The Power of Community in Entrepreneurship: Adam's Mushroom Kingdom

Speaker 1: 0:47

undiscovered entrepreneur, episode number 49. We're almost a 50.

Speaker 2: 0:53

You know, as you said before, money is a metric by which you measure success, but it's in, it's an indirect measure. The success is really the goodwill of the community around you, and I am a very big believer that Whatever you put out into the world, it gets returned to you. So if I'm gonna put out my goodwill and my expertise and my willingness to help other people grow, then I have full faith and full belief that it's going to come back.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Welcome to the undiscovered entrepreneur, the podcast where brand new entrepreneurs come to life and could quite possibly be discovered. Join me, dj Scoob, and the rest of the screw believers as we help these new businesses become a reality. And now way we go. Hello, scoob believers, and welcome to another episode of the undiscovered entrepreneur. And it's me, dj Scoob, coming at you on whatever device you happen to be listening on. Alright, so today we're gonna get a great education on mushrooms. That's right, mushrooms. I have Adam, who is a mushroom farmer, who is actually starting his own mushroom farmer. He actually hasn't really decided exactly what is gonna be yet, but that's okay, that's what we're here for is to talk about it, and you're gonna get such an education about mushrooms more than I thought I was ever gonna get when I started this, this interview. So strap it, ladies and gentlemen, and let's talk to Adam. Music. Salutations, scoob believers. And we are here again with our next amazing, brand spanking new entrepreneur. Today, we're here with Adam. Hi Adam, how are you? I'm doing great.

Speaker 2: 3:25

Jesse, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Great Thanks for coming on to undiscovered entrepreneur. Now I have a really kind of semi serious question to ask you, okay.

Speaker 2: 3:31

Alright.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Alright, here we go. Are you a Scoob believer?

Speaker 2: 3:37

I am now.

Speaker 1: 3:39

That's a good way to put it. I love it. Thank you so much for being a Scoob believer, adam. I appreciate you Absolutely. So what I'd like to know here is you're a brand new entrepreneur. I'd like to know a little bit about you, about what you do and how long you've actually been doing it for.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Okay, so I am an urban farmer. I've done a couple other businesses in other things in previous iterations and lives, but basically, for in two different iterations over the last 10 years, I've been an entrepreneur. Now it is 10 years, but my first business started 10 years ago and I think in the eight years, seven years that I ran it, I might have actually grossed, you know, 30, $40,000 over seven, eight years. So I didn't really do a whole lot with it. Now my second business was an urban mushroom farm. I did that with a business partner here in the Dallas, fort Worth area. We started well, he started a year before me, but he and I started together in 2019. And we started in a 2000 square foot warehouse. We started growing about 30 pounds a week gourmet mushrooms and over the next three years, up until when I exited the farm last July, we grew that up to about 800 pounds per week and when I left we were on track for grossing almost three quarters of a million dollars. So I did a little bit better with that one. I made some mistakes, we learned some lessons and right now I want to help other farmers learn how to do business better, because food is important, but staying in business is what allows us to get it out to other people.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Exactly, Exactly. I love how you've actually taken kind of that step. There's the steps that you take. I did this and I did this, which is do a little bit better, and now I'm doing this. That's awesome. It's great to have that kind of journey. That's why I call it an entrepreneur adventure really, because it really is an adventure not just a journey, but it's an entire adventure that we take in our lives. If we want to start this, you know what we're doing. What actually made you start this business? I know you said you had a couple of businesses already, but where is the beginnings of this? Tell me how you actually got started in all this.

