that sees things the way that she sees them or anyone that resonates with where she’s coming from.

That type of thing is what you should be looking for in terms of your views of things in terms of who you are, in terms of your confidence, all of who she is is wrapped inside of this business and that is why she prospers and I think we’ll continue prospering.

I don’t think this is the last time we’ve heard from Petra Page-Mann. She’s very interesting and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with in the future.

 

Scott Smith – Earth 2 Earth Compost Pail

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Scott Smith
Earth 2 Earth Compost Pail

Episode 021.

How do you gauge success? Are you positive regarding your future? Are you persistent?

Scott Smith invented the “Earth 2 Earth Compost Pail” while still working full time in construction. He is now trying to spread the word of how important composting is, and how simple the process is using kitchen scraps and small garden trimmings.

Though new to business, Scott’s passion and drive will inspire you. Listen Now!

Go to Scott’s website for more – https://www.earth2earthcompostpail.com/

Earth 2 Earth Trailer
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Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

 

Full Transcript

Scott: Met some very nice people had a great time.

Did it really help my business? Time will tell.

If you’re a business, you need to get out there and meet your customers.

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: Scott Smith has been in the commercial construction industry for over 40 years building quality projects that have provided his customers years of trouble free use.

That same pride and workmanship is exactly what’s led him to inventing the Earth 2 Earth Compost Pail, hoping he can help every homeowner to compost and do their part to help the environment.

Scott Smith welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Scott: Thank you.

Brian: Hey, besides what we heard in your bio, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Scott: I’m a construction Superintendent by trade I’ve been in construction business all my life. Was raised to where you do a job right? Try to the best job you can, you know, get up early, go to work every day, try to earn your paycheck.

And you take pride in what you do. Kind of how I live my life by you know, I mean, and if something’s not done, right, tear it apart. You fix it. No, you make it right.

You know what I mean, because if it don’t work, what good is it?

So that’s kind of the idea behind Earth 2 Earth compost pail. I spent a couple years making them redesign them. So they work right so they’re easy to use.

So the handles are right, so it does what it’s supposed to do. Trying to provide the average homeowner a product that is easy to use, affordable, and it does exactly what it’s designed to do, you know help you compost all your organic organic kitchen scraps.

Every person can do their part to try to help do a little bit to help the environment.

Brian: Awesome. So what actually led you to building the compost pail?

Scott: It started from a phone call. A friend of mine is a truck driver. He drives over the road he called me one day he’s on top of mountain, up in Montana. And he’s stuck in a blizzard. He can’t get down the mountain.

He had to go to bathroom. So he goes back to back from his trailer to go to bathroom and a moose started chasing him.

So moose started chasing him.

So he’s running downhill and so he’s trying to get away from the moose. He gets back to his truck, and he calls me up and he says he says man, you’re not gonna believe me.

I’m going to pass him and went back to my trailer and a moose started chasing me.

You mean tell me you got $300,000 track trailer and you don’t have a bathroom and your tractor trailer?

So starting from that conversation to me, I’m working on designing a inexpensive composting toilet because he was looking at some different composting toilets and they’re anywhere from 1,000 to $5,000.

I started just working on as like just something to do. It transformed into me going from working with a composting toilet to working on a compost because that’s more where my lord he’s lied because I like the garden.

I like to play in the yard I like do certain things.

And so I started messing around with that. So that’s kind of how it transformed me working with the compost.

It was funny how it went from a phone call to me spending two and a half years working on this compost payoff a file for a patent getting my patent, having a product that I market I sell, and it actually works and out of all the compost piles that I’ve sold, I’ve had zero returns.

So that tells me one thing is that even though my product is affordable, that it’s a good product to customers that are buying a product using their product must be having success or I’d be getting some return, so that makes me feel good.

And a few months ago, I attended the Mother Earth News Fair in Frederick, Maryland.

So I’m talking to a few of the possible customers coming by and an older lady was there. She says this great idea. Because if you could sell a million of these stop millions of tons of organics from going into the landfill, you would have a successful life.

I started thinking about what she said to me. And it made me smile, because how true would that be that if my small invention could have a positive input on helping people reduce their carbon footprint to help each person do a little bit to help the environment?

And that really hit a chord with me. Is my product, right for everybody?

Probably not.

But it’s right for a majority of the people? Yeah.

Do I want my business succeed? Absolutely. I want my business succeed.

When I leave this earth, it would be nice to have a positive impact.

Do I have all the answers? I really don’t. lol.

One thing that all the years spent designing this product and testing it, testing and have family members test it that it does exactly what it’s designed to accomplish faster and more efficiently than any other product out there in the market.

And I’m really proud of what I’ve designed.

Composting is not a knowledge that we’re born with.

Composting is just like recycling. It’s something that’s learned, you know, I mean, so it’s passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.

So you get done with your plants with water bottle, you throw it into place recycling day.

If you get done with your organic kitchen scraps if you throw them into the compost, or instead of throwing them into the trash can and so the more education we can give everybody to let them understand that we only have one planet we have one earth but people polluting all the rivers and throwing all the trash and it’s just like now, today’s like disposable world.

People eat something and they throw it in the trash. Trash guy comes, picks it up, takes away anything else ended a promise. That’s just the beginning of the process.

Now you’re putting more trash bags into landfill. You’re putting all your organics into the landfill.

You know compost on a large scale is a huge job with collecting all the organic materials, the trucks to labor, the co2, you’re putting in the air, hauled it all to landfill, and then all the equipment all their.

My compost pile can compost over 520 pounds of organics a year. That’s over a quarter of a ton. So a four of us do it.

That’s one time I need a million people as 250,000 tons and we’re not putting into landfill.

Before I started working on a compost pile, I didn’t have the knowledge and understanding how much waste was actually being taken to the landfill. Because it wasn’t something I was reading about.

