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My Digital Farmer Podcast
292 My End of Year Housekeeping Tasks for Farm Marketing
00:42:05
As the year winds down, it’s the perfect time to take stock and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 10 essential housekeeping tasks I tackle every December to keep my farm marketing...
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Corinna Bench
It's the end of the year, and that means it's time to take care of some of those annual tasks that help us review our season and look ahead to the next one. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you my short list of tasks that I always do in the month of December to tidy up my business and keep things running smoothly. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 292 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable farm business. How's everyone doing today? Happy Christmas season. I was just looking at the calendar and this episode is going to be dropping December 18, I said I think is what it said. So big shout out to all of my regular listeners. Welcome back. If you're new to the show, so glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and go check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an onboarding ramp into the marketing lingo. Another place to go is to join my email list because when you do, I'm going to send you an email about every five days that walks you through the marketing jungle and teaches you the ropes. If you're especially green when it comes to marketing, that is a gold mine. It's all free and I think it goes on for like three months. If you get sick of it, just unsub. But it's my way of investing in you. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at localline. Imagine all of your farm sales under one roof. Localline is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs, selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, running a csa, and more. Features include E commerce, automated inventory management, a box builder, subscriptions, point of sale, and more, helping you increase your sales, save time and streamline your processes. Are you looking to switch to sales software that does it? All subscriptions start as low as $49 a month with no setup fees or sales percentages. Plus, if you join LocalLine today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost to you, so you'll be up and running in no time. You can even pause your subscription in the off season. And bonus, as a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code. So so head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and enter the coupon code MDF2024. Our farm uses localline as our E commerce platform. I can't say enough good things about it. We love it. Make the switch today and now back to the show. Well, I'm back. This episode is going to be dropping sometime around mid December, maybe even close to to the Christmas holiday season. And so for those of you who celebrate Christmas and Christ's birth, I just want to say Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and I hope you have some time with your family and some time to rest, relax and rejuvenate. Today I wanted to do an episode all around the topic of end of year activities. I'm often asked by farmers to be a little more descriptive about how I run the day to day elements of our farm business. What are the things that drive my energy? What are the things I'm spending my time doing? And there are a lot of rinse and repeat behaviors that I'm doing within the season itself that I talk about in other episodes. But I definitely have seasons of the year where there are certain tasks that come up one time and I have to make sure that I do them so that I don't get behind or so that I stay on top of my vision and my values and I have clarity about where I'm going, what direction we're going as a business? The end of the year is one of those times of year where I have a lot of these kinds of activities show up. Many of them are 10 to 30 minute jobs, but they're important that I put on the calendar and that I take care of because they just keep our business tight and neat and tidy and I'm all about being organized. So I thought I would spend this episode today walking you through what are these tasks that show up on my list in the month of December, early January that I make a point to take care of. I'm not saying you have to do all of them, but maybe some of these haven't occurred to you. And I just want to suggest them to you that you put them into your practice this time of year because it's the ideal time before we begin a new season, before we set our compass in a new direction. I think it's helpful for us to close up shop, tidy up what happened the year before, reflect on it, and then turn our eyes in a new direction. So it's about 10 things. Some of them take a little bit more time than others. But I'm just going to go through the list and I want you to just sit back and let this wash over you. Some of these items I hope will challenge you to take action in the next few weeks. Some of them are going to be like, oh, my gosh, yeah, I should totally do that. And that's important. And you're going to go, quick, take care of it. That's the goal. Okay. And I will make sure that I put this list in the show notes in a nice little tidy list so that you can go and just quick copy them down. So if you don't have a piece of paper or pencil right now, no problem. All right. So I did try to put these in a little bit of an order because I do have to do some of these first before I can do other things. So let's get started with the first one. That's my end of year evaluation. I spend at least an entire day on this process and I actually look forward to it. I get out my journal, and sometimes I get out a big whiteboard or piece of newsprint and write on that. But a lot of times it just starts out as a journaling process. This is where I am debriefing my entire year. And I really look at it through the lens of a marketing perspective first. Although there are some things that I look at in terms of production, but since marketing