Speaker 2: 5:59

So I grew up, my parents were both entrepreneurs. They had construction companies and then that kind of failed and you know, the construction business died in the mid 90s. So they stopped building restaurants and they started building houses and then from there it kind of morphed into being a property management and this and that, and so I grew up seeing entrepreneurship and seeing small business and that was what I just thought was normal. So I grew up and went to college and tried to get a normal job and I didn't really like having people tell me what to do. You know, big surprise there. So I started looking for ways that I could kind of call my own shots and, truthfully, I fell into my first business, honestly by accident. The real short version is I was trying to learn how to do aquaponics, which is hydroponics but using fish to provide the nutrient source, and so I joined a meetup group in the Dallas Fort Worth area and the first meeting I go to and I mean I've done some reading and some research in this and that, but the first meeting for this group I show up and I just start asking other people there what they were doing and what their experience was, and such, 45 minutes later, the guy that was running the meeting never showed up. Everybody else thought I was the one leading the group and it just kind of grew from there and I literally just fell into it. So what I've done for a day job for the last 15, 17 years is I've been a teacher. So I've taught math, I've taught science, I've taught agriculture, and so teaching people how to do things is second nature to me. So running those workshops just, or going to those meetings and such, became teaching workshops on how to build this system or that system or how to identify fish disease or this or that. And from there it just kind of grew forward. To well, we've taught everybody how to build a system, now let's people teach everyone how to grow different crops. So we built a training farm and that was a 20 foot by 40 foot greenhouse and then we went okay, well, now we need to make it actually profitable. So let's build a 20 by 100 foot greenhouse. And we did that and we started growing lettuce and selling it farmers markets and a couple of restaurants, and it paid the bills and it, the business supported itself. It just didn't support me. It was never at a point where I could quit my day job and actually be a farmer. It made enough to cover its expenses and that was really about it. It was about that time that I started looking into other things that I could grow, other things that I could do, trying to make that far more successful, more viable. And I found mushrooms and I always thought it was cool and interesting, and I just couldn't find anybody to teach me how to do it. And, out of a completely random turn of events, I was on Facebook in some group, whatever, and somebody was like, hey, roll call, where are you, where are you from? And I saw this comment I'm in Dallas, texas and I went okay, that's somebody I need to meet. So I messaged him out of the blue. We met up at a farmer's market where I was vending and he brought some of his mushrooms and we ended up kind of talking ideas and such, and six months later it was January of 2019. And we signed a lease on a 2000 square foot, a former auto body shop, and we built everything from scratch and three and a half years later, we were growing 800 pounds of mushrooms a week and it was. It was great. I quit. I quit my day job a year into year, into that, and it was my sole employment for almost three years. We made it through COVID. We made it through multiple ups and downs and twists around the way and it worked. But yeah, my path was one of those that was kind of random, but it just, it just every, every next step seemed right at the time.

Speaker 1: 10:18

It's amazing how that works out sometimes, where just random events all come together to the one thing that happens. That really fits right where you want to be and that's awesome. And I think that happens to us a lot when we're working within our zone of genius. A lot of just things happen, just the way they're supposed to, to make things work for you and work for your company and work for yourself personally too, as long as you stay within your realm of what you really love to do. So that's awesome. That is such a fantastic story, and I like the fact that you took two different things, two loves that you have, and combined them into together to make something for yourself that ultimately ended up being fantastic. And a lot of us are in that new realm where we're just not even paying our bills, maybe just paying the bills and not really sustaining for ourselves. So we all know we have to take that next step to be able to sustain ourselves, so we could possibly get into something. That's a new adventure for us that will actually get us to where we need to go, and I like that. It seemed like your parents taught you how to pivot, because it seemed like they're, they're over here. They're like oh, this is the working, let's go over here and try this. And that starts working. I was, okay, let's go over here, maybe this is working. But they didn't give up. They didn't just throw their hands up in the air and say, hey, that's it, I can't do this anymore. And that's something I really think we all should really take advantage of it being able to make that pivot, that change, so we can keep moving on in our entrepreneur adventure, no matter what we're doing. So when we hit those times, those random events can actually happen to us. So if we're not doing things, we're not moving, these random events are not going to happen. That's all within ourselves to be able to do. Quick question, because I'm a huge mushroom fan. Since you mentioned mushrooms, can you just really quick and I know this is kind of random but can you explain the difference between Portobello mushrooms and just the regular white mushrooms?

