Growing Revenue at a Pumpkin Patch (Part 2)

The Growth strategies that helped us achieve record-breaking revenue and profitability in 2024.

Oct 31, 2024

Hi there, it’s Adam. 🤗 Welcome to my weekly newsletter. I started this newsletter to provide a no-bullshit, guided approach to solving some of the hardest problems for people and companies. That includes Growth, Product, company building and parenting while working. Subscribe and never miss an issue. I’ve got a podcast on fatherhood and startups - check out Startup Dad here. Questions? Ask them here.

A year ago I wrote about how a group of volunteer Dads applied growth strategies to a local pumpkin patch and transformed our earnings. We previously pushed past a ceiling of $30,000 where we had been stuck for ~13 years to achieve new highs of $38k and ~$42k in 2022 and 2023.

When we exited last year’s patch I was sure we couldn’t top it. After all, there’s only so much interest in a small-market, school-fundraising pumpkin patch. We also had Halloween falling on a Thursday this year (Happy Halloween everyone! 🎃) which means we had to close down the patch the previous weekend and missed several extra days of sales. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to go higher than $42k.

I was wrong.

We leaned into some of our best performing tactics from 2022 and 2023, tested several new hypotheses, and delivered a 30%+ YoY improvement… AGAIN. This year we closed revenues four days ahead of Halloween at ~$54,001. The best part? We didn’t change prices at all from last year.

While there were a few logistical snags this year (I’ll elaborate below) we managed to persevere.

Here are 9 tactics we improved upon and several new tests for 2024. I’ll break down each one in the rest of this newsletter.

Signage
“Door Busters”
Delivery
Positioning and messaging
Merchandising
SEO
Improving sales tactics
Bulk discounting
Inventory management

Each of these tactics can be leveraged across most other businesses - they’re not unique to our efforts and they are powerful when executed well.

Background

The Wildwood Dads Club non-profit organization is a storied institution that dates back 100 years to the founding of the Wildwood Elementary School.

Our mission is to drive fundraising and community building for Wildwood alongside the Wildwood Parents Club. In our district, ~37% of school funding comes from local funding sources: parcel taxes, our education foundation nonprofit, and parent/community support. Throughout the year the Dad’s Club raises ~$15-30k for the school which is then spent on capital improvements, infrastructure projects, and classroom support. Things like sports equipment for PE, classroom technology, and more.

This year, our fearless “Patch Papas” were again Matt Derrigo and Russ Griffith. Team consistency from year to year turned out to be incredibly important. In the forming/storming/norming/performing cycle we are definitely at the performing stage. Matt helmed growth, marketing, and sales while Russ was in charge of vendor management, inventory and city relations (this turned out to be one of the more interesting years for that).

We again set new records for:

Total patch revenues
Total patch profit
Single day sales
Single hour sales
Largest single transaction
Total number of pumpkins sold
Total number of smiles delivered

As a reminder, there are three distinct phases to a successful patch effort: prep and planning, execution and liquidation/cleanup.

Breakdown of Tactics

Signage

There are still only a handful of pumpkin patches in the immediate vicinity of the Bay Area. The “mega patches” (think Pumpkin Patch meets Disneyland) are farther out in more rural areas and tend to be half-day destinations requiring some planning. Ours is a “city patch” which benefits heavily from drive-by traffic and quick stop-ins to stock up. It’s especially helpful for last-minute shoppers.

We learned from our customer intercept survey last year that most people heard about the patch through three sources: local signage, Google search, and the school announcement.

Last season Matt introduced our “Giant Jack” sign which we placed on a highly trafficked street that people exit onto from the highway. It alerted people to the presence of the greatest photo opportunity of the season: the giant pumpkin (author note: here’s how you can grow a giant pumpkin; the seeds are $20 apiece!). This year the Giant Jack weighed 1,150 pounds!

This year, ahead of the patch Matt re-created all of our patch signage. Many of them hadn’t been touched in many, many years. This was driven out of the survey outcome from last year that helped us recognize the importance of local signage to patch traffic.

Here’s the before (old sign) and the after (new sign). We’ll get into the messaging changes a little later but both the fresh, highly visible new signs along with messaging had a huge impact.

Old Signage

New Signage

The other big change to signage was the location of the signs. We had to get a bit more creative this year because the city decided that they really wanted to crack down and enforce their previously unenforced sign restrictions. Despite the fact that we are a non-profit organization that funds our schools, the public works department took down several of our signs and said we had to find new locations or private property.

While we initially fought this (and will be getting the city to change their law in the near future) we eventually gave up on it for the patch. It turned out that this unfortunate event became a great new discovery: by moving some signs just over the city limits into Oakland we were able to capture new demand from additional neighborhoods who want pumpkins but don’t have a local patch.

Matt Derrigo:

“This year I had placed two signs in Montclair that definitely resulted in new customers. And after the city took our signs down, I reposted one further up on Oakland and Mount Vista which I learned attracted customers from that neighborhood.”