and sales is my area of expertise in the farm, it's where I'm supposed to focus. I mostly look at this analysis through that lens. And so here's where I'm looking at my sales data and my sales metrics kind of at an overview, annual overview. Like, I'm looking at this data all year long. This is not the only time that you should be looking at it. But there are patterns that I can see when I get to the end of the year and I look at the big brush strokes. Now I'm going to be teaching an entire workshop class on farm marketing metrics. I think I'm going to call it Marketing Metrics Dashboard. And it's going to go inside of Farm Marketing School. It'll be a live class during the month of January. So if you want to join Farm Marketing School to take that class and kind of figure out what are the metrics I could be reviewing and tracking and then create some kind of a vehicle within your business so that you are tracking it throughout the season, you can join Farm Marketing School in the month of January just to take that class. So I'll let you go learn more about that. I have a little promo about Farm Marketing School during this podcast so you can listen to that in a few minutes. But it's mydigitalfarmer.com FMS but I have this process already in place throughout the year to be tracking some of this important metric information so I can go back and look at those and see what the patterns are. And this helps me kind of keep my finger on the pulse of the business and evaluate how we're doing. I'm looking at things like what products did really well, what drove sales to the store. Were there some offers that seemed to be really strong? Were there some that were consistent? Were there some that were kind of meh. Where did the revenue for our business come from percentage wise? That's always a good thing to be aware of. We don't just do CSA anymore. We also have a pretty sizable wholesale track now, which has been really huge for giving us some security. And we're also developing our online store aspect. So I'm kind of looking at those numbers and noticing how they're shifting and where is this, the financial security and the cash flow really coming from? Where were the tight cash flow moments that we had to address this year? There was one particular month where things got really close and that's just going to be an interesting thing for us to take a look at together, Kurt and I, and say, okay, why did that happen and what can we do for next year to make sure that that kind of kind of thing doesn't happen again? Because that was very stressful. Where was the time crunch especially dire? So not just where was cash flow dire, but where did we feel really stressed when it comes to our time and our energy? And it seems like every year we have this happen at least once where we overload the that particular, I don't know, two or three week period. It just seems like everything is happening at the same time where we have a couple of wholesale contracts plus our CSA started, plus, you know, we have to take care of this planting and production element and we just don't have enough hands on deck to be able to pull it off when we're pulling really late nights. And it's just, just tough on the whole team. So for us to kind of look at that and say, what can we shift for next year? Right. So we're just evaluating all this stuff, debriefing the stuff for the whole year. And I, I want to make sure, I say here, too, that this isn't the only time that I'm debriefing. I think it is important to have debrief moments periodically throughout the season when you have an important thing that just happened. So, for example, in, in the marketing world, I always do a special debrief after my CSA Early Bird promotion. That is the biggest promotion event of the year that I plan. I put a lot of energy into it. It drives a lot of our sales. If you listened to one of my previous podcast episodes, I share with you the, the amazing results that we had this year. And so I always take the time to just look at, okay, what, what were the numbers for that? What went well? And I do a special hardcore debrief for those special occasions. You might do something similar to that after, you know, you finish a big production push and you want to take a pause and just reflect on what worked well, what didn't work well, what will we fix next year? But I'm now talking about, like, overall, over the whole year. It's important for us to sit down and ask these questions generally so that we can see how the energy flowed, how the, the cash flow flowed over the course of the 12 months in our farm season. I'm also looking at things like my email nurture sequence. What was even opened in that? How did it do this year? Is it still on track? How many new customers came into the fold? How many new leads came into the email list? So is that top of the funnel pipeline still working? Well, if not, I need to. There's a little yellow flag that goes up and that I need to address that here in the off season. Yeah, just general, like, what felt easy this year? What. Where did I feel excitement and where do I feel excitement moving forward? Where is their energy? What shifts do I see coming down the pike? Any opportunities that we feel energy around? What did I learn this year? There's always a lot of stuff that comes out in my journal on that question. How do I want to grow next year? What am I feeling a lot of energy for? Because I want to make sure that I'm honoring the needs that I have personally to grow and that may not even have anything to do with the business. Um, just generally, what are the numbers telling me? And I always ask this question too. Where am I having fun? Where am I having fun in my business? And where do I wish I could spend more time? So all of this stuff is kind of getting filtered through a whole entire day, sometimes two days of my annual debrief. And I will usually just throw it all down in a journal, but then I'll. I'll spend a little bit of time looking for the patterns. So I've just put a lot of information down on these pages. Now I need to assimilate it a little bit. What are the