Speaker 2: 12:07

All right. So pretty much any mushroom you see in the grocery store the white button, the Portobello, the Babybella, the Cremini, those are all what are called agaricus mushrooms, and that's the bottom of the barrel commodity mushroom grow. It's the equivalent of corn and soybeans. They're grown on massive scales. They are actually grown out of a manure-based substrate and these are the ones that are grown in near darkness and such and all of that. Classic. That's the stereotype. What we grew were the gourmet mushrooms. So that was oyster mushrooms, lion's mane, chestnut mushrooms. We grew mitake. We actually, over the course of the farm we actually grew up to 12 different species at one point, but primarily oyster mushrooms, lion's mane, chestnut, mitake, a couple others in there, but those were the main ones that we grew and they're all wood-loving substrates so they grow off of hardwood sawdust and then some type of nutrient supplement. We used soybean shells, actually soybean meal or soybean hulls, rather not meal. But there's a lot of other nutrient supplements that you could use, but primarily wood substrate, but they're very different. So we grew out of individual bags. So it's a lot of work, it's backbreaking, and some of the lessons that we learned were how to minimize that lifting when you're making 200 bags a time, three times a week, and you're doing 10-pound bags. That's a lot of lifting that you got to do, moving those bags around seven or eight times during their life cycle. So it's fun, though it's super fast. So our oyster mushrooms from the day we started the bag to the day we harvested was usually 21 to 23 days, so it's a super fast production period.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Okay, so a little mushroom education for everybody. Thank you so much, Adam. That's actually more. That's just fantastic information, and if you want to grow mushrooms, this is the guy you want to talk to. Okay, so, in your entrepreneur, I'm going to just kind of go into another questionnaire In your entrepreneur adventure and it sounds like you've been doing this for a little while altogether but what are some of the pitfalls that you've come across in? Like let's talk about what you've recently done have you had any pitfalls that kind of came about that you can maybe speak of?

Speaker 2: 14:48

Yeah. So one of the issues that I saw overall between my lettuce farm, between the mushroom farm, is communication, and it's communication across all different levels, with employees and staff and such. But the most important level of communication and where I saw a lot of struggle initially for us was with clients, with customers. So with the mushroom farm we initially started serving just restaurants and we were serving reasonably high end restaurants that were chef driven. So we're not talking corporate concepts that have multiple locations, such, we're talking about one restaurant that you know. Some of our restaurants that we dealt with had 12 seats, not even 12 tables, just 12 seats in the restaurant, and so that chef demands a level of interaction and a level of familiarity with his suppliers. So we had to develop that level of trust and that relationship with him that he trusted that we would be able to meet his needs, his quality levels and his timelines, all while staying within his price points. So it developing those relationships with chefs and being able to provide them what they need when they needed it. That's really, at the end of the day, I think the backbone of what made us successful was because we were willing to do a lot more than some of the other food distributors in town. We did deliveries seven days a week sometimes we did. You know, if a chef ran out of mushrooms at 7pm on a Saturday night, all right, either me or my partner went to the farm, picked up a case of fresh mushrooms and got it out over to him, and over time that really developed a very loyal following that chefs, when they moved from one restaurant to another, they would start buying from us at their new restaurant. And so it. Relationships and communication are probably the two biggest things that I would say are absolutely fundamental, aside from having a quality product. Whatever it is that you do in your industry, you need to know your customers and they need to know you.

Speaker 1: 17:15

That's good. That's some great information. Yes, I agree with you 100%. Good communication is key when it comes to a lot of different types of things, especially when you're talking with potential clients or anything like that. Also, communication between employees all that's great information. But I think you hit a really great point there when it comes to, you know, those client-to-relationships client relationships because it just seems like no matter where you go, they'll kind of follow you anywhere that you are, and that's really good to have, because then you know you'll have something set for quite some time that you're their guide that they go to. For whatever mushrooms or audio video, who cares, you're the person that they're going to go to. So that's fantastic. Thank you so much, adam. That's awesome. So, as we're moving along here, just the next question Do you have and I like asking this question, but especially with someone like you do you have any influences or somebody that maybe like either mentor you'd like to talk about or someone that really makes you look forward to doing what you're doing, like anybody like that in your life?

