That's another one of the great things about this business is it doesn't actually take that much time. Like these plants are growing, I don't have to sit there and be like, 'Come on, keep going.' Like they know what they're doing. They're as long as I come down here

water them in the morning, give them some words of affirmation, some words of affirmation and some funk music, like they're good to go. And how much could you make off of like one rack? Off of one rack, you can make 500 bucks a week. Okay, so just with these two, it's a

thousand a week or so. Yep, that's crazy. That's awesome. So if you scale into, oh yeah, yeah, 6K a week right, a week just from this one spot. Hello and welcome, my name is Tyler, if you're new to the channel, and in today's video, we are

doing a local CEO show. So this series is all about finding and highlighting local small business owners who are doing interesting and big things. I think a lot of what you see online in today's day and age is the flashy, sexy overnight success things, right? People uh, put some

money into crypto or an NFT, it blew up overnight and they made millions of dollars, but a lot of the time that is very unrealistic. So what I like to highlight is the nitty-gritty, the real business that goes on every single day

in this country. So today's video is is pretty exciting. I met someone at a networking event who is running a microgreens business and he happens to be the number one influencer or in the microgreen space. So when I met them, I didn't

know what microgreens were. I Googled it and this guy was the first guy that came up, which is pretty cool. So I met this guy at the networking event, he was the first guy that came up. He has over 85,000 subs on YouTube, I think he has a lot

of views on, totally used TikTok, but um, he's been in the space and he knows everything there is to know about this space and I think it's a really interesting business that anyone could could do. And I guess we'll find out because I'm going to ask him a ton of

questions, but um, he was kind enough to invite me down to come see his farm. He's like 40 minutes away from me, so I can get a little tour of his spot and his whole setup and I can ask him a bunch of questions about how this whole business

works and that's really what this is all about. So this is the Local CEO show. I'm gonna go meet up with Donnie Greens, we're gonna take a drive and uh I will see you guys there. Let's do it. So I got Donnie Greens here, uh, first question,

what is a microgreens business? So, a microgreens business is simply a business that grows microgreens and sells microgreens and you're probably wondering what microgreens are, right? And you're seeing them behind us. These are very young plants. So this is a broccoli,

normally when you picture a broccoli, you're picturing like a head of broccoli. This is actually a broccoli that's grown out for only seven to ten days and it looks like this and these are actually going to be harvested tomorrow. So it's a very quick life cycle. All of these crops have

very high concentrations of nutrients, vitamins, enzymes, as well as flavor, so that's why they're so great for chefs as well as health purposes, depending on, you know, what your goals are for a business. So you said it takes like seven days to four weeks to just grow

one of these normally, it would take how long to grow broccoli? So normally broccoli takes a few months, okay? And then for the broccoli microgreens, I think these are about a 10-day cycle from literally seed to finished product. They're under lights for only a week, how

did you get into this whole thing? Um, well, my sophomore year in college, I was in this class that was pretty silly. It was one of those like, like one of those classes that you kind of just had to take. It was like a history course, but luckily enough, the teacher teaching that

the professor, it was his last semester teaching this course, okay? And he was an awesome, epic teacher, and he brought up this urban farmer named Will Allen, and I became obsessed with agriculture in this moment because the way Will Allen was doing his farming, it was like everything

was symbiotic, everything worked together. Um, it was organic and was a closed-loop system, so I started writing all my papers on him and then I was like, all right, well, I like farming. Like, maybe I should go work on a farm, so I went and I

worked at Thera Farms um after my sophomore and junior year of college, and then I was like, all right, I like hands-on farming. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like, I always like had the sense, like I had the feel that like

I just wanted to work for myself so I was scanning the internet like, "What, like, how to become a farmer? Like, what crop am I going to grow?" Yeah, to actually make it work, you know, I don't have space, I don't have time, I don't have money.

