Niche Markets and Small Businesses with Rockbridge Farmstead

Kody: Hi Everybody. I am so excited to have you back here this week. We have a great guest coming on, but first I just want to give you a little bit with what’s been going on here at the Homestead Education. Last week we released all of your favorite Homestead education stories in book form or as a boxed set.

Kody: The boxed sets make really great stocking stuffers or just gifts under the tree. They’re beautiful, wholesome, traditional homestead stories that teach character for young children. Speaking of gift-giving, I don’t know if you guys caught my podcast two weeks ago about Homestead Gift Giving and the Homestead 12 Days of Gift Giving. Have I said gift-giving enough? So go ahead and the link is in the show notes to that.

Today we are going to have Greg and Marrianne Russell from Rockbridge Farmstead on our podcast and they couldn’t have picked a better time to come on because we’re going to be talking about niche marketing and supporting small businesses when gift giving this holiday season and beyond. All right guys, I have Greg and Marrianne Russell from Rockbridge Farmstead here today. They are homesteaders on just under three acres in Kentucky. They have a farm business where they make the most amazing real beeswax products and they do everything with their kids right there on the farm and have a podcast where they talk to other homesteaders about how they run their farm. So, hi guys.

Greg: Hi. How are you?

Kody: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on this evening.

Greg: Oh, thanks for having us. We’re really excited.

Kody: So I actually got to meet Greg and Marrianne at the Homesteaders of America. We’d been following each other on social media for a while and we get to the conference and turns out we’re right next to each other.

Greg: We were, we were neighbors.

Kody: We got to be buddies really fast because, you know, our typical Terrorist Branch ate everybody’s snacks.

Marrianne: We were happy to share. It was fun.

Kody: So go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourselves or tell my listeners, because I know a little bit about you guys.

Marrianne: Like you said, we live in Kentucky and we have about three acres which we kind of have a little bit of everything. We’ve had a variety of different things that we’ve figured out weren’t for us. 

Greg: Animals.

Kody: The kids took it really hard when you decided parenting wasn’t for you.

Marrianne: We decided they could stay. As you mentioned, bees are our main focus and then all of the other things are sort of as far as business goes. And then all the other animals are mostly just for our own consumption or sustainability for our own family. The bees are really the passion behind what we do.

Greg: And they’re relatively, we’ve had bees for this summer will be our fourth year I believe. And so we’ve had them for a while. We moved to this property in 2014, with no expectations to do what we’re doing now. So we wanted out of the city, but we didn’t really plan on jumping into animals and self-sufficiency.

Marrianne: Sort of rolled into that slowly as we decided we really liked this lifestyle. And we’ve always been health conscious or aware of what we’re eating.

Greg: She can say health conscious. We actually started this because I was just being really lazy because we have three acres and I was mowing all of it. I was mowing for four hours a week and I was like, this is ridiculous. And everyone’s like, “Get goats.” So we did. So that’s what I did is I got goats to let them help, so I didn’t have to mow as much and it kind of took off from there. So we’ve had goat, chickens, we have meat rabbits, meat birds, laying hens, ducks, geese, pigs. We have sheep, goats.

Marrianne: And thousands and thousands of bees.

Greg: Yeah. We run about 30 colonies of bees right now.

Kody: Do you tag them, so you know who’s in and who’s out? all 30,000 of them?

Marrianne: Man, that would be quite a job. And they only live for about 30 days, so you’d have to be doing it once a month.

Kody: Oh wow. I knew they had a short lifespan. I didn’t realize it was only 30 days.

Marrianne: During the summer .

Greg: Except for the queen, she can live up to about six to eight years.

Kody: Oh wow.

Marrianne: Yeah. On average it’s three or four years. But she can live for longer.

Kody: Oh, right. We all learn something. We’re good to go now.

Marrianne: Yeah.

Kody: I love how you know everybody. I was talking to someone the other day about how everybody has this catalyst that takes them to that self-sufficiency and I love yours. Like, oh, we’ve just decided we need someone else to mow for us. Yeah. Mine was actually, my original website was homemade revelation because I realized I wasn’t cooking homemade even though I thought I was. We were big hunters. We always grew our own meat and had really nice fried venison steak with macaroni and cheese with it. And I was like, “Wow, this isn’t what I thought it was.” I’m so happy for this homestead movement that everybody’s on right now.

Marrianne: Yeah, absolutely.

Kody: I really hope it sticks because we need to go back a generation, or three

Marrianne: I totally agree. And I was thinking about that the other day. If everybody, all these people who are interested stick with it, because I know that that’s really hard. You get into it a few years and then you’re like, ugh, I don’t know if this is for me or not. Or you go through enough difficulties at that point that you may not end up sticking with it. But, you know, our grandparents or our great-grandparents things were just so much better as far as the world and the way things were and the environment and all of those different aspects, that if we could get back to that, that would be really great.

Kody: With all the convenience foods, people have too much time on their hands to come up with really dumb stuff.

Marrianne: Yeah.

Greg: Yeah.

Kody: So tell me a little bit about how, because they’re homeschoolers and homesteaders a lot of us, and so tell me a little bit about how you integrate the homeschool into your homestead.

Marrianne: Yeah, we do, I guess formal lessons. It’s very informal. I think we fall into the unschooling/Charlotte Mason category of homeschooling a lot of the time.