patterns that I see? And I'll usually write out, like, a summary again, just because I find that really helpful. And then that's this working document that I then base the rest of my actions for the month of December on. Okay, so if you want to get a little bit more guidance on how exactly do I do an end of year evaluation, I did an entire podcast episode on the questions that I ask in that evaluation and debrief and what I journal on. And I will make sure that I put the link for that in the show notes. I can't remember the episode off the top of my head. I did not come prepared with that number. And I'm recording this while my Internet is currently down, so I can't go check it right now. So I will just. I'll put it in the show notes for this episode and you can go back and find it. It is a really good episode. In fact, it was so good that I. That I did a repeat of that episode the following December. So it actually shows up twice in my podcast archives. Okay. The second thing that I do in the month of December to kind of close up the season is I review my budget for the remaining fiscal year. So I'm recording this in 2024. So we are going to be spending a few hours looking at the budget numbers for 2024. Where are we at? Are we on track? We've got a few more weeks to meet our goals, to meet our targets, and we also have, you know, the possibility if you're actually having a really strong year like we are this year, we're looking at things like, okay, how can we lower our tax liability because we only have a few weeks left to do some of these expenses and write these. These expenses off. Where might we want to reinvest in our business? Or are there some expenses for next year that we can invest in now with this year's sort of surplus now. We haven't always had a surplus. If some of you are listening and you're like, well, that must be nice to have a surplus, I just want to tell you that we weren't always there either. And in fact, for many years, it was really, really tight for us in the last two months and we would often have to draw a line of credit. And that was a really uncomfortable place for me to be. We were always okay, and we could always pay it off in the end. But I remember that that was kind of a part of the process of building our business. And eventually we got to a place where we were able to no longer have to do that anymore, and we could have a plan for reinvesting that money back into our business if we wanted to. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we. We take it as a owner draw and we celebrate and reward ourselves. So this is when we kind of look at any infrastructure plans. Kurt always has a wish list, and I also always have a wish list for things that I want to develop. Usually it's personal growth opportunities that I can also write off. And I will take a look at that and we'll just see what's possible. But we're trying to ask the question, how do we bring down our tax liability? Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly online membership program for beginning to intermediate farmers that's designed to teach you the ropes of farm marketing, but also more importantly, to help you actually build the most essential marketing assets that you need to have in your farm business if you want to thrive. Now, I know you know how important systems are. You have systems in your business for all kinds of things in the production realm, but you also need systems in your marketing and sales, especially if you want to scale up and get to that point where you can have a team, hire a great group of people and be less and less involved in the minutiae of your business. So inside of Farm Marketing School, there are over 15 different classes that you can take. You join for a monthly fee, and you can have access to all of them. You can binge them all if you want, or you can be selective about which ones you want to deploy. They're each designed to take about 30 days, and you watch the training video and then you actually build that particular marketing asset, whether it's updating the homepage of your website, or it's writing an email nurture sequence, or it's practicing writing a weekly email really well, or building out different kinds of promotion Offers so many different projects inside of there. I also give you a resource folder with examples and templates to shortcut the process. Sometimes I have bonus videos that give you a step by step of how to do the tech work. It's really good. It gets really high marks. So I encourage you in your off season to take some time and invest in building out the sales and marketing systems in your business. To join farm marketing school and try it out for a month. Head to my digitalfarmer.com forward/fms. And now back to the show. Okay, so we review our budget for the remaining fiscal year and we kind of take some action steps. We know, okay, we've got to pay for these expenses or we want to get our checking account down to this number or whatever. Here's how. We want to reinvest in the business by this date, and we take care of that. The third thing that I do is I set goals for the next year. This is something that I usually do first myself. And then I will bring my work to the table with Kurt, and he will have done some of this work through his lens, through the production lens, and we talk some of this out. We usually do this actually on a full day retreat where he and I will go away, usually to like a state park lodge or something, and we'll just have a night together and then two. Well, essentially really, one working day where we kind of work on this for several hours and we talk out, what are. What are our goals? We'll usually do some hiking and we'll talk while we're hiking. We'll talk out some of our stuff. And then when we come to the meeting, we. We've already sort of worked stuff out, but this is where we're thinking about personal goals that we have. We're thinking about business goals, revenue goals. Where do we feel energy? What are we excited about? What are the projects that we want to create? What were some of the tough points last year? That debriefing