Um, and then sure enough, the YouTube videos started coming out like, "You can start a business growing microgreens." And I was like, "Boom, this is it! Wow!" I was working a crappy job at the time, like switching out old, uh, fluorescent lighting in businesses, so like LEDs. Wow.

Um, so we kind of knew the lighting. I did know the lighting stuff a little bit. Yeah, it worked out, so I quit that business. I had only three thousand dollars saved up at the time, dumped it all into supplies and equipment, and then nine months later, I was in the black, so...

net positive, and I made all my money back for my investments. That's sick! So then you can also, I think one of the coolest things that most people would love is that you could put this anywhere. Like right now, it's in the basement of a

house. Right, so like you could have this in the basement of your house, which is like insane. Would you put in like a garage too, you think? Yeah, there's plenty of people doing it in the garage. My process for this farm actually starts up in the garage where I make my trays and store

my soil and, uh, I started in just a tiny little corner, 10 by 10 space of my parents' basement. Wow! So I started just right there. I don't even need a whole basement. Just how much, how much space would you need? Just one rack, baby, right?

Yeah, you could start lower, like you could mount a light underneath a kitchen cabinet and start growing four trays under there and learn the growing cycle, you know. So anybody can learn to grow this stuff, and I think everybody should be growing microgreens, you know.

That's my opinion. But then if you want to start doing it as a business, you do need a little bit more space. You should probably get a rack and have a place to harvest, a place to make trays, and that that type of thing. Question: how much

does it cost to, I guess, start a, to get a rack, or actually in general how much is it cost to start the business? Would you say like, you can, you give me a range? You could realistically get started for like a thousand bucks. Really, I ended up

spending like 4 000 because I was new and didn't really know anything and there was a lot less resources at the time. Um, but like this rack for instance, like I used to buy these racks on eBay for 60 bucks. Wow, now they're like 120. Okay, but

that's okay. So the racks are 100, 120 bucks. The lights, you know, depending on what light you get, they're going to be around 30 to 50 bucks per light if you're getting high quality. The trays are like five bucks per tray, which is a

little bit expensive, but you want to get these nice heavy-duty trays that way they're not breaking on you and then you're just throwing them out because that's a liability rather than an asset. Yep, I reuse these every time. They never break on me, and they're an asset for the

business that I can keep on reusing over and over and these are from Bootstrap Farmer okay and in total this setup is about a thousand bucks or so you think like this one rack it up didn't even last probably like probably 500 bucks got it and how much could you

make off like one rack off of one rack you can make 500 bucks a week wow it's a 500 one-time investment yeah and then how much like do you think it would cost the ongoing expenses like the cost of goods um like to refill this rack I guess so

you make 500 a week so 500 a week each tray for the seeds and the soil you're looking at just a few dollars okay like even like two to three bucks um so 20 on a rack two to three bucks you're looking at like well definitely

less than 100 bucks and wow cost of goods sold wow yeah 100 bucks and then so the profit's like 400 bucks a week or so yeah great profit margins on this stuff that's awesome and uh especially if you're running it out of like your

home like I am yeah then that helps big time because you don't have these heavy overheads yeah like I used to rent from another person and I had overheads and lack of control and stuff like that yeah so now it's awesome what is the I guess

what's the best part of a business like this what would you say the best part of a microgreens business is there's two best parts okay one like the whole process of it is like easy and fun easy to some degree like running a business is one of the hardest things

Anybody could ever do yeah but from a business model perspective compared to other business models like it's relatively easy and the crops are not that difficult to grow once you get them down so it's just like a good vibe like being around the greens all the time

It's just like nice and happy and fun then the other great thing about it is I have the privilege of growing food for my local community helping them to you know get nutrition into their bodies so their bodies can heal so you know I love doing that too helping the community to

increase their health that's awesome um and then so I guess that leads to another question I have where like what are your main customers with this like restaurants do you go to Farmers Markets I guess what would that look like for you so when I first learned this they

were telling me to go to Farmers uh no they're telling me to sell to the chefs okay I realized very quickly I didn't want to work with chefs it was a little bit difficult okay and then I started doing a lot of farmers markets and that's how

