This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

It's Your Business with Michael Aikens is brought to you by WCTE, PBS, and the Tennessee Tech Center for Rural Innovation, with funding provided by the Rural Reimagine Grand Challenge and the Tennessee Rural Development Fund.

For many of you, watching your dream may be to own your own business.

Be your own boss, but you may also feel unable or unsure of how to make that dream come true.

Well, you've come to the right place.

We love to bring our viewers advice and resources from skilled professionals, as well as everyday people who have made their dream of owning a business come to life.

Join me as we meet successful business owners right here in the Upper Cumberland.

Hear their stories and learn from their successes and shortcomings in starting their business.

♪♪ There are many options when it comes to starting a business, but one option that is sometimes overlooked is to join forces with another business to make a one stop location for both.

And that is how the Silver Fern in Cookeville, Tennessee began.

Brandy Lynn and Brie Flora had the idea of combining their two vocations of health and wellness and beautiful art into a single business to serve the Upper Cumberland in one location.

And in doing so, they flourished and are now even looking to expand.

♪♪ We're here in Cookeville, Tennessee, talking with Brandy Lynn and Brie Flora, owners of the Silver Fern.

Brandy, Brie, welcome to the show.

Thank you guys for having us.

Very glad to have you on the show.

Let's start out with the basics.

The Silver Fern.

Tell us about it.

What do you do?

So the Silver Fern kind of.

Our tagline is we're a gallery in handcrafted wellness.

So it's a little mix.

I am an acupuncturist.

That's where my education and everything comes from.

I do see clients, but the wellness area is kind of my expertise.

And then Brie, the art, the art, the artist side of things.

So we have over 60% local artist in the shop.

Everyone else if they're not local, I either knew them from undergrad so going to college or I used to do a lot more craft shows.

So I met a lot of the artists that are in here, either doing craft shows I teach around the country, so I've met some of them, even teaching there, teaching other workshops.

So I'll contact them and be like, do you want to be in an art gallery?

So yeah.

And then we have a large collection and over think like 60 loose leaf teas, single herbs, things like that.

Yeah, I think it's more like it's more now.

Yeah.

We're running out of room.

That's a good problem to have.

And so let's unpack all of this.

So acupuncture art.

And now you've got a retail shop.

How did you come to that decision.

And when did you open.

So 2020 was hitting all of us.

And I was talking to you virtually.

I just lost all my work.

I was doing craft shows at the time.

I was supposed to be doing about like 20.

And they all got canceled.

So I was getting acupuncture from Brandy, and I had been thinking, you know, I knew that she had talked about wanting to expand on her herbs and some of the other things that she can offer her clients, but didn't really have a space to do it yet.

And I was just kind of like, would you ever want to, like, have your rooms out the back of some sort of like, gallery thing that we could like?

And she just said yes.

And so then we started meeting a lot.

Yeah.

So we met once a week for about a year, and we worked on a business plan.

We kind of thought through, you know, like what we would do.

And to be honest, originally we didn't have a gallery per se in mind in the shop.

That was a happy mistake.

Thanks to our Landlord.

It was supposed to be a storage room, And then our landlord came because we built out the rooms back here this was just an open space.

And he looked at the plan.

He goes too small.

What would I do with that space?

You know, after you left?

Which totally makes sense.

So it had to be a certain size.

And I remember we were both just standing in it and I think we thought of it at the same time I was like ..Gallery.

Gallery, gallery.

So yeah this year it's a lot of, local artists.

So I kind of like to bounce that back and forth to bring things here that we don't see, and then also to uplift the artists that we do have here.

So it's a little balance that I try and do.

Yeah.

Right now we have handmade puppets, Holly Arms.

She's local.

And then next month will be Tony.

So they'll be paintings and, you know, pastel work and things like that.

So another question for you.

You talked about the acupuncture.

You also mentioned herbalism and teas.

Walk us through that.

Yeah.

So you know, in the shop we have a variety.

So we do have just loose leaf tea that is just for taste.