It wasn’t something that I was involved in. The one thing I tried to do when I invented this compost pail, I tried to make it as the best materials I could find for being in construction because I wanted to make something that was made of the best materials and it was affordable.

That it worked and it worked every time there was no guesswork so somebody from five years old, 80 years old can use it.

And they’ll get years and years of success out of it. So I tried to make the best product I could, and I feel I’ve come up with a pretty good product I really have.

Brian: Awesome, that’s really cool. And just to let the audience in on it the way I met Scott, he was a vendor at the Albany Mother Earth News Fair.

Just to give you a little bit of an understanding of this and if I have pictures, I’ll include them on this post over at offthegridbiz.com.

He actually had his setup outside he has a back of a trailer all set up you get to see these compost piles there. He shows you a live demonstration. It’s a very impressive setup.

Is this your first business Scott, have you ran businesses before if you had your own business?

Scott: Never had a business before. I did some home improvement stuff but I’ve always been a commercial construction industry and I did the Mother Earth News Fair in Frederick and we rented a tent we had a table and all but it just didn’t suit my needs.

That’s why I purchased the trailer and one thing People need to understand is that I’m from Maryland. I drove from Maryland to Oregon, which was almost 4,000 miles to attend a Mother Earth News Fair because I was hoping everything that we hear on the East Coast is that the West Coast, California, Oregon, Washington, they’re all in the forefront of the composting world.

It’s funny, stopped in California. Then we went to or we stayed in Albany, Oregon. I was talking to a bunch of different people there and they had just as much knowledge as the people on the East Coast compost.

Yes, people need compost. What’s that? Why we’re not compost. I’m seeing that the lack of education, lack of knowledge is from coast to coast. You know, it’s great that San Francisco and Seattle and those couple little cities are doing it. But those two cities can’t correct the problem.

No, it’s every city, every little town.

It’s just there’s so much positive that could come out of it. The more people we could educate, and the more people we can Get the understanding of….see, here’s the here’s the deal.

Your goal is not to get compost, compost will be your end result.

Your goal is to reduce your carbon footprint trying to compost as much of your organic kitchen scraps as you can show it don’t go in the landfill.

So whether you have a garden, everyone knows someone that has a garden or they have a community garden, or there’s a forest or there’s someplace around once you compost all your organic, that’s over a quarter of a ton that we’re not putting into the landfills, it would be great if we could go from San Francisco, Seattle, to San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Baltimore, Orlando, it’s nothing but positive that could come out of it.

If I train my daughter and train my son to complex and to recycle and not litter, then they’ll train their kids and then they’ll train their kids. Then next thing you know, once we all understand, hey, when you’re riding in row, you don’t throw your trash out the window.

Wait till you get to a gas station and you put your trash in your trash receptacle.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of education.

My father taught me something a long, long time ago, and it stuck with me my whole life. It takes more energy to be a bad person than it does be a nice guy. It’s easy to smile and is frown.

So when you compost, it makes you feel good not throwing your organics into the trash. It makes me feel good that it makes other people feel good. You know, I mean, because my trash got cut in half.

So I’m putting one less trash bag in the landfill a week. So if I put 52 less trash bags, your landfill a year, it might not be a lot, but at least it’s something.

Brian: How did you first become a vendor for the Mother Earth News Fairs?

I mean, you said was in Frederick, did you reach out to them? Did they reach out to you?

Scott: I was going to attend the Mother Earth News. I was searching online about different compost things and different things that do with recycling and composting and stuff and Mother Earth popped up on the internet.

So I started reading a little bit more about it and I reached out to them and the year before I was wanting to attend one of the shows they were having at Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, but some personal issues came up and I couldn’t attend.

I paid for the booth, but I just couldn’t attend.

I tried to make it a conscious effort this year to do these two shows. I’m just trying to promote composting as many people as I make because the last four years of my life, I live, breathe, eat, sleep, compost. The more people, I try to educate, maybe I can make a positive effect. The only promise I can make everyone out there, whoever’s listening, is that I stand behind my product.

And if there’s anything I can do to help people use the product to the best of its ability, I’m here for them.

Brian: That’s a huge business plan into itself.

If you can really be able to create great customer service, that’s something that people will go miles for. So that’s awesome to hear.

And we have a lot of other executives, business owners, entrepreneurs that listen.

Do you think it’d be worthwhile for them to go to similar events and do vending like you did?

Have you seen success from it?

Scott: Well, it’s not too early to see, about how you would rate success.

I’ve never driven in California and Oregon before and seen some beautiful country. I grew up 6966 miles from my house all the way through 40 through Arizona, New Mexico, California already back to Wyoming. So I’ve seen some beautiful country during the trip.

Did I make enough money to pay for my trip to go to Albany? Absolutely not.

But I met some very nice people. I had a great time.

Did it really help my business? Time will tell.

if you’re a business, you need to get out there and meet your customer. You need to meet some other vendors that are kind of in the same business even though a lot most of the of the vendors that were at that show didn’t have my product. They were doing other things, you know, whether it was flowers, or plants or straw houses or whatever it was.

Most of people there still had the mindset of, “it’s our Earth, let’s try to takecare of it the best we can.”

Did we see eye to eye on everything? Well no we didn’t. But we all had one goal in mind, you know, it’s like we have one planet, man. If I do a little bit, you do a little bit, hey man little bit turns into a lot.

Do I have any regrets about going to the show? Absolutely not.

I would do it again in a heartbeat to go to the Mother Earth News Fair.

It’s really cool. I mean, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to walk around and meet all the other vendors.

My wife had a chance to do a little bit of that, but she really had a great time seeing a lot of different products and different things that it was it was really cool with. If I was not a vendor, I would definitely attend. I mean, it’s nice for to take the kids here with the petting zoo and the animals.

There’s a lot there besides television and video games, is cool. It really was.