Speaker 2: 18:30

So I've had a lot of what I would what I guess would be like content mentors. You know they're farmers that I've looked up to and people that I have really that I've really appreciated what they've done for the field that I was in. So with Aquaponics there are a number of big names. I mean Will Allen of Growing Power up in Milwaukee did a great deal and I learned a lot from him. Murray Helm down in Australia there's 15 or 20. But when I got into business and started trying to figure out how I could make a salary for myself, how I could actually run a business that supported employees in a consistent and dependable manner, what I realized was a lot of the people that know how to produce food, a lot of the people that know how to farm, they're not really the best mentors for how to run business. I always remember it was probably two or three years into doing this somebody told me a joke, and apparently it's a pretty old joke. It's how do you make a farmer a millionaire? You start them off with $2 million and it's just that idea that farming is a losing proposition, that if you're in farming, it's great, you're growing food we need that but you're setting yourself up to lose, and I never really agreed with that. I never liked that. So over the last five, six years I've really kind of I've looked for mentors in the business space, in the entrepreneurship space, in the networking and relationship space, and it's it really comes down to the idea that marketing is not marketing and sales are not this like evil, slimy, sleazy concept. It's the lifeblood that keeps your business afloat and it's necessary, it's absolutely necessary. But if you reframe that in your mind, that you're not trying to con people out of their money, instead you're providing them so much value in every possible way related to your product that they feel the least they can do in return is give you money. For me, it was that reframing that allowed me to shift my mentality. With the mushroom farm, we grew gourmet mushrooms At the farmer's market. They sold for $20 and $30 a pound. These are not cheap mushrooms. We had free recipes every week. Every week, one of our gourmet chefs from the high end restaurants in Dallas, fort Worth, we had a different recipe. We gave away free recipes to people that bought mushrooms. We had medicinal tinctures and we told people how to use them to address certain issues and certain ailments that they might have and such. We published research and shared articles and we just educated the community about what mushrooms are and what they could be. We provided value, above and beyond the simple transaction of here's a mushroom, give me dollars. As a result, at our farmer's markets we had people who would drive 45 minutes just to come to our booth at the market just to buy our mushrooms, because they appreciated what we did. Then we started doing other things. We started actually putting together recipes of here's what's available at market now. Here's what's in season, here's an entire dish that you can make or an entire meat like meal plan for the week, but you're going to buy mushrooms from us, but you're going to buy carrots from this farm and you're going to buy beef from this farm and chicken from that farm. We started sharing the wealth, so to speak, and we started increasing the traffic and the sales to all of the vendors at our markets. Then it wasn't just our customers coming to us, it was hey, this other vendor is going to send their customer over to get our mushrooms because we send our customers to them to buy goat cheese and so on. I don't know. I can't remember where I first heard it. Maybe it was Seth Godin, maybe it was Gary V, I don't know, but somebody said it once and it just stuck in my head If you are stuck looking at the pie as something to be carved up, then you're going to hoard it and you're going to fight and you're going to claw and you're going to hold things close to your chest and you're not going to share. Once you realize that nothing in the world is really and truthfully that unique, that it's all about marketing and it's all about market share and it's all about what message resonates with what person. There's 50 people out there talking about entrepreneurship and every single one of them has a different audience because they resonate with different people. When you flip that script around and you realize that I don't need to worry about market share, because if I work with everybody and if I share what I'm doing and if I'm transparent about what I'm doing, the pie gets bigger. So it doesn't matter how much of the pie I get, because my slice, whatever percentage it might be, it's bigger than it would have been if I didn't help everybody else. In the end I still get more, so does everybody else, and it's the rising tide with all boats. And if we work together and we share and we combine our efforts, everything's going to work out better for everybody else as well as us In the end. Ironically, I think that was one of the things that didn't really jive between me and my ex-partner. I wanted to share everything and be fully transparent 100%. He really didn't In the end. I exited the farm last year, so now I'm trying to figure out what's going to be my third farm. That's where I am right now.

Speaker 1: 25:12

Okay.