We also have quite a few blends that have medicinal value to them.

And then we have a lot of single herbs.

So I do have people who come in and say, hey, I have this thing going on, and if I don't have a pre-made tea for that, I can be like, all right, let's make you something Latino.

You know, whatever is within my kind of reach, you know, I will try and do that.

So let's dive into the art.

You're the artist.

Although I would say you're the artist who has maybe a traditional perspective of art.

Yes, I'm a jeweler.

Metal smith.

I've also started getting back into drawing and painting, which has felt very good.

But I went to Massachusetts College of Art and design up in Boston, and I was there for six years.

So originally I was on track to do four and a half.

I was just doing art education, but then I took a jewelry class and was like, oh, this is really fun.

I feel like I'm finally like learning some like a new thing.

You know, I've always known I like to draw and paint, but that felt so like, oh, I can it's like an being an alchemist or like changing something hard, right?

Taking metal and moving it around and and making cool stuff out of it.

So that was my third year.

And so I did a lot of thinking and talking and basically added that on as a full second major, which made me go to school for a total of six years.

So it sounds like first of all, you'll have a lot of fun.

There's so much creativity and freedom of expression.

Let's take a little bit of a turn, though.

You're running a business sometimes those things, or at least you might not think they really mesh.

How are you making that balance between artists creativity and running the business?

We're still trying to find that piece of patience for for me at least.

You know, I, I definitely always have struggled with it.

I think I'm better at it than I think I am.

And Brandy is good to like, ground me and remind me of that.

But it is a lot like right now.

This year especially, I've been kind of thrown into we're switching gears, we're switching our point of sale system because we want to hopefully, maybe by the time this airs.

But, if not sometime this summer, we want to have, tea available to order online.

So, you know, figuring those types of things out, like inventory and switching gears and getting an online store working.

And it's it's good thing it's good growing pains, but it is this work.

We don't have employees.

So it is just me and Brie.

And you know, we kind of s a slow growth node debt situation with our business, which I think is good, but it does put a lot of strain on us.

So, you know, we don't make money from the business yet.

We have to do our other jobs to keep that going.

So you know, our hours are a little stranger than some.

We're not.

You know, we're only open Wednesday through Saturday.

But that's because, you know, Brie needs time in the studio or needs to go teach or, you know, like, whatever that is.

And so we've learned to balance it.

I actually did a solo show in our gallery last year, and it was all about, like, grief and and emotion and feeling things.

And, you know, that's something I've been trying to figure out and channel through my everyday life, right?

Like we can feel joy, but also feel stress at the same time.

And I think that is honestly what a small business owner is constantly.

I mean, you can talk to any small business owner, and if they don't tell you that, they're definitely thinking it because it's true.

And and then it's like you work with communities like Cookeville.

We love being here.

So that's also another push.

Like we were feeling a little stress the end of last year as everyone was, you know, the market was weird for retailers.

And then we just kept having people from the community come in and say, man, I just love your space.

It makes me feel so calm.

I'm so happy you guys are here.

Thank you for being here.

And then we just kept looking at ourselves, being like, okay, you like going, we gotta keep going.

So yeah, there's that and we.

And then that's why you keep going.

Tell me a little bit about how you prepared.

You know, when you were starting this, did you have business education.

Is this trial and error.

How are you doing this?

Well, I mean, technically we both ran our own individual businesses, right?

Like she ran her jewelry business.

I ran my acupuncture business separately.

Retail is different for sure.

But for I think one reason we were successful is we literally took a year of planning.

We wrote, we built a physical business plan.

The best money we ever spent was getting a good CPA to make sure everything was lined up.

Yeah.

And then honestly, a lot of other specifically women business owners and the community helped us a ton.

There were some people that did not believe in the mesh of the concept of tea,wellness and art.

They were like, And we were like, it's going to work.

You know?

It's that same.

It's the same crowd.

And even if, like the art person comes in not knowing, you know, the other side, they're going to be like oooh tea and then vice versa.

Yeah, we're going to catch them.