Brian: That’s great. Do you have any logistical tips for any especially vendors that are looking to go cross country or even smaller distances where they’re taking their wares with them?

Scott: Depends. My product is a little bit bigger than most products. I’ve got enough product to try to pay for my trip, but most people aren’t going to drive across country.

You know, I drove cross country because I want to drive cross country. I could’ve shipped my material out there. Could’ve flown. But then you can’t see what we did see from an airplane.

You don’t realize how much desert there is out there between New Mexico and Oklahoma in California, but some beautiful country. I mean, so all I can say if somebody wanted to tend to fare, give it a shot, what do you got to lose? It’s only money. You can’t take it with you.

You know, but sometimes you have to weigh things other than monetary. Sometimes you have to weigh things in relationships.

Meeting people is a plus get away from work for a while and then going out there and meeting all these people. It changes your perspective on things, you know, it takes the cobwebs out of your head, you start thinking a little bit different. You get away and you can relax you can breathe as the hump you know every day going to work going to work on work, so it’s cool Mother Earth News. Very nice people.

Brian: Very cool.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets. We are going to be putting out helpful materials on how you can use events to grow your business.

When you go to this page, you will either see our latest programs or if you make it there early enough, you will see an email address, capture page, put in your email address and we will be sure and update you.

As soon as we get these out there, you’re not going to want to miss this.

If you get in early enough, you can get a special deal. These are principles that never go away.

These programs will be based on the experience of people who have written books, spoken at the events or exhibited.

They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: Where do you find new customers at besides doing shows like this?

Scott: I have a website and I have my trailer and my car has signage on it. It’s word of mouth. I’m knocking on every door I can find a knock on. You know, I mean, like, say I live in Maryland.

So I’m trying to….I’ve been sending emails and trying to meet people from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, I’m pulling up an internet.

I’m trying to find addresses for people and I’m sending them out emails, trying to get responses back and some of them I’m getting responses back from some I’m not I just got my patent a few months ago to try to market my product.

So and right now it’s baby steps.

I can’t expect my business to be in Home Depot and Lowe’s and everywhere else. When I’m a startup business, it’s just a matter of baby steps you gotta crawl before you can walk, you know what I mean?

So it’s one of those things that my product was like Coca Cola, I wouldn’t have to educate my customer.

I’m hoping that the more composting comes up into the forefront and more people see how beneficial it is to compost that it might make my job a little easier. And only time is going to tell right now my expectations are sky high, my attitude is positive.

I know I’m going to do good, I know my business is going to succeed. I know I’m going to get my compost pail into a lot of households and I’m going to be able to help the environment in some way.

I try not to get too high. I try not to get too low. I try to stay on even keel.

I try to look people in the eye and tell them the truth. If I can provide my customer with all the information that I have about my product, so they can make an informed decision.

Then they can say it’s pretty cool My God by this or no this ain’t for me, but at least I did my job and I’ve gone them all the information, I’m not going to sit there and lie to somebody, and I’m not going to force my product or any person.

What I want the person to do is to say, Man, that’s pretty cool. Hey, I like to have one of those.

And then when they buy it, then if they have a problem, then we do FaceTime customer service and help them walk through the issues. I stand behind my product.

I can tell you the pluses and the minuses of my product. Again, the day you got to live with yourself. So long as I’m honest with me, and I’m honest with them, and I’m not trying to hustle nobody and I’m trying to provide them best product and I can make to do the best job that can do.

And I hope Chris will teach us all listening out there because I would be open to donating a few compost piles, a couple of different schools.

If they want to teach like say kindergarteners first grade, second grade of how to compost and you know, no teachers budgets are tight and they don’t have money for school supplies and also can’t donate compost pills to every school district in the country but I’d be willing to help someone.

Who knows, maybe if I donate 20 combos pails each player’s got 40 kids if they teach 200 Kids about composting folks who might be a good thing

Brian: That’s a great idea Scott.

Scott: You see the thing people don’t understand is is the company forcing whining nitrogen and homeowner provides that with their carrots, onions, celery, coffee, egg shells tea bags.

Second thing you need carbon source. Okay, with our compost pail, we’re the only compost product that provides you with a carbon source a lot of experiments of how to make it work. And you have to have the right carbon source certified we provide two carbon sources.

One carbon source we provide is peat moss. We provide the peat moss because peat moss holds moisture and the second core resource we provide is pine bedding time bedding serves three functions.

One is another carbon source, but it’s a harder carbon source so it takes longer for it to biodegrade.

The second function it serves is it keeps the pail loose so it’s easy to turn. The third function that does is that when you turn the pale the pine bedding keeps airpot inside of the material, so, the decompose organisms conform faster.

Now, a third thing you have to have is air. So top four pale and 360 degrees the pale we have air holes so mostly outside so it gets cross ventilation of air the more air that the material side the pale gets, the more the decomposer will form an AIDS and faster decomposition.

The fourth thing you have to have and you must have for compost is turning. So when I designed my compost pail as a handle on the outside of the pale, it has an internal auger inside of the pale so when you turn the handle on the outside of the pale, it turns material inside of the pale which mixes and air rates the material which aids effects or the composition with which means it’s compost faster.

I tried to make it simple.

I’ll talk to somebody was Oh, I got a big compost pile if I turned on a pitch for example, you’re 74 years old, how long you made a turn.

I mean, the thing is, most people think composting these be hard three separate bands and all this other stuff. It don’t.

With our compost pail it compost faster than anything out there. So you don’t need all that space in your yard. It’s a five gallon pail normally my wife cooks for five days a week, I have to empty my pail out about every three or four months.

So each time I empty the pail out, I’ve composted 180 pounds of organics, and I emptying out about four and a half gallons or four gallons of compost.

That’s how much organics that this pill eats because no decomposes.