Speaker 2: 25:13

That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 25:14

Yeah, you said something really similar to what I'd say we rise by lifting others, really helping everybody else out there, and not worrying about so much as the money, but the quality of what we're actually doing to help other people and what we're doing. Yeah, it's pretty much the same thing, so that's great. I really like saying, too, that the money actually becomes a bad product of how we treat other people, how much value we actually give our customers or our followers or anything that you use at that particular point. Not worrying so much is the money, as what kind of value am I giving this person? And eventually, or even on their own, they'll say, okay, that's awesome, thank you. Here is this in exchange Not always money, but money always helps. But yeah, that's really what it comes down to here, and I love that. You kind of cross, and here you're doing it again crossing farmer and salesperson Another type of thing that you really want to put together, especially like what you're talking about, because they really need to directly work with each other to be able to survive. Ultimately, in the very end, you still need to make your products, but then you still need to be able to sell those products, and that's really, really important. Also, when you're following your people, you want to try to stay in your field. I noticed you have to do that too. The people that you follow you started following in your field of work, but then you're like, okay, I got enough of this, now I need to go over here and work on the sales part. Now I'm going to start following these people and learn as much as I can from them and then, once again, just taking the best of both worlds and putting them together, and it's really all about providing a service. It's not so much as just like you said, just a dollar exchange for a mushroom, but the value we have along with that mushroom is what brings people to you over somebody else. That's just not a number, but a person that wants that value. I commend you for that. That's fantastic, adam. Thank you All right. So I'd like to know, since you've been doing this for a little while and you've had a lot of things in front of you I see you coming, but when will you know you've made it? When do you think you've gotten to that one point where you said this is exactly where I wanted to be at this particular time? What does that look like to you, adam?

Speaker 2: 27:39

I honestly have no idea, because I'm never going to get there, because to me that goalpost is always going to be moving. It's kind of silly, but I remember as a kid I was probably in middle school and we read this book, jonathan Livingston Segal, which, if anybody out there hasn't read it, go find a used bookstore and pick it up. It's about 26 pages. I mean, it's a tiny little book. You read it in an afternoon. But the crux of it is that perfection is never going to be reached. No matter what you think you can do, as much as you think you could possibly learn, by the time you get to where you think is the end point, you realize that's the start of the next plateau and you have that whole level to learn again. So for me, right now, where I am, I'm still teaching because I enjoy it. I'm still teaching math and I'm having a good time with it. I'm looking to figure out what farm I want to do next. I honestly don't know. It might be a hybrid CSA type vegetable farm through aquaponics and hydroponics. It might be another mushroom farm. It might even be a spirulina algae farm. I honestly I'm trying to figure out what works best with the time I have available. But honestly, right now, where I am the next plateau for me is, as you said, I've done this for a little while and I've learned a lot of lessons. Mostly, I've learned what not to do and I want to be able to help other farmers and you know, I mean in all honesty other small business owners to grow faster than I did. I would like to be able to work with them to help them get to their goalpost or what they think is their goalpost faster, with less pain, because I've learned some of those lessons. So right now I'm reaching out to a number of the local farms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and I'm basically just offering services. I'm going on every podcast I can to think about and such, to basically say the same thing that if you want help growing your business, give me a call. I would absolutely love to help anybody. That's right now. I'm kind of in that amazing, lucky, beautiful point where my money issues are taken care of and I can focus on what brings me joy. And you know, as you said before, money is a metric by which you measure success, but it's an indirect measure. The success is really the goodwill of the community around you and I am a very big believer that whatever you put out into the world, it gets returned to you. So if I'm gonna put out my goodwill and my expertise and my willingness to help other people grow, then I have full faith and full belief that it's going to come back in the end and help me grow. And maybe that'll be in the form of money, maybe it'll be in the form of you know, somebody's out there and wants to invest in a new mushroom farm or a new algae farm and they're like, hey, this guy knows what he's doing. Okay, let's talk to him. I don't know. Right now I'm just kind of playing and I want to go have some fun. I don't want to help people grow some food and get bigger. So that's probably a long-winded and tangential answer to what you asked, but that's what I'm looking for. I'll work until I drop dead and they, they nail me in my coffin. I don't ever see myself exiting and just being like that's it, I'm out. I will probably and hopefully get to a point where I don't have to work you know that a little bit further than where I am right now of my money. My finances are stable and they're taken care of. You know, I don't need to make ten million dollars a year and go hobnob everywhere. Give me a house that's paid off, a car that's paid off and, you know, groceries. I'm good. I don't need to be extravagant, I just want to help people, and that's really all I've ever done. So first I help by growing food, now I want to help by growing businesses.

