I checked with Miguel Gomez at the Dyson School at Cornell to see if there are resources on business and marketing aimed at cut flowers. While there are not, he did suggest some other Extension bulletins that might be helpful. They are aimed at other types of production (berries and broccoli) but the methods and tools might be useful for your cut flower businesses.
- Business Tools for NYS Berry Growers Includes how to do a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and a tool for analyzing production costs
- Eastern Broccoli Production Enterprise Budgets –Looking over what goes into production of broccoli might help you analyze your own productions costs.
Does anyone else have resources on budget and marketing tools that they have found helpful?
Jenny Marks
On my blog I have an article on calculating enterprise analysis budgets specifically for cut flowers, which can be found here (I just held a free webinar that walked people step-by-step through the enterprise budget analysis last week, sorry to anyone who missed it):
I also am currently publishing an advanced crop planning series with an emphasis on profit planning and financial projections. The first two of the four part series are now published here.
I have an article scheduled about marketing and strategies to build your customer base (it will be published in a few weeks, after the crop planning series). You can check back on the blog or get on my email list (through my website) if you want to be notified.
Additionally, in March I am hosting a profit planning workshop that goes into step-by-step detail about the advanced financial planning/production planning and profitability analysis process, in case anyone is interested. It will include fillable excel spreadsheets for both crop planning and profitability analysis (enterprise budgets) that you can use on your own. The details haven’t been announced yet, but are coming soon. It’s specifically designed for existing flower businesses with at least two growing seasons of experience that need help scaling up their business to a full time career.
Hopefully you will find the articles useful!