But if you throw it in the trash bag. I throw 200 pounds of stuff in the trash bag, so many trash bags you got to have. So once you start seeing how it works, and how much you’re not putting in the trash that makes feel good makes me feel it’s like glowing with diet or exercise.

You know all the good intentions in the world to do the right thing. But that don’t looks awful good.

When things are hard to do and they become a hassle. You’re stopped doing it. But when you have a tool like the compost pile that’s easy to use, and you see fast results, you’ll continue to do it.

That’s why I designed it the way I did because I wanted to be fast, easy and simple.

And the main thing I wanted to be was affordable. A few people say, well, you need to make it look like something somebody can’t make themselves.

I said yeah but if I did that then I’m getting from the 40 or $50 price range up to a couple hundred dollar price range so less people can afford it, the less people are going to want to do it.

People are surprised how much organic material this small compost pail could chew. I just wanted to explain all the listeners out there that I would love them to visit my website.

I would love them to look at my product and I’m going to promise to you one works it does exactly what it’s designed to do.

It compost fer for quicker than anything else in the market. And I stand by my product you buy you don’t like it send it back and give me money back samples is everybody will be happy with it? Probably not.

But I know it’s good product.

You know, it’s good product, you’ve seen it.

Brian: It’s a great product and I love all the energy you have for it and everything else, which is why I wanted to get you on the show.

If we were to get back together. Let’s say we talked again a year from now, and we looked back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with the progress concerning your business and your composting pail?

Scott: Well, the number one thing is if the business could be self sufficient to where I could dedicate 100% of my time to my business. Everybody needs to understand something, everyone of these compost pails are made by hand.

They’re all made by hand in the United States by me. No, they’re not made in a foreign land.

What I would like to happen is I would like my product to be picked up by major retail like Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe’s, because right now I’m not making a ton of money, okay, and it’s the cheapest price it sounds for right now.

See, the way it works is, the more material I buy in bulk, the cheaper it is, I can create a good amount of sales, I can buy the material in bulk, then I can lower the price.

So if I lower the price that more people can afford it.

That would be what I would like to happen.

I’m kind of a pretty simple guy. I’m not a materialistic person, I don’t wear one piece of jewelry.

That’s not what I do. I work with my hands.

I’m a construction worker, you know, I build buildings and monumental that could happen.

Or if I can make the same money working for myself as I’m making work for somebody else, that would be a plus plus, because I have other things to pipeline. All the different type of composters and I’m working on besides just for household, but right now, the research and development that I need to do when those other products.

All that’s put on hold right now, because I need to make my business self sufficient.

I saw where you need to get on Shark Tank, you know, I mean, that’s a pretty lengthy process to try and do that.

But it would be really cool that one of those people like maybe not one of those people would have somebody else in my works for Home Depot or somebody works for Lowe’s or somebody out there that might listen to this broadcast and say, hey, let’s look at the product and see if it’s something that’s viable for us.

You know, I mean, I don’t know but all I know is that me making a product cheaper so I can put more money in my pockets? Not really.

It’s not really in the way I’m thinking, because whatever money I make I’m putting back into the company.

Am I having all the success that I hoped I would have or going? No.

Am I hitting a few speed bumps in the road? Absolutely.

Is it discouraged me? Absolutely not.

No, but that’s great. Now let’s be honest with you, though, I have really high hopes that I’m going to meet some people out there some people into the green building is or door right for the environment.

I’m going to meet some people that are going to see how great my product is, and they’re going to maybe open a few doors for me. If you don’t shake the tree, nothing’s going fine.

I’m one of the type of guys when I get up 3:34 o’clock in the morning, go to work and work all day. So long as I keep getting up, put my nose to the grindstone, keep moving forward day after day after day on two things and come out of it.

I’m going to do my best to just keep pushing along and try to help as many people as I can. I appreciate being on your show.

Because, you know, I’m just trying to get the word out there, you know, I mean, we have one planet. If I don’t do anything, you don’t do anything, nothing’s gonna change.

Brian: That’s great. That’s fabulous.

So are there any other questions I did ask you that you wish I would have?

Scott: Not really I just want people to understand that a lot of these different municipalities are giving you a compost receptacles trash cans, and they’re coming by picking up all your organic stuff. How much money in fuel, trucks, equipment, co2, they’re putting in the air, labor, insurance. That’s just to get it to the landfill, then all the equipment, labor, co2, how long it takes this stuff to biodegrade in the ground, to where all the money that they’re spending.

I think there are thousands of other programs out there that all these communities could benefit by taking that money and even if it’s paying for school lunches, for kids, or even if it’s like say a single mother has couple kids and she needs daycare and so she can go to school and get an education so she can get a job so she can take care of herself.

I mean those are some pretty good things they can take money and use those resources I’m sure other people have a whole lot better ideas where they can use the money to help the community instead of picking up the trash.

And I’m trying to be a smartest guy in the world, there’s a lot more smarter people out there to me that can see the Hey man if a week to more people and get to compost at home. We ain’t got all these trucks and fuel and all this stuff. You know then maybe this is millions of dollars we can use your budget help the community.

Just my opinion.

Brian: A lot of great ideas in there. I mean, everything you’re saying I think you’re heading in the right direction with everything you’re doing. What could a listener do, who’d be interested in finding out more you keep mentioning that you have a website?

What’s your website address so people can find you?

Scott: The website is Earth, E A R T H, the number 2, Earth, E A R T H, compostpail dot com (earth2earthcompostpail.com). And our email address is earth2earthcp@gmail.com.

Like I said we’d be willing to answer any of your questions. Anything you got, you know, I’m not a tree hugger by heart. I love my country. I love the world like to see the blue sky like seeing white clouds.

We like seeing green trees, know what I mean.

So I live in the Chesapeake Bay Area, right. And Maryland’s a big crab state, right?

Chesapeake Bay blue crabs.

That’s what everybody does in Maryland, right.