Speaker 1: 32:22

That's a great goal to have it itself, you know, is to be able to help other people as much as you can. Now that you've kind of reached this plateau and where you're at Now, it's time to share that information. It's time to share that, like you were talking about earlier, that being able to help other people grow their businesses farm-wise or anything else wise too. I've already learned a lot from you just listening to you, so. So, thank you so much, adam. Appreciate that, okay. So, since you're actually into helping yeah, since you're into helping other people and you wanted to share a little bit of your knowledge, if you were to actually meet somebody that wants to have a similar adventure as you and growing whatever it is that they want to grow, what steps would you have them take if they asked you for advice?

Speaker 2: 33:16

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. I know my journey was not a linear straight line, so I would probably start by asking a whole lot of questions about where they were, where they started from, where they wanted to go, what they envisioned their pain points would be, and then we just start having a discussion to see, okay, well, where's the low-hanging fruit? Where's the? You know the 80-20 rule? What can we work on? You know what's the 20% that we can work on that will relieve 80% of the pain? Or what clients bring in the least revenue but take most of your time, you know, is it worth firing one of those clients so that you can focus on the others? I have always found, personally, that stepping back and kind of gaining that perspective on everything helps me then streamline and move forward faster. So that would be the first step that I would take. Working with somebody is trying to figure out okay, well, what's the way of the land? What you know? Are you looking to go into a wholesale distribution but you're stuck in a farmers market? You know? And what do you want to do? Or you're, you're outgrowing the farmers market, but you're not quite at enough production to be able to go to a wholesale and such. So it's. Everybody's situation is going to be different, but in general I would say, start with building your relationships with your clients. If you don't have a newsletter, if you don't have a regular communication with them and it doesn't have to be a newsletter I did it brute force. I messaged nearly 45-50 chefs individually every week asking them how their order went the previous week. You know, do they need anything special or do they want anything else? Do they have any plans for specials coming up? You know, and I did it like I said, I did it brute force. I didn't have any elegant, easy way to communicate with everybody. I always said I was gonna start a newsletter and I just never quite got around to it. So I just had all these text threads that I just kept track of. But it works for the scale we were at. If we got much bigger than we had been, it probably wouldn't. It probably would have fallen apart. But if you're not already communicating with your clients through a newsletter or direct communication or such, that's easily the number one thing that you need to do. Start with that and try to get some perspective on the overall operation there you go.

Speaker 1: 36:06

That's some good advice. Yeah, we go back to the communication thing. Like we said in the beginning of the podcast, it's really important to have that communication with your clients so we know what they're looking for and that way we can provide what they need. For providing what they need, then why do they have us? So it's really important to have that. And you make a great point too and I'm gonna kind of highlight this fire and clients. It's okay to fire a client. A lot of people are really scared to do that because like, oh, I'm losing money, but I mean as much energy and money as you're putting in. Why don't you use that same amount of energy, something that's gonna produce more, instead of having to walk on eggshells because you're not sure if it's working right or you don't have a great relationship with this, with a client. So don't be afraid to fire a client.

Speaker 2: 36:51

So you make a good point there, adam well, I mean the the first time I did it. It was terrifying to me, but I, once again, I step back and I look at that perspective and I realized that over the course of a month, I had something like 35 emails with one client and I think I had like 10 emails combined with the other like 12 clients, and that one client was not even a tenth of my monthly revenue. And I'm like you know what it? Yes, I can afford to eliminate this one client because then, all of a sudden, I've got this much more time to grow the business, and that's that's probably one of the other things I would tell people is, if you are spending all of your time working in the business, then you don't have any time left to grow the business. If you're doing the tasks that your employees are doing, you need to stop, and when you're first starting out, you can't. You, you know your bootstrapping, you've got to do it all, but as soon as you can fire yourself from a position and hire that away to somebody else, you absolutely need to, because if you're working doing the business, you're not gonna have the time to grow the business the way it needs to, as, as the entrepreneur, as the owner, you've got to work on the business, not in it yeah, I've heard that many times with different types of entrepreneurs not just farmers, but all different kinds.

Speaker 1: 38:32

I mean, you got to work on your business, not in your business. I like how you see fire yourself. That actually is a nice way of putting that. I never really thought about it that way. So fire yourself so you can improve your business. I like that. That's awesome. All right, so here is my favorite question, but I did steal it from another podcast, so sorry everybody. What is the one question you wish I would have asked you? But didn't I always miss one really good question? And, like I have my guest goes, I really wish he would ask that question. I was really hoping and I was ready for that answer. What is that question, adam?