work that I talked to you about really helps with this. I've already worked some of this out, and I can share some of the highlights. The highlights reel with him. And this allows us to make a short list, usually no more than three things that we want to try and work on over the next coming year. And what this does is this creates a foundation for setting our budget for the next fiscal year, which is what we do in the fourth step. So that's the fourth big kind of item that comes out. Now, this doesn't always happen in December. Sometimes this doesn't happen until the first two weeks of January. But we first have to debrief our year, evaluate our year and set our goals for the next year. Because it's from the goals and your values that your budget should spring. Right. So for example, this is maybe a silly example, but I really want to update and create a new CSA brochure. I haven't had one for like seven years. It's really outdated and so that's going to cost some money. That's going to end up having to be something in my marketing budget. But I can set that as one of my little minor goals. As we're working through this process. I know one of our big projects for this year is to explore the value added world and adding some value added products into our online store. And so this, this feels a little overwhelming right now for me, but I'm going to create some baby steps, some step one, step two, step three, and help me kind of figure out how do I begin this process. And that'll be kind of the big project this year that we're going to work on. And we'll have to parse out what does this look like? So yeah, we just kind of set some very specific goals that are measurable, that are, that have some teeth to them that I can actually write down and they're not so vague that I don't know how to take action on them. And that usually comes out of this, out of this meeting. Okay, so then we set the budget for the new fiscal year and that's usually a full four to five hour process. Some of you may, may not have any knowledge of how to go about setting a farm budget. That may be a totally new concept to you. I remember when we first started, we didn't even know what types of things should be in a farm budget. What are the categories that should be there? And so if that's you, first of all, that's okay. Like that we've all been there. And I would encourage you to reach out to a more seasoned farmer and just ask them to maybe share with you their categories. They don't have to share if they're not comfortable sharing their whole Google sheet with you budget sheet. But maybe they can share with you the categories of things that should or could be in a farm budget. Another place to ask, this is your accountant. And that's actually where we went when we first started. We were like, hey, what are, what are typically the, the different account categories that, that are in a farm budget? And what is the quote? Unquote right amount that we should have for each of these line items, like what percentage of our revenue should be going towards insurance and so forth. So that can be some helpful data for you or it might be worth it to hire a consultant to help you navigate that. Especially someone who has experience looking at farms and working with farms because then they can kind of see, can see patterns and they can share like where you fall within that. Okay, so we do set our budget for the next fiscal year. Like I said, that doesn't always happen in December, but it definitely happens by the end of January. It is super important that you have clear goals for your revenue and your expenses so that you have a road map that you can follow. Number five is I build my promotional calendar for the next year. This usually happens in the first two weeks of January. Sometimes if I get my act together, it's earlier than that. If you have products that you need to sell, like if you've got a big launch that brings you a large amount of revenue in January, then this is something you'll need to start working on in December. For our business, we really go dormant and quiet until about March when we start promoting our spring plant sale. So if I don't get on top of this until the middle of January, it's really not that big a deal because I'm not actively promoting a whole lot of stuff. And I can kind of fall back on my regular rhythm of just a weekly email or an every other week email and the social media promotions that I do. So. But you might have to be a little more intentional about this and get on top of this a little earlier. There is an entire class or workshop project inside of Farm Marketing School about the promotion calendar. How do you put a promotion calendar together, especially if you're kind of a beginner, intermediate farmer? What does that even look like? And the more advanced you get and the more like awesome you get at generating revenue, you will develop a more, much more detailed promotion calendar. But this is a really great class to take if you just want to understand the basics and get your kind of first promotional calendar under your belt and you'll see examples of them. You'll get ideas for the kinds of offers you can be putting in there and the process. So if you're interested in that, just again, join Farm Marketing School and that can choose that as the project you want to work on for 30 days and get that, watch the class and then download the resources and then just get it done. Tons of things in there to help you manage that. Okay, so Once I've built my promotion calendar, sometimes that requires a slight update to the budget. If, you know, I decide, for instance, that I'm going to need to invest in, I don't know, Facebook ads to grow my email list more than I had anticipated. Or there's this project I want to try, and it's going to cost an extra thousand dollars to get the promotional materials ready. Like, I might then have to adjust the budget, but usually the tweaks that I need to make are so minor that it's not even really worth mentioning. So, number six, this is easy. I spend about an hour in the month of December cleaning my email list. So I