Chrysanthemum Farm Profits

Abigayle Lett shares how she built a successful chrysanthemum business while also being a race car driver.

"I am a senior at Odessa High School. I'm 17 years old and my business is growing and selling chrysanthemums - mums, which are something you'd put on your front porch during the fall season and Halloween. My business is two years old. This past summer I made $15,000 in revenue, and this year I expect to grow by 100% and aim to do at least $30,000 in revenue.

How my business works is I order the mums, which we call plugs because they're about this big, from a company in North Carolina. I also order fertilizer to make sure the plants get nutrients they need, plus soil and pots. We have about a two-week long process of putting it all together - mixing the soil, putting them into color blocks, then putting the mums in the color block. It's a really long and tedious process.

Then we put them on what we call runs - big tarps with watering lines. For the next three to four months, I spend time watering them. After they're ready, fertilized, watered, and grown as big as they can get, we market them to schools and fundraisers. I also do retail at my own house, posting on social media and handing out flyers to local towns and businesses.

I live on 40 acres, with about 30 acres leased out for farmland. The rest is for my mums - anywhere we can put them on the yard, we do. Right now we're building a greenhouse that I bought with my profits, so I can have a place to start my mums and also have steady revenue for the other six months of the year.

Our profit last year was about seven to eight thousand. Each year it fluctuates based on soil and pot costs. Our big cost this year was making those runs, but now we already have those so we can pack them away for fall and wintertime, then put them out next year - that's another cost we don't have to pay for.

We actually use my sprint car trailer to deliver all the mums, which is kind of funny how it clashes with my racing. I'm actually a third-generation sprint car driver - my grandpa drove race cars, my dad has driven race cars, and then it kind of just passed down to me."