(Sadly, one of the risks with signage is that it can go missing. We lost this sign about 2 weeks into the patch operation).

Door Busters

This year we leaned further into “school announcement” which was a top 3 traffic driver in 2023. We continued the coloring sheet for classrooms (bring in a sheet, get a free pumpkin) this year but turned it up a few notches.

First, Matt expanded our coloring sheet distribution and gave out sheets to two local churches for their youth groups and published it on our Google Business page.

Next, we decorated the fencing along the patch with all of the coloring sheets to highlight the great work of our community. People who came to the patch would see the coloring sheets, ask about them, and then take one so that they could come back to get a free pumpkin. This drove repeat foot traffic and repeat purchase in much the same way that an eCommerce store will give you a post-purchase discount for coming back a second time.

But the big unlock was the professional photographer door buster. This year, on a handful of weekends we had a few of our more photographically-inclined volunteers bring their high-end cameras and take family photos for people at the patch. This served two purposes: the first was that it again drove incremental traffic since most everyone wants a family photo at a patch and second, we offered this for free and asked them to share info about the patch with their friends and family. If they felt compelled we asked they share a review as well.

This helped raise our visibility in searches for “pumpkin patch” and “pumpkin patch near me” which helped us capitalize on the Google search volume spike as the holiday approaches. We had nearly 700 direction requests from our Google business page this year.

Here’s “Pumpkin Patch” in Google Trends for the last year:

We now have 23 5-star reviews on Google and 10 on Yelp. In addition to helping with local search the reviews serve as a great way for us to identify things that customers want and highlight those. Examples from recent reviews are: where the proceeds go, parking, gracious volunteers, complimentary photography, and more.

Delivery

In 2023 we did away with the online ordering which we had introduced during COVID. It was obvious from our Square data that we hadn’t sold much via online ordering. This year we lightly introduced a delivery service for Dads who wanted a way to volunteer but couldn’t work a shift. It worked like this: we put a call out to the Dads Club to ask your neighbors what they wanted from the patch and offer to pick it up for them when you were there shopping. This was an experiment so we didn’t emphasize it too much but it led to some incremental sales – especially for neighbors who couldn’t stop by. The “delivery” option led to our highest single order of all time at $900, eclipsing the previous one by 3x.

Next year we may lean into the local delivery even more!

Positioning and Messaging

This was one of our big wins for 2024. As you saw in the signage we leaned into the “Support our Schools” message. We heard from countless visitors that this made the difference for them because they knew the money stayed in the community.

From Matt:

“One of the big changes that we made on our signs this year is we included in large font “support our schools”. People mentioned this when I asked them about the new sign whereas in the past, they would never have known — it just said pumpkin patch. For those unfamiliar with our patch and purpose, that was a game changer.

One anecdote someone from Walnut Creek (which is 25-30 minutes away from our patch) shared when asked why they didn’t stop at the countless patches between their home and us was that they “liked the cause.”

The key messaging that really resonated:

Support our Schools
Volunteer-led
Local elementary school

Merchandising

In past years we had been concerned about piling pumpkins really high—feeling that it might make it harder to choose the right pumpkin. We’d arrange them in a single stack on hay bales or pallets. But after consulting with some produce vendors we learned that piling high is a key to accelerating sales. If inventory looks sparse people are less likely to buy. So we took a page out of the grocery store playbook and really stacked up the pumpkins. You can see somewhat in the photo below that we abandoned the single-stack on the hay bale and actually brought pumpkins out into the walkways. We also piled them up on pallets instead of single-stacking.

The psychology is clear—just like no one wants to take the last piece of cake; no one wants to grab from only a few remaining pumpkins. It also improved the choice and gave people an excuse to linger for a longer time at the patch to peruse the inventory.

SEO

In 2023 we greatly improved our SEO by claiming our Google Local listing along with our Yelp listings. Improving both of those has helped us dominate local search. The WWDC Pumpkin Patch is now in the Google Places listing showing our perfect, 5-star reviews and is the #1 recommended patch in Yelp’s “Top 10 Best Pumpkin Patches in Oakland, CA.” In fact, we’re the only 5-star patch that appears in the Yelp listings. This matters as Google Search is the top traffic driver to the patch!

We even won out in the LLM generated results:

Improving Sales Tactics

Selling is hard and not everyone is a natural salesperson. There were three, specific sales tactics that we introduced this year which made a huge difference in sales:

Walk around

We encouraged Dads to get out from behind the counter and walk the patch—helping visitors find the right pumpkin, taking heavy ones off their hands, and explaining the assortment. This proved crucial as we don’t have wheelbarrows or wagons at this patch (there just isn’t enough room). People are hesitant to pick up a pumpkin that they can’t lift or often are busy chasing their kids around and feel rushed. By getting out into the patch and helping busy parents we took some of the pressure off.

