Another part of meeting people where they want to be met is with advertising. We advertised via the social media platforms for anywhere from $5-$50 per week. So even though we are on our farms all week, we were still able to reach the people in our area with digital advertising. For any farmers or business owners out there that don’t use any form of digital advertising, I challenge you to add it to your arsenal, especially if you offer any kind of delivery service.
As the COVID crisis locked down the whole country, we no longer needed to spend even a dollar on any kind of advertising, as Cait & Joe were talking more about limiting the number of subscribers we could realistically handle.
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(time lapse to current day, June 22nd, 2020)
So with all that, you think we’d be riding high, feeling validated, looking forward to doing this for the next 5 years.
I could imagine most of you would think that would be the case, but sometimes things just aren’t supposed to go that way.
For me, in early February, I had decided to move from North Carolina to Florida to start a new life and business with Michele Madison from Farming The Future.
At the same time, Cait & Joe spent the past winter break in Costa Rica where they were offered to spend a few weeks doing the farm-chef thing at a wellness retreat. It went so well that they've been tasked to lead creation of a farm-chef experience at a new retreat center starting construction this July.
It would have been great to keep this business going, but Cait, Joe and myself are all the looking-forward type, and decided not sell to the potential buyers that came forward. The CLFM was a special project and we all feel proud about what we've accomplished. We're excited to see our local friends fill in the void, including Seed to Shaker in New Bern, NC and Locavore Market in Washington, NC.
In 2015, I moved to North Carolina with the goal of creating this business framework, and thats what we did.
It feels quite fitting of my last 5 years that as soon as things felt automatic and normalized, Cait, Joe and myself all realized we had done special things, but that it was time to pursue ever greater opportunities.
In many ways, this is another restart. Another new beginning just as it was 5 years ago, facing my biggest challenges yet.
Reaching targeted audiences with Facebook or Google ad’s is easy.
Reaching people who are looking for a path forward, but don’t know where or how to look, or lack the education, confidence, or financial resources to achieve it is a challenge on another level.
But just like Veg2Bowl, Craven Local Food Market, Bootstrap Farmer & Urban Farm Academy, the next phase will be starting from the ground level to provide solutions that break down those barriers.