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James Worley is the entrepreneur behind Yum Yards — a service that brings gardening expertise right to your yard. James has advice for small business owners and some serious recommendations for dealing with squirrels. In today’s marketing tip, we talk about the kind of people you’re likely to have working in your marketing department — are you a unicorn or a true student of the marketing science?
Transcript:
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising and Marketing. We’re going to talk about marketing and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs. We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward. This week we sit down with James Worley. He’s the entrepreneur behind Yum Yards. But first, we’ve got another small business marketing tip to talk about.
For our marketing tip today I want to talk about the camps that marketing staff will fall into a lot of times. Small businesses and nonprofit organizations alike typically have smaller in-house marketing staff. The people they hire are just regular people. They’re good, but they’re not marketing unicorns. After all, marketing unicorns are rare. A marketing unicorn is somebody who has a plethora of skills in multiple areas, can wear lots of hats, and has the ability to both think strategically and execute on that vision. You can see now why they’re a very rare breed to see in the wild.
Now, since marketing unicorns are rare, marketing staff can gravitate toward a few different camps. I’m generalizing here, but you’ll find these camps out there in the labor market and the first one is the blinders. And that person says, “Hey, look, I know this tactic, so I’ll go heavy into that tactic.” And that may be social media, it may be content creation, it may be something much more specific. Are there other tactics that would work for that organization? Yes, plenty. There are more priorities that that person can’t get to. But these are the ones I’m comfortable with so those are the tactics that I’m going to use to make my case to management about how valid that tactic is and so I’ll be focused just on that one tactic that I’m really good at. So that’s the one with the blinders on.
Next we may see the yes person. This one responds to a lot of pressure. “My boss thinks social media, or whatever, is the best thing. So we built a TikTok page and I do a lot of videos with my time and hopefully TikTok is where my audience is and hopefully you don’t have other issues that are much bigger to deal with.” So that’s the yes person.
We also have somebody who takes direction well. This person executes, but they may not be comfortable thinking things through. If you tell this person to do a thing, they’ll figure it out, but they likely have to ask for direction and decisions all along the way. So, a lot of oversight needed for this guy.
And then there’s the student. They soak it up like a sponge. They’re trying to gain new skills. They see the strategy and know what the priority is, and then they figure out what skills they need to acquire to get there. You may not have this person in your company for long because they may start to show signs of a single unicorn horn growing out of the top of their skull. Of course, again, I’m generalizing here based on some of the different camps that we see, and I’ll pick a student any day of the week for my marketing team. Just know you may not have that person for long.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a full marketing tip if I didn’t mention that outsourcing your marketing to a well-rounded team of marketing experts is a cost-effective way to staff that marketing department keep up on the latest technology and regulations and best practices. And because agencies typically see dozens of clients in several different industries, marketing unicorns also tend to flock to us because they can show off their multitude of skills since we never see the same problem twice. It’d be really nice to see the same problem twice. Anyway, that’s our marketing tip for today.
We are joined by James Worley. He is the owner of Yum Yards. James, welcome to the program.
James Worley:
Good morning. Thank you for having me on today.
Jeff Randolph:
Happy to have you. First, tell us about Yum Yards. Our office coordinator, Beth, is a happy, happy client and she brought in several green things for us to share. So we were very excited. We thought, yes, this is a great business. Let’s have James on.
James Worley:
Well, Yum Yards is my little idea of teaching folks how to grow vegetables in their front yard, backyard, side yard, wherever we could find a sunny spot. I was a fifth grade teacher for almost 20 years, and then I taught, I was an education specialist for the Missouri Department of Conservation for five years. And all along that time I sold plants, tomato plants and pepper plants as a hobby in the spring. And I taught gardening classes. People wanted to know how to grow and they would come to my house and I would teach them how to grow. And everybody told me I should do this for a living, but I was too busy working for 25 years until things changed and I had a midlife crisis and decided to start this crazy business, did some research on it, and no one in the country is doing what I do, which is focusing solely on raised bed vegetable gardens. Two weeks ago, well, we started this in January of 2020, which was right before the pandemic, and it was the greatest business ever to have during the beginning.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, for sure.
