How To Keep Your Farm, Garden Center, or Nursery On Track and Making Money…

One of the first ways to keep your farm, garden center, or nursery on track and making money is to focus.

What do I mean by that?

Focus with your goals in mind.

Make a point on either the first or last day of every month to take the time to sit down and plan. Plan. The first time you do this it will take a bit longer because you do need to plan ahead.

First, plan your goals for the year; do this once a year. Eventually you may want to plan out 5 or 10 years ahead to give you an idea of what you need to work towards. Then break those goals down to month by month goals. This will probably be affected by the time of year and what you are working on in your business.

Break the first month into weeks. Then at the beginning of the first day of the week or the night before, sit down and write a list of what you want to get done that first day. Do not go overboard. Make 3 to 5 reasonable things to do. Start immediately on working on getting them done. Do not read or send your email until you are done with these little goals. Don’t say to yourself, I’ll do it later. Do them now.

After you accomplish one, reward yourself with a snack or cup of coffee while you think about how you are going to tackle the next project. Continue on like that. When you get to the end of the day, you may have some more to do, put that at the top of your priorities for the next day above any other things. If you have extra time, do something to reward yourself. Sit back and put your feet up, go for a swim, make yourself a healthy smoothie, etc.; do something that you will appreciate.

At the end of the month if you have accomplished say 95% of your goals, go do something fun for yourself (or with someone else) like go to a movie, take an overnight trip, a nice dinner, etc.

Make sure that you make all of your goals ‘measurable’. Give a deadline or a number value or a monetary value to your goals.

Personally I like to call my goals “Promises”. This is because I never want to break a promise. Most people make goals or resolutions. Many times they do not really care if they accomplish them or not. But how do you feel if it was a promise? Another way to make these happen is to reveal or tell someone else about them and give that person a handshake while telling them that this is what you are truly going to do. That person can help you keep on track.

Do not say, “I will try.”. You are instantly setting yourself up for failure. When you say try, you are saying that you really aren’t going to make that thing happen.

If you break your ‘Promises’ down into manageable bits of work, you will accomplish what you started out to do. As you find yourself reaching your goals, you will feel better about yourself. You will start setting more goals to get your business and yourself to a better place.

It isn’t hard if you do it piece by piece. Drop me a line at Anne@SuperStarGardening.com and let me know how this works for you and your farm, garden center, or nursery business. Let me know if you have any other ideas too.

Tags: farms, garden centers, garden nurseries, how to market your business, increase profits, increase traffic, more customers, more farm profits, more garden center profits, more nursery profits, nurseries