If I Wanted to Make $5,000 Quickly as a Gardener, I’d Do This

Foreign. Have you ever wondered if you could earn money based on your garden expertise? Well, today I want to show you how you can earn $5,000 as a garden coach or consultant. My name is Nicole Burke. I am a self proclaimed garden coach since 2015. And I want to teach you today how you can take all your experience in the garden and and turn it into an incredibly meaningful business that doesn't just pay you back, but also helps people in your community learn how to garden and build the most productive, beautiful gardens just like you have. So my name's Nicole Burke, and back in 2015, I started my first garden consulting business. I named it Rooted Garden. And I first thought I was going to sell things from my garden. In fact, I called it Rooted Garden Goods. To start, I was going to root plants and then sell the propagated plants. Called my friend, told her all about it, asked her how I should set my business up. She's like, nicole, I don't really want to buy your plants, but I would absolutely love you to teach me how to keep plants alive the way you do. And that was a light bulb moment. That was a moment that changed everything for me because I realized I didn't need to be in production mode to have a great business. I could be in instruction mode. And that changed the game for me because that meant I didn't have to be working with my hands. Instead, I could be working with my brain and my mouth and with motivation. I loved the idea and I thought, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to turn my garden knowledge into a consulting business. So I sent out my very first email in 2015. It said, I love two things about Houston. I love the garden and I love the people. And my new business brings those things together. And I explained in the email that I wanted to help 100 people start a garden in Houston that year. I know small goals, right? Like, I'm obviously an underachiever here. I didn't do that goal. I didn't hit that goal in the first year, not even close. But I might have met. I definitely met over 100 people in that first year and got to teach them in some way about how to garden. So since that time when I figured this out, in the very first year, I earned over $100,000 in my business with that goal in mind of teaching people how to garden. So I ended 2016 and I'd made over $100,000 in my business. So after I wept and paid the tax bill, I was like, I figured Something out here. This is amazing. I get to garden for a living. I don't just work with my hands. I get to teach people how to garden for a living. I loved it. And I kept getting more and more DMs on Instagram and from online people saying, like, you have my dream job, like, how could I do that too? So in 2017, I started teaching other gardeners around the country how to do this too. How to take their garden knowledge and turn it into a business. And since that time, I've trained almost 1500 gardeners around the country across the world to become gardenary consultants and to do this for a living as well. So today I want to give you a little sneak peek of what it's like to earn money as a gardener. And, and I'm going to show you very specifically how you could earn your first $5,000 as a garden consultant. Now, when you're thinking about any business, any sort of business that you want to run, you simply want to think about how much you want to sell and what you want to price it at and how much time you want to work. And so you kind of just add those three things up and that's how you start to figure out your business model. So for me, I always had to work with time. My time was my biggest limitation because I'm a mom of four. And yeah, you know, like, I only had a few hours each day, so I had to do this really in the mornings from like 9 to 12. So first you can think about how much time you have to offer this business, how much time you'd be able to put into creating a business like this as a garden coach or garden consultant. So you come up with your time and then you want to start to come up with your product so what you're going to sell. A lot of times people really low ball themselves in terms of their pricing. So they'll think of a product that they can sell for like $5 or $10. I mean, I totally get it because we're probably afraid that people aren't going to want to spend money with us or buy our thing. So that's fine. You can absolutely have a very low priced product. When you have a low priced product, the thing you've got to be really good at is marketing. Because if you're selling something for five or ten dollars, you got to sell a lot of them, right? In order to sell a lot of them, you're going to need a whole lot of people to hear about it. So anytime in your business you can kind of imagine that if you want to make one sale, you need about 50 people to hear about that product. So if you want to sell one thing a day, you need about 50 people to hear about your product a day. So if you're selling something for $5 or $10, you kind of get the gist of it, right? So five or ten dol that you're going to have to sell quite a bit if you need to make a living from this or if you want to make even $5,000. So to make $5,000 off of a $5 product, we're going to need like a thousand of them, right? We've got to sell a thousand. And if we need 50 people to hear about to get just one sale, that means we need 50,000 people to hear about the product. So you could totally do it that way. But don't worry, I'm going to tell you an easier way. All right, so you come up with your price. 