I got the word out about my business in the first place farmers markets are awesome they're local so the people are local they're looking for this exact type of product you're able to talk to them try different things in real time it's great farmers markets are awesome

and if you're smart about it you get that email list going and then you have a customer list that you can then sell to and the business model that I kind of pioneered for this industry is the Home Delivery subscription model so I was taking these customers from the

farmers market and turning them into weekly subscribers where I deliver it right to their home wow yep and that's how I built the business really and then you went more B2C because I was always thinking this would be B2B that's what I

came in here I was thinking you're going to sell to restaurants or supermarkets or things like that you can too at the peak of my business when I was in my other farm I was in about six different health food stores okay right now I'm not doing any health food stores because

I have a goal of making it even more sustainable than it was I don't want to use stickers okay so like there's no stickers right now um so I'm just I'm literally just direct to consumer model and uh that's awesome things can change but I'm working with a

few chefs now hence like these prettier varieties that I'm growing and uh yeah chefs Farmers Market health food stores so what are some mistakes that you've made with this business that people can avoid mistakes so in the beginning buying the wrong equipment okay I got

pretty lucky with my racks and pretty rough pretty lucky with my lights I had an early mentor that turned me on to some really good stuff um but one of the mistakes I made was within my trays I was buying these cheap chintzy trays and they were just

breaking and then I had to throw them out so now those trays are like it's an ongoing cost it's a liability but then I switched over to these trays and they're super sturdy super strong they don't break so now this is an asset for the

company that I'm able to reuse, make money with over and over again. Cool. So that's one thing. Just buying high quality equipment, um high quality seeds, going to the good seed suppliers in North America. It's typically true Leaf Market for everything other than sunflower. If

you're getting sunflower, you got to go to sunflowersuperseeds.com. Really? Yeah. And then up in Canada, that would be Mums is a popular supplier up in Canada. Okay. Uh, what else? I mean, I see a lot of growers, people get really excited about the

microgreens business, and they see the numbers and the flashy videos and all that, and they get really excited and they just want to jump in and like start a business. But I think it's very important to learn how to grow first without all the pressures of the

business. Okay. Just learn how to grow. So do it for yourself. Do it for yourself. Start small. And then another great thing that happens there is you don't have the pressure of the business, and now you're learning how to eat the product yourself before you have the

business. You can better eat the product. You can better help your customers to eat the product. Got it. Therefore leading to more sales, better customer retention, that type of thing. That makes sense. So you could literally just get like one light and like one tray and just start

Yeah, in your house, right? Yeah, absolutely. Good at growing it. And then once you figure it out, it only takes seven days, right, to grow something, so it's a quick turnover from a learning process too. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. So that's one thing I see people in the beginning

they get too excited and they go gung-ho and buy a bunch of stuff and then they're trying to sell all their stuff a few months later when they realize they don't even like growing, yeah you know what I mean? And then another common

mistake is like trying to do too many varieties in the beginning. Okay, I kept it nice and small and simple: easy varieties, popular varieties, pea, radish, sunflower, broccoli. Okay, and those are the varieties that I grew for these past six years. I've had a great, amazing business

with just four simple varieties. And people start off with like 12, 15 varieties and they're trying to do everything and it's like don't focus on that, you're already going to be overwhelmed with the whole business side of the operation. Yeah, so don't bog

yourself down with learning varieties, just those for now. Most people want to like those, they're the most popular, yeah. They're so popular. Okay, yeah cool, that's funny because most people have entrepreneurial like ADHD anyway, so that's the exact same thing with

microgreens business, exactly. Just trying to add so many services, 100, with every business, dude. Everybody because it's exciting, you just like see all the opportunities, but at the end of the day you need to keep it simple and tight. I say that all the time, like I actually

saw something crazy the other day. It was the iPhone sold 300 billion dollars, one product, one product, there you go, the freaking iPhone. So let's make one good product and you just scale it, exactly. So how much work does it take? How many hours do you think you put into