want to encourage you to put this on your list of things to do. I try to do this twice a year, and the end of the year is when things are dying down for me, is a perfect time to do this. This is just when I go into ConvertKit, now known as Kit, by the way, they rebranded where I go in here and I do a search for who are my cold subscribers. And so these are the subscribers that haven't opened up an email in, like, I want to say, three months. And Kit will actually organize those into a giant list and I will usually just kind of open up a few of those. It's several hundred every time I do this. It's. In this case, I think it was 500 names. And I will kind of spot check several of them to see if indeed this is a list that you know, where people haven't been opening. And you can go back and kind of see all the emails they've gotten individually and have they been opened at all? And if I just see a sea of blue dots, blue is the color that shows that they haven't opened the email, then I know that, yeah, this is pretty accurate. And then I will, I will just select them all and maybe uncheck a few names. I'll usually review and just be like, oh, no, I don't want to remove that name. And I will delete them just like that. So that usually takes me about an hour to go through that process. And that incredibly affects my email open rates. Like, I see them bump up within a few hours because of doing that. So you want to get people off your email list. If they're not opening your emails, it either means that they're no longer engaged with you or they're not seeing your emails because they're going into the spam folder, in which case they're pretty much, you know, not a real email lead. If they're not ever going to see your emails, then you might as well just get rid of them. And if they really want to know you, they will find out about you again and they will resubscribe. So it's always hard for me to do it, but I, I just did it actually yesterday and yeah, it's done. Feels good. Okay. Number seven. I organize my files so that they are easier to get through the next year. And I. I'm talking about my physical files, but also my digital files. I primarily use Google Docs as my method for organizing things on my computer. And so I will occasionally just create documents. Documents, but I won't create them inside the right folder. Have you ever done that? And so I just have this collection of 20 documents or you know, sheets, whatever that, that are just hanging out in a random place. And so I make it nice and tidy and I put things back where they belong. I'll go through the different folders, I'll delete things that I no longer need and just clean things up. I do the same thing with my Google Photos. I am not very good at filing and organizing my photos as I take them. I really need to create a process to do that every, every weekend or every month just to go through my photos for the month instead. I do it in spurts and, and then there's just a lot to do. But this is where I go into Google Photos. I have it set so that all my photos that I take on my iPhone automatically go into Google Photos. So I just go in there and I will check, mark or tag the ones that I want to save or organize in a certain way and then I'll stick them into a special Google folder that I've labeled. So I have folders for things like testimonials. I have like screenshots of testimonials. I have folders for things like digital farmer marketing ideas. I have folders for user generated content. So pictures of things that my customers have made and then photos for the staff pack nights different by vegetable name. Because sometimes I need a picture of a really great tomato or different product launches. So if I have like bulk tomatoes is one that comes to mind. I have a certain slide or graphic that I created on Canva that is loaded into the Google folder so that next year when it comes time to sell the bulk tomatoes and I want to show a picture of the wax box that they come in and how much £30 actually is, I have a good photo that I've taken already of that product that I can just grab instead of having to go and make it. So taking the time to think about what are the products that you sell and organizing them into the Google folders can be. Google photo folders can be really helpful. All right, we're almost done. I also review my email nurture sequence this time of year and also my sales sequences. I usually do those actually before I have to promote that product. So that's not always something that I do in the off season. But the email nurture sequence is definitely something I review and update. This year I plan on adding a few additional emails to the nurture sequence. It will be a mix of emails that I was sending this past year as a weekly email to my farm list. Some of those were really good, so I'll take a look. I always log like, what are the emails that I send every week that's on a special spreadsheet. So I can kind of go through that list and read the subject lines and be like, oh, that was a really good email. And I can copy and paste that email and stick it into the nurture sequence so it becomes part of an evergreen resource. Some of those topics that went out in the weekly emails were actually could do double duty as an evergreen type of email. I want all new people to read that email at some point. So that's kind of a little hack. If you are somebody that does a weekly or every other week email and you occasionally write a. A slam dunk winner, don't just let it disappear, but you can resurrect it and put it into your nurture sequence eventually. So this is the time of year when I evaluate that and when I do that, I'm also. I've already decided I'm going to do this, but I want to create a whole new strand. I'm not sure if it's going to be in my email current email nurture sequence, or if I'm going to create an offshoot or a whole separate email nurture sequence on my health journey. Because I feel like what I have gone through and the things I have learned can help a lot of people who are in my farm audience. I. I know I have a lot of customers who come to me with health