Reflection & Gratitude

The thing I’ve realized since owning my own business is just how important customers are to a small business owner… I know someone is rolling their eyes and thinking to themselves, ‘duh Kendall’ but hear me out.

I’ve learned that when you’re supporting a small business you’re actually important as a person, not just for the sale.

It’s like when Adam went for an extended visit with his family, and Jay asked if we’d seen an order from him lately. Not out of worry of lost revenue but because he’s an important part of our community and Jay was worried that something might have happened.

That prompted a call to mom who also noticed. She let me know that she would check in on him next week if we hadn’t heard from him and sure enough later that week his name popped up on an order and mom called me on her day off to let me know…. (don’t worry Adam you can take a vacation without checking in lol)

Or the way we know Lori always likes the small tenderloin steaks or that Kate’s young daughters don’t like bacon.

When I see Terri-Lynne’s name on an order I can’t help but smile because she was my very first non-friend or relative customer. You guys, she was with me when I was just a chest freezer in the back of a dirty old barn with no lights. She used to hold my cell phone flashlight so I could dive down into the bottom of that freezer to fish out a chicken for her.

Gosh, I can’t even believe how far I’ve come from that 27-year-old farmer… I used to price everything with a kitchen scale, my cell phone calculator, and one of those old school pricing guns with the dial that you twist to change the numbers and it stamps the price when you pull the trigger.

But that’s a post for a different day.

There are dozens and dozens of other stories just like that. It’s the small moments that you chat with mom when picking up your order. Or the conversations with Jay at delivery. Or the messages that pop into my email or sent through social media.

And we aren’t special when it comes to being a small business, I hear these same stories from all my small-business owning friends. You matter to the local boutique, the farmers market vendor, or the local shop you choose to frequent.

Don’t get me wrong, we obviously can’t do this without selling our products, but we wouldn’t want to work this hard if it wasn’t for the people we have in this community rooting us on, sharing about our farm, and in our case, choosing our family to help feed theirs.