5 to $10 for me, for this model, I want to talk about having a hundred dollar product. All right, $100 product. And in this case we're going to talk about that as a garden consultation. So consultation is literally a time where you go and you meet with a client, you let them show them, show you their space, show you their garden, tell you about the things they're interested in, the garden, tell you their goals and, and then you teach them. So you're going to teach them your method, your way of gardening, your best practices. And what we teach inside of Gardenary is we show you how to present it in a meaningful way with just a few steps so they don't get overwhelmed, but they definitely walk away with way more clear understanding about how the garden works and how they can be successful. So they have a time to talk, you listen, you ask questions, then you present your way, your solution to their problems and, and then you come up with a plan for the future at the end. So at that point they decide if they're going to go on their own and solve their problems, taking the knowledge you've just shared with them, or they're going to do what we call a dwy. Yes, a DWY model. And this is where they ask you to stay with them and help them throughout the process, or if they want to do a dfy. And that would be where they actually hire you to bring in people and to actually implement all the plans, all the things you're suggesting, and do it on their behalf. From that consultation, they either diy, they go off do it themselves, they dwy. They do it with you, they ask for your ongoing coaching and consultation or they want you to do it for them. They dfy and they just hand it back to you and say thank you for the advice. Now please make it happen in my yard and my garden. So a consultation kicks all those things off and you can sell a consultation for just a hundred dollars. So in this case, we're going to keep it super simple and we're not going to offer any other services beside the consultation because I want to see show you how you can actually make $5,000 just doing consults. So consults take about an hour. If you're driving to the garden space, you want to add about 30 minutes on both sides. So $100 takes you about two hours to complete one. So let's do the math. If we need to make $5,000 in this new role in this new little business as a garden consultant and you charge $100 per consult, how many do we need? Well, we've got 100 times 50. Is that right? Yeah, because 10 is going to get us to 1,050 is going to get us to 5,000. So it's going to take you about two hours to do one consultation. You're going to make about $50 per hour, charging $100. And you only need to do 50 of these in order to make $5,000 by the end of the year. So we've got 52 weeks, not 52 years. We've got 52 weeks in one year. So you just simply divide that out and make a goal as a gardener that you're going to do one consult a week for 50 weeks of the year. Now, you could absolutely double this up. Let's say you've got a really freezing cold winter. No problem. Do two consults a week for 26 weeks out of the year and then take the rest of the year off. You can divide this however you want to. You can have busy seasons and slow seasons, but essentially when you break it down, you only need to sell 50 consultations in order to make $55,000. And the crazy thing about the consulting and coaching world is that the profit margin is huge because the only expense you've got is to get yourself to that client's garden. Then the rest of it is just you talking. You're not paying for materials, you're not paying for labor, you're not paying for any other expense other than you getting to the client's yard and having this conversation with them. So the margin is Huge. You're literally going to take home almost all that money. That's why I had that major tax surprise after my first year in business. So this is the formula. You have your product price, you have how many times you have to offer it in order to get to your final number, and then it has to work with your time. So the way we did the math here was that you could do this in about two hours a week. If you add all that up, it's going to be about 100 hours to complete these 50 consultations. So in 100 hours over the year, you can do 50 consults, you'll meet 50 different clients, and then you could gross $5,000 simply by sharing your garden knowledge. I mean, does that sound like a good deal for you? I don't know about you, but it definitely did for me. So back in the day, when I was trying to find my way and find a way to make a living, to add to my family's income, but not take away from my time with my family, this would be a dream job. It became the job that let me make my dreams come true. Because with four kids, I needed time to get them to school, to pick them up from preschool and from elementary school, and then get them to all their activities every night. So the only thing I really could fit in was doing something between nine and 12, like four or five days a week. So this consultation model was absolutely perfect for me. I, I could drop my kids off, head out to a