So.

Well, you know, my work at Tennessee Tech, luckily I get to interact with a lot of art students.

I get to interact with a lot of artists in the community.

One thing that I see, I don't want to paint broad brush, right?

But one thing that I do see is a lot of times artists won't necessarily see themselves as entrepreneurs.

Why don't you talk to the artists that are out there about that balance and that importance?

Yeah.

It's hard.

I think a lot of times, at least for me, and you go to art school and you learn how to do your craft, and then you get sent out and you're like, what do I do now?

Luckily, there is a great class and we've worked with that class.

It's called, Professional practices, Professional Practice.

And Kim Winkle started it.

The Director.

And that class is great.

We've had them do a little mini pop up exhibitions, which has been a great collaboration, but that class is so important and I'm glad it started.

And it's still just like the tip of the iceberg right?

Until you actually get into it.

But that teaches them a little bit more of the business side.

Now, for those artists in town that are not getting the traditional education, I'm also on the board.

I'm now the president this year, new.

I've been vice president of art around Tennessee.

And, our director started, I think this is the third year that we're doing this symposium.

So we now have a symposium that happens in March, and it's open to our members, also, nonmembers.

And I would recommend keeping an eye out for that.

And it's I think we have four speakers this year, and they all speak to something that's more on the business side of things.

Well, last question for you.

Look into the future.

What does that hold for Silver Fern.

Bigger building.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we would love to have a bigger space so we can do even more, you know, expand on the things we already offer.

You know, like we said, we've had to say no to a lot of artists because we are we don't have space.

We have no more wall space.

Short term, we are going to sort of we're going to do a big rethink of this initial space.

So probably our four year anniversary, we're going to move things around.

We have some new colors that we might want to do.

We might just jump the space a little bit.

So that's that's the immediate new.

And then getting our tea online to order.

Well, I got to say the future certainly sounds bright.

Brandy, Brie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

♪ If you're a meat eater and I know that I am, then you know it's hard to beat the taste of a high quality marbled ribeye fresh off the grill.

And that is exactly why the Beason family decided to start their own business, providing locally produced, high quality meats to the communities of Upper Campbell.

Although their product has the potential to help them become a mass produced beef operation.

Right now, the Beason family is more interested in keeping their operation a local business for the people right here in the Upper Cumberland.

♪♪ We're here at the Biz Foundry in Cookeville, Tennessee, talking with Ed Beason of Beason Family Meats.

Ed, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Michael.

I'm glad to be here.

So bass and Family Meats, tell us about your business.

What do you all do?

Well, we provide for the community.

Local produced beef comes straight off of our farm, and we like for it to be the highest quality that we can produce.

So we talk about high quality beef.

Obviously that's very important.

That's an important part of your brand.

What does high quality beef actually mean?

High quality beef to me means it's got to be high marbled.

What we like to say is our beef is higher choice to prime.

So the way you get that, there's no shortcut.

You have to feed.

You have to put a lot of time, a lot of effort.

So how did you get the idea to start a meat business?

My uncle and I are the ones doing this.

You know, we were just in the farming business.

We were just doing, you know, straight cattle.

I took mine to the sale.

You know, he's in a he's in the registered business.

He raises registered Gailey, animals.

So we kind of ventured over into the freezer beef market, which is more custom, difference in, you know, the custom business versus what we're doing now is we're selling USDA.

If you're doing custom beef, you have to sell an entire animal, doing USDA, you have to be USDA to sell to a restaurant.

You also have to be USDA if you're going to sell individual cuts.

So we just decided to kind of go that route, and see if there was a market for it.

And what we found is, you know, there's lots of folks that can't handle an entire beef or half a beef.

They're more interested in buying a package.

So it's worked out, you know, pretty well.

So I was looking at your website.

I got to say, it looks really good.

And you told me before the interview you made this website yourself?

I did.

During my college days, I had to build a website for my, portfolio.

And so I had a little bit of experience doing that.