So ever since I was a kid Chesapeake Bay watershed, and it’s about taking care of the bay. We have one bay.

And most people in Maryland, you go to DMV, get saved to be licensed by trade take $15 to donate to the Chesapeake Bay foundation. They have all kinds of clean up programs.

Just like any other city, you know, I mean, so I drive across the Bay Bridge every day. I see the Chesapeake Bay, you know, I mean, and I was born and raised here.

I wouldn’t know what to do if I never seen it again. Because when I was a kid growing up downtown Baltimore galleries companies just dumping all their chemicals right into the heart.

Now they’re cleaning up the last 10 years, they cleaned up the Bay in the harbor.

And now the wall is coming back crab populations bigger, the fish populations bigger.

The marshes are growing back with filters to ban sediments out of the water. Everything’s hand in hand.

You know what I mean? So whether you live in Wyoming or you live in Maryland like I do, you depend on your environment.

Whether you buy my product or not, please just do even just a little bit does matter.

It really does.

Brian: Hey, thanks so much, Scott.

This has been a lot of fun, really interesting getting to hear about your journey, and we can’t wait to hear more. I’d love to have you back on another time. If we can in the future, see where you’re going from here.

Thanks for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Scott: I appreciate you having me and I would love to be you on your show again. I really would.

To you and everybody else, have a great weekend.

Brian: You too.

Scott: Thank you.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Scott is a really great person within the first few minutes of meeting him It was very clear that he had a whole lot of passion for his product, and all the issues that surround it.

I’m going to point out a few things that he said, just to focus on them a little bit.

I think he made a really good point when he was talking about it all depends on how you gauge your success. When he was discussing how well they did at the fair.

He said, I may not have made my money back on the trip. But I set up this huge trip to where we were going across country, dragging all this stuff with us, and got to see all these great things and meet all these great people.

And that’s really cool.

It’s good to be able to step back and look at things not just from a monetary perspective, but in the long term perspective of what am I getting out of it.

I mean, what a great story just being able to go across country and come out to the Oregon fair. He also had what a lot of people who visited the fair said, which was you have a real eclectic group of people.

And it’s not like you see eye to eye on everything, but you do have something in common.

The overall commonality of wanting to make the world a better place, and seeing each individual as being necessary to create that on their own first, and then going out from there, that self reliant message is weaved throughout every person that was tied to this mother news fair.

Very cool, very neat idea.

I love his dogged determination. And that’s one of the things that a lot of business owners or executives have in the very beginning when they’re getting their business up and running.

And sometimes you lose that over time, sometimes with success.

It takes you to a point that you don’t necessarily have that determination and persistence. But I love how he said he knocking on every door that he can, he’s looking for any way to be able to bring this dream about.

Finally, I think his most important point was a personal one.

And that’s that I try not to get too high and try not to get too low. And I try to keep everything on an even keel.

I think that’s always important to keep in mind.

Keeping your own mentality in place, while you’re going through the ups and downs, especially in the very beginning of a business is probably the most important advice you could ever get as long as you’re willing to take it.

I think anyone that listens to this can say that Scott has the right attitude about this. He’s going at it with enthusiasm, determination, but he’s also willing to let it grow on its own. He’s doing this part time This is in addition to the work that he already does during the day.

So it’s really neat to be able to have something like that that he can build up and if you know anyone that can help Scott go to the next level with his business.

Be sure and get in touch with them. Can’t wait to hear more about what Scott Smith is going to be doing in the next six to 12 months.

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.

Greg Key – Hoss Tools: Gardening!

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Greg Key with Hoss Tools
HOSS: We Help You Grow Your Own Food

Episode 002. Have you taken full advantage of “content marketing” to both educate your crowd and prepare them to buy?

Greg Key discusses how Hoss Tools (http://hosstools.com) uses a combination of superior customer service and content marketing to bring people to gardening tool website.

Amazon-Proof Your Website! http://brianjpombo.com/amazon/

Full Transcript

Intro: Welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, a place for conversations about out of the box businesses with heavy e-commerce elements. I’m Brian Pombo.

When thinking about your business or project, what do you think about when I say phrases like customer service, ideal customer profile and content marketing?

I know these are kind of dry and they’re overused so often cliches in the industry, but today’s conversation is going to uncover how to bring these concepts into actual real life for your business and how you can profit from them.

Here’s our very first conversation for this podcast and if you stay until the very end, I’m going to go over some of my takeaways from it. Listen to this….

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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: Greg Key is the owner of Hoss Tools.

Born and raised in South Georgia. Greg has been involved with agriculture and horticulture for over 30 years. He’s witnessed how food was grown years ago on a small family farm all the way to the huge corporations that dominate agriculture today.

Being a big believer in clean, healthy food, Greg started Hoss Tools to help people grow their own food with quality tools and supplies. He enjoys growing food sustainably on a 10 acre homestead with his wife of 34 years.

Two dogs, eight chickens, two horses and one jackass.

Preserving the harvest, making wine and enjoying his four children keeps them busy.

Greg: Grandchildren.

Brian: Sorry, four grandchildren.

Appreciate you coming on the show. Greg, welcome.

Greg: Well, thank you. Glad to be here, Brian.

Brian: Yeah, this is really great. Why don’t you give everyone an idea of what it is that you do?

Greg: About nine years ago, we started a company called Hoss Tools. And our goal is to give people the tools and information for them to be successful and grow their own food.

Brain: That’s great. How’d you get started in all of this?

Greg: Back in the early two thousands we’ve kind of seen the trend were a lot of products being imported in here.

They were being sold, but they were not being supported. So if you went about a product and it tore up, you simply threw it away and went and bought another product. And the quality of the garden tools we seen was on the demise.

I thought, you know, there’s gotta be a better way.

What we decided to do was start a company, manufacture as much product as we could in USA and make a jam-up quality product and support it. There’s nothing I hate more than to call a company and get a recording.