Kid selling

In our volunteer outreach we made sure to mention that Dad volunteers should bring their kids to the patch to help. This year we had older kids working the register and ringing up guests as well as helping carry items to cars. We also sent kids out into the patch to help busy parents when Dad volunteers were otherwise occupied. Not only could the kids talk to visitors about their local school but they could help them pick out pumpkins. Who is going to say no to a cute kid?!?

Volunteer

We leaned hard into the volunteer messaging in our sales strategy. Not only did everyone have “Volunteer” badges that they could wear, but we would introduce ourselves to new visitors and explain that we’re a volunteer run, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Bulk Discounting

As mentioned in last year’s newsletter one of our end of patch goals is to liquidate everything. We want to sell every last pumpkin and basically anything that isn’t nailed down (hay bales, corn stalks, etc.). To do so we implemented a last-day bulk discounting strategy:

10% off 1-3 pumpkins
20% off 4-6 pumpkins
30% off 7+ pumpkins
Buy a hay bale and the whole order is 50% off

At this point the COGS are a sunk cost so if we can liquidate everything then it is all incremental profit. We also added extra “Closeout Sale” signs to our neighborhood signage and kept the patch open while we were cleaning up to sell everything. This strategy was successful yet again as we sold every single pumpkin in inventory.

Inventory Management

Last year we learned that this was critical to our profitability. Because we pay per pumpkin from our supplier and each varietal has a different cost (and demand profile) we wanted to make sure that we managed inventory incredibly tightly so as to not over or under order. The under-ordering turned out to be a killer last year as we probably lost out on $2-4k in extra sales when we ran out of carving pumpkins at a few critical points.

Not this year!

Through daily inventory tracking and sales forecasting we made sure we had exactly what we needed at all times. The “piling up” strategy also helped us make use of our inventory but merchandising as much of it as possible.

Matt:

“My forecasting changed Russ’ order amounts in a huge way. He'd take a physical look and derive a reorder, I then used the data and looked back a week and also analyzed last year— this would give us the confidence to bulk up far more than we did— to the extent that even I got nervous about some of our inventory. It's clear to me, you can’t sell product you don't have. We really should be buying even more and the goal should not be to sell everything, but have some pumpkins left on the shelf -- no different than the newspaper.”

Much like 2023 we saw similar trends in popularity—decorative gourds and cooking pumpkins are more popular at the start of October and then carving pumpkins come on strong later in the month.

One other key observation this year was weather patterns. While rain has never really been a factor for us in California this year the heat certainly was. We had a huge heatwave early in the month – with temps as high as 100, 101 and 102 and several days in the 80’s and 90’s. You know what people don’t like to do when it’s that hot out? Buy Fall pumpkins. Somehow we managed to avoid significant YoY declines despite an average temperature that was 5 degrees warmer this year!

Conclusion and Lessons Learned

When we started this year’s patch I was convinced that all of the optimizations we had done in years past would make it hard to grow again like we had the past two years. But against all odds: the city mandating we move signage, the heat, and a shorter selling season due to the date of Halloween we managed to grow all of our numbers: customers +44%, revenue +30%, and profitability +50%! We still need to dig into why AOV declined slightly YoY, but it’s likely a mix of traffic source and other factors.

Since we always do a retrospective, here are a few things that we’ll take into next year:

More door busters in 2025. The photographer was a big hit and we could schedule and publicize it even more. Giant Jack is such a big draw for the patch. This year’s Jack was 11% bigger than last year. Does that size drive incremental sales? Who knows! But it sure is fun.
More photo ops. We didn’t introduce the painted, wooden cutouts this year but that could be popular in ‘25.
Lean into the retention strategies with email outreach. We have two years worth of emails from our Giant Jack weight guess. We didn’t leverage them enough this year.
Delivery! At least 15% of households in Piedmont have retirees (who likely once had kids in the schools here). A well-executed local delivery strategy and door-knocking campaign could add thousands to revenue next year for those who can’t get to the patch.
More signage in more places. This continues to be a great driver of patch traffic and we should do even more.
This year the biggest limiting factor was parking. If people come by the patch and see that all the spots are taken they won’t stay. We can do more to zone off specific patch parking to create space.
Leverage community foot traffic for games and practices. There are lots of soccer games at the field and we could walk around to take orders from people and set out pumpkins for them. This is an area of exploration in ‘25.

From 2022 to 2024 we’ve grown revenue 42% and profitability by 57% from some straightforward growth and P&L tactics, steeped in data analysis. You can (and should!) apply these to just about any business and you’ll likely see similar results.

Now if only we could figure out some SaaS pricing…

Happy Halloween, and see you next year for Part 3!

The Wildwood Dads Club is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you were inspired by this newsletter and want to contribute to local schools you can make a donation to our club here. It’s for the kids!