And I thought, you know, if we're going to do this, you know, this is going to be probably the first place, you know, that at least a lot of people are going to come in contact with our business.

And I think it needs to look, you know, like somebody put some design and intention behind it.

So we've tweaked that along the way because we don't get a lot of requests, you know, for some of those off cuts.

So we'll kind of gear try to gear it toward, you know, what most people are actually ordering.

So let's focus a little bit more on the pricing and actually the processes involved in the business.

So you got the website.

People can order things, but there's so much more that goes on behind the scenes, from raising the cattle to getting it to the person, can you just walk me through what that looks like?

And also how do you decide how much all this costs?

When I say that prime meat, we're looking for that nice marbling we want, the animal just has to be mature.

And, you know, in order to produce that.

And that comes with feed, but it also comes with age.

You know, you have to have kind of a combination of the two.

So, you know, we have to make appointments.

We have to coordinate with the processors.

We don't actually have our own processing building or anything like that.

But we work with local processors and we work with some great folks to determine how we price things.

Obviously you have to figure up How much do you have in that animal and how much do you have in that processing?

And then, you know, we want to be as competitive as we can with like the local grocery store prices.

And so what we have tried to do is, you know, kind of mirror that, you know, and, you know, how we can actually kind of pay our cost because it costs a lot of money, you know, to produce one from birth up to that end product.

So you've got him processed, you got the website.

How do you actually get customers kind of metaphorically speaking, door knocking, door knocking and social media.

You know, we had some customers that were already, you know, that had bought custom, but, you know, we basically said, okay, now you don't have to buy an entire, you know, animal if you don't want it, you can buy a small package.

And so that was kind of like a built in, you know, to start with base of customers.

But then, you know, from there it, it spreads word of mouth.

You know, we've used some Google Ads, we've used, you know, social media to get our word out.

And honestly, the, the social media, Facebook post, that kind of thing has been as effective as, as anything.

And I think word of mouth too, as people eat higher quality beef, no preservatives, no.

You know, we don't do hormones, won't do additives of any kinds.

It's just when you eat our meat it's just beef.

Well, you know, and there's such a push these days for people to know where their food is coming from.

It's right here in the upper Cumberland.

I think you said that you had two locations, two farms.

We do.

We work off my farm, and then my uncle has a farm, up toward Monterey, and that's exactly right.

You know, you can know that when you purchase our animals.

They're coming from the upper Cumberland.

We produce, I'm going to say 90% of the animals, you know, on our farms, if we take any other animals there from trusted local producers that we know who are doing the same thing that we're doing, that you know, maybe don't have the USDA license or they don't, you know, they're not interested in, like, actually marketing it door to door.

So you're raising the cattle, you're working the farm, you're building websites, you're taking orders, you're fulfilling things, you're delivering.

You also have a day job.

How are you balancing all this?

Well, it's just a good thing that, you know, my uncle works with me and he's retired, so he does a lot of the running during the day.

Although, you know, there is some coordination that we have to do, you know, in the evenings, on weekends, typically we, we try to schedule the pickups, you know, if we have, you know, a couple or three animals to pick up, we try to do that on Saturdays.

So that's, you know, takes up some weekends, takes up some nights.

You know, it's, you know, you just have to do that.

But it's worth it.

It's worth it.

Yeah.

So let me ask you this.

What is your favorite part about the business?

Well, I just I really like the idea of producing local meats.

And, you know, we have always, I'll say always, you know, for the last, I'm going to say 20 years, we have produced our own for beef on our own farm, just, you know, doing it for ourselves.

And there's just something about having your own animal and you knowing where that meat comes from, and then just being able to offer that to other people, you know, they they can be assured that they know where their food is coming from.

What would you tell another aspiring entrepreneur, whether they're getting into the beef business or maybe something completely different to just in general their thinking about starting a business, what would you provide to them?

I would just say, you got to be patient.

You know nothing happens overnight.

You're not going to build, you know, a super huge profitable business in two weeks or two months or maybe even six months.

You know, it just takes time, you know, and that can be, you know, a three year period.