James Worley:
I was an essential worker, so I got to be out there on the empty streets and everybody was at home and bored and they had extra money from not taking vacations and going to shows and sporting events, and they had stimulus checks and they were putting money into their homes. They were spending much time there. And that first year we built almost 40 gardens, not knowing what I was doing. We just built gardens everywhere and it became very successful. Two weeks ago, we actually built our 200th and 201st garden in the Kansas City metro area. And my goal is to build 1,000 gardens in Kansas City as my legacy to the place where I was born and raised and loved so much.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, that is outstanding. So ideal time to do that. ‘Cause everybody is home and trapped and ready to do something interesting, and that is tremendously interesting. So you’re helping people who don’t necessarily have the skill or knowledge or equipment to start a garden and you’re helping them acquire all of those things.
James Worley:
We do. We’re a service only business, and I guide people on what products to buy. We build metal raised bed gardens from a company out of Austin, Texas, American made product. These beds are beautiful. They are at least a 40 or 50 year product, so they’re not going to have to be rebuilt or they’re not going to fall apart like wooden beds do. They’re very, very attractive and a great investment for your yard. All we need is a sunny place and some access to water through a spigot or a sprinkler system that we could tap into and a willingness to learn. My business is a teaching business. If you want to learn, we try to educate people on how to grow everything from early spring veggies that you said Beth brought in, probably some lettuce and radishes, and we have broccoli and carrots and kale and kohlrabi and beets and everything else. So we can grow in the spring.
And now we have our summertime crops growing, our tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and okra and beans and all the things that grow well in the summer. And then in September we’ll plant those fall crops, which again is similar to the spring crops, the lettuces and radishes and broccoli that we can grow in the fall of the year. So it’s basically a nine-month business. We start in early March, we end in October, we start building gardens and topping off gardens with fresh compost in January and February, and we hit the ground running on March 1st, teaching folks how to grow.
Jeff Randolph:
Can I start anytime? Can I just show up in summer and you’ll say, “Hey, here’s what you’ve got left.”
James Worley:
Actually, timing is a little tricky. I just had a consultation yesterday, and we’re really at the very end of where we can plant a successful summer garden. If we try to plant anytime in June and it gets really hot if we get some temperatures in the 90s, which we’re prone to get in June, summer gardens just don’t do well if they’re not planted in early May. We need to get those roots to grow in May when the temperatures are in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And then once it hits the 90s, the plant is fully developed and ready to grow. If we start a little too late, then you’re going to have less than ideal conditions. So I recommend, like the clients yesterday, I recommend that we just wait until September and start them a garden in September where we can plant fall crops and that can be harvested all the way into November, December, depending on how the weather goes in the fall.
Jeff Randolph:
And, so early days, you’re doing just a smaller number of those raised bed gardens. Now, of course, with a goal of 1,000, you can’t do all of those things. You have a term that you use on your website called Yardeners, which I thought, your brilliantly branded term, Yardeners. So these are the people who go out and help do …?
James Worley:
We at Yum Yards hate yards. We think that grass is dumb. Grass is the only thing that humans grow that doesn’t provide any food or floral benefit. There’s just green and people spend literally thousands and thousands of dollars on their yard with chemicals and mowing and weeding and more chemicals to grow a thing that’s just not normal. So my Yardeners are turning your yard into a garden. And I had six last year doing the work and some of them were great, and some of them were so-so and some of them weren’t so good. And I focus on quality. My goal is not quantity. I say I want to grow 1,000 gardens, but I want to do it the right way. So I have two awesome Yardeners right now, Rhae and Max, and they’ve been with me for, Rhae’s been with me for three years and Max for two.
And they do an amazing job of not only doing the work of building the gardens, but all of the planting, all of the weeding, all of the plant supports, and they do the teaching. I’ve trained them how to do the teaching, and we do that through videos. So every time your Yardener visits your garden, they do the work, they pull all the weeds and plant the seeds and do all the things that need to be done. And then they give a in-depth video of which the first half is explaining what they did in the garden with regards to maybe treating for fungus or insects or replanting if a crop was harvested and space opened up.
And then the second half of the video is basically instructions for the client on what they need to do while their Yardener is gone. We have a bimonthly service where we come twice a month and a weekly service, and there’s still chores that need to be done in between visits. So the video explains to the clients what they need to do so they can take their phone out to their garden and walk through and learn from their Yardener on how to maintain their garden.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s brilliant. So talk to me about your target audience of customers. Do you have an ideal client or, who is that?
