Tools? Do you mean my spade and fork?
No. Roz doesn't mean the tools you use in farming but the tools she would recommend to run your cut flower farm business. And there are a lot of them.
Roz Chandler started her flower farming business ten years ago. She will be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media and upscaling your flower farm. No matter what point you’re at in your journey, this podcast will give you the information you need to grow your business. Roz isn’t about overcomplicating things. She wants to help farmers grow their businesses and there are a number of online tools that will help you plan your business and achieve growth and profit.
In this episode, you will learn about tools for:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Connect with Roz Chandler:
Join my Facebook group: Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business
Thank you for listening. I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review or rating.
Tools? Do you mean my spade and fork?
No. Roz doesn't mean the tools you use in farming but the tools she would recommend to run your cut flower farm business. And there are a lot of them.
Roz Chandler started her flower farming business ten years ago. She will be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media and upscaling your flower farm. No matter what point you’re at in your journey, this podcast will give you the information you need to grow your business. Roz isn’t about overcomplicating things. She wants to help farmers grow their businesses and there are a number of online tools that will help you plan your business and achieve growth and profit.
In this episode, you will learn about tools for:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Connect with Roz Chandler:
Join my Facebook group: Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business
Thank you for listening. I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review or rating.
Welcome to the Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Roz Chandler, a flower farmer for over ten years and thirty years as a business owner and Marketing Director. This podcast is for you if you're an ambitious flower farmer, and looking for hints and tips to grow your business, we'll be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media, and upscaling your flower farm. So much more. I'm so excited to introduce you to my amazing guest speakers along the way. All of you will be at different points in your business. Our podcasts will take this into account. We look forward to joining you on your journey.
Hello there. I thought today we’d talk about the tools that I use in my business that might help you in your cut flower business. So recently, I've been adding to these tools more and more and I don't mean tools in terms of a spade and a fork. I mean tools from a business point of view that might aid you to grow your business. So I thought I'd go through my top fifteen. And that sounds a lot, doesn't it? But I do use a lot of tools in my business to help me. So I'll go through them all. And in the show notes, I'll put the URL of each of these tools for you to go and have a look.
So first of all, I use Dubsado. It's an all-in-one business management tool. It can house all your contacts, your invoices, it handles project management, you can create questionnaires and forms in it, you can manage your bookkeeping, you can track your time. But and I use quite a big but. It’s quite a complicated system. It requires quite a lot of setting up and quite a lot of training. Now I just use it in one part of my business. I use it for weddings. And the reason why is because it keeps it all in one place. And I can invoice them and send a contract that they can sign, I've can then send them another invoice before the wedding, six weeks before. So a lot of automation, which helps me run that side of the business really well. Because otherwise, I find that weddings are very time-consuming and you can lose a lot of information. So I would suggest you look at that. But a big but that it is quite a complicated system.
I use Buffer, which is an online tool that allows you to schedule all your content into social media platforms and actually all your Facebook groups too. Brilliant tool. I love it. It's my Sunday afternoon job. I plan the content for the following week. I line it all up in Buffer. And then I don't have to be doing it every day. So it's a real timesaver. And I highly recommend it.
I use Canva, which is a graphics tool. You can create all your social media graphics, you can do presentations, you can do posters, you can do documents. You can do all sorts of things. You can play around with logos. It's got lots of templates in it that you can use. It starts being free for you to get used to and then offers paid subscriptions like Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise. I actually subscribed to Canva Pro. I love Canva. And I'm using it almost every day.
Next one, number four on the list, is Kartra. Now Kartra is an online portal. And I use it to house all my online courses. So it houses video and PDFs and content and I can build memberships and have membership access. It houses all my data and my data lists. I love Kartra. And I use it like I say for online courses.
I use a little unknown tool called Group Leads. Group Leads takes my Facebook members' questions, you know, when they fill in those questions in the Facebook group, their email address and what they want to get out of the group and all those sorts of things, and it takes that data and puts it into a Google spreadsheet. The Google Spreadsheet then links up with Kartra, the database I just mentioned. So straight from somebody coming onto my Facebook group and saying, yes, I'd love to look join your group, the reasons I want to join your group is because I'm starting out being a flower farmer and here's my email address because I'd love to hear from you on offers and promotions and details about what you're offering flower farmers. So straight away, I know they're starting out. I've got their email address. I know what they're interested in and that all goes into Kartra. So brilliant. I'd say Group Leads is brilliant. I think I paid $47 for it for a year and that allows me to do two Facebook groups and it comes highly recommended.