something like that obviously depends on how big it is but definitely depends on the scale of the business and that's another one of the great things about this business is it doesn't actually take that much time like these plants are growing I don't have to sit there

and be like come on keep going like they know what they're doing they're as long as I come down here water them in the morning give them some words of affirmation some words of affirmation and some funk music like they're good to

go so watering this amount of trays right here so my business right now is at a thousand dollars a week I re I revamped I rebuilt this farm and now I'm getting it back up and going again these two racks are bringing in a thousand dollars

a week my watering time on these crops every morning is maybe like no more than five minutes then aside from that we have to harvest on Wednesdays which takes maybe like six to seven hours okay then we do a drive on Thursdays to deliver what does harvest look like what

does that mean exactly for someone who doesn't know we're basically just taking these trays over the harvesting table and then just cutting with a knife like we're using a knife cutting the greens out of the tray right at the bottom right at the base okay I got you I'm

taking the plants off exactly and then just putting them into a package yeah so that's the harvesting process so that takes some time that's very time intensive Wednesday Harvest Thursday delivery another time intensive process okay um so that takes definitely five to six hours and then

the other big um time labor task is making the trays which we do most on Saturdays and then a few on Wednesdays and that's only like maybe three hours a week for the scale got it so just with these two it's a thousand a week or so yep that's crazy that's

awesome so if you scale into oh yeah yeah 6K a week right a week yes from this one spot I know how many square feet do you think we have here right here I don't know but it's very small yeah it's not very many square foot it's

got to be like 200 250 yeah I think when I like this part right here yeah just this part yeah probably like 300 300 and you could probably make like 6K a week from that yeah that's insane because it's so crazy such a cool

business um and it's pretty passive and if you had like one part-time employee to do it so it's that it's not like as passive as an actual passive income stream or you literally don't have to do anything don't have to think about anything yeah

but it has its profit margins yeah there's not a tremendous amount of labor involved so once you get the business up and going you can hire employees and then it does become it makes us come in one day a week for harvesting one day for delivery it's not like a full-time

exactly or anything like that yeah that's really cool that's awesome all right so back to like acquisition how you're getting clients in the beginning you were just going to the farmer's market networking with people um what about now like do you is that

still the way, or do you think you have relationships now that for someone who's just starting out, would you ever recommend running ads or doing anything like that? Or no, it's the best way just to get out there? Yeah, I mean the best way to grow a company in today's day and

age, 2023, is is paid advertising. Yeah, if you can figure out how to make the right ad and put it out there, you know, it's amazing. You can reach so many people so quickly with the right message and get the exact right target audience right into your business. Yeah.

So paid advertising is the best. Yeah, but you know, it takes skills and time to learn that stuff, or money to hire an agency or whatever. Yeah, so overall for any business, I'd say paid advertising is the best. Then of course, you have your organic reach, so both of that is

involving the internet and social media. Yeah, um, and then but for starting out, yeah, walk walk in and meet with chefs, walk in and meet with health food stores in the produce department, and then farmers markets. I think really are the best. Is this something they're looking for, like

actively that people want? Yeah, people want this stuff. Yeah, um, they're getting more and more popular over time, and a big part of that is the farmers popping up and just like driving the education forward and the awareness forward, which is awesome. And I like to, yeah, you take a

lot of credit for that. I I mean I like to think that I played a big role there, and that, you know, not to be like hockey or anything, but I just feel proud. Yeah, I feel I feel just like cool and proud that I'm able to have that impact on

people's lives where they can create a real business for themselves, but also grow a whole industry, you know what I mean? So yeah, and you're the main, you're like the main thing that came up when I Googled, like seriously, so it's cool to

meet you at the networking event and see you there, and then Google it to do some research, and I was like, Donny's the first guy that comes up. So that's another thing I had a question about was like YouTube, I guess we can kind of take