Kody: I haven’t really covered Charlotte Mason here yet. Do you have a quick overview of it?

Marrianne: Sure. So Charlotte Mason was in England and, I believe in the 1800’s, mid-late 1800’s. She was a huge advocate of both literacy, classical literacy and then also huge into nature study. So learning about nature and the more that you can get your children immersed in nature, the better. And including all of the different types of, not curriculums, but all the different sections of learning, math, science, all of it with nature. And so I feel it naturally lends itself into our lifestyle. It just lends itself to being a simple way to incorporate education into everything.

Kody: Very much so. We definitely follow some of her methods, but I haven’t really gone over the different styles of homeschooling yet. So that’s a perfect opportunity to catch that one because I’m not very versed on her. But no, the whole natural spending time in nature concept that she taught.

Marrianne: Yeah. it’s really kind of revolutionary. And I don’t know if you follow 1000 Hours Outside. She, I think, is very inspired by a lot of Charlotte Mason’s writing and stuff too. And it’s just such a great way to encourage your children to engage on their own and learn on their own and be curious and just all of those different things that I absolutely love, and wanting to make sure that our kids are learning about how to grow their own food and how to start a fire and how to safely use a knife and all of those kinds of things.

Kody: Yeah. So, sorry, I did cut you off a little bit earlier. You were talking a little bit about how you include the kids just working outside and stuff.

Greg: Yeah our kids, that’s one thing. Our kids do everything with us. And that’s not always by choice. We live, we don’t have any family close to us. So my family’s about three and a half hours and Marriane’s family’s about five and a half hours. So we can’t be like, “Oh, hey grandma, can you watch the kids while we extract all this honey?” Or “We’ve got to spend a whole day moving these, can you come over?” They’re just with us all the time and it slows things down quite a bit, but it’s so worth it. Just life skills that we get to teach them that I just feel they’re not going to pick up at school, you know? Our six-year-old son, we let him go outside and shoot his BB gun by himself because we’ve taught him, we trust him. He has his own pocket knife. He carries around a pocket knife, not very many six-year-olds. Maybe they do, but I don’t feel like,

Kody: When I was a kid I’d just see my dad for the weekend and he was always working on the ranch and so he would just set me up a box with a target on it and be like, ‘Sit here and shoot while I do what I need to do.”

Greg: Exactly. He has a BB gun, he has a bow, he has a slingshot. He knows how to use it, how to be responsible with it, and we haven’t hit any windows yet.

Kody: Absolutely.

Marrianne: Or people, thankfully.

Greg: Yeah. So just having them around and getting to show them different things. I have an old Jeep that breaks down constantly, it’s just part of owning a Jeep.

Kody: Uh, yeah.

Greg: So he is under the Jeep with me working all the time, learning how things work. And it’s just skills that they’re learning that I feel they’re not going to get anywhere else and that’s just because they’re around us all the time.

Marrianne: Yeah. I guess the hope is that all of these things that we’re able to instill in them, they can then carry on later in life and ultimately being a student of life, being a lifelong learner, that’s something that I always try to have in the back of my mind. And I feel personally I’m always learning something new. And I think even as adults we can continue learning and then teaching things to our children. I love that concept.

Kody: Right. So I was on a podcast last week. I’m not sure when it’s going to air, but they had me on to talk about raising the self-sufficient teenager.

Marrianne: Oh.

Kody: It was a concept that I hadn’t really thought, about. Obviously, so many of the people in our homestead business influencer bubble have younger children. Not a lot of them have gone to that teenager market. Right. (And sorry for my listeners, I have a cold.) I was laughing to myself when we were talking about your six-year-old going out with his gun. For me that was normal life. So many of us were proud to say that we can trust our young child with a gun. And then I think about where I’m at with my teenagers who now, at that point, this is just normal life for them. I’m not bragging that my 17 year old can go out and shoot by himself.

Marrianne: Right. Yeah.

Kody: But I was on this podcast and I was talking about how when we got home from Homesteaders of America, so actually on our way home, our son rolled his truck. Well, his buddy rolled his truck and he was in the passenger seat. Really scary. They weren’t drinking or doing anything dumb. They just came around a corner. There was a deer there. They ended up rolling into the creek. Everybody was okay. Thank goodness. It’s one of those things that just happens. I mean, I’m not brushing it off, but they had a bunch of guns in the back of the truck because it’s hunting season in North Idaho. So they came home to our house because nobody was here and laid everything out on my brand new carpets, and cleaned these guns and then made sure they worked by shooting them off the back porch.

Kody: And I had to laugh about it because the only thing they were in trouble for with me was they didn’t clean up all the shells off the back porch and I found them when I got home. So I’m being interviewed on this podcast and I’m telling them this story and she’s like, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.” Then I was like, “Well, the only issue was that they didn’t clean up after themselves.” Because those are the things that I would rather my boys be out hunting and know how to clean guns and make the smart choice with their guns afterwards. I was just mad they didn’t clean up after themselves, because I have self-sufficient teenagers. I don’t have teenagers that clean up after themselves.

Marrianne: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a real thing. Are there teenagers that clean up after themselves?

Kody: I don’t think so. No. Not unless they’re called.

Greg: I mean, I’m an adult and she says I don’t clean up after myself.

