Profitable Mindset

FREE Two Day Event: The Farm Marketing Fix - June 2026 Sign Up HERE Where Do I Start With Farm Marketing When I Have No Customers and No Idea What I'm Doing? If you're a new farmer wondering where to begin with marketing, this episode walks through the exact starting point Charlotte has used with thousands of farmers across the U.S. and 15 countries. No theory — just the four foundational steps in the order they actually work. Where should a new farmer start with marketing? Start by writing down every person you know who might be interested in what you sell. That list is the seed of your email list, and your email list is what builds a profitable farm. Most new farmers think they need a logo, a brand, a Facebook page, or a fancy website before they can start. They don't. The first move is identifying the people in your existing life who eat eggs, buy flowers, or care about pasture-raised meat — and that almost always starts with mom, sister, neighbor, cousin. Every farmer starts from zero. That list is your starting point. Should farmers build a website before using social media? Yes — your website should come before social media because Facebook and Instagram are designed to keep people scrolling, not to help you make money. Social media algorithms show your posts to a small fraction of your followers (often less than 5%), and you don't own that audience. A website works for you 24/7 and gets found by new customers searching Google. Social media should funnel people to your website, not replace it. Why is email marketing better than social media for farms? Email marketing outperforms social media by thousands of times because subscribers have given you permission to reach them directly, with no algorithm in the way. When someone is on your email list, they've said yes to hearing from you. There's no platform deciding whether your message gets seen. Email is also where people make purchasing decisions — social media is where they scroll. You also own your email list; you don't own your Facebook following. What is the correct order to set up farm marketing? The four foundational steps, in order: (1) write your list of people who might be interested, (2) identify your brand by interviewing customers, (3) build a website designed to sell, (4) email your list consistently. Skipping ahead to social media or paid ads before this foundation is in place is the most common reason farm marketing doesn't work. Build the foundation; everything else feeds into it. What are the stages of farm business growth? Charlotte teaches eight stages every farm moves through: Seed, Sprout, Roots, Bloom, Harvest, Orchard, Estate, and Legacy. Where you are determines what work matters most. Seed-stage farmers ($0 in sales) need to decide it's a business and pick one focus product. Sprout farmers ($1K–$10K) need consistency — one weekly email, one sales channel, one anchor product for 90 days. The most expensive mistake is a Sprout-stage farmer trying to solve a Harvest-stage problem. How can farmers learn marketing without making expensive mistakes? The fastest way is to follow a proven, sequenced path rather than piecing things together from free YouTube videos and conflicting advice. Charlotte's Profitable Farmer Marketing program enrolls twice a year, in June and October, and teaches the exact sequence in this episode with weekly coaching, a private community, and (new for June 2026) a done-for-you marketing plan built privately for full-pay students. Resources mentioned in this episode: Farmer website template (Squarespace): charlottemsmith.com/website Free email marketing course for farmers: charlottemsmith.com/free-email-course The Profitable Farmer Marketing program — opens June 2026. Welcome workshop is Tuesday, June 23rd. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/mastery FAQ: Q: How many people should be on my starting list? Ten people is fine. Two hundred is fine. The number doesn't matter — what matters is that you start one and add to it consistently. Q: Do I need a logo before I launch my farm business? No. A logo is not a brand, and you can launch without one. Your brand is who you help and how you help them — that comes from customer interviews, not a designer. Q: How long does it take to build a profitable farm using this approach? Most students inside the Profitable Farmer Marketing program make their investment back within 90 days. Some do it in two weeks. The timeline depends on how consistently you do the foundational work. Q: Can I just use Facebook instead of a website? No. Facebook controls who sees your posts, you don't own your following, and the platform isn't designed to convert visitors into buyers. A website does all three. Q: What if I'm too rural for online marketing to work? Distance isn't the obstacle — relationship is the opportunity. Charlotte's clients regularly have customers drive 60–90 minutes past cheaper options to buy from them, because their brand is clear. Connect with Charlotte Sign up for Farm Marketing Week at charlottemsmith.com/masterclass. Subscribe and Review Subscribe to The Profitable Mindset Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And consider leaving a review. Your reviews help other farmers find this work. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE This is the episode where it gets real. Not Instagram real. Actually real. Hayden's MRI confirmed a cartilage tear in her wrist. Recovery is months out, surgery is possible, and she can barely make bouquets one-handed. She's been in a depression. Her corporate job is doing layoffs and she doesn't know week to week if she still has one. She wanted to quit. And then she opened an email and found out she'd won a $15,000 grant from Ag West Farm Credit — the one she spent days applying for back in March and never thought she'd get. She was crying when she read it. That grant is going toward a greenhouse, season extension supplies, and, for the first time, hired help. On the sales side, the four-week CSA subscription is done. Pre-selling $1,200 back in spring funded her startup costs and meant she didn't have to market during the busiest harvest weeks. The flowers were already spoken for. But pickup logistics were a mess. Friends texted asking for exceptions. She ended up