that angle, um, because he has 85,000 subscribers, so that's pretty impressive. What would, well, I guess what got you into that first, first and foremost, like why'd you start a YouTube channel? So I understood the power of social media, even when I first was starting my

business, my first like I called them mystery mentors is people who I've learned so much from that who have no idea who I am. Yeah, so so Gary Vaynerchuk was like my first mystery mentor. Got it. So I knew the power of social media in the

beginning. Then the guy that I learned this from, Nate Dodson from microgreensfarmer.com, okay, he interviewed me because he wanted like a really good success story for his product, his course. Got it. So at the time, I got an email from him that was saying

hey, if you if you buy my course and you end up selling three thousand dollars worth of product, like I'll interview you and I'll give you all your money back on the course. So I email him, I was like, I'm currently doing three thousand dollars a month

consistently I took your course I'm finding success actually no dude if you want to hear something crazy I built this business just off of his free lead magnet oh really wow so I just got his lead magnet watched a few or something yeah all

right watch a few YouTube videos and that's why I created the business I hadn't had the course yet wow so I emailed them back I was like yo Nate um I don't have your course yet just from your free stuff I'm making

three thousand dollars a month why don't you give me the course for free you can interview me and like that's how it went so he interviewed me he gave me the course for free that video blew up on his um YouTube yeah that's even better

testimonial for him right free stuff is that good right so the testimonial was good for him blew up on his YouTube channel yeah and then that's when something clicked in my head I was like damn now people know about microgreens through him and now they're seeing me

like now I have attention yeah because he interviewed me as his like top student did you have a channel then I didn't have a channel so you didn't capitalize on that no I did I was like dude I gotta start a channel now like right the next day right so then I don't

think it was exactly the next day you know I'm a bit of a procrastinator here and there yeah so but yeah very quickly I was like all right I gotta get on YouTube so I bought a course okay on YouTube I'm taking on like how to do

YouTube and I learned how to do it properly, and then started with videos. The fact that I knew how to do YouTube properly combined with the fact that I already had a little bit of attention on me allowed for some good growth in the beginning. Got it. So, how much like, 

how long did it take to go from like zero to a thousand subs? For me, it was quick. I really knew what I was doing. Um, I mean, we could look at my YouTube stats upstairs. I'm sure I was at a thousand subs month two. Really wow, that's awesome. 

Because my first four videos, I made very generic. I just wanted to like test the waters a little bit. How to grow microgreens, you know, whatever. Yeah, five tips, whatever. And then in my second set, which is really where I was going for what's called a breakaway video, okay, 

breakaway video is where you identify a video that's a breakaway video where you see a video that's blown up on somebody else's channel, but that channel doesn't have the subscribers to warrant that blow up. Okay, so it's not getting the 

views from their actual channel, it's getting the views from discoverability. So, if they have a weak channel and this video blew up for them, chances are that's a good idea to make a video similar and have it blow up on your channel. So, the video was 'The Truth About 

Growing Microgreens for Profit.' It was this surfer dude who, I mean, in my opinion, all I heard out of this video was like, 'I don't really want to work hard, I just want to surf, so the microgreens business doesn't really work.' 

and his was the truth about it was like the truth about dude I remember the exact title because I stole all the keywords that's awesome didn't steal them I just inspired by that I was inspired good artist coffee grader yeah exactly so it was yeah the truth about

growing microgreens for profit okay so I combine that with a local health conference that was going on here on Long Island the real truth about health conference so I did the real truth about growing microgreens for profit and instead of talking about just the

downside and why it didn't work for him got it I talked about the pluses and the minuses the benefits and the drawbacks how yes it can totally work but it's also going to be hard work and I have the keywords right I had the

content right and that was the breakaway video that worked for me too how many subs do you think you got from that one video we can go look at it but I'm sure it's 40K really wow dude that video is the one that brings people into the channel

How He Turned $1k Into $12k/ Month from Microgreens (Local CEO Show Ep. 03 Donny Greens)

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