James Worley:
I really like to grow for families. That’s what I really like to grow for. Young families that are just starting out, maybe have their first home and they’ve got a couple of kids, those families are very receptive to education and the kids. I just love working with kids. And my Yardeners love to work with kids as well. We love to have them out and help with the garden, help do some planting, help pull some weeds, and help to harvest, of course, the kids love to harvest. That’s the best thing. So that’s my ideal client. But my clientele ranges from everything from brain surgeons to blue collar workers and everything in between. So all you need is a sunny spot and a willingness to learn and we can grow for you and be in the Kansas City metro area.
Jeff Randolph:
And I know that education is a big part of this, and from experience and from reading all kinds of tips, if one of the kids grows something that they typically don’t know that they love, “I grew it. I harvested that. I may even help cook that.” That’s a great way to help kids try new vegetables.
James Worley:
When they’re connected to a food from seed to harvest, it’s just amazing what they’ll try. So my number one thing with kids is radishes. Radishes, we love to grow in the spring and fall because they grow very quickly and kids have fairly short attention span. So from the time we plant a seed to the time you harvest a radish, it’s about a month, which is one of the fastest growing vegetables and radishes that you grow in your garden are a completely different animal than the radishes you buy in the store. They have a lot more flavor. They’re sweeter, they’re quicker, they’re prettier, and absolutely kids just love to grow vegetables and eat them in the summertime. They love to pick cucumbers and make pickles and learn that process, the science of that. They love to eat cherry tomatoes right off the vine, and they’re understanding where their food comes from.
Jeff Randolph:
Perfect. And I’m going to switch it away from kids for a second to go into my next question, which is all about the brave new world that we live in, especially on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metro in terms of regulations and gardening. And that is you quickly answered the call with a cannabis grow consultation, clients purchase the seeds and you provide the education and tell us all about that service.
James Worley:
Missouri in 2022 passed legal, growing and recreational use of cannabis and passed a law that’s very, very friendly to home growers. If you’ve ever been to a dispensary and purchased cannabis, it is extremely expensive with all of the taxes and all the things they do, and the quality you get at the dispensary is just not great. So I can grow anything, that I can teach people. So it just kind of naturally came together. Let’s teach folks how to grow their own cannabis.
And the thing with cannabis is it’s a weed. It grows very easily, but it’s very difficult to grow it well. It requires a lot of training, a lot of pruning, a lot of nutrients, a lot of support. And then to get the finished product to be cured and ready for consumption is quite a process. So, we go to people’s homes and we start seeds for them, teach them how to start seeds, how to transplant, all the process, all the way to consumption. And I actually work with some chefs that will do infused with your own harvest. So we can take you all the way through the process with your own home grow, save you a lot of money, and teach you how to grow your own medicine and your own recreational cannabis.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s amazing. The entire life cycle. And you started out with lettuce and now you’re into the devil’s lettuce. Well done, well done.
James Worley:
We call it the Lord’s lettuce.
Jeff Randolph:
The Lord’s lettuce.
James Worley:
That’s okay.
Jeff Randolph:
That works. That works just as well. And hypothetically, if you had several stalks where the stem isn’t standing straight up and it’s bent over at say, week two or three, how do you fix that? Is that a nutrient tissue?
James Worley:
That’s a support between, they’re very heavy, the colas get heavy, and we use cages and trellising and stakes. An average cannabis plant grown outdoors, we do indoor grows as well, but outdoor grows contains about a pound of dried and cured cannabis when it’s finished. So before it’s dried and cured, we’re looking at five, six pounds of flowers hanging off of a plant and they’re heavy. That’s a lot of weight. So we have do a lot of supporting so they don’t break.
Jeff Randolph:
Outstanding. And is that part of the business really taking off as people are getting into that?
James Worley:
Not as much. I’ve got a few cannabis clients, not as quite as many as I thought I would have. There’s still a bit of a stigma of folks about growing their own, and they’re just a little bit nervous about it still. Fortunately, the federal government is moving cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug to a Schedule 3 drug, which will change the legality of it considerably. It’s going to change the whole business, and hopefully that will take away some of the stigma that’s been placed around cannabis for a long, long time. But Missouri’s laws are just incredible for home growers and for consumers of recreationally, and hopefully as attitudes change, people will be willing to learn how to grow.
Jeff Randolph:
Outstanding. That’s a great service, great educational service as well, and it goes all the way from the seed to consumption. Thinking about you as an entrepreneur and this concept that you had right before the pandemic, what advice would you give to first year in business entrepreneur you, if you could go back in time and give yourself some bit of wisdom before you started this whole journey?