Kody: I only clean up after myself when I have to. So, you know, I thought that was an interesting piece that all of us are really working on our younger kids. And I know that I’ve been working really hard on my teenagers, but even in my writings and stuff, I’m not talking about my teenagers. I’m talking about what I’m doing with my younger kids. So you have a six year old, give it a few years. Let’s see how you like him shooting out in the yard.

Greg: Yeah.

Marrianne: Yeah.

Greg: Yeah.

Kody: So you guys with your products, tell us a little bit about your products that you sell because I love them. They actually have a special place in my kitchen, and I totally treated myself to homemade cornbread with your honey all over it the other night. I have pictures and I haven’t put them up yet. I was saving it for later. So tell us a little bit about what you guys have.

Marrianne: We have a variety of different things. We have herbal salves, which most of those all have different purposes. Some of them are multipurpose, but they all are just different. They all offer different medicinal . . . what am I trying to say here?

Kody: Different

Greg: Purpose. So the herbs, we actually grow them all here.

Marrianne: Oh, a lot of them. Not all of them.

Greg: A lot of them, yeah. We either grow them or forage most of them. Then the beeswax is from our bees because when you’re a beekeeper you have an abundance of beeswax.

Kody: Yeah.

Greg: So that’s how we started because we ended up with beeswax more before we actually made a lot of honey. We’ve just been working on growing everything, growing our apiary. So when you grow you don’t necessarily harvest a lot of honey. So we actually haven’t, this was the first year that we’ve really harvested a significant amount, more than just for us. And it still, in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t a lot. We harvested I think 180 or 190 pounds.

Marrianne: Which isn’t that much.

Kody: Well, I’m glad I got some of it then.

Marrianne: Yeah. Hopefully in the future, we can, that’s our goal for next year is to produce significantly more honey. Now that our population is up. So we sell honey, we sell salves and lip balm, we have beard bombs, we have lotion bars, and then most recently we started making candles, which that’s been a lot of fun. A little bit of everything.

Kody: Those are what have a special little spot in my kitchen. They’re behind a little glass window on a shelf.

Greg: Aw.

Kody: They’re just so cute. I’ll never actually burn them.

Marrianne: I know a lot of people say that and I’m like, “No, you should. You should, you should.” But I understand, because personally, I also am like, “Oh, but this is so cute. I don’t want to burn it.”

Kody: I need to order some of your candlesticks because I think it feels sad, burning the cute little owl or something.

Marrianne: Yeah. The candlestick definitely. We’re going to burn some of those probably for Advent and for Christmas time.

Greg: That’ll be fun. The owls are my favorit, too. They’re really cute.

Marrianne: He picked out that one, the mold.

Kody: They’re pretty adorable. And yeah, it would just feel weird lighting the little owl on fire and watching him.

Marrianne: I know. I actually thought about doing a nativity candle and then I was like, this is kind of weird, to light Baby Jesus on fire just seems sacrilegious.

Kody: Yeah. I don’t know what the rules on that are.

Marrianne: Yeah. It just seemed wrong, so I said against that one, but yeah, a little bit of everything. We’re actually trying to do more local markets and trying to make more local connections because I think that’s really where we’ll sell the most things, really and the most honey.

Greg: And that’s been harder for us because, I work on the weekends typically, so we can’t do a lot of farmer’s markets. Marianne can do it, but she also has the kids on Saturdays, you know.

Marrianne: By myself.

Kody: That’s hard.

Greg: And we’re transplants. We’re not from here.

Marrianne: We don’t know people.

Greg: Yeah. It’s not like we know Jim Bob down the road there.

Marrianne: We’re starting to meet more people and getting, we’ve been here for eight years, which seems it’d be long enough, but it takes a while, I feel like, to get assimilated into your community and really meet people.

Kody: Especially when you’re raising younger kids.

Marrianne: Yeah.

Kody: And you’re homeschooling so you’re not part of the public school drop-off line.

Greg: We don’t really have a ton of neighbors. We know the ones that are relatively close to us, but we don’t live in a subdivision.

Marrianne: Yeah. So how do you meet your neighbor that lives four miles down the road?

Kody: Right. Well I meet my neighbors because my dogs won’t stay in their fence. Maybe you should get a dog that won’t stay in their fence.

Greg: That’s a great,

Kody: We don’t suggest that.

Greg: We had a pig story and that’s actually how we met one of our neighbors.

Marrianne: Yeah. I think we talk about that on our podcast.

Greg: Yeah. We had a pig that got loose for almost three months and was living under our neighbor’s deck.

Kody: I always worry about our pigs getting out because we’re right on the Canadian border. It’s dogs, you could call them back, but pigs that does not work.

Greg: No. We assumed that the coyotes got it because it was young. It was the size of a football, it was a baby piglet.

Kody: Oh wow.

Greg: And it disappeared and I thought that, I figured the coyotes had gotten it and then we get a phone call three months later. “Hey, weren’t you guys missing a pig? It’s under Alan’s deck.” I was like, oh my gosh.

Kody: Oh wow.

Marrianne: And he was tearing up . . .

Greg: He was significantly bigger.

Marrianne: Yeah. Tearing up his lawn and we’re like, oh no, he has this beautiful hot tub and pool back there and it looks amazing. And I’m like, “I’m so sorry our pig is living under your porch. This is very embarrassing.” But he was a good sport about it and we got to meet him.