So when you call Hoss Tools, you get somebody that answers the phone and we’re going to be here to help you. We’re going to support you, we’re going to do whatever it takes for you to be successful using our tools and our supplies. Quality tools, quality customer service.

Brian: That sounds great.

You guys have so many things on your site right now. You’ve got your wheel hoe. One of the signature things you guys have cedar shovels, spades, forks, man tools of every kind of machetes, knives, axes, raised garden bed kits, irrigation equipment, pest control, fertilizers, food preservation tools, whether you’re fermenting or pickling.

I mean a lot of great stuff on there.

Out of all that stuff, what would you say is your top selling product?

Greg: Well, the first product that we ever started with was the wheel hoe and that continues to be a number one seller.

However, every product that you see on our site, which is around 300 and we’re in the process now adding several more. We have tested and we have looked at and we’ve made sure it’s good quality product. So we’re familiar with everything we say, we can tell you everything about it and we support it.

However, the wheel hose continues to be our number one seller.

Brian: Is it the single wheel that sells the most or the double wheel or a little bit of both of them?

Greg: About half and half.

We sell about equal amounts of each one.

Brian: One of the main ways that I found you guys, I was searching for these types of markets, but the thing that stood out to me about Hoss Tools was the amount of information that you all have out there, especially if you just go through your YouTube channel and look at all the videos you have.

And these are videos folks that are just commercials selling their products. They’re going deep into the personal knowledge that they have in gardening with these tools. They go into specifics on different vegetables.

I just have to ask you, there’s a lot of our audience are going to be preppers and so forth.

The homesteaders and what would you say are the foods that can grow with the least amount of refrigeration or no refrigeration afterwards.

What are the foods that are going to last?

Greg: You get the foods that we all love, that sweet corn and things like that that we love them. The fact is that didn’t have much of a shelf life and I’m a big believer in growing your own foods and you get to have the staples that will last.

Some of the things that we have tested, that we’ve grown, that we’d get pretty good at is those vegetables that last.

To give you an example, the winter squash, the pumpkins, which could easily fall into winter squash category, sweet potatoes and onions, leeks, guards, all those really store well and they store well without refrigeration.

So those are a lot of the things we love to grow that we can put up and we can store it and we could eat them all winter long.

I feel like a lot of people out there, we’re missing the boat on these great crops that can give you a food source without refrigeration.

You know, I live in South Georgia and we had a major hurricane Michael, that knocked us out of power for seven days.

We could go out there to the garden shed, where we had our vegetables stored up and we could get onions, we cold get garlic, we could get sweet potatos, we can get winter squash. And we can go fire the gas grill up and we can have a meal.

Not only that, but I mean it’s just a good way to prepare yourself to have that skill set to grow those vegetables that will last for a long time.

And also prepared. I mean we do a lot of canning, we do a lot of things like that around here. Having that skill set to do that. So these foods store, so you can have a food source during the winter time or heaven forbid something happened.

You could have this food source when you don’t have electricity.

Brian: Yeah, that’s great info. we’ll get more into what you guys do on your YouTube channel and so forth through your videos later.

Who would you say is your ideal customer? What’s their mindset? Where are they coming from?

Greg: Well, let me put it this way. Let me tell you who our customer is because ideally who our ideal customer is, they are 85% male and they seem to be anywhere from the 25 to, you know, 70, 80 year old.

We have some 80 something year olds who call in every night. However, we have to treat that older group a little different than we do the millennials, the younger group.

What we find is the younger customers we have are starving for information.

They don’t know how to do this and how to do that.

So we’re tried to put the content out there to give them the information they need to be able to use our tools and supplies.

However, that older group recognizes a good tool or supply and they simply just want to call and buy.

So we don’t have to do as much is education with the older group as we do with the young group.

What I have found about the millennials out there is they’re starving for information. They’re starving to learn things that they can’t find anywhere. And that’s where our YouTube channel comes in.

We’ve been so effective there and it’s just an amazing thing to me to see these young people out there want to learn and have these skillsets that have been lost through generations.

Brian: Absolutely. That makes a whole lot of sense. Because I mean, just when I was going to high school 20 years back and I took ag classes and everything and we learned a little bit, but they don’t really teach you the down and dirty of how to grow, just what you guys are teaching on your channel.

I learned so much just by sitting there and watching it or listening to your podcasts.

That’s really good info.

So you’re saying by going out there and teaching this, you’re also bringing in customers that way without you even doing a hard sell, they’re coming back your direction and buying the product.

Greg: Yeah. We don’t believe in the hard sale and we do some, I guess you could classify it as the soft sale, but we rather refer to it as content marketing. Putting content out there, show people what they can do with our products and if it fits what they need and they can come buy. That’s exactly what we try to do.

That’s been our strategy from day one is to do content marketing and do a great job at it.

Brian: Oh, that’s a great point. What do you like most about this business in this industry?

Greg: What I like most about it is my customers are exactly like I am.

I’ve been in a few businesses before in my life where I had to deal with the very wealthy people being in agriculture and horticulture from early days and it was very profitable. But people that are consumed with the way they are, they’re very rich and they are very consumable people, and that’s not who I am and I don’t like hanging out with those kind of people.

The customers that I have today, at Hoss Tools, is exactly who I am.

What I say is, they’re my kind of people and that’s what I love about this business here is I’m doing people that have the same interests that I do and have the same passions and that makes it all worthwhile.

Brian: Absolutely.

What would be your biggest gripes with your business or your industry?

Greg: Well, you know, we’re going through a lot of consolidations now.

Back 15, 20 years ago, you’d see a lot of mom and pop stores on the internet, they were selling things that they had. Those days are gone by the wayside.

Amazon has took a lot of the mom and pops and pushed him out of the way, and it’s the way of life and it’s something that we’re going to have to adjust to, and I understand it’s a natural progression.

