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If you've ever thought my customers will leave, if I can't offer that one thing, then this episode is for you. Today we're digging into a live coaching call in farm marketing school where we turn scarcity, fear and assumptions into strategy and confidence and a mindset shift. So many of our business challenges will be one in our minds. 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 336 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 strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the podcast. Big shout out to my listeners. Really glad you're here. If you're new to the show, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and go check out my first 10 episodes because I designed them to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. If you have no idea about the basic framework of marketing, that's the place to go. Another good thing to do would be get on to get onto my free email list because when you do, I'm going to send you an email every four or five days for about three months and they're going to basically walk you through the jungle of farm marketing and teach you the ropes. The key insights and principles point you to the most important episodes. Follow people you should be following, resources you should have and know about. A lot of freebies. It's really good, so just go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe and you can get started on that. 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 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. Well, happy Halloween everyone. That's coming up in a couple of days and this is a fun fact, but tomorrow is my birthday. Yes, I was almost a Halloween baby and my husband is probably going to be planting garlic. He always seems to do that on my birthday. We'll see if that happens again this year. We have just finished our CSA season last week and so this has been a different week for me. I have a lot less on my plate, more rest, more bandwidth and frankly, I have just been taking some time to do nothing. It feels really weird. It feels really weird to not be busy all the time and I have to actually calm the voice down in my head that tells me I should be working and that I'm not valuable unless I'm working. Do you guys ever have that voice? Yeah, like. Like I feel guilty getting caught in my lazy boy reading a book. So this is always a shift that I go through when, when we're transitioning from the really busy season to the winter season when we get a little bit of a break. But anyway, today's episode is going to be a little bit different. A few weeks ago, inside of Farm Marketing School, we have a monthly zoom call where the members can come and just bring anything into the room. We sometimes share really cool things that are working in their businesses, share ideas. Sometimes they bring a question to the table and ask for some coaching support or ask the group for some ideas. And we had a live group call with several members. During that call, one of our farmers, Stacy, opened up about a really stressful problem that she was having in her business. She sells meat. She has a membership model where her customers pay monthly to get first access to all her products. And right now she is completely out of beef. Like zero inventory and she's not going to have any for at least nine Months. And she thinks that beef is the item her customers love and always want. It's her highest priced product. So she has a really high profit margin on it. And she's watching beef just go out the door in other places for ridiculous amounts of money. Right. And she's just seeing this lost opportunity. And you know, to make things worse, it's just going to be several years before her own cows are ready. So she's, she's kind of in a tough spot. I wouldn't say she was panicking, but she sounded frustrated. And the big question that she brings into the room is, how do I keep selling when I don't have the one product everyone wants? What if people leave? What if they go to my competitor? What if my membership loses value because I just don't have beef for sale? And that's the thing that people want. And so I want you to listen in to the conversation. This was actually an hour long zoom meeting. We had several other things that we discussed, but I only chose this. I pulled out this excerpt because I have a feeling that this is something that comes up for some of you. And I thought that it was just really interesting to walk around the thoughts and the feelings that were going on inside of her and to notice them and to talk about how do we need to shift how we think about this because that's what's going to unlock us. So I think you're going to see how there's some, some really big mindset shifts that happen in the conversation that are powerful. There were some assumptions that were made. There was a lot of scarcity mindset. And I don't know if we like solved the problem or she, you know, Stacy was like gangbusters right off that call to go change and save the world. But I do think that she could see the perspective that we were talking about and it gave her something to think about, to journal about and to work on and to practice A lot of like when, when I get coached by my own coach and I bring issues to the table with her every week, the problem doesn't go away just because we talk it out. Like I have to practice a new way of being, a new way of thinking about it. And practicing still feels uncomfortable. Practicing is awkward. I notice the, the feelings that come up as I'm trying to practice being in a different way. Sometimes I have to the feeling to be there as I'm practicing being the new version of myself. And I have to be comfortable with the both and. Right. So I just want you to listen in on a coaching conversation and just see how we go about challenging the assumptions, how this process kind of works, because this may not be the specific issue that you're dealing with, but I can promise you that whatever challenge you're facing, a lot of it is likely based on thoughts that you're telling yourself that may or may not be the only way you can look at it. And so I just want to show you how it's possible to change the outcome by simply changing how you think about things. Okay, so I'm going to play a few clips from that live conversation. In between the clips, I'm going to jump in, share some commentary, because there's some really big lessons in here that I want to tease out a little bit more. And I just want to say a huge thank you to Stacy, who shared so openly with the rest of the group. You know, it's really hard to be vulnerable like this, and they all know before I get started on the show or on the zoom call with them that some of this might end up on a podcast. And I just really appreciate how Stacy shared, like, something that's very real and raw to her, and she was willing to kind of put herself in the hot seat and let us kind of tear apart the issue and look at it from lots of different angles and that she was really open to seeing things from a different angle. So this episode isn't just for farmers who sell meat who have this very specific situation. It's for any farmer who has ever felt stuck or afraid or unsure of how you should move forward. So let's dive into this conversation, and I will meet you on the other side of the first clip.
