First year not selling got me reminiscing. Ask me anything. For context - when I was 18 I got a job selling Christmas trees, became basically family with the owners(old married couple no kids) after 3 years they asked if I’d take over eventually and stated to train me to run it for them. Did that for about 6 years. No trees this year as our tree farmer lost a lot of his stock to fires and couldn’t supply us.
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Where do your trees come from? What type are they?
How many acres do I need to buy to start a tree lot? What’s the wholesale price vs retail in HI? How much work is it to harvest?
So the guy that ended up taking me under his wing had already been selling for 20 years, we’d rent some parking lot space at a shopping center. Set up our operation, sell trees, wrap up n come back in a year. Pricing is its own world. Most Other tree lots get “Home Depot” trees and sell them cheap cause they weren’t very nice(quality) we worked with a very well respected tree farmer out of Oregon and had a good relationship with him. We were known for having pricey trees, but the quality was unbeatable. As for harvesting, thats out of my wheelhouse
I would look for other supplies and try to expanding on selling other stuff like Christmas decorations and gifts, toys. It may work for other holidays like Valentine, Mother’s day, etc. Things happen and all we can do is adapt to the situation
How much do you make per season?
What do you do the rest of the year?
Between $100,000-$250,000(that was the best year we’ve ever had) Ultimately it depends on how many trees we can sell during the season. We’d start day after thanksgiving and go until the the trees are gone. I’ve only ever seen one year where we didn’t sell out. But we had already made profit for the season so it wasn’t a big deal. And back when I started I worked as a carpenter and was out of work at the time, after that I’d save me pto and take off work to sell trees. Now I have a small business I run year round.
They pop the can open n check some trees for bugs. We’ve lost an entire shipment one year because of a beetle🤦🏻♂️ we’ve had some with fire or snow burns but no actual snow.