Kody: There you go. You know, pigs are respectful of hotwire because they touch their nose to it and they don’t like it. But once they get 800 pounds they don’t care anymore. So if my boys leave the gate open, they just walk right over the hot wire. They don’t care if they get a little zap from it. And today I looked out my window and I had a whole herd of 800 pound sows on the side of my hill and I’m like, “Boys, do you want to maybe go do something about that?

Marrianne: Yeah. Oh wow.

Greg: That’s crazy. Yeah.

Kody: Yeah. They’re like, “Well, that one mama always gets out.” I’m like, “Great. There’s seven.”

Marrianne: Yeah. Don’t blame it on just one.

Kody: Yeah. Because we do have one mom right now that’s in a separate pen that we don’t normally put moms in. We only put babies because we don’t have a way of closing it. And then there’s a concrete drop down so the babies can’t get up over that, but the moms can.

Marrianne: Yeah.

Kody: But she only had two piglets, well, she had a whole litter of piglets, but she had them out in general pop and some of them froze. It was very sad.

Marrianne: Aw, that is really hard.

Kody: It was the first litter out of our new boar, too, so we were really excited and we only got two that survived. But you know, it happens. I mean, we have nine sows and we watch them, but sometimes it happens. We aren’t doing AI either, so our boar, we only have an idea of when he breeds, not an exact day. So we have to just kind of keep an eye on them. And sometimes it’s our teenagers who don’t keep an eye on them.

Greg: You mean you don’t look down and see the candles lit in the barn and all the romantic music playing.

Kody: No, but I do have pictures. The first time we were seeing if he was tall enough, we have pictures of the whole family, peeking over the gate and the baby peeking through the peephole, all seeing if he could do his job. It was hilarious. So what does your homestead family do on a Friday night?

Marrianne: This is our entertainment stuff . . .

Greg:. . . that city folks just wouldn’t understand.

Kody: The kids get so excited over the semen catalog and we don’t even ever order semen. They just want to all look at the pictures and they don’t think that it’s weird. So then we have people come over, we have an early intervention therapist that comes and works with Branch because at almost three he is still not talking. So they come over to work with him and the other kids come in, they’re like, “Yeah, the semen catalog came in,” and this lady’s like, “Oh!”

Marrianne: That’s too good.

Kody: Yeah. Just homestead life. Gotta love it.

Marrianne: Yeah. You never know, especially with kids what they’re going to say. Or do.

Kody: So you guys, I mean you were telling us about your products and that you’re going to work with trying to sell more locally, but I feel you’ve really built a brand on, I don’t know how to say this exactly. I have a lot of people come to me and they go, I want to make salves or I want to sell wool. It’s a really, flooded market. And you guys have really made a brand for yourself in that. I mean, I see you everywhere online, I see you at events and that type of thing, with something that’s a fairly flooded market. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Marrianne: Yeah. Honestly the number one thing in my opinion is being consistent and just constantly engaging, constantly trying to make connections, constantly coming up with ideas on how to share things or how to share your product or explain what your product does or is so that you can let your audience know what you’re trying to sell. Really telling your story.

Kody: You guys have done a beautiful job of that.

Marrianne: I was listening when we first started our business, I was listening to all of these different podcasts about how to get your business started. I have some marketing experience just because of my design background. Marketing and design go hand in hand, so I’ve worked with a lot of marketing people in marketing and done a lot of collaborations with people in marketing. So I have a little bit of experience there, but really the podcast I was listening to is talking about that and telling your story and what do you want people to know about you or your business? What do you want? And being authentic, too. I think people can see through if you’re not being authentic or not. So that’s really one of our main goals is to be authentic and to be consistent and to be engaging with people. I feel if you’re doing those things, you can only go up. I don’t see how you could really fail. That’s just my opinion anyway.

Greg: Yeah.

Kody: I love all your cute little bee videos when you get the real closeups of them, doing stuff. Those are my favorites.

Marrianne: Yeah. People love those. People love all the bee videos.

Greg: And I think, too, something that we’ve always been super-mindful about is we’re not in competition with anyone. We are content doing our things. If people buy stuff from us, that’s cool, but even on our Instagram, we share other small businesses’ stuff that sell the exact same thing that we do.

Marrianne: Or similar. Yeah.

Greg: We don’t care. We want people to support small, and support other homesteads. And that’s not necessarily that you have to buy anything from us. I would rather educate you on why it’s important to support a small business than buy anything from me. It’s great if you want to buy something by all means.

Marrianne: But that means you can buy more beekeeping equipment and he’s always a fan of that.

Kody: Well you guys do a great job of bringing the other small businesses on your podcast, the other homesteaders and stuff.

Marrianne: We really try to do that. I mean, that was the passion behind that was just sharing other people’s stories and giving people a platform to kind of explain how they got started and why they do what they do. And yeah, just connecting people. I’ve always liked communicating and connecting people and making, helping build relationships and helping people to understand one another. And so that has really been a passion of both of ours. I think we both really enjoyed doing that and engaging people.

Greg: Yeah. And the whole podcast and everything that came out of our first year at Homesteaders of America. So we had had the farm or the homestead farm, whatever you want to call it, we were doing animals, we were doing all this stuff here doing, you know, gardening and livestock. So we’d been doing that for a while. But then we had heard of some of the bigger names, Justin Rhodes and things that. And we’re like, “Huh, you know, people are recording themselves doing that. So let’s do that.” So that’s how the Instagram started. So fast forward five months, we had heard about Homesteaders of America and we really wanted to go. And it was one of the first times that we had been somewhere without our kids for probably a year or two. We got the whole weekend to ourselves. It was awesome.

