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What happens when you're a brand new farm just dabbling in chickens and eggs and trying to find your way? In today's coaching call, I sit down with Erin and Glenn of Wild Cedar Ranch and we talk about what's working in their sales funnel, where they should focus next, and how keeping the joy front and center can actually guide their business growth. If you're in the early stages of farming or just need a reminder to follow the fun, you'll love this one. 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 gotta 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 and increase your sales and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 331 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 get more confident in their marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners. I'm glad you're here and if you're new to the podcast, so glad that you're checking me out. Make sure you subscribe to the show and go listen to my first 10 episodes. Especially if you are new to the marketing space and you need to learn the overall framework. They were designed to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. It's a great place to start, but you could also just look through all of my back issues, my archives, over 300 episodes now and just whatever tickles your fancy, you can start there. There's a lot of good stuff. Make sure you get onto my email list too, because when you do, I'm going to send you an email into your inbox like every five days for maybe three months. And I'm going to roll out the most important things you need to know first as you're trying to learn how to be a better marketer. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe subscribe and you can start getting that free resource. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at localline if managing orders, customers and inventory feels chaotic this season, it might be time for a better system. Localline is the all in one sales platform built for farms and food hubs. Whether you're selling direct to consumer or or managing wholesale buyers or running a csa. With tools like E commerce, automated inventory management, subscriptions, barcode scanning, box builder and pos, localline helps you simplify operations and grow your sales. In fact, farmers using localline increase their annual sales by 23% and boost their average order size by 9.5%. Switching is easy. No setup fees, no sales commissions, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free. No joke, so that you can get started without missing a beat. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use my code MDF2025 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline use that coupon code and you'll be on your way. Start selling smarter this season with localline. And now back to the show. Today is going to be fun. I decided to include a recording of a one to one coaching call that I had with one of my farm marketing school members. This is an option that opens up for my members once they've been in the program for, I want to say it's three months. Then they get this little perk unlocked and I have quite a few people that take me up on it and we get to talk for 30 to 45 minutes over whatever they want to talk about. And so I never quite know what to expect and sometimes the conversations that we have just feel so relevant to other farmers that I know listen to the podcast. And so today I decided that I would share one of these recordings with all of you and I did of course get permission to do that from our two guests today, Erin and Glenn from Wild Cedar Ranch in Texas. And they are still in the very beginning stages stages of their business. Glenn is actually retired. Aaron is a full time school teacher. And so this is kind of a hobby thing on the side that they would like to grow into something more significant, but they don't have a lot of pressure to make that happen quickly. And so this is kind of a unique case. I know some of you who are listening are also in that situation, but even for those of you who are full time farmers, you've just gotten into the business and you really need to make profit fast. I think there are some wise lessons in here that could be relevant to you. I really enjoyed this conversation. We talk a lot about their sales funnel, like where they are starting out in their after one year of business, I kind of listened to some of the things they've tried, some of the things they're innately doing well. Aaron got inside of our marketing school and wanted to put some structure together like an email nurture sequence and just get some real good clarity about some of the elements she needed to have in her sales funnel. And she's been working through that process really well. And so I think she wanted to just get on this call, she and Glenn, and talk out what should we be working on now? Like what is the most important thing for us to be figuring out in the early stages of building a business. And it was a fascinating conversation. I thought there were some really good wisdom gems in here and I just wanted to give you a sense too of the kinds of things that, that you might talk about if you ever got onto a one to one call with BE Anything. But I hope that you'll see how they found their way to their own solution as we talked. It was all from their own ideas and it was just me trying to pull it out of them with some well placed questions and a few prompts. The answers are inside of you, my friends. And you know exactly how to manage your business. Sometimes though, you just need to talk it out with someone. And so that's what I love about being able to offer this to my farmers inside of farm marketing school. So some of you might be thinking about joining my school this fall now that the season is slowly. Well, it's not coming to an end yet, but I know it will be winding down at least here in a month or so. I typically have a lot of farmers that come in in like October and then stay in through most of the winter time. And so maybe you're thinking about doing that too and joining our community. Right now we have about 40, 45 people inside of Farm marketing school and it's a good crowd. It might be something that would really help you this coming winter to spend some time building some of these systems together. We're going to do some fun stuff this winter. I have some cool ideas and I'm going to be updating some of those sessions that are already in there and really focusing a lot more on ChatGPT and how we can be using ChatGPT in all of the projects to make things a whole lot faster. So maybe just be thinking about that as you listen to this call. Just ask yourself, is that something that would be helpful to me? Can I imagine myself in that community, is this the kind of support that I feel like I need? Is this where I want to invest my resources this winter? And maybe that's a heck yes. And if so, I hope so and look forward to spending time with you this winter. You can learn more about farm marketing school@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and of course, I have a little plug for it in the halfway point of the show too, so you can always listen to that as well. All right, so without further ado, we're going to jump right into this recording of a zoom call, and you will notice that my voice is not quite as loud as theirs. I had to do some major adjusting in the editing section of this podcast. I forgot to hook up my. My microphone because I wasn't planning on using this for an episode. And so it was just using the microphone from my laptop instead, a real microphone. So I had to go in and try to raise the volume on all the places where I was talking. And you'll still notice that I'm a little bit softer. I'm sorry about that. I hope you can still hear me. And yeah, sometimes the editing is just what it is. So I hope you get some value from this conversation. I want you to think about if you remember these good old days back when you were starting your business, or maybe that's where you are right now. What can you remember from those times? What wisdom can you glean from this conversation? And I hope you can hear the inspiration and the energy from these two fabulous people, Aaron and Glenn. All right, let's dive into the interview. Here we go.