Dropbox. I use Dropbox as a file hosting service. It's an American company, Dropbox. You've probably all heard of it. But it allows me to store files, allows me to share files, I do a lot of video sharing. You know, if I've got a video crew here who are producing videos, they then share them to me through Dropbox. It allows me to share with my web developer in order to get it onto a website, and so on. So I use Dropbox as a file hosting service. On top of that, I’m greedy, I use two file services. I use WeTransfer. If I just want to quickly send a file, I don't need to necessarily keep it, I just want to send it to someone. And I use WeTransfer which is actually based in the Netherlands.
The next one I use is really important flower farmers and it's one we all neglect. And that is logging our time. Because actually, the most costly part of your business is your time. And we forget to log it. What I do is I use an app on my phone, and it's called TDF and I track the activities I do in there. So you can actually track them against a job, let's say you're doing a wedding, or you can track against an activity, like weeding. And you can pull reports off, which show you just how much time everything takes, which is really, really valuable when you're thinking about pricing. And I think you'd be quite shocked when you start to look at your time, how much time you spend on marketing, how much time you spend on weeding, how much time you spend on picking, how much time you spend with brides on administration. Add it all together, put it in a tracker, and it allows you to price in the right way to make a profit.
I use something called One Password. I was getting really quite annoyed with all my different passwords and then forgetting them and resetting them and it drives me nuts. So I now use something called One Password. It’s developed by Agile Bits, which is again another American company and it provides a place for users to store various passwords, software licences and other sensitive information. And it's all locked in a virtual vault. absolutely recommend one pass password.
Next one I use is Fiverr. FIVERR. It’s is an Israeli online marketplace for freelance services. So you could find a freelancer to do your logo or you can find a freelancer, what did I do? Oh in my podcast, I found an amazing freelancer in Chile who did some music for me at the beginning and end of my podcast. You can have a look. I think I paid about $14. But I'd be grateful for your response to that one. It was very quick, she did exactly what I wanted, I wanted the sounds of nature. I didn't want to pay a recording artist to do it. So I use the platform called Fiverr.
Next one is Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is the easiest way to start a podcast. I use Buzzsprout to publish my podcasts. So basically, I want to have done a recording, I upload the recording into Buzzsprout. I then put it in lots of different directories. So I might put it in Apple, I might put it in Google, I might put in Spotify. But Buzzsprout is a really good platform, easy to use if you're starting out in the land of podcasting.
Next one, we must be getting near the end now. I mean, this is an awful lot of tools. Trello. Now Trello is a collaboration tool that just allows you to project manage projects. You know, it tells you who's working on what, where you are with it. It's a bit like a to-do board. I find it really useful. I work with a couple of virtual assistants, one in Dubai and one in Manchester. And sometimes we'll all be working on the same project. And therefore we can all put on Trello where we are with the project, who's done what, where we are now. And it stops all that kind of panic of oh, I've forgotten to tell somebody that or how am I doing with that. So I recommend if you're doing any projects or website project, or you're looking at a marketing plan, that you put it in Trello.
Another one which is a bit fun, and I've recently happened upon it, is an app called King Sumo. As in King and then Sumo. This is a competition app in reality and allows you to build your email database, which is another really important thing to do. And I'll be doing another podcast on that. And the reason why building your email database is really important is because those followers on Facebook and Instagram are really, really important, but you don't own that real estate. You don't own Facebook or Instagram and at any one moment, they could stop or they could block you or something could happen and then you've lost your business. So I would always recommend collecting email data. And using King Sumo every so often, doing once a month competition or once every other month allows you to build your email data list.
Number fourteen, I think we're at now, is Zoom. Now you must all be using Zoom in COVID times. And yeah, it's great. It allows you to run online courses, have meetings. I've been using it for bridal conversations in the initial. So I haven't been meeting them. I've been doing Zoom, which has been an absolute time saver. I love Zoom. We deliver courses on Zoom. We can record on Zoom. And I would recommend it if you're going into workshops and that kind of thing.
And my last one, we talked about Buzzsprout being the distributor of the content for podcasts, which is brilliant. But I actually record on something called Alitu. ALITU. And it's just editing software. I'm using it right now to do this. It takes my raw podcast recordings and turns them into something much nicer. It allows me to edit them. I rarely edit my podcast actually because I just go for it straight and they're not perfect and they might have some noise in it or something or you might have a sound. But it's more natural for me. I'm not really editing but you can put music at the beginning and at the end and intros and outros. So I just use Alitu.
So I hope that gives you a roundup of the tools we're using in our business. Now that's quite a lot. And I think what you need to be wary of is that if you buy the paid versions of all of those, that's quite a costly expense if you add it all up and put it in an Excel spreadsheet every month. So you need to start off with the free versions and see how you're getting on. But thanks very much for listening.
This has been your host, Roz Chandler. If you'd like to know more about growing your cut flower farm, do join our Facebook group. It's called Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business. Many thanks.