Kody: Oh, nice. That’s what we did last year at Homesteaders. We left all the kids.

Greg: Yeah. So we were driving home and usually our best conversations happen in the car on trips for some reason.

Marrianne: We’ve always had good road trips. Road trips are our thing, I guess.

Greg: Yeah. So we were having this conversation, we were like, “You know, we see all these people, all these “famous” homestead people”. And not that there’s anything wrong with this, but not a lot of them started from scratch. Not a lot of them didn’t have any experience whatsoever. So we were like, “We want to hear about other homesteaders that are in that situation. You know, not someone, people who has inherited 200 acres and is making it work. We can’t afford a tractor, so we use a lawnmower to pull everything around the farm. Those are the kind of people we want to talk to because we feel that’s the kind of people that a lot of people can relate to. Yeah. So that was where the podcast and the whole Instagram thing started. And, you know, none of our pictures on our Instagram, I don’t think you use any kind of filters or anything crazy. They’re not doctored. They’re not photoshopped. It’s just our farm. Sometimes you see junk in the background and sometimes you see a dirty floor or something that. But it is what it is.

Kody: I just had a photographer come up to the farm to take pictures of the family and stuff for the website and for a few things and yeah, we didn’t even, I thought, “Well I won’t even clean the trash yet because she’s going to be doing head shots and that type of stuff.” Then she took all these pictures that have our trash in the background and they looked amazing. I’m like, “You’re an artist. How did you make it look like we should have that trash?”

Marrianne: Everyone has their junk piles,

Kody: Right? I mean, it’s stuff on our chicken coop. There used to be a tarp up and the tarp is all shredded now and it was in the background of the picture and it doesn’t even look it wasn’t supposed to be there.

Marrianne: Yeah. We have a pile of ladders on the side of our building. I mean, you just have.

Greg: You never know when you’re going to need that junk. It comes in handy.

Kody: I’m big on the organized junk. Sometimes my family likes to leave all the junk just out.

Greg: Yeah.

Marrianne: We like organized junk.

Greg: Yeah. We’re in the process of organizing it a little bit better because eventually we want to have a commercial kitchen on our property,

Kody: Ooh. Nice.

Greg: As much as I don’t want any government involvement in my life, they have to come out and do septic inspections and all that kind of stuff. So we’re trying to make it a little bit more, looking a little better, I suppose.

Marrianne: It doesn’t look bad, it’s never looked bad. I think we’re just trying to minimize our mess. I guess you could say that.

Greg: Yeah. But make those junk piles straight.

Kody: So yeah. I love what you’re saying about your podcast, because it’s this realm. It’s turning into such a commercialized industry, good and bad and whatever. We’re making some of our income off of it so we can’t hate it too much.

Marrianne: There’s a place for it and informing people who would never otherwise find out about homesteading. I think that those people reach out to the masses.

Kody: Yeah. I just love what you guys are doing, bringing people together a little bit more where somebody else has a place to be able to be like, “Oh, me, me.” I think a lot of these places you’re like, “Man, they’re a really big name. I wish they would notice some of the rest of us,” you know?

Marrianne: Yeah.

Kody: And so I really like that you guys are doing that, bringing people on as they’re getting going and being scrappy.

Greg: We had, I don’t know if I should share this, you can do with it what you will, but we had shared someone’s products on our Instagram and this was a while ago and it was a product that we had bought. We had enjoyed it. We shared it and we got a private message from this person and they were like, “Thank you.” I was talking to another person on Instagram who was

Marrianne: Another homesteader person.

Greg: Yeah. Instagram-famous, whatever you want to call it. But I had asked her if she would maybe, because I was starting out, would you be willing to talk about this? And she was like, “Oh yeah. For a thousand dollars.” And that just burnt me to my core. I’m like, really?

Marrianne: I mean, you could just say, “Oh, that doesn’t really fit what I want to share with my people,” or something nice. I don’t know. Not that that’s mean, but it is.

Greg: But we should be lifting each other up. We should be trying to help each other out.

Kody: I get so crazy, you know, there’s that little bit of a marketing window, but that’s why, for example, I put together my affiliate program is people want to share it, but let me, if I can get more people to share it, they get something out of it, you know.

Marrianne: Well, there’s nothing wrong with networking and being a business person. I mean, that’s absolutely understandable. That’s, as you said, we’re all trying to make a living off of what we’re doing. So I don’t fault anybody for that. I guess it’s just being reasonable and having the willingness to, like you said, to

Kody: A brand new one can’t afford a thousand dollars.

Marrianne: Yeah. Seeing somebody who’s starting off that has the passion and wants to do all of this. Yeah. Help them out. I would like people to help me out. I would want people to help others out. I don’t understand. It doesn’t hurt anything.

Kody: No, no, it doesn’t. I like that concept. I have a Facebook group for the Homestead Education podcast, so you know, everybody go join. But I put on there every week and I wish I could get a little bit more involved, but, you know, we’re learning. But you know, I’m like, “Hey, here’s my podcast for the week. Everybody else shares yours, you know?” Because my vision for The Homestead Education is for everybody to teach. And there’s more to that coming in the future, hopefully. But that’s where I really want to make some of my networking is by giving a platform for more people. So, you guys get over there and share your podcasts every week.

