How we scaled our microgreen farms to 1.500.000€ in yearly sales
6 years ago I started growing microgreens in my living room, and today I am a cofounder of 4 vertical farms that currently make more than 1.500.000€ in yearly sales from growing microgreens. We are currently consulting others for success in other countries and the number of mentees is growing each month. During this blog post I will share more about why this business model works and why the key to making this work is to work with someone who already achieved success instead of thinking you can do it all by yourself. And since time is your most valuable asset I strongly believe that the time you will invest in this email will be time well spent.
In this blog, you will learn why it is possible to start growing microgreens in your own home and grow your business from there making your first €1000 in profits without renting an expensive commercial space with little investment. You will learn how working with the right mentor will accelerate your growth beyond your competition and save you many headaches by copying the model that has worked for us in multiple markets around Europe. I will teach you why setting up your business to find customers who keep coming back buying more is a much more profitable business model than having to go out and keep finding one time sales each time.
This blog post is for you who are considering starting a microgreens business and need to understand if this is a business for you to invest your time in, or maybe you are already growing microgreens and need help scaling that into a more profitable business. Anyway this email will hopefully deliver alot of value to you. If this is not you, then you might as well skip this email and find something more entertaining if that is what you are after.
If you, like me, believe that vertical farming is a great opportunity for growth, that we need to find innovative ways to make more local food production using less resources, and being able to provide food for your local community, then this email is definitely for you. Vertical farming is still in its infancy and a great opportunity to become part of before the market is saturated with efficient companies that find ways to deliver value for supermarkets and the hospitality industry since most produce is transported a long way from where it is consumed.
I want to make a deal with you. I am going to show you that working with our programs will be the best approach you can take in getting to the results you are seeking and that the investment will actually make you more money and profits long term. So as soon as you understand this you are going to go to the button in the bottom of this email and set up a discovery call so we can find the best way to work together. Are you up for this challenge? If not then take what you learned today and apply it to your market. Anyway you choose this will be valuable for you! If you stick until the end of this email i will make you an offer for doing this that would guarantee help from us until you succeed.
First I want to tell you a little bit about who I am and where I come from. My name is Anders. I am from a typical suburban family here in Denmark, my parents divorced very early in my life, and I have been living with my dad for most of my life until I turned 18. I personally never felt like I fit into school and had a hard time seeing why it mattered. I tried going to international business high school because that was what my family wanted for me to finish school and find a stable job or at least finish university. Early on in high school I was watching a seminar with a very famous serial entrepreneur who gave me the idea that I could go out and start my own business and run my life like I wanted to. Set my own schedule and not have to force myself to wake up early in the morning to go to a job that did not inspire me or got the best out of me. This idea completely changed my life and I set out into the world to create my own path.
I heard this quote I really liked. I remember: Do not go where the path may lead, instead go where there is no path and leave a trail. And that became my thesis of my life trying to figure how to make this work.
For years I struggled with addiction while trying to create something that worked. I had accumulated a debt of around €10.000 and i got to probably the lowest point in my life where nobody would lend me money. I smoked a lot of cannabis primarily. The harder drugs I could stay away from, but cannabis was my weakness. I heard this saying that we all have our preferred drug. It can be alcohol, cigarettes, tv, weed, food or now watching our phones has also become part of what can be holding us back from living the life we want. Typically if we invest the money we waste on this then we can completely turn our life around.
In the past tried starting a seed webshop, an internet company, I was also a bartender for multiple years and tried starting a cocktail company where we would host these private events teaching people to make their own cocktails in their home, we had a little success with that but the first success came when I gave my all in starting a hydroponics shop selling grow equipment, the first 9 months i did not make a single sale. From the businesses I had started in the past I learned many lessons, among them one was that if things don't succeed at first, but you are persistent and never give up, you have to achieve some small success at some point. If you never give up you cannot lose, it's only when you give up that you lose. If you keep going eventually you will learn the skillsets needed to succeed. I believe that every business is constrained by a bottleneck which is usually the skillsets of the founder. The higher skilled the founder is the faster and longer the business can grow. I saw a presentation by someone who wrote 1.000.000€ on a board and then asked a participant to state their current revenue which was 50.000€ then he proceeded to reduce the 50.000 from 1 million and stated that the cost of not knowing how to generate 1 million in sales was 950.000€ each year. This hit me and I understood that by applying the right knowledge and skillsets would be very valuable.
The next 4 years I got a partner in my company Hjalmar and we gave our all, to get the hydroponic shop to grow, and we succeeded growing it into the market leading hydroponic shop in Denmark. But there was a big fundamental problem with that business, we were selling something that people would buy once and then we needed to find new customers all the time since when somebody bought an led lamp they did not need another for the next 5-10 years. This meant that we would spend most of our time acquiring new customers, sales would go up and down a lot month after month and there was no consistency in the business.
We realized the potential of Controlled environmental agriculture since we could use the equipment instead and find products to grow that customers would buy on a more consistent basis. With vertical farming we would not be dependent on the outside weather since the climate can be controlled all year round in all climates.
Now for the first secret: why is it possible to start growing microgreens in your own home and grow your business from there making your first €1000 in profits without renting an expensive commercial space with little investment.
We got a metal shelving system and ordered some varieties of different LED growlights and started testing out microgreens that we saw others grow on youtube and started promoting this in our local community. We had invested under €2000 in equipment and seeds. We got our current partner Alex on board who was a Michelin trained chef student and from there we went all in on selling our first batches of microgreens. It was a big challenge in the beginning but little by little we started getting customers at farmers markets, retail stores and restaurants. The next challenge came when we had to figure how regulations worked with food safety laws and promoting our new company.