Speaker 2: 39:19

um, I honestly don't know. You actually the one that I usually want to answer that I rarely get a chance to. You did ask and that was what advice would I give to somebody, and that I don't know. But I guess that's usually the question that I want to answer, that very few people ask. Most people seem to be more concerned about the journey and not about how to help others, and that's, I guess, in all honesty, that's one of the things that I really like about your podcast, and what Drew needs to want to be on it is that you're helping people grow their business and you know your audience is looking for the things that I want to share and that's so. That's why, yeah, that's why I'm here and I'm going to stop, okay that's okay.

Speaker 1: 40:20

I appreciate the kind words, adam. That's awesome. Thank you, because you talked so nice to me. We'll let it slide this time, okay, all right, so all right, and this is from the heart. So we've gotten to the point now where I really like to know what is the next goal you have for yourself in the next six months. What I'd like to do is follow up with you in six months and see if you've accomplished a goal. So, in the next six months, what do you see yourself accomplishing?

Speaker 2: 40:52

So short term, I know that within the next six months I am going to be taking over a distribution service for a friend of mine. He's moving out of state so I'm going to start selling farm eggs at one of the local farmers markets. So I'm going to take over that distribution. And I'm doing that one because he asked me nicely and two because it gets me back into the markets where I can get a pulse on kind of what's going and how the markets are going. So that gives me the opportunity then to meet more of the local farmers. And I don't know, I don't know if it'll happen in six months, but definitely one of the things I'm going to be working on is setting up a farmers networking group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where farmers can talk and share with each other as much as they want to share, but where we can talk about business issues. Hey, who can help me with this organic certification application? Who has a line on good compost? Who has a line on good seed or distribution? Or hey, I need a mechanic. My ex broke down. I just once again getting back to that communication, it's important at all levels and I want to try to develop a community where the farmers in this area don't view each other as competition, even if they're at the same market, even if they're growing the same types of crops. You know it's we've got to start talking and working together. I mean, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex has over 8 million people in it. We don't grow a fraction of the food that is actually needed to make this community stable. If anything happened to the food system we need, we probably need 3,000 more farmers than we have here already. So the more I can do to build that community and make that a place where people can jump into it and get support and get the ability to grow, you know that's the least I can do, so that's. I don't know how far I'll get on that in six months, but that's definitely the big goal that I'm gonna start working towards.

Speaker 1: 43:15

So yeah, all right, those are very unmerble. I really like the idea of having a farmer's network to be able to work together to accomplish things that normally you by yourself wouldn't be able to accomplish. So I would. We've actually kind of strongly urged you to do that. That's really great. So what we're gonna do is follow up with you in six months to see if you've achieved those goals or, at least you know, moved towards those goals, and see where you are. Is that okay? Absolutely yeah, fantastic, excellent, okay. So, adam, it's come to the time here. This is your time to shine. I want you to be able to talk about who you are, what you do and how we can get ahold of you if we wanna talk to you about farming.

Speaker 2: 43:59

So, like I said, I'm willing to help anybody. Farming is what I've done mostly, but I think I'm pretty decent at business and I'm willing to give it a shot if you're not in the agricultural industry. So if you wanna reach out and chat about anything, you can find me on Twitter or YouTube at IamAdamCohen. I've started in Instagram and such, but I'm not really doing much there. Twitter's probably the best place to get ahold of me. Or you can reach me at Adam at GreenPhoenixFarmscom, if you wanna email me. But either way, just reach out and give me a shout, say hello All right, awesome.

Speaker 1: 44:38

We'll make sure to put all that in the show notes so somebody can get ahold of you. They can look there first and just go right to you. Okay, that'd be great. All right, adam, thank you so much for being an undiscovered entrepreneur. It's been an absolute pleasure. I learned a lot from you. I gotta tell you, just listening to you and how you've run things and that kind of thing fantastic. Thank you so much for the information, adam.

Speaker 2: 44:58

Thanks, Jesse.