Marrianne: Yeah, we will. Yeah, for sure. I’ll definitely do that.

Kody: This network of people is really it, and it’s a great group of people. I’ve been so happy with everybody that I’ve met, you know?

Marrianne: Yeah. I just see it as a bigger community. I just see it as, instead of my actual neighbors, you’re my neighbor in whatever state you’re in. I just see it as you’re my new friend and I don’t see it as like, “Oh, you have a podcast too. Oh no, I need to hide and make sure nobody knows about that.”

Kody: I’ll be really honest, I’m putting together a little gift giving email thing, all the typical marketing stuff you have to do. And I have on there, “You guys, these are good friends of mine,” and they know that when you’re buying from them, you’re buying from people and not a corporation. I don’t have an affiliation with you guys or anything like that. I just wanted to be able to send some business your way.

Marrianne: We appreciate that.

Kody: If anybody even reads those emails, who knows?

Marrianne: That’s the risk we all take. Sometimes you are just talking out into the void. That is a reality too, that people don’t necessarily talk about. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve said something or asked people to do this or tried to do a giveaway or whatever and it just flopped. Sometimes that just happens. Or no one responds to what you’re asking, you know, a question and no one says anything and you’re like, okay, nevermind. That didn’t work. So you just kind of learn and roll with it as you go.

Kody: You know, my business coach, she always says make sure you remind them to like, and share. And I’m like, “Man, if they wanted to, they would, you know?” But that’s a really good point. If I were going to put this out here for everybody that’s listening, those of you who are wanting to get something off the ground, like things, share, comment, ask us questions, respond because you’re helping us. And in return, we’re going to remember your name. If you want to join our community, too, our community that we’re creating for ourselves that we want you to join, you know?

Marrianne: Absolutely.

Greg: Yeah.

Marrianne: That’s so true.

Greg: I’m not trying to be arrogant by any means, but we get a lot of . . .

Kody: You come off as an arrogant guy, you know.

Greg: I know I’m kind of a jerk. But we do get a lot of followers on Instagram. The way Instagram works, we do get a lot of followers. We get a lot of unfollows every day too. It’s a give and take, but we don’t always, you pull up Instagram once and you might see a list of 25 people that followed you. And then, “Oh shoot my kids doing something.” You put your phone down. Well, that list is gone when you pull your phone back up so you don’t see everyone. But if someone follows and then comments, engages and says something really nice or engages or whatever, then I’m more likely to be like, “Oh, who is that? Oh man, they do some really, really cool stuff.” You know what I mean? It’s not that we’re ignoring anyone that follows us. It’s just we don’t always see it. It’s really hard. Especially, too, because both of us use the Instagram.

Marrianne: Yeah. We both manage our account.

Greg: If she looks at something and then five minutes later I’m at work and I’m like, “Oh, I got a free minute,” and I pull it up. . .

Marrianne: You miss all your beekeeping people because I saw the video. Sorry man.

Greg: All my beekeeping content.

Kody: So you know what? Our Facebook ranch page, Ron and I share it and I finally had to just be like, “You go ahead and check the messages and if you feel something I need to take over, if it’s too much of a business type transaction, let me know.” But if it’s just someone asking what we have available or something, you go ahead and handle that and it’s one thing off my plate. Then we aren’t missing messages because we’d both see it and I’d be like, ‘”Oh, he already saw it. So he’s handling that.”

Marrianne: Yeah.

Kody: That’s not always the case.

Greg: Yeah. Once we figured out how to do the unread, mark it unread. At least on Instagram.

Marrianne: We can do it on Facebook, too.

Greg: If I read something I’m like, “Oh, that’s probably something for Marrianne.” Then I mark it as unread. So then she sees it later.

Marrianne: Yeah, I do the same.

Greg: But you can’t do that with notifications.

Marrianne: No, but you can with messages.

Kody: Well, I think that’s going to be really helpful. All of this is going to be really helpful to the listeners because I have a lot of people that follow me that are trying to continue this homestead homeschool path and moms that are trying to stay home. And I’m trying to figure out how to have a voice in this really loud arena, but be able to still work from home and stuff. It’s challenging.

Marrianne: It is definitely challenging. I mean, we were just talking about that before we started talking to you and just how there’s so many things happening all at the same time. And sometimes that alone is exhausting. Not even the things that you’re doing, it’s just the fact that you have 25 little small things that you have to do and make sure that you remember. It’s a lot on your brain. It’s a huge mental toll. I think most moms can relate to that especially. You just have all those little things that you’re focusing on and sometimes that brain power is just like, my brain is about to melt. I can’t do this. So it is challenging, even working from home as, you know, it’s a challenge to try to juggle it all.

Kody: Yeah. And then, from a marketing standpoint, you’re trying to be like, “Okay, what’s everybody else doing? What’s working for everyone else?” And then all of a sudden you’re trying to do everything and it’s like, “Wait, wait, wait. I can’t do everything.” And especially some of the bigger names who have production companies with them and stuff. There’s no way.

Marrianne: They have a team.

Kody: Yeah. They have a team.

Kody: You know, my team is, “Honey, have you shipped that yet?” “Honey, Have you shipped my boxes yet? Okay, fine. I’ll just do it by myself.”

