Scaling Your Aquaponics System Design & Consulting Business
Whether your working in Aquaponics, Hydroponics, or Aquaculture, you’re going to want to ensure that your customers are long term advocates for your services.
As a consultant, your advice goes a long way to ensuring their success.
As a system designer, you know that once a system is built there are still things that go wrong and TONS of things that are learned along the way.
This raises the question: How do you ensure customer success when they’re far away and out of touch? You’ve just invested time, money, resources, and information into their success, but now it is up to them to implement it and one of two things can happen:
- Everything goes as planned. They get things running smoothly and follow your detailed instructions. Nothing bad really happens and their system puts out tons of product.
…or the much more probable:
- It started off okay, but then something happened. Maybe their pH was off, maybe their DO dropped, maybe a tank overflowed or their humidity went off the charts and wiped out an entire crop. They’re already too busy to contact you, and let’s just be honest, you’re pretty busy too…
They contacted you but didn’t know what information you needed, maybe they didn’t keep good records of their logs, or we’ve even seen water splash on the log and they can’t tell you what it said…
so it spirals into a, “this isn’t what I expected, i’m out.”
How do we keep our customers successful after the initial setup of a system?
A challenging question until now… Let me share an alternative outcome when using our platform.
You have your desired operating procedures on the platform. It has all the information needed to run the farm, notifications to keep you up to date, and notebooks to keep your data clean and tidy.
You have fish libraries of fish you know work in the system along with all their ranges of operation.
Same goes for crops. You build a collection of crops that relate to market conditions/climate and how to keep the system optimized for this crop.
All of this is loaded into your dashboard once, to be reused over and over.
When a customer comes to you for a new system, you create a project for them.
You move ALL your highly valuable recommendations to their project with a few clicks.
You transfer that project to them and explain how important data tracking is.
They now have instant access to:
- Your recommendations for crop pH, temperature and humidity ranges.
- Your recommendations for fish and the water parameters to manage for this particular fish
- Alerts if something goes out of range (like pH or temperature for example)
- Your SOP on how to run the farm!
It’s instantly available on all connected phones, tablets, desktops and fully customizable as things grow and develop. You can continue to further contextualize your recommendations for this farm starting from your pre-loaded recommendations.
What happens when something goes wrong? Because… we all know it will
When something goes wrong, they contact you (or if you’re awesome you actually receive a notification from the system before they even know). You quickly log into their account and view all of their live farm stats. You can view anything they’ve logged: fish deaths, local weather, pH, nitrogen, etc. Being an expert, you can quickly, efficiently and accurately provide a solution for their problem.
That’s for the tough stuff… Now let’s talk about saving you some time…
Let’s say you get the same question over and over. This wastes your time and money. It’s frustrating because you know you’ve talked about it and you really shouldn’t be spending your precious time on this topic.
Solution: You can actually build alerts that inform your customers with action steps! They’ll know what to do when something happens, and not even have to call you.
Thats a very different scenario. It’s exactly why we built this platform: To help you scale your business.
Tips for additional revenue streams
Referral Program
Because we’re a social impact company we’re dedicated to seeing you succeed in every way possible. That’s why we’ve created a refer-a-grower program to give you an added revenue stream for your business. You’ll get a percentage of the referral for the life of the account!
Marketplace
You can sell your insights, SOP, fish profiles, and crop profiles on the new next-gen farming marketplace. This gives you credibility, new international market segments, and ways to empower your past customers.
Let’s do this. Start scaling your business on the Aquaponics platform today.