However, it does bother me a little bit, that Amazon has taken so much of the marketplace out there and snuffed the mom and pop out a little bit and it’s changed the way that we do business.

However, like I said earlier, that’s just a natural progression of things, we just have to learn to deal with.

Brian: Absolutely.

Commercial Break – Okay. I’m going to jump in and interrupt the conversation I had with Greg, he was just talking about Amazon.com and if you’re running an eCommerce platform, chances are you have some opinions about Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos.

Now you may see him as the devil and Amazon.com as an absolute apocalypse on the e-commerce community. You may see Amazon as being helpful.

Either way, no one can deny that Amazon.com has had an impact on the industry as a whole when talking to owners and executives of eCommerce companies.

One of the most common issues I see over and over again is them asking how do we handle Amazon?

Do we work with them?

Do we work against them?

Do we try to get around them?

They certainly can’t be ignored, at least in most industries, so I actually developed a technique that I can walk you through in a little thing I call a strategy session. We can do it over the phone or we do it over video chat and I would be able to take your specific company and customize a solution to help Amazon-Proof your website.

If you’re interested in Amazon proofing your website, go to BrianJPombo.com/Amazon and that will take you to the Amazon proof my website strategy session.

Now, normally I charge $600 for this one hour session.

There’s no doubt that $600 is a great deal for what you’re getting back from this, but since I’m trying to test out podcasting and see what our reach is, if you add in the coupon code podzeroone, P O D zero one you will be discounted all the way down to $60 I’m going to take a zero right off the end.

You will only pay $60 for an hour long strategy session.

This is not a sales call. I’m not trying to rope you into anything else. If there’s something I can help you with beyond that, we can discuss that later.

Within that hour though, we’re going to talk about actual solutions, actual strategies that your company can take to make your website Amazon-Poof, to make it to where Amazon is no longer a major competitive force against you, that you can actually work around Amazon.

It will no longer be a detriment to your company.

So like I said, BrianJPombo.com/Amazon. And now back to the conversation with Greg.

Brian: Where are you finding new customers at besides this media that you’re putting out there? Where else are you finding customers?

Greg: Well, Facebook, I mean we do a little bit on Facebook. YouTube is our biggest driver.

Facebook is entirely different than YouTube is and you’ve got to treat them differently.

We do some lead generation through Facebook. However, you got to be real careful with your content, because our content doesn’t do as well on Facebook as it does on YouTube.

But it is a good start place to plant that seed and then move them over to YouTube.

If you noticed your friends and everything is big in the Facebook, they have these real social personalities. It’s a social platform. It’s where you can go and relax, look at your cousins pictures, look at their babies, you know, catch up on things.

But you don’t go to Facebook to learn anything. You go to YouTube to learn something.

You go to YouTube to learn instructional stuff.

If you’ve got a question about a product where you will review your product or a way of life, you go to YouTube to search so that you don’t do it on Facebook.

So you have to create, you know, you have to treat those two mediums completely different. But we have been successful in doing some lead generation on Facebook.

Brian: Any other places or is that your main places where you’re getting customers right now?

Greg: Yeah, it is. I mean, Instagram’s up growing.

A lot of people I talked to are doing extremely well on Instagram. I do not know much about Instagram, but I would look in Instagram very hard.

The top three I think right now is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. YouTube probably being at the top of that list, it drives probably around 30 to 40% of our business, YouTube does.

Brian: I can see videos going back to 2012 on there. You have over 19,000 subscribers on there.

Your Row by Row Garden Show, with you and Travis hosting. For those of you who don’t know, go and check them out on YouTube Hoss Tools and you can see Greg and Travis there and they’ll sit there and they’ll talk and they go through all these different items talking about growing specific vegetables and so forth and what they’re doing and what they’re dealing with during that season.

It’s really interesting because they can take a show that’s so simple with just the camera sitting there and then at the same time you guys also have the podcast, which is just the audio of you talking available over on iTunes and other places so you can check them out there too.

Do you find that the customers that are coming to you are more educated in general by the time they get to you if they’ve been watching your YouTube videos and so forth, are they coming with more educated questions and so forth?

Greg: Absolutely. And another thing too we get there are Row by Row Garden Shows, we also have a Row by Row Facebook group. If they’re really a Facebook person, they can watch it on Facebook. We have the two different channels or they can watch on Facebook or they can watch it over on YouTube.

However, YouTube seems to be the best driver with a medium there.

So let me explain to you what we try to do with our YouTube channel with our products. Now we encourage other business to do the same thing. Go to your customer service. The person answers the phone at your business every day and talks to front person the phone that talks to the customer. Let them wright down the top five questions that they get, whether it be product, whether it be store hours, whatever it be, the top five main concerns that she or he answers on an everyday basis.

That’s the first thing you do is you make a video that’s addressing those pain points.

So you take those five and this gives you a start and you take those five and you make a video address needs. What you have done is you mentioned that question for that customer and you’ve made it easy for that customer to get an answer and you’ve took that burden off your customer service.

That’s the first one you do.

Then after you do that, then you can move it into more of the soft sale content marketing.

Brian: That’s great advice.

If we were to talk again like a year from now, what would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with the progress concerning your business?

Greg: Well, we’re in the garden industry and what we found in garden industries, when the stock market is doing well and when the economy’s doing good, we have less people gardening.

We’re kind of in the mood right now, we’re satisfied with a decent percent amount of growth. We’ve grown every year and we continue to see that.

We don’t want to grow a lot because we can’t handle that. We won’t have steady growth every year. And we thought we’re going to experience that. Even with good of commerce.

We are adding a seed line for this coming year and it’s a pretty big ever for us and we’re adding 120 to a 230 different varieties come spring time.

It’s going to be interesting to see how that happens. We’re going to back these varieties up with the support that we’ve grown.