delivering some bouquets herself. Next year she wants a community drop point and stricter boundaries. The U-pick events were the biggest learning of the summer. Her practice run with 20 friends revealed that people were scared to pick the flowers, cut stems three inches long, and needed way more upfront education than she expected. The paid events went better until a bachelorette party of 10 bought tickets to her intimate sip-and-snip evening. They showed up 15 minutes late from a winery. Lesson learned: group bookings get a private event option with a minimum price. The two biggest fails? She didn't get succession planting done, which meant spending $200 at Wilco on plant starts right before the U-picks so the field didn't look empty. And she hasn't tracked a single harvest, expense hour, or bloom count all season. No system, no clipboard, no data. She knows it'll cost her in planning next year. The biggest strategic shift: she's moving away from summer bouquet sales entirely. Next year she wants to focus on early spring flowers with season extension, run the CSA from March through Mother's Day, and spend summer on higher-profit events instead of sweating through harvests in 90-degree heat while working 12-hour corporate shifts. Life is 50-50. This episode is proof. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE Hayden's four months into building Big Oak Flower Farm and she's in that weird middle spot — wishing she was selling more while intentionally holding back because she doesn't have enough flowers yet. Sound familiar to anyone starting out? The free queer wildflower walk she organized at Champoeg State Park? Twenty people showed up, almost 100 people and businesses shared it on Instagram, and one attendee turned out to be a tourism marketing director who called her event email "marketing gold." She didn't spend a dime on advertising. She just offered something free that her ideal customers actually wanted, then asked local businesses to share it. Every single one said yes. She won a $900 grant from Wine Country Pride to fund supplies for her U-pick events — snips, vases, signage, all the stuff that adds up way faster than you'd think. And even though she didn't get the money just to learn, the grant application process forced her to budget down to the cost of parking signs and scissors. That kind of planning pays off whether you get funded or not. On the sales side, she's at $1,000 in pre-sold subscriptions, a couple of walk-up bouquet sales, her first bulk "bucket of blooms" order for a baby shower, and a $40 custom bouquet she sold at a party after someone saw the flowers she'd brought as a gift. She's also dropping bouquets at local coffee shops with her business card — something that terrified her a month ago and now feels natural. The real talk this episode: $1,300 for farm insurance as a first-year business (and why you need it before your first event), using Wave for free accounting, and why she's finally turning to AI to help her figure out what to actually say in her marketing emails instead of staring at a blank screen. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE I can look out my kitchen window and see Hayden's flower farm taking shape. She lives in a little cottage right on our family property, and I've had a front-row seat to every breakthrough and every meltdown. Hayden is 32. She moved back to the family farm after years of city life because — as she puts it — "it's so much more fulfilling to wake up and go outside and see things growing than there is at any corporate job, no matter how cushy it is." But the practical side of her kept saying no. She grew up watching how hard farming is. She's got good health insurance. She sits at a desk. Why would she go do that all over again? Because the dream wouldn't leave her alone. Sound familiar? In this episode, you'll hear the story behind the name "Big Oak Flower Farm" — it came from her childhood, when she and her cousins would call each other up and say "meet at the big oak in an hour" or "let's race to the big oak." When that name hit her in the car one day, she knew it was right. You'll hear her scrappy funding strategy: $500 saved from working twice a month on a neighbor's farm, driving her old pickup to get $10 loads of compost from the city waste treatment facility, and doing absolutely everything herself. We dig into three sales models she's weighing — CSA subscriptions for early cash flow, a little farm store for walk-up sales, and you-pick events (she's dreaming of "sunset in the flower field" evenings). And you'll hear me pushing back in real time on her decision to NOT start an email list yet. No formal training. No business degree. No trust fund. Just a woman figuring it out. If she can do it, so can you. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE Are you a farmer struggling to turn a profit despite working harder than ever? In this episode, farm marketing expert Charlotte Smith answers the most common questions from over 2,000 farmers who attended her recent webinar—and the answers might surprise you. Charlotte explains why social media is a distraction for most farmers and why email marketing should be your number one priority. She breaks down a counterintuitive truth: at farmers markets, your primary job isn't making sales—it's capturing email addresses. Why? Because the lifetime value of a single customer can reach $5,000 or more, compared to a one-time $50 purchase you may never see again. You'll learn practical steps including how to collect emails legally (and why using your personal Gmail can get your account shut down), which email platforms work best for farmers, and how to keep customers buying all winter long—even when the farmers market closes. Charlotte also addresses the overwhelm that keeps farmers stuck: how to find time for marketing when you're already exhausted running the farm. Her solution involves creating two hours of protected "focus time" daily to work on money-making activities rather than constantly reacting to interruptions. Whether you're a beginning farmer or have been in business for decades without turning a profit, this episode provides the foundational marketing strategy that's helped Charlotte's clients achieve results like going from $45,000 to $300,000 in annual revenue. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE Why do your gorgeous farm photos get dozens of likes but zero sales? Charlotte Smith has the answer—and it's probably not what you think. In this Q&A episode of The Profitable Mindset Podcast, Charlotte responds to questions pouring in from farmers who signed up for her upcoming Farm Marketing Fix webinar. These aren't hypothetical problems—they're the real struggles keeping small farmers stuck. The first question hits hard: "I have a small flower farm and I can't sell hardly anything. I put it on Facebook and I get likes and shares, but no money." Charlotte breaks down what's missing: a clear call to action and a defined brand. Without both, you're entertaining people instead of converting them into customers. She introduces the Rule of One Framework—the system her successful clients use to cut through overwhelm: one ideal customer, one core message, one primary platform, and one call to action. When farmers narrow their focus this way, marketing finally starts making sense. Charlotte also tackles a question about marketing mindset, explaining why the farmers who succeed share a specific belief: marketing is serving people, not pushing products. She shares what she discovered after years of teaching—students with identical training and similar products had wildly different results based entirely on their beliefs about selling. The episode wraps with advice on transitioning from wholesale to direct-to-consumer sales, and why comparison marketing ("our beef is better than the grocery store") actually backfires long-term. If you're creating content consistently but your bank account doesn't reflect the effort, this episode will show you what's missing. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if Farm Marketing Mastery can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE What happens when you finally hit your farm revenue goals—but you're exhausted, overwhelmed, and thinking about quitting? It's more common than you'd think. In this final installment of the four-part Year-End Business Marketing Planning Workshop, host Charlotte Smith tackles the piece most farmers skip: personal fulfillment. Because a profitable farm you hate running isn't really success. Charlotte shares from her own experience running a raw milk dairy. After eight years of hosting a popular (and profitable) farm camp, she realized she was done—and gave herself permission to stop. When she turned 50, she hired and trained milkers so she could step back from the physical labor she'd outgrown. These weren't failures. They were intentional choices that made her farm sustainable long-term. In this episode, Charlotte guides you through questions like: What did you actually enjoy doing this year? What are you complete with—and ready to never do again? What was your biggest moneymaker with the least effort? And critically: Who do you need to become to hit your 2026 goals? She also walks through a practical exercise for projecting revenue by product. List every way you make money on the left. Write your 2026 sales goal for each on the right. Add it up. Does it match your total revenue goal? If not, you've just identified the gap you need to solve—whether that's raising prices, adding volume, or cutting what isn't working. Charlotte gets honest about the mindset shifts that made the biggest difference for her, including giving up weeknight wine to improve her sleep, energy, and focus. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if Farm Marketing Mastery can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE Are you farming without a clear sales goal? In this episode, Charlotte Smith—farm marketing expert and business coach who works with 300+ farmers annually through her Farm Marketing Mastery program—reveals why having a specific revenue target is the difference between a thriving farm and one that struggles to survive. Charlotte walks through her proven goal-setting framework, explaining how to choose your gross sales projection even if you're brand new to farming or unsure what you'll sell. She shares real client success stories, including a farmer who made $100,000 in beef sales in one week and another who generated $2,000 before breakfast from a single email. You'll learn Charlotte's counterintuitive approach to goals: if you don't hit your target, don't lower it—extend the timeline instead. She explains why goal-setting is really about personal transformation and developing the marketing, mindset, and time management skills needed to reach any revenue number. The episode also covers a critical business planning exercise: evaluating what worked and what didn't work on your farm last year. Charlotte shares her own experience letting go of a successful farm camp program and teaches you how to distinguish between ventures worth refining versus those ready to release. Whether your goal is $10,000 or $10 million, this episode gives you the exact planning process Charlotte's clients use to build profitable farms across the country. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if Farm Marketing Mastery can break you out of marketing misery. Resources & Links Mentioned Training & Programs Farm Marketing Fix (Free January 2026 Training): https://charlottemsmith.com/masterclass Farm Marketing Mastery: https://charlottemsmith.com/mastery Five-Day Launch: Sales strategy taught within Farm Marketing Mastery Key Takeaways Choose a specific gross sales number – Any goal is better than no goal; leaving revenue "up to chance" dramatically increases the likelihood of going out of business. Work backwards from your goal – Break annual targets into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily actions. Don't lower goals; extend timelines – If you don't hit $100K in 12 months but reach $65K, keep the $100K goal and extend to 15-18 months. Goal-setting transforms you – The real value is developing skills in marketing, boundary-setting, decision-making, and time management. Evaluate what worked AND what you still want to do – Something can be successful and still be worth letting go (like Charlotte's farm camp). Write it down by hand – Physical planning exercises significantly increase follow-through compared to just thinking about goals.