James Worley:
Don’t be afraid and don’t get too invested financially in a business until you know it’s going to take off. I basically started Yum Yards with $1,000. To set up a website, set up an LLC, and I didn’t take out a big loan. I didn’t borrow a bunch of money. I didn’t do a Kickstarter. I just had a little bit of money and wanted to see how this works, and it worked out very well. And the next year, I borrowed a little bit of money from my 401k to buy a truck and paid that off in a year. Just don’t want to be in debt. Don’t get yourself in debt when you’re trying to make money. Live within your means, and if your business takes off and does well, keep reinvesting in the business. The more you put into the business, the more you’ll get back out of it.
Jeff Randolph:
Great advice. If it’s all right with you, James, I’m ready to take you into the lightning round. Are you ready for the lightning round?
James Worley:
Here we go.
Jeff Randolph:
Lightning round. Here we go. Are there vegetables that you grow that you just can’t bring yourself to like or eat?
James Worley:
Wow. I’ll eat about any vegetable there is. One that I just don’t care for to grow is probably artichokes.
Jeff Randolph:
Interesting.
James Worley:
They take up a huge amount of room. They have giant spikes all over them, and you get like three bites out of one artichoke. So, just don’t grow artichokes.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s good advice. I mean, the spinach-dip lovers out there …
James Worley:
Yes, absolutely, but …
Jeff Randolph:
We get it. It’s just a lot of work. You mentioned that tomato thing. You’ve been described as the tomato whisperer. What is the secret to a productive tomato plant?
James Worley:
Oh my gosh. I’ve grown almost 1,000 varieties of tomatoes in my lifetime. And the secret, and this is what blows people’s mind, the worst thing you could do to a tomato plant is water it. The absolute worst thing. My tomatoes in my own gardens last year, and I have dedicated tomato beds. We had a drought year last year, if you remember. I watered them four times the entire season.
Jeff Randolph:
Wow.
James Worley:
Tomatoes are a desert plant. If you starve them for water, they’ll send down really deep taproots and tap into subsoil moisture, and you have a much happier, healthier tomato plant, if you don’t water them.
Jeff Randolph:
You just don’t water it. Man. So counterintuitive. Good whispering. Good whispering. Let’s talk about, there are a lot of times where, on the lightning round, we will give somebody the power to do something, like the power to change the world, how would you do it? Or what would, if you could remove stigma from this or that, what would you do? I’ve got one for you. It’s the, what common garden pest would you eradicate from existence if you were given the power to just get rid of an entire species?
James Worley:
Oh, that’s the easiest question I’ve ever been asked. That’s the squirrel.
Jeff Randolph:
What’s a squirrel?
James Worley:
The squirrels are the bane of our existence. They are evil little monsters that, they don’t eat your garden as much as people think, but they love to dig in your garden and bury nuts. And then when they do eat in your garden, they love tomatoes and they only take one bite of the tomato and then leave.
Jeff Randolph:
What
James Worley:
And ruins entire plants full of tomatoes, so the squirrel, and they’re almost impossible to fence out or use chemicals like pepper and stuff like that. They are the most adaptable little monsters, they are.
Jeff Randolph:
They’re brilliant. Brilliant. They’re smart as can be.
James Worley:
Oh my gosh. Yes. And they can figure anything out, and trying to get rid of them is a futile effort.
Jeff Randolph:
I’m so glad you mentioned squirrels because in my next question, you won an event in Arkansas that has something to do with squirrels. What was that event?
James Worley:
It has to be in Arkansas. It’s the World Championship Squirrel Cook-Off. It is a spectacle. You really need to go and just see this. It’s the second Saturday in September this year in Springdale, Arkansas. We have at least four to 5,000 people attending, 40 teams competing. And yes, I won it in 2019, and I took second place two years in a row. I’m officially retired because technically I’m the best in the world at cooking squirrels. My partner, Brad Atkinson, Jeff and I, we’ve dominated the competition, but I do some fun events down there. I do a World Championship Squirrel Skinning Competition and a World Championship Hot Squirrel Eating Competition. And it’s just a really good time, a lot of fun, really diverse crowd. We had everything from the Mongol Biker Gang who one of the Duggars, remember the Duggars that had all the children? That was the range of the participants we had attending the Squirrel Championship last year. So quite a mix of folks.
Jeff Randolph:
All of humanity on display for you right there. Humble brag for I’m the best at cooking squirrel. That is amazing. No one’s ever said that. This is perfect.
