Zachery Jones

As a mobile art studio, we do guided painting and crafting events at local venues. A major trademark of ours is the ability to do in-house graphic design, web development, and video production. The long-term goal is to grow into something that can be marketed as a franchise opportunity to people with artistic skills seeking a low-cost-of-entry business with a good profit margin.

• Research for branding design of modern logos and websites.
• Development of branding package.
• Design of Logos in 5 formats with vector software (photoshop)
• Design/code website
• Designing original artwork for classes with a focus on "forward design."
• Marketing of classes.
• Leading class instruction.
• Learning new video editing programs for instagram/tik-tok.
• Researching how to make interesting promotional videos. (still learning)
• Book Keeping.

• Managed buying/loading/hauling of produce from various WNC farms and the WNC Ag Market.
• Understanding how to buy enough for a $30K gross peak season week, but also how to mitigate loss when sales dwindle to 2.5K gross.
• Purchasing only A+ "fancy" quality produce.
• Setting prices based upon maintaining margin (cost+loss), but also upon cost perception.
• Making attractive displays and labeling items in a way that works in relation with in-store traffic.
• Maintaining the produce area and keeping the produce storage area clean and sanitary.
• Assisting customers with produce questions, joking with regulars, and in general just trying to make everyone's day a little brighter.
• Ensure that the establishment is welcoming to everyone from locals to sometimes affluent travelers.

• Started out as unfortunate as the previous founding operators had cooked the books so to speak, early season sales were below operation cost.
• Instituted sound business practices to improve sales.
• 50% first-year weekly profits after 3ed months (2 months to realize a problem, then we quickly instituted changes)
• 15% boost in first-time new customers in the second year after improving road appearance and signage.
• Started setting prices based on margin as opposed to price matching with larger corporate stores.
• Improved store accessibility.
• Visually improved the store with more attractive displays and cleaner appearance.
• Fixed disguised building code problems.
• Worked hard to discount undesirable old stock and replenish it with more desirable items.
• Managed 4 part-time employees by supervising daily tasks and working beyond full-time myself (average 85 hours weekly).

Started as a 1 ac small farm utilizing both a cultivation tractor (Allis Chalmers G) and a 90hp utility tractor (JD 5420), greenhouse with automated irrigation, raised bed mulch layer, and drip irrigation with filters. Our goal was to farm at a 5-10ac footprint using a CSA farming style. Where we failed was underestimating the importance of post-harvest handling tools to efficiently process and prepare for the market. Essentially we had a mid-season house fire that we couldn't recover from and that took our ability to invest our way out of the processing problem. So rather than make quality concessions we shut down the farm and are now storing the equipment in our barn slowly collecting said processing equipment.

• Utilized chemical (ORMI) and non-chemical methods to protect crops from weeds and pests.
• Conducted soil and plant tissue testing to determine nutrient availability levels and soil composition.
• Used Blue Hill Farms Excel platform to plan, record, and document all crop inputs and planting schedules.
• Set and improved SOPs to oversee all crop needs.
• Integrated pest management techniques for pests.
• GAP food safety post-harvest procedures.