garden, do a consultation, and then come back and pick up my preschooler right at noon. Then if I was going to do any other services for a client, I would head with my preschooler, go buy supplies and go drop things off at particular clients homes. Then go through the afternoon with all my kids, cook dinner, spend time with them, do a little bit of follow up at night, maybe through email, and then the very next day start the whole process over again. So it was with this model, with this basis of making $5,000 a year, that I actually ended up making $100,000 a year. Because I first figured out how to fit in the consultations into my everyday schedule. And once I figured that out, it allowed me to start figuring out how to do the next steps. Because remember, the next steps after the consults are them choosing if they're going to diy, WY or dfy. And all those involve getting your help. So if they're DIYing, they're going to want to plan from you, right? They're going to want supplies from you. They're going to want more of your expertise as they go and take it on themselves. They still want to make the most of that consultation that they had with you. For the person who wants to do it with you, they're going to pay you for your ongoing time. So Instead of needing 50 clients, you might only need 25. If each of them hired you for the consultation and then hired you to come back again and be with them when they put their garden in or where they planted for the next season, and then for that DFY client, the person who wants you to do everything for them, if you have a bunch of those, you actually might only need 10 clients or maybe 15 clients, because those clients aren't just going to pay you for the consult. They're going to pay you to come back. They're going to pay you for the setup. They'll pay you for any of the materials that you buy for them. They'll pay you for your coaching. They'll even pay you to do the physical work if you're into that sort of thing or if you want to hire it out. They'll pay you a premium to get it put in the right way. And then they'll pay you to come back and keep consulting with them and coaching with them so they know what to do every step of the way. Listen, the kitchen garden, the vegetable garden, is unlike any other garden because it's so dynamic and it changes literally every day. Especially it changes every 90 days. And this sets us up as gardeners, as experienced gardeners, to have an incredible business that doesn't just have one touch with the client, but gets to serve them again and again and again. So today I mapped out for you the easiest way to make $5,000 as a gardener. Sell a consultation for $100 and do 50 of those a year. It maps out to just 100 hours of work and $5,000 almost completely profit. I'm not just making these numbers up. I've experienced these numbers and so have dozens, hundreds of the garden coaches who come through the gardenary program. So tell me in the comments if you think that this sounds like a dream job to you. And if it does, then you should come and check out the gardenary certification program. So all that we do at gardenary is we equip you to take your garden knowledge and to use the gardenary method to grow a profitable garden coaching business. You get to decide how laborious you want it to be, if you just want to do consultations, or if you want to take it all the way into installations, but we give you the tools to do it each and every step of the way. We've trained thousands of gardeners to do this, and we're currently accepting new applications for our Gardenary certification program. So you can go to gardenary.com apply or you can just find the link right below this video to get more details. Whatever you do, I want to encourage you to make the most of your garden knowledge. One thing I learned years ago is that people who pay pay attention. So a lot of people may say that they want your garden advice and you may be already giving away tons of free advice, but you're probably feeling like I was like it's going in one ear and write out the other. So I never sell my consultations and my services to my friends and family. I sell these to strangers, to people who find out about my garden and want me to come and coach them and teach them how to do it too. They pay me, they pay serious attention to what I say and they have incredible results. And I know you'll be able to create those same kind of results for your own people in your own town and city when you apply this method. So if you're looking for a couple of extra dollars, if you want to make a little bit of money on the side, or if you want to turn this into a full time career, garden consulting is an up and coming industry and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. So come and learn more. You can go to gardenary.com apply find the link right below this video, but if you're still watching then I'm guessing you're super interested. So don't let this moment pass because your dream job may be right on the other side of that application. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I love you being here and it means the world to me. You can learn more about gardenaryardenary.com, follow us on Social and please come back. I'll be right here next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, I, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.