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Being a Sole proprietor what is the hardest thing you have had to face?

Polly

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While we are now registered as an S-corp for tax reasons,  2020 was the first year since my Great Grandpa came over to the states from Holland that our family is not farming or participating in Farmer's markets anymore.  We are now exclusively a Garden Center open to the public, and we still have a wholesale Fresh produce distribution of produce.  It was for sure the hardest decision I have ever had to make for the business, but also in a weird way was also the easiest.  Without getting too far into the weeds we had over 200 acres of fresh produce, not grains.  It is all planted by hand, obviously with tractors and equipment, but the plants are literally planted by a person not some giant seeder.  Well all those plants have to be cared for by hand and then ultimately picked by hand.  That takes a large labor force to accomplish all this and a ton of time.  working 15-18 hours a day 7 days a week isn't good for 30 years and it takes its toll. Farmer's Markets sound great until you realize to have a full booth setup with 4 20' x 30' tents and 45 tables of produce ready at 6 am that means we start at the farm at 2 and are setting up at the market location by 4am.  That takes a special kind of employee to work those days between all the other long days. Prices in the vegetable industry are ridiculously low and you can find many examples of when prices were higher wholesale in the 80s and 90s than they are today.  And labor was getting harder and harder every year to get people to work in the sun bent over most of the day.  I didn't want to get into hiring H2a workers because that's just a whole other level I didn't want to get into housing people.  We've always paid well with the lowest paid person usually making $4 above minimum and many making 6-10 more than minimum, but it is very hard work and many don't even make it the first day or first week.  We tried moving away from the more labor-intensive crops and I had a solid group of 20 people but every year at peak you'd hire an additional 20 people and 75% of them couldn't keep pace with the good people so it would just cause issues that the good employees were mad the poor employees were there.  So we crunched numbers and looked at options and decided if we switched to being only a garden center we could still keep 50% of the employees working and build the garden center even bigger and cover more areas of that industry to make up the million dollar plus income that we were choosing to let go.  

 

In the end it has been by far the best decision ever as we are now much more profitable and have a good chunk of our lives back as the garden center season is only 15 hour days for like 3 months and 2-3 months of 10 hour days.  We had enough "spare time" to start up 2 bakeries, that we always wanted to do, and they have been super successful despite opening in Covid era and already winning best of the region awards.

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