James Worley:
No, we’ve done some cool things with squirrels. We’ve stuffed squirrels and pickles. We’ve made squirrel cannoli, squirrel paella. Last year we did squirrel and waffle. Just some really creative, fun dishes that you can do with this really abundant resource we have. And you’re helping save a tomato by eating a squirrel.
Jeff Randolph:
Hey, eat a squirrel, save a tomato.
James Worley:
Absolutely a bumper sticker.
Jeff Randolph:
There’s a t-shirt, there’s a bumper sticker. There’s all kinds of things. Was there a teacher or a coach in your past that gave you some advice or gave some kind of intangible lesson that you keep with you to this day?
James Worley:
My grandfather probably was my best teacher. He’s passed several years ago. Didn’t get to see all the things that I’ve done in the last decade or so. But my grandfather was old school and he taught me how to hunt, how to fish, how to garden, how to change a carburetor on a car and fix small engines and plumbing. He really taught me how to be self-sufficient and work on my own. And his teachings have let me teach so many other people so many different things that have improved their lives.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, amazing. Good. That’s that’s a great one. What part of the business do you wish you knew more about? Because oftentimes I think we start our entrepreneur journey as I know this or I do this very well. What do you wish you knew more about in the business?
James Worley:
I know very little about business, actually.
Jeff Randolph:
Business itself.
James Worley:
And the paperwork is the hard part. Fortunate, I have a really good bookkeeper and tax preparer that take care of all that for me. And I’ve got, one of my Yardeners is adept at doing spreadsheets and things like that, so she’s helped me with that. So relying on other people that have the skills that you don’t have is hire good folks to help you out, to keep you from making mistakes and make your business run smoothly is essential. So find good people to support you. Find good people, and that’s hard. That’s the hardest part of business is finding those good people that have your business in mind and success in mind as well is the toughest part.
Jeff Randolph:
And let’s imagine you’ve got a big win and whatever a win looks like in your world, if it’s a personal achievement or if it’s a business achievement, how do you celebrate that big win? What is it that you do to celebrate the highlights?
James Worley:
So my biggest win would be maybe building a garden for our esteemed quarterback, Patrick Mahomes at his new home. That’s what I’d like to do one of these days. So Pat, if you’re listening and you got a couple of kids need a garden, let me know. I’ll hook you up. I
Jeff Randolph:
I think that would be a giant win. How do you celebrate that win? What would you do to celebrate that?
James Worley:
I would celebrate it by building more gardens. I mean, to me, the reward is getting to continue to do what I love to do every day. And if you do something really well and you’re successful, then you get to do it again.
Jeff Randolph:
Excellent stuff. What’s next for Yum Yards? What’s coming up? Where do you go from here? More gardens for sure.
James Worley:
Right now, just more gardens. We’re just looking for more folks that want to learn and then looking for people that want to work for us. People that have a knack for communicating and teaching. They don’t necessarily have to have a knack for growing. They don’t have to know anything about growing. I’ll teach them how to do that. Looking for people that want to do a good job and want to teach people things and want to learn themselves. And that’s what I’m looking for, is finding those folks that can help my business. That’s a daily thing. I’m always on the lookout for somebody that wants to help us become bigger and better.
Jeff Randolph:
Outstanding. James, you survived the lightning round. Nothing to it. We got through all the, we did everything in that lightning round. We got to squirrel cannoli in that lightning round.
James Worley:
Exactly.
Jeff Randolph:
I don’t know if you could ask for anything else. That’s outstanding. Hey, tell people where they can find you if they want more information, if they want to start that amazing garden project, where do they …?
James Worley:
So we’re all over the internet. We have a great website, yumyards.com, and then we have a amazing Facebook and Instagram pages that are actually run by one of my clients that’s now my media queen. We just do her garden for free and she does all our media. Videos on Facebook and Instagram and lots of things on there for you to learn about how to deal with unique vegetables and what’s growing in the garden.
Jeff Randolph:
I follow you on Instagram now. That’s a nice account. I’ve gotten some good recipe tips on that.
James Worley:
She does great photography and great work.
Jeff Randolph:
All right, well James Worley from Yum Yards, thanks for being with us today. We’ve learned everything I could ever hope for. Thanks so much for being with us.
James Worley:
Thank you. I appreciate your time.
Jeff Randolph:
And that is our show. Thanks to our guest, James Worley from Yum Yards. And thank you for listening to the Small Business Miracles podcast. Remember to subscribe. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Drop us a line on the website at eagadv.com if you have any thoughts. Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another Small Business Miracle.