Marrianne: Yeah. We’re the team. That’s it. This is it.

Greg: Well we say team, but Marrianne, she is a machine when it comes to this stuff because I do what I can and I do the stuff outside. I work with the bees, do and all that kind of stuff, but I also work 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours a week.

Marrianne: So there’s only so much you can do at home.

Greg: Yeah. And we couldn’t, if I didn’t work that much, we couldn’t do what we’re doing now. Eventually I would like to not have to work.

Marrianne: Go to a job.

Greg: But for now, that’s what we have to do. Honestly we, as far as job goes and working off the farm, this might be a little bit off topic, but we’re so looking back we are really blessed just by that. So when our oldest son, when he was six months old, I had to call Marianne, “Hey, I just got let go from work, laid off. You . . .

Marrianne: Downsizing.

Greg: . . .need to come pick me up because I drove a company vehicle. She had to come pick me up in the morning. So, six month old kid, we were basically kind of living paycheck to paycheck.

Marrianne: Less than that because I only worked part-time.

Greg: So Yeah. And no job. And it was like, oh crap. So the job that I’m at now, I’ve been here six and a half years. Five, five and a half years. This will be six. Yeah. Coming up on six years. I didn’t really like it, but you know, I just worked and worked and worked and in those six years I’ve tripled my salary.

Kody: Oh wow.

Greg: Yeah. I can say it didn’t always feel like it was a blessing, but God really has taken care of us in that amount of time and it’s really led us to be able to do the things that we are doing now.

Kody: That’s great.

Kody: And no, it’s not off-topic because we talk a lot about all the different streams of income that you need to have to have to make a home, you know? I’m listening to radical homemakers or some of the other passive income type people. I mean, you need a regular income, you need an entrepreneurial income, you need a non-monetary income and a long-term or passive income type thing. You know, for all those people that work off the farm and think that that’s not part of this bigger picture, it really is. Ron and I are lucky enough that our full-time income is his disability from being a veteran. He was blown up three times in Iraq, so he earned our base income.

Marrianne: Yeah. I would say that’s definitely accurate. Definitely.

Kody: So, you know, I’m lucky that I get to have him home, but you know, a lot of people are like, “Oh, your wife makes enough for you to be able to be home.” And he’s like, “No, I make enough so she was able to be home, and then she chose to start these businesses because she can’t hold still.” Of course, now that I have three businesses going, we definitely rely on those incomes at this point.

Greg: Yeah. Even as income has been great, moving up, but here recently, within the last four months, I think it was I got another promotion at work.

Kody: Congratulations.

Greg: Oh, thank you. I was driving around in a work van out in the field, climbing telephone poles, carrying ladders all day long, in server closets, working on a laptop, doing all this crazy stuff. Never knowing when I was really going to get home because you work until the job’s done. But now I’m in an office, so I got a bathroom. It’s awesome.

Marrianne: The luxury of having your own bathroom.

Kody: Even I talk about the different funny things that we get to flex on and you get to flex on a bathroom.

Greg: I know right? It’s not nice and it’s not really always clean, but it’s a bathroom, you know. But even doing all that kind of manual-ish labor, I was just getting wore out, doing all that throughout the week and then coming home and having to do everything on the farm and it was just, it was getting too much.

Kody: That’s hard.

Greg: So now my job is not physically demanding at all. It’s very mentally demanding, but I can handle that.

Marrianne: You have a fortified mind.

Greg: So, it’s really been a blessing and I feel whatever God’s plan is for us, I feel it’s in the process, you know.

Marrianne: Yeah. The way I see it, it’s all helping us to try to achieve our goals. You said, I think sometimes it’s really easy to think we’re all just going to quit our jobs and stay home and make YouTube videos of us milking our goats and that’s awesome if you can do that. I really appreciate people who are able to do that. More power to you, but it’s also not that practical if you have bills to pay.

Kody: Yeah. I was watching Ron watching some history channel show the other day and I was like, “What is the draw? It wasn’t that I was asking, “Ooh, what’s the draw?” It was, “I was literally asking what is the draw because I see so many people in our homestead world really making it on making these YouTube videos and I’m milking a goat and I don’t have that. Personally, I don’t think I have the draw to get people to listen to me every week watching me milk a goat, but I’m getting people to listen to me on my podcast, so I don’t know.

Marrianne: I think that’s another valid point too, though. Find what your strengths are. You were talking about marketing and stuff. I knew that I knew how to do really good design and really good marketing. I knew that about myself. I knew the skills that we already had. So instead of trying to squeeze yourself into all these things that already exist, think about your own strengths, your own passions, the things that you really want to do that you are equipped to do and do that, instead of trying to become something else. You’ll be more successful if you’re passionate about it. And if you have some skills going into it, I mean, we all learn things as we go. But being able to offer something and that’s what you do. I mean, that’s your background with starting your curriculum and all of that.

Kody: I knew I wasn’t the, have somebody follow me around doing my farm chores but I found something that did work for me. So I think that’s a really valid point. But it’s the story too, and trying to figure that piece out is, because people, that personal connection is, it’s big.

Marrianne: Yeah. It is important. I think people just want to see that you’re a real person, you know, Right. I want to see that when I’m talking and connecting with other people, I want to see that they have struggles or that they, not everything is perfect, or that they have, that they’re working really hard or that, you know, whatever it is, that it’s an authentic human quality that we can actually relate to. I think that’s really important.