You know, you've got to kind of take the long game you truly do and just be patient and work at it, you know.

And during that time, you know, you're investing your time, your resources, your money and, and that.

And it can be a long game.

Yeah.

I'm imagining there's probably a little bit of stress that's involved with that.

How do you deal with that?

Oh yeah.

Well, you know, you just kind of have to take it as it comes.

And you're exactly right.

You know, you are investing your resources and you don't always know that that's going to pay off.

You trust in it will, you know.

And I think the biggest way I deal with it is, you know, you just kind of have to have faith that you can work at it.

You can, you know, promote your product and that you have a good product.

If you've got a product you believe in, you know, I think that's the biggest part of it.

You know, if you believe in what you're doing, I think, you know, the stress is worth it.

So one of my favorite questions to ask, I'm thinking back to when it all started.

You decided, you know what?

We're going to make this a business.

I'm sitting here right now.

What do you know that you wish you knew then?

Oh, there's a lot.

There's just there's a lot about the specifics, the mechanics of the business that you just can't learn.

You just can't know until you actually get in, you know, and and work on whatever it is you're working on.

There's a lot of those little details like that that you do is it's trial and error and you just have to figure that out along the way.

You're just continually learning, continually improving and using the data as your guide.

Yeah.

That's right.

So last question for you.

Yeah, obviously you've got a well-oiled machine.

You're doing great.

What's the future hold?

Well we don't know just yet.

You know hopefully you know everything continues to move along like it is.

You know we have kind of toyed with the notion of like, selling to, more restaurants, but we're just not.

We're just not sure just yet, you know, because we do want to keep this a local business, not be a mass produced, you know, top, beef operation.

So we're pretty satisfied right now doing individual sales, you know, and we do, like a local restaurant.

And so, you know, we're kind of satisfied with that right now.

Well that's great, Ed, thank you so much for being on the show today okay.

Thank you for having me.

Appreciate it.

♪♪ Hi, I'm Andrea Kruszka I'm the assistant director for the center for Rural Innovation at Tennessee Tech University.

Our big mission is to help rural communities improve their quality of life using things like economic development, tourism, community branding, and any kind of resources we can provide through Tennessee Tech to help the services we provide at the center for Rural Innovation are no cost, and we help everyone from small businesses, chambers of commerce and even county governments.

One of the main ways we help small businesses is through technical assistance.

This comes through us a lot of different creative ways we do photography, whether that's product, event, headshots, anything you could need.

We do content creation.

We do a lot of graphic design, and if you need a brand, we're the ones to call.

One of our biggest initiatives is branding, because when you're getting started as a small business, you need to build your own identity, and your customers need to be able to figure out who you are, what you do, and how you can help them.

That's something we're great at helping with.

We've got a huge range of graphic design students just waiting to help you pick out a color palette, figure out your target customer, and then create a logo and anything else you need to go with it.

In addition to small businesses, we do a lot of work with communities, including tourism branding because being able to tell your story is how you get visitors in and how you get those tax dollars.

We all desperately need.

We'll come to your community, do workshops, work directly with your residents to figure out who you are and how to tell that story.

In addition, for small businesses and communities, we can do economic impact studies.

If you're not familiar with what that is, we can help a business or community figure out the rippling economic effects of things like events, tourism assets, and small businesses.

Just like everything else, the impact analysis are free, and that's something that could cost you up to $150,000 or more.

To get started with this and much more, visit the Business Resource Collective website.

Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope that you've learned that entrepreneurship doesn't have to be a scary venture.

When you have the necessary resources for success at your fingertips.

If you'd like more information on today's topics, please visit the WCTE website and to learn more about free small business resources and expert assistance, visit the Business Resource Collective website.

Until next time, I'm Michael Aikens.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It's Your Business with Michael Aikens is brought to you by WCTE, PBS, and the Tennessee Tech Center for Rural Innovation, with funding provided by the Rural Reimagine Grand Challenge and the Tennessee Rural Development Fund.

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.