issues who probably have gut dysbiosis and maybe haven't realized that that's part of the problem. And so I. I'm excited to kind of develop a series of emails where I just basically say how I'm going to share my journey to health with you and what I went through and how formative it's been and how I'm really passionate now about seeing food as medicine because I've lived it and I am. I know some things now and I want to share them with anyone who's interested in learning. You know, click here and you can follow. Follow my journey. And I don't even know if I'm going to pitch anything at the end. I don't really have a product necessarily that I'm going to sell out of that. I'd have to kind of think about that. But it's more just goodwill. It's like, hey, I. This has been so groundbreaking for me and I know that I've been praying to God actually to send people who need help to me if he feels like I could be helpful to them, to just send them to me. And I'm not going to go actively looking for them, but they'll just come to me and I will be happily guiding them. I can point them in a direction and say, I'm not going to give you the step by step, but I can show you where to go to learn it. I'm really excited about that and I think it could actually benefit our business to attract a whole new group of people who are really keen on, on getting healthy and using food to heal themselves. So we'll see where that goes. But that's something that I can be doing here in my off season. Okay. The other ones are really quick. Number nine, I update my copyright language on my website. So all of my landing pages on my website and all of my email subscribe forms inside of Kit or convertkit. This feels weird saying kit Convertkit is now Kit. So I just have to get over that. But I have to go inside of all of those and change the copyright language so that it says 2025 instead of 2024. So make sure you do that. You want your customers to see that you're staying on top of your marketing assets. I send appreciation notes to my vendors, usually end of year gifts or at the very least a note. And my customers get a Christmas card. So I'll. I no longer do a whole ton of that. I put the card together, but I used to hand write the envelopes because I feel like that's important to me. I just want, I want it to feel like my farmer is like really thinking about me and like, you know, this is a family feel. In family we, we write this out by hand and with like 400 customers. That was becoming such a burden to me. So now I have a teenager that I pay and she helps me write these and that has really reduced the burden. I no longer dread it, and I still feel like it's got like a handwritten touch. So my customers appreciate getting that card from us every year. Okay, so those are the top 10 things that we do in the month of December, maybe the first two weeks of January. I know there's a couple of others that I can't think of, but those are the big ones. We do have our LLC annual meeting at the beginning of the year, which is like a token 30, 30 minute meeting. And maybe I should mention that too, but you might not be an llc, but that's something that we technically by, by law have to do. But yeah, those are my, those are my annual repetitive tasks that I do again and again. I normally have one big project that I have earmarked for the off season that I'm developing. So aside from these, like, regular repetitive things that I have to do at the end of the year to tie things up, I'm also usually working on one exciting thing that is an innovation in our, in our business. So for this year, that project is adding a value added line to our brand. My interview with Kendall a few weeks ago, if you haven't listened to it, you need to go back and listen to it. It was a very popular episode where she kind of laid out how they have a frozen prepared foods line. Frozen prepared foods line, and how much extra revenue it's brought into their business and how much excitement and new kinds of customers it's attracted really challenged me. And so Kurt and I got excited about that and we are going to test it out. We're at least going to look into it. And maybe five, six months from now, we're going to decide that it's not worth it. But I'm excited to explore it. So big shout out to Kendall from Marketing for Farmers for inspiring us to, to try that out. And we've already found a chef and we're kind of actively working on some recipes now, so we'll see how that goes. But that's our big project that we're working off. Working on in the off season. So I encourage you to always be innovating, always be looking for something new that you can add on or change in your business. And I wouldn't go too crazy and do too many things at once, but I feel like it's important to continue to innovate because that's what keeps you excited about your business and keeps your customer coming back for more too. All right, well, there you have it. That is my list of the top 10 things that I work on to close up the end of the year and to transition into the new one. I will write that all down in the show notes which you can find@mydigitalfarmer.com 292 all right, if you like today's episode, please go leave me a rating or a review. It really does help more farmers find out about the show. And if you want to get onto my email list and get some of that free stuff, I have to send your away to make your marketing even stronger and to gain more confidence in what you're doing. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe don't forget I am now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I show up there with a marketing tip mindset coaching moment on Instagram Stories primarily. So I'd love to connect with you there. And I am looking for podcast guests. If you know someone who would be great on the show or have some insights to share in the topic of sales and marketing. I would love to talk with you and meet with you and see if it's a good fit so you can reach out to me@mydigitalfarmersmail.com thanks so much for joining me today everyone. Have a great week, a wonderful holiday and remember, I believe in you. Bye.