We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Blayr Barnard a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Blayr, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

Barnard Beef has used various social media options. We’ve had a social media management company take care of our work, I’ve done it myself, had an in-house person and had a virtual assistant.

I love the graphics and connections for the management company but they didn’t know my business details well enough to answer questions and help further push the funnel. I felt the price, while reasonable, wasn’t justified for my style of business. We have a high cost product – around $1500-3000. Most people want to ask questions with that amount of money. For businesses with an easily automated process and small value items, I think it would be a good fit. For us, I was spending so much time answering the questions that the photos/graphics posting didn’t make sense.

For our business, the in-house person is the best fit. We need someone to take photos, videos, edit them and answer questions. Unfortunately, she moved – so she became a virtual assistant and does everything other than taking photos and videos.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Blayr Barnard and I’m the owner of Barnard Beef Cattle Company. I have 2 BBA’s in Marketing and High Performance Management, as well as, an MBA from Texas Tech University. I was a small business consultant for 13 years before moving back to Central Texas and taking over my family’s 100+ year old ranching operation.

Barnard Beef sells beef, pork, chicken, lamb and accessories (steak turners, hats, etc). We focus on beef but wanted to provide other options for our customers as well. We started selling to the public when COVID hit and people were scrambling to get food. The packing plants shut down and shelves were empty, but we had local butcher shops that had openings.

I think Barnard Beef has become known for our quality and customer service, but most start with us because we have a clear, affordable pricing. When I first started selling on social media, we charged by the hanging weight like most ranches. That required the customers to pay 3 times (deposit, hanging weight price, then processing fee) and they didn’t know how much their beef was going to cost them until the end. That’s not really an issue if you are going to the store to buy two steaks and you don’t know until you get there that it is $20 instead of $19, but $3,200 instead of $2,900 is too much for most families to stomach. I decided to change the sales model and target my cattle to a certain weight so I could charge a flat fee. That really resonated with families and our business took off from there.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When COVID hit, cattle that should have been worth $1.75 to $2.20 a pound were worth around $1.08 per pound. It doesn’t sound like a ton but that is a difference of $1750 down to $850. I had 30 truck loads that I sold at that small price knowing I was losing money but without a choice because of the pandemic. I pivoted and started selling direct-to-consumer at a reasonable rate. It really took off. I don’t sell all of my cattle that way, but I’ve gone from selling .03% that way to selling 3% direct and wholesale finished cattle.

I’ve found people really care where their food comes from today. Even your local butcher shops are usually getting beef from the same suppliers that the big box stores like HEB and Walmart are getting their food. They are just cutting it up at the store and giving you the local treatment, but they aren’t locally produced. We’ve had so many people reach out asking tough questions and making sure we have our processes in order to gain their trust.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I don’t have a business partner any longer. When I came home, my father was my business partner. We both had ownership percentages and made the decisions jointly or had defined areas we were in charge of so that we didn’t overlap a ton.

In another business I own, we had two couples that came together to create the company. We had defined ownership roles and very clear practices. Unfortunately, the wife in the other couple was very finnicky – for example, she was to do the books for the company but would wait months to do them and then become overwhelmed and demand help. After a year, the husband came to us and said he needed to get another job because they had fallen on hard times and she wasn’t wanting to help with the company any longer. They just walked out of the business leaving us holding the bag — and a non-winterized home with busted pipes they hadn’t told us about. It made me never want to share ownership or have a partner again.

When my father died, I swore I would do it on my own or never open another business again. The decisions are made as a team but the final say rests on my shoulders. There is no fighting amongst owners, no bickering, no worrying that bringing up a problem is going to cause ownership issues – it’s just me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.texasbestbeef.com
• Instagram: @BarnardBeef
• Facebook: @BarnardBeef