Speaker 1: 44:59

All right, all right, scoob Believers. Make sure you stay tuned for the wrap up. All right, everybody. Thank you, bye-bye Beep. ["scoob Believers"]. All right, scoob Believers, that was Adam man. Adam had oh boy, that was just amazing. I'm almost like completely speechless about how awesome that was. That was actually a lot more than I was expecting out of a farmer, to be honest with you, but he had so much great information about entrepreneurship and things to follow in that nature. I liked how he took a lot of his experiences and kind of interweaved and combined them into something. That's just amazing how he could learn how to be a teacher and farm and teach people how to farm and turn that into an entrepreneur adventure. Great, great. Also, it's really important to follow the people in your field so you can learn from them, not just like it's like kind of like a shortcut. I mean, you can go out and learn a lot of different things by reading books and trial and error and things of that nature, but it's so much better, so much quicker, more efficient, easier to just go to somebody and say, hey, can you help me with this? Hey, I'm really trying to learn this. What can you do to help me? Don't be afraid to reach out to somebody and say, hey, can you help me with this? You'll learn a lot quicker and probably a lot better too. It'll sink in your head a lot as easier if you just ask somebody and kind of to keep a dialogue with them. And it's really important to have that value, that value aspect of what you really are trying to accomplish. It's important to be able to maintain people, not so much as, like I said before and he said too just exchanging a product for a dollar, but exchanging a product for a dollar and something else and something you know that will be of value to your customer, that way of coming back for more, because they know you're more interested in them as a person and not just as a number or somebody that's giving them money. That's really important in our entrepreneur adventure. Being able to fire your client I really wanted to make sure I made that very clear. It is possible to fire a client if they're just not working out. Sometimes customers expectations are different than yours and when you have that, sometimes it gets a little funny, it gets a little fuzzy, a little communication errors there. So just make sure that it's something you're willing to do. Don't be afraid to do that. And speaking of communication and we've said it several times in the podcast communication huge, super important. Not just communication between you and your employees or anything else or sometimes you're your own employee but communication with your guests, communications with your clients, communication with what's actually working with you, cause when there's a loss of communication, there's always something that gets missed and that can cause big, big problems. All right, so thank you, adam, very much for being on the Undiscovered Entrepreneur A little bit with me. The entrepreneurship in a box that is definitely in the works right now, really kind of getting into it. I would really like some ideas from you, my listeners, my screw believers what you would actually like to have inside this box. I've already come up with about three or four different types of things I would like to have in the box to be able to help you get your entrepreneur adventure started. But if you were able to put something in the box for yourself to start an entrepreneur adventure, what would it be? I would really like to hear about it. Hit me up on Twitter and all my Twitter spaces at UEPodcast 2021. And email me or just go to my link tree L-I-N-K-T-R-E-E link to slash DJ Scoop. Find the ways to get a call to me through there. They're all right there for you to see and let me know. I would really like to know what you would like to have in this entrepreneur box. All right, and something else that's kind of come across here that I really want to talk to you about. I decided to take my group coaching from the just exclusively doing it in the community that I'm in, numospect and bring it out to the public. So here we go. This is going to get really real, real quick. So I have five spots that are open right now for anybody who wants to take advantage of them for a bi-weekly group coaching. So if you would like to fill those spots, you reach out to me at doingitodaycoachingatgmailcom and we'll set you up with times and dates and when you would like to get involved in that. Just so you know right up front, though, because I try to be very transparent when I do the things there is a very minor cost involved, but that is going strictly towards my podcast and me visiting my father, who's not doing so hot Nevada right now, and I want to get out to him. So it's definitely going towards a good cause to be able to do all this. So thank you so much in advance for anybody that wants to join me in this group coaching, and with that I'm going to say thank you everybody. Join me on any of my social medias. You can find me on linktree backslashdjscoup that's linktreete, or t-r-t-r-t-e at DjScoop, and reach out to me if you'd like to know anything and if you could get around to possibly even sending a review. That would be amazing, and I will definitely say your name on the next podcast right after I get that. So thank you very much for a great evening, everybody. We'll see you next week for coaching. Thank you so much. Bye, bye, wee, hee, hee. Hello there. Dj Scoop here and I just want to personally say thank you for listening to my program. I really hope you learned something. Tune in in two weeks to listen to another brand new entrepreneur. And remember I can, I am, I will and I'm doing it today.