When you understand how all this works everyone can do this business. I'm a high school dropout and if I can do this, so can you.
The second fundamental secret is how working with the right mentor will accelerate your growth beyond your competition and save you many headaches by copying the model that has worked for us in multiple markets around Europe.
When we began we had no idea what we were doing, we had to spend much energy and time testing different sales models and how to acquire customers, later when we started helping others the growth has been much faster than when we started, since we now knew what actions gets the results and what not to do because it simply is not time efficient. I always had his idea that investing in coaches and mentors was a waste of time, but later I understood the power of learning from someone who knows how to do things more efficiently will quickly get the investment back. It is like going into a maze and not knowing the way out, you have to go through all the dead ends which will be a big time waste. Instead having someone who already went through it and knows the exact way will be the fastest way out of it.
I was in Austria the whole summer last year and there I went with our business partner Florian to bicycle up to the top of the mountain he lives on, it was easy since all i had to do was follow him and soon we were at the top. When he went on holiday and i was going to do it myself, i thought i knew the way, i followed the signs that were on the way and was soon on my way. But I hit one dead end of the path after another and soon I had to give up on going to the top since the e-bike I was driving had no more power on the battery. Have you tried going up a mountain on an e-bike without any power? I can tell you it is exhausting!
The last secret i want to show you is why finding customers who keep coming back is the best business model you can adopt
As I showed you earlier when I started my other businesses I did not think about this and that gave me the headache of always having to find new customers to sell to.
You need to be able to stay consistent, your daily habits and routines are what keeps your customers happy or it can be what will repel your customers. If you are inconsistent in your quality and what you say then you will lose potential customers over time as fast as you can get them but if you can stick to your word and keep your commitments then you will get much farther ahead than your competition.
Are you open to hear how we can help set you up for success and profitability in the long run?
We often get asked what is the investment in both time and money using our system and it is very simple. We set it up as a journey where we take it step by step to keep your investment at a minimum level for all stages. Since the skillsets and know-how is different in each case you are in. And each market is different, therefore having someone who already knows the workings of 10 different markets will be invaluable to you in achieving results in your market.
First you learn simple growing and selling methods going for consistent quality and customer purchases. This took us the first 2 years to completely master but we will teach you the first steps in only a few months to master. This is our small scale blueprint microgreens masterclass.
The next 1-3 months you can take the next program which will be our program commercial sales training selling microgreens, here you learn to master sales to retailers, wholesalers and restaurants and how we approach our customers, who to approach first to get your skillsets mastered before taking on bigger clients which you will also learn here. This process is from 5 years of experience on how to increase your closing rate most optimally and not lose potential clients in the process. How valuable will it be for you if we can increase your closing rate by 50%?
Our final program is scaling into a commercial farm. We found from years of experience that this step is where most make very costly mistakes that could have been avoided by having the proper expertise in setting up your farm and optimizing your procedures. So far we rented or assisted in renting 8 commercial spaces and only 1 has gone bankrupt, this was primarily because they did not listen to our advice in finding the right facility from the beginning. Here the cost can overwhelm you fast and by being able to get assurance that what you do is right you will be in a much stronger position to make good decisions.
Our programs include accountability where we will set goals together and we will guarantee coaching until you succeed. As I promised after reading the full email I will not leave your side until our goals are met. This is not a guarantee we will make forever since at some point markets will be full of successful farms, the time to act is now.
We have condensed all our lessons into videos with actionable steps and after you have watched them then our coaching calls will begin. These calls will be as many as you need to succeed and you can ask me anything and get my best point of view from the experience I have. This is 6 years of mastering the system and how to make the sales best for your market. Together we will make a strategy to ensure that you stay in front of your competition at all times.
We have made a fast track blueprint 10.000€ program where we keep assisting you until you have made 10.000€ in profits with our system. If you are interested go to www.nordichydro.com and read all about it. Here you will also find the necessary equipment and seeds to begin your vertical farming journey.
Remember that it is not about the time or money, it's about acquiring the right skillsets to be able to generate a profitable system. No one starts out by knowing how to make it work but by being able to be coachable and consistent you can achieve whatever you set your mind to.
We have set up our farm in Denmark with such a good supply chain that competing with us makes no sense anymore that is why we are so open on Youtube. One of the many reasons is the buying power we have coming from buying tons of seeds at a time for ourselves and our international partners of high quality seeds that are certified , which is very difficult to get at low purchase orders. We are so far ahead by now in our position but we know how we got here and the steps we took, these steps we can teach you as well.
You are probably thinking this will require a lot of energy and that will be costly. Denmark has the highest cost of electricity and labor costs in Europe and if it can work in Denmark it can work elsewhere. You also probably think that we can sell it at the highest costs in Europe, this is also a fault since we are a farming nation who sells the produce at the lowest cost since we produce almost everything locally and do not need to import our produce.
Maybe you think you need to invest a lot of money to get into farming? This is also far from the truth since this can be set up for as low as 1000€ and can be done in your home without any rent cost if you know how to work around the legal frameworks which are set by the European standard.
But I can never do this because I don't know where to start? That is why we have made it so easy and as a step by step process so you can leverage our experience and learn from a system that we have simplified as much as possible after 6 years of trial and error.
There really is no excuse to start growing in your home if you are looking for a profitable hobby that can bring many benefits to your local community!