Greg: Yeah. And I don’t want to let you in on a little secret. Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret, but we actually watch a little TV occasionally. We do indulge in some tv, but right now we’ve been watching The Middle, and I’ve never, I don’t think we ever ever watched it before.

Marrianne: No, it’s an older show. I mean, it’s not new at all.

Greg: But we love it because if you watch it, it just looks real life. Their furniture doesn’t match. And their washer and dryer, they have a different colored washer and dryer.

Marrianne: They have stuff on their coffee table and a blanket that somebody crochet. It’s just real.

Greg: She doesn’t cook, so she stores her blankets in the oven, which is really dumb. But I could see where someone would do that. But anyway, it’s probably on more for background noise, but we noticed those little nuances more than what even show’s about. It’s normal stuff.

Marrianne: Or it makes you laugh because the dad on the show is talking about “I don’t communicate, I don’t talk, I don’t care about what other people think about me. I’m dead inside and I’m okay with that.”

Greg: She looked right at me in the eyes. She knew.

Marrianne: And you smiled because you knew. And this is exactly, I mean, he does care a little bit, but Greg, he doesn’t care. He’s just himself and he doesn’t, he’s not trying to impress anybody. He is who he is and you know, I would be lying if I didn’t say that I didn’t care about what people think. I’ve always been more conscious of that, I think.

Kody: I think that’s a woman thing.

Marrianne: Yeah. I think it definitely can be. And so it was just funny that we’re like, “This is so relatable.”

Greg: So, anyway, we were talking about being authentic. And that’s what made me think of that. It’s just being real.

Kody: Well, you know what, I’m looking at the time we’ve been on here about an hour, so that actually is a perfect time for my next big question.

Greg: Oh, good.

Kody: What does keep growing mean to you?

Greg: Do you want two separate answers or do we need to collaborate?

Kody: My big thing I tell everybody to keep growing because I forgot to keep growing at one point and that’s how I turned the corner of my life. So I tell everybody, I’m here to teach you and your kids how to grow your own food and grow as a person.

Marrianne I love that. I really love that. Yeah. I think for us, or for me personally, I feel growing for us means continuing to chase our dreams, and just putting one foot in front of the next and pursuing that wholeheartedly. I think it’s easy to not think about all the little milestones and the little goals, but that’s really important and slowly growing. Of course we think about growing in the spring. You have seeds and they pop through the soil and it’s this big momentous, amazing thing. You don’t see all the work underneath the soil. You don’t see the slight cracking of the shell, the water absorption. Oh. Now it’s slightly opening and forming that little sprout, and then it pops up to the surface and all the work behind the scenes and all the extra hours and extra time.

Kody: What would  be the full analogy? Sorry, keep going.

Marrianne: That’s okay. I love it. I just, I feel all of those little things add up and I want to keep doing all of those little things so that one day this can be our full-time job and it can be the dream that we have and that may take 10 years. I have no idea.

Kody: I just say for my viewers, because they can’t see you guys, but when you said, “So that this can be our full-time job,” you looked at him and smiled and it was just beautiful. I wanted to share that because nobody sees my videos, but that was really special.

Marrianne: We see each other sometimes.

Greg: Hundred percent honesty. We just had a big fight right before the podcast.

Marrianne: It wasn’t a big fight. It was an argument, but yeah, we did.

Kody: You know what? My husband and I spend 24/7 together because he is home all the time.

Greg: Yeah.

Kody: So I totally get it. He’s my best friend. Drives me crazy.

Marrianne: Yeah, exactly.

Greg: We had a disagreement because I’ve been stressed with some stuff and then it just came to a head five minutes before we got on here.

Marrianne: No, it’s fine. And we talked it out.

Kody: You know what, then maybe you needed to hear how beautifully she looked at you

Marrianne: Well yeah. Aw, I do love you.

Greg: I Love you too.

Kody: Aw.

Marrianne: It’s your turn. How do you want to keep growing?

Greg: Keep growing? I think for me keep growing just kind of means keep pushing forward. We do the online stuff, the social media stuff, and to be honest with you, I really enjoy it. But if that left tomorrow, it is what it is. I have goals and dreams. I want to, ytake care of my family. I want to be at home with my kids. That’s kind of why we’re trying to start the bee business and help that grow. And I really, if I could just stay home, work the bees with my kids and make enough money to make ends meet, I’m 100% okay with that. But it’s a process, right? So you just have to take one step at a time and keep your eye on what your goals are, what your future is and realize that that could radically change in an instant, but you just have got to keep going.

Marrianne: He wants to build a beekeeping empire is what he always says. I don’t know what that means, but . . .

Kody: Hey, I love it. I love that thinking bigger than what you’re doing.

Greg: She always asks me what I’m doing. I’m like, “I’m thinking about my beekeeping empire, babe.”

Marrianne: That’s true. And he is.

Kody: Oh, I love it. Okay. You keep growing a beekeeping empire.

Greg: Yep.

Kody: All right. Well, thank you guys, so much, for coming on and I can’t wait to see you again in the future.

Marrianne: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. We look forward to having you on the podcast.

Kody: Well, thank you for joining me today at the Homestead Education, and I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me, please comment and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram at The Homestead Education. Do you have questions that you’d answered or just want to say hi? Please email me at hello@thehomestead education.com. Until next time, keep growing.