We’ve looked at them and we know these are good varieties, see business as competitive business. So we got to be on our game to be here and be upsale seeds and we’ve got to give people a compelling reason to buy from us.

And so a year from now when we talk, I hope you asked me, was the seed business a good decision to make a fabulous going into a whole new line.

Brian: What are the main obstacles do you see standing in your way from getting to where you want to get with seeds within a year?

Greg: Oh, just let getting the word out there. You’re like, I’m not going to sit around and give people a compelling reason, because you know, everybody’s selling seeds. But giving people a compelling reason to know why they should come to us.

Thousands of dollars to put in a cloud control warehouse so we can control the temperature of the humidity so that our seeds germination will hold up better.

We’re going to do pack to order. So if somebody wants a pound they can call in and we’ll pack that up and send it to them.

We’re real proud of the fact we get most of the orders up the sameday.

What we have to do is convey all those points, that I just mentioned, all the way to the customer and make them understand, wow, they should buy from us. And if we can do that, then I think we will be successful.

Brian: Awesome. Greg, this has been a great talk, a great look into your industry and where you’ve come from on this.

It’s really, really interesting.

Let’s say someone’s brand new to Hoss Tools. What could a listener do?

What would you recommend them do if they’re interested in finding out more about your products?

Greg: Oh, absolutely. Go to our YouTube channel Hoss Tools. Join our Facebook group Row by Row.

What we have found, our Facebook group is we’re pretty knowledgeable about what we do. There’s a lot of people that we have that we’ve sold to that we’ve interacted with it are part of our Facebook group.

They can answer a lot of garden questions, so if you have a problem with any type of garden or you’ve got a question posted there on the Facebook group, if we don’t answer it, some the rest of them chime in there and maybe give a look different opinions.

That’s the great part of the group is the interaction.

If Simply got a question about products, or about our company, you can go to YouTube and we’ve got close to 200 different video. So you could find the answer there somewhere.

Brian: Greg Key from Hoss Tools. Appreciate you coming on the show, thank you.

Greg: Thank you.

Brian’s Commentary: Wow, that was a really good conversation.

In a short period of time, Greg went over a lot of ideas that I’d like to go back and put a little final point on.

First off when he’s discussing his concept of an ideal customer target market. The one of the first things he points out is it’s people that are looking to grow their own food.

Well, that’s a very clear idea and when he gets into the demographics of 85% ages 25 to 80 and talking about the difference between the younger customer and the older customer, the younger customer being starved for information, which is where their content marketing comes into play.

And if you look at what he’s doing for content marketing and why having a huge focus on their YouTube, and this isn’t necessarily something that you would want to do to focus primarily on video, you have to look at your market, look at what you have the ability to do and what you think you’d work out best at, but focus on it once you find your form of content marketing.

Nothing works greater than having content marketing that educates, entertains and drives traffic back to your website.

Look at what he’s doing with YouTube.

They have regular shows, they have personalities on there. They’re actually discussing the thing that the person wants to do, which is grow their own food and discussing everything around that. They’re not just promoting a product, they’re not just promoting their tools or their upcoming seed line.

They’re discussing everything around it, making it entertaining, informational that helps relate with people and actually starts driving people back to your website.

Eventually they become customers, but in the meantime, in the very beginning, they’re getting to know, like and trust you. This is a term that comes from old times sales people that know you, like you and trust your ones that are going to do business with you.

Not just once, but ongoing.

Also the fact that he defined his customer as my customers are exactly like I am. My type of people, my kind of people, and I’d like to point out if you hate your customers or your clientele, you’re going to be in big trouble.

If you’ll look at the fact that he relates so much with his customers that he believes he knows what they’re looking for and he talks with his customers both via social media and via customer service line and the people that are running customer service.

His focus on ideal customer service on actually having a live person who could answer the phone, someone they’re local that they can discuss with. Relating that back to the content marketing, so creating content based on the most common questions that you get back.

That is such a huge service that you could provide and that step will make you more relatable back to your customer base. It becomes a virtuous loop where you get to know your customers better, you serve them better, you answer their questions before they actually post them and it makes your whole process work 10 times more effective.

Also, Greg has a very clear understanding of the flow of the customers, so he knows that if he’s meeting them on Facebook, he wants to bring them over to YouTube and educate them a little more and from there eventually get them to the website.

The speed of getting someone to purchase does not necessarily mean that they’re going to purchase ongoing, but that relationship, building the relationship via your content is what’s going to grow things long-term.

Finally, the question that he put out asking, what do my customers need?

What does my market need?

And going back to them and finding out what they’re looking for, more of, led them to developing a new seed line and actually start producing seeds or delivering seeds to the market.

This is the Disney model. If you watch what the Disney corporation has done, they go back and they look at, okay, what do they need next?

Disney starts off with babies. You see Minnie mouse on the diapers, you see all these characters being introduced as early as possible, and then they take them the next step.

Okay, what is the next thing?

The next age group, what are they looking for?

They have an entire channel playing to preschoolers with all the characters. They have toys associated with them every step of the way throughout your entire life.

There’s a place for Disney that they’re producing content directly to you regardless of what age or gender you are.

If you could step back and look at your business and try to find a way to be able to speak directly to people ongoing in the same way and ask them really what do they need next? Okay.

Once they have the seeds, what do they need next?

What is the information that my market is asking for?

What are the visitors to my website looking for more of?

If you’re talking to them directly, like via live, over the phone, that makes a big difference.

If you’re talking via social media to your customer base, that’s going to help you out a whole lot. The whole idea is to really get inside your customer’s head and answer the questions they have before they even pose them.

I think this has been a great start for our podcast and where we’re going in the future. I think we’re going to be going more in depth into these concepts over time, so be sure and stay tuned.

Go and visit BrianJPombo.com to find out more about me and what I offer and come back for episode two.

We’ve got another great conversation coming right up.

Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is 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.