Although Barn2Door works with small farms, their mission is big: Bringing small farm businesses online, democratizing the sale of local food, and providing an alternative to the way Americans eat.
The only things Americans spend more money on than food (annually, on average) are rent and mortgage payments. And yet, Barn2Door knows that farmers are up against incredible odds to keep their businesses stable. As major retailers consolidate the farms from which they source food and focus on minimizing costs for maximum profit, farmers are increasingly vulnerable. And as with any business, that vulnerability is countered by a farm's ability to diversify their products and the buyers they sell to.
Barn2Door makes that possible, offering farmers an online platform to sell from, as well as powerful integrations like Mailchimp and QuickBooks to market their products and manage their finances. In tandem, these platforms empower farmers to build their businesses around selling directly to consumers, which frees them from risky deals with big retailers. Plus, this model generates community and saves farmers time they need for literal on-the-ground work.
Barn2Door helps farmers get their accounts on each platform up and running, and then the emphasis shifts to education, which they provide in partnership with Mailchimp and QuickBooks-certified pro users. They offer blogs, e-books, classes, one-on-one coaching, and more, empowering farmers to run their businesses efficiently with the use of these powerful platforms.
We talked with Barn2Door Chief Operations Officer James Maiocco about bringing farmers online and empowering them to seamlessly grow their businesses and balance their books.
Why does Barn2Door prioritize teaching farmers about marketing and finance?
Let's say you have 100 customers. Well, you can't sit on your heels and just trust that those existing customers are always going to be happy. You have to market to them. You have to stay top of mind, because other people are going to be competing for your customers. So we tried to train and teach farmers the importance of sending out regular order reminders through Mailchimp, setting up Customer Journeys, making sure that you're speaking to those people based on that audience—whether they're a frequent purchaser or maybe they're a prospect. You also have to understand that one out of 8 people in America are going to move every year. So you have to assume customer attrition, which means you have to always be growing your customer base just to keep a core customer base. That has to be just a part of their modus operandi: Always be collecting emails, always stay top of mind, because if you don't you're going to go out of business. Secondly, assuming you can acquire those customers, you can get them in and give them a great experience purchasing your product and you're driving revenue.
But that doesn't mean you're profitable. The real question becomes, can you cover all your costs? Too often farmers, unfortunately, don't pay themselves. And as a result, many farmers in America go out of business. So we really try to teach them the essentials like—it's wonderful that you've done a great job growing and harvesting great products, building a great local brand, but at the end of the day, you have to be profitable to be in business.
We want farmers to really understand what it means to look at their numbers. How do they analyze not just their revenue that they collect with Barn2Door, but how do they manage their expenses with QuickBooks? And then really making sure the business is healthier over time.
How and why did education become a major focus at Barn2Door?
It's one thing to drive top-of-funnel acquisition, but it's much more important to drive adoption and keep people. No one wants to pour water in a bucket and then have a big hole in the bottom of the bucket and just watch it go out. The key is to be able to pour water in a bucket and keep it.
We already had an academy program for learning how to use Barn2Door. Then we added academy programs that are taught by certified instructors in every category. So for email marketing, all the instructors are farmers who are certified on Mailchimp and use Mailchimp for their own farms. All of them make 6 or 7 figures, so they're all doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in business. They've walked the walk, they can talk the talk, and they know exactly how to use Mailchimp, and they're happy to share those best practices with other farmers.
The thing is, it can be very intimidating as a business owner. This is not unique to farmers—very rarely [does anyone] actually teach you how to run a business. Very few programs actually teach you what a profit and loss statement is. How do I market my business? How do I build a brand? How do I pay my employees? What about taxes? But it's so critical, because small businesses are the backbone, not just to the United States, but globally. We want small businesses to be successful. So we find the education that we invest in leads to really great outcomes, not just for our business, but for the businesses we serve.
"We certainly have seen much better outcomes, higher sales, higher retention for us as a business, and most importantly, a more resilient small business owner when we encourage farmers to connect their Barn2Door account with QuickBooks."
Why does Barn2Door encourage farmers to use both an accountant and QuickBooks?
Probably the most important thing for any small business is to be connected to an accountant and have a third-party objective business advisor. And it's certainly no different with farmers. In my experience—and I've had a lot of years of experience working at different accounting solutions in addition to working closely with QuickBooks—you see a higher degree of business success and stability when they work with a third-party advisor like an accountant.
We obviously want to increase our long-term retention and success of the farms that we work with. And so we certainly have seen much better outcomes, higher sales, higher retention for us as a business, and most importantly, a more resilient small business owner when we encourage farmers to connect their Barn2Door account with QuickBooks.
What does QuickBooks Online offer to farmers?
The greatest value that QuickBooks has to offer for the farmers we serve and the value we bring is really helping them understand how to manage their expenses and then to save time. Time is the most precious asset these farmers have. There's no farmer who has extra time on their hands. They're super busy. There's always a laundry list of chores, things that have to get done on the farm, off the farm, in their families. That's never-ending.
Most farmers are manually assembling invoices, manually trying to track time. Everything's done manually, pen and paper; most of them have no software at all. So when we get started, the first thing we do is work to start driving revenue. So we help them build a brand. We give all the best practices, get them set up with a vertical solution built for farms [to sell their products].
The second side of that with QuickBooks then is let's take all those sales—it could be thousands of sales in a given month or hundreds of sales on a given day—you don't want all that data individually in QuickBooks. That'd be a nightmare for your accountant. But what you want to have is an aggregated summary of all that data pushed into QuickBooks, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly. And then they'll just be able to map that to their chart of accounts. And most importantly, the farmer has to be able to match their expenses and take a look at their profits and losses and really understand: Am I making a profit? Is this actually proving successful or where do I need to sharpen my pencil and make some hard decisions?
Why is this work so important?
The market we serve has a really positive impact on job creation. It also has a huge impact from a climate perspective, because our mission at Barn2Door is to be able to connect people with farmers who can serve them locally. There's no reason we need to be shipping food all around the world.
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- The views, information, or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent those of Intuit Mailchimp or any of its cornerstone brands or employees.
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