Flower Farming Business Masterclass

This course brings together years of horticultural and business experience to help you with strategies to grow your agro-ecological business with environmental and financial sustainability.

Whether you are a new or more experienced flower grower, the Flower Farming Business Masterclass has been developed to give you the planning tools you need to create your enterprise in a way that aligns with your values and sets your business on a foundation that will allow you to grow in a sustainable way. The objective of the course is to help the small-scale grower improve the productivity and profitability of their business.

In the five years that I’ve been running workshops for growers, less than 25% of participants have started their business with any sort of business or financial planning. Over the years I have seen many small-scale growing businesses fail and too many growers are not able to pay themselves a living wage. It’s time to change that - and the Flower Farming Business Masterclass will help to guide you to transform your passion for growing into profit!

Over the years, growers from all over the globe have attended my workshops - from right across the UK and Ireland; from countries in Europe such as Belgium, Czechia, France, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden; growers in Canada and the United States across time zones and hardiness zones from Alberta to California, Texas and the Carolinas; and growers as far away as New Zealand - half a world away!

COURSE DATES FOR AUTUMN/WINTER 2024 TO BE CONFIRMED

Includes Digital course book, access to three Zoom sessions, class recordings, downloadable templates, access to Facebook Group on completion of course.

The course is taught over three sessions via Zoom. Working through the course modules in small groups allows for lots of questions which is one of the benefits of face-to-face teaching over remote learning. Each session is recorded and every participant receives a copy of the recording to watch back at their leisure.

In Module 1 we cover topics such as writing a business plan; what it means to be an agro-ecological business; assessing your limitations; creating work-life balance; how marketing works and how to use market research effectively for your business; cash flow forecasting and setting financial targets.

Module 2 is all about Production Planning; soil management; variety selection and cultivation techniques; crop scheduling and planning succession sowing of annual crops; gathering crop data for analysis.

We delve deeper into the detail in Module 3 when I take you through calculating production costs and pricing; this, for me, is one of the most important elements of the workshop. Understanding the costs of your production, the economies of scale and how this forms the basis for profitable pricing is an essential piece of the flower-growing puzzle that is often missing from other courses. We look at the factors that affect crop profitability; investigating the wider flower market and its influence on your pricing; working out wholesale and retail level pricing.

With every module comes templates for data collection and analysis which are available to download; these can be used as a guide for setting up systems for analysis for your own business.