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

Hi Nicole, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

As a daughter of an entrepreneur and business owner who included and shared his self-built business with his children, I’m a huge fan of family owned businesses. I think including your children in your hard work and your dream can inspire your children to have their own big dreams and aspirations. While my dad was in the technology industry, I never grew to have a lot of interest or passion there. However, I did grow up to have big dreams of my own. Over time my dreams and aspirations have changed but because of my father and his inclusion of me and my siblings in his business, I have always had the drive to follow my own dreams. Building this flower farm with my family has been such a huge blessing and I hope that including my children will build their self-esteem, their confidence and help them to have the courage to pursure their own passions.

Nicole, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My husband and I have been growing a variety of different plants for the past decade and over the years we’ve shared this passion with our friends and family. During the past few years, we were growing cannabis and had the opportunity to make medicine, RSO (Rick Simpson Oil) for my father while he was going through chemotherapy which helped him with pain management, sleep and his appetite. He really enjoyed watching and being apart of the growing process and learning how the medicine was created. While going through the process of chemo, my dad asked my husband to help build his own home garden where we grew a variety of vegetables and flowers together. This sparked a conversation with our family about turning our passions into a family business and we did just that.

Right before my dad passed away, we purchased some land in Valley Center and started working on the raw land to turn it into a flower farm. Shorty after he passed away, we planted thousands of flowers and opened our business. In the last year and a half since his passing, we have grown and sold a variety of seasonal, cut flowers as well as farm fresh eggs in his honor. We consider ourselves to be a micro farm and are proud to be a small, family owned business.

While our business is still fairly new and growing, we’ve gained a loyal, local following and are best known for our cut flowers including: dahlias, ranunculus, anemones, tulips, eucalyptus, wax-flower & cone bush. These are our best known varieties but we are constantly learning and growing new varieties of flowers. We also sell our eggs on a smaller scale and hope to continue to grow that side of our business. What sets us apart from others is that as a micro farm, we focus on quality over quantity. We currently sell to retail and wholesale businesses, we do front porch sales and have sold to florists and brides as well.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

I’m very grateful to say that 100% of our sales is done through social media and word of mouth referrals. Whenever we have flowers available, I post to our social media outlets and they are typically sold out within a few days. We started by selling our flowers solely through Instagram but have now grown to share our availability through multiple social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook and even TikTok!)

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Again, social media has been a great tool for us to keep in touch with our clients. We are still building our website so we haven’t created an email list yet, to engage with our customers. We typically keep in contact through sharing our process with our customers via social media and letting them be a part of the journey with us.

Contact Info:

• Website: Coming soon!
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lilacvalleyfarm/
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/1587244984725552/
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lilacvalleyfarm

Image Credits
CARRIE ANNE KELLY / CARRIE ANNE KELLY STUDIOS