154: Julian Awad on Backyard Riches & SPIN Farming
Taking a Small Plot and using Intensive Farming to generate income.
Julian experienced entrepreneurship early at the age of 12 when he first started importing candy from Singapore to Malaysia where his family was living at the time. At 19 he started his first company in real estate. Since then, his interest for business and social responsibility has taken him from refugee trips in Sumatra, Indonesia to driving new innovative genetic risk assessments.
It was while working with Google on marketing and advertising, that Julian realized the need for marketing agencies which focused on a Return On Investment or were performance oriented. Eventually he formed JSA Interactive Inc. to meet the growing demand for his marketing and commercialization services.
Julian has over 15 years of professional experience in marketing, strategic planning, project management, and internet technologies. He also has 10 years of entrepreneurial experience in marketing companies, launching consumer focused internet startups, and financing small businesses. He states his greatest achievements are finding and marrying his wife/best friend and having his new son and twin daughters.
In This Podcast: Greg talks to Julian Awad of Backyard Riches, who breaks down some of the intricacies of turning a backyard plot into a profitable urban farm business. As an entrepreneur who has figured out how to turn ideas into businesses, Julian describes the models that he offers to help urban farmers become successful in a sustainable way. The method of Small Plot INtensive Farming is the new way of being a farmer – especially in urban areas.
Listen in and learn about:
- How he started a business as a kid selling candy to his friends by thinking ahead
- Some of the small business experiments he has tried including Alzheimer genetics and helped people start businesses at MIT
- Then he started working with urban farms and local food farms finding ways to make them financially sustainable
- He found out about SPIN farming – small plot intensive farming – to maximize the revenue and profit from a small plot
- The focus was on generating as much as $50,000 to $100,000 per year from a typical urban backyard farm in just a few years
- How this helps the community in multiple ways as well
- How the training program is broken down in the two basic programs
- How the programs help turn cash from seeds in two weeks
- How certain herbs have better markets in some areas over others
- Some of the tactics and techniques the Backyard Riches program teaches as well as some of the resources that are shared
- The guide that is step-by-step and includes photos
- How they set up benchmarks to help farmers meet their goals and work with their abilities to optimize their urban farms
- How to figure out what the goals are and deciding which business models will help an urban farmer reach them
- Some of the success stories of retirees and even teenagers that have tried the models and love the SPIN models
- How to encourage kids to participate in the fun of selling the produce too
- How working together as a family has so many more benefits
- The larger extensive model that sets goals of $100,000 annually by scaling up and teaches how to plan appropriately to make it work
- Some of the focus areas that are taught in the program
- How to choose crops for the areas needs and consider regional and local needs
- His advice to listeners is planning is the key – “if you’re not planning, your planning to fail”
Special SPIN offer for Urban Farm Podcast Listeners
How to Contact Julian:
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You will be an inspiration to a lot of people. Making your way to the top is not easy, struggles and challenges are just along the way but what matters is that you never give up. The techniques shared here is worth remembering.
It is important that you have a plan before you start a business. It is essential for your business not to fail right away. That’s why it is a must that you must be equipped with the right kind of information before you open a certain business.