Your Ideal Customer

Most people start farms because they love farming, not because they love running a business. Fortunately I enjoy running a business, and Jake loves chatting with customers. Unfortunately neither of us had any particular skill in gaining new customers.

In the beginning we courted restaurants then had frustrating relationships with their chefs, we had a dismal CSA retention rate (just over 20% from year 1 to 2, and that's counting Jake's parents!), and a "good" day at farmers market grossed about $200. Going into our fourth year I put most of my winter planning efforts into marketing and am so relieved to say that those original numbers have changed quite a bit. This year we opened our CSA to returning members on January 1 and sold out of our 100 member Spring share by January 2! We regularly have a 80% - 90% overall CSA retention rate, our farmers market stand grosses an average of $2,000 per week, and our wholesale customers are consistent, dedicated, and a joy to work with. These numbers are more than I could have hoped for when we started out, and I have a couple of key resources to thank for it.

In order to prepare for making that first marketing plan I did a whole lot of research and came across Corinna Bench of My Digital Farmer. Corinna and her family run a very successful 400 member CSA program in Ohio. They boast an impressive retention rate, high community involvement, and a robust online marketing presence. That winter I spent many hours soaking up Corinna's wisdom through her YouTube station, and got a chance to see her speak live at PASA last winter. I found that she particularly excels at creating a profile of your ideal customer, creating a product for that ideal customer, and creating an email marketing plan that serves that customer.

In addition to Corinna's resources, that first plan was influenced by meeting Ellen Polishuk, a badass lady farmer turned farm business advisor. Ellen now runs Plant to Profit, where farmers can attend workshops, receive consulting services, or buy her new book, Start Your Farm. Ellen has a wonderful way of looking at farm finances through a clear and honest lens, and is particularly good at asking hard hitting questions like, "Taylor, WHY are you going to a tiny farmers market than only earns you $200 per week?"

The influence of these two women helped me to create a framework of looking at and understanding customers that was later refined by LEAN techniques from Ben Hartman. I highly recommend learning from all three so that you can find information that pertains to your own goals and priorities, but today I'll share the framework they helped me create.

First of all, when I am thinking about customers, I start with my own goals. My business goals always come back to financial stability because I know I cannot achieve any of my other goals without it, and it's the all important customer who ultimately provides the funds. That means that it's CRUCIAL that you understand your customer. A business owner really needs to understand who their customer is, what motivates them, and how to keep them coming back for more. For me, that "coming back for more" piece is paramount because I really truly dislike traditional marketing. I feel like I'm wasting my time when I make and distribute brochures, I don't think newspaper ads work for us, and I'm not really sure how to use Facebook any more. Instead of drumming up new business I'd rather my current customers come back year after year, and tell their friends about how much they love it. That's why we now focus on creating a product or experience that our customers cannot live without.

Because we were already in business when we were going through this process for the first time, we had some idea of who our customers were. We made a list of individuals who had come back for a second season of our CSA, who visited us regularly at the farmers market, and who we liked working with in wholesale. We looked for common characteristics, then created fake, or "avatar", personalities for our "Ideal Customers". Here's what that looked like:

Farmers Market:
Lucille is an 80 year old woman who lives with her ailing husband in the nearby retirement community. She comes to the farmers market each week for the social experience and to buy a quarter pound of greens, a tomato and a few potatoes. She likes us because we remind her of her grandchildren, and she will usually stay to chat or bring us muffins or her favorite quiche recipe.

CSA:
Jennifer is a 35 year old mom of two kids aged 5 and 7. She has a full time job as a marketing consultant and her husband John is a full time builder of high efficiency homes. Though they both work full time, they manage to keep both kids in a full schedule of sports, music recitals, and play dates. They has a large social circle of families with kids the same age, their extended families live nearby, and their social life revolves around cooking and eating meals with friends. They are also very conscious of their food choices, buy locally when possible, and are willing to spend more of their budget on food than what's standard today.

Wholesale:
Steve was a chef at a high end restaurant in Burlington and has since started his own restaurant in a smaller town nearby. He's in his mid thirties, enthusiastic about high quality ingredients, and changes his menu with the seasons. His restaurant is doing well, and he has started to request weekly deliveries of salad greens, wants to talk about specific varieties of bell pepper for next season, and insists he pay each invoice upon delivery.

We then took these avatars and created the perfect farm for each of them to buy from. Lucille got her sweet young couple with affordable prices and time to chat. Jennifer got a CSA with pickup hours that fit her kids' school and social schedules, easy to use ingredients, and loved it even more because all her friends were members as well. Steve got a farm that prioritized him and his menu. He got first dibs on the first heirloom tomatoes of the year, he felt he could ask the farmers to change up the greens mix because he wanted something sturdy that could be dressed without wilting, and he got produce that was consistently clean and ready to prep, which saved him a ton of time (and money) in the kitchen.

After dreaming up ideal farms for each ideal customer, we realized that our favorite customers went hand in hand with our own ideal farm. We then took a hard look at our customer list and prioritized them. This felt weird, but it became apparent that we just weren't the right fit for some of our existing wholesale customers, and our website description of our CSA needed to answer questions that our "Jennifers" might be asking, and gently turn away customers who would not thoroughly enjoy a CSA experience with our farm.

Once we knew what our farm could look like, we went directly to a handful of customers who matched our avatars most closely and asked them specific questions like, what's your ideal pick up time? Is it important to you that the greens are triple washed? Have we ever given you something that you were unhappy with? We also made an effort to chat one on one with these people at pickups and deliveries so that we could get a better idea of what they liked (and didn't) about the product we were providing. After time we have learned the phrases that our ideal customers use to describe our product, and we use that language on our website. We hear "fresh", "clean", "nutrient dense", "friendly", "educational", "consistent", and we make an effort to continue to provide those things.

This process is slow, and takes a minute to get used to, but I'm convinced that if you create your ideal farm, and that farm happens to be the ideal farm for your customer, you've got something pretty special in the works.

Feel free to ask questions or specifics about this process! We've been working on it for years, and it's a work in progress, so there's much more to write and think about than what's on this page.

​Good luck!