Case Study · Five Oaks Farm
An Alabama family farm built on handmade beeswax bread bags, trading viral spikes and quiet weeks for a system that sells the same amount tomorrow as it did today.
Paid social, email, and a budget tuned to actual stock on the shelf, year over year.
Jenni McCarthy built Five Oaks Farm with her family in Alabama, growing most of their own food on the land. In December 2023, she posted handmade beeswax bread bags on the farm's Instagram account, hoping to sell a few. Sales took off. January 2024 doubled. February was bigger again.
Then summer came, the season slowed, and the channel that had built the business showed its other face: the silence. Every order on the books had come through one channel she couldn't control, and the work of marketing was landing entirely on her shoulders, while she ran the farm and raised five kids.
"I felt like I had almost cracked the code on successful organic marketing. But it's so unpredictable. You can put out the same quality of content that took off last time, and just not have it land again."
Jenni · Founder, Five Oaks Farm
She knew the playbook on the rest of marketing. She had a business degree. She'd read the books. She knew email was supposed to be the most valuable asset. She knew paid ads could turn a great piece of organic content into something predictable. She just didn't have the bandwidth to actually do any of it well, on top of building, shipping, and being the face of the brand.
What she was looking for was the part of marketing that was actually plannable.
Jenni had already done the hardest thing: built a brand from zero, on a single platform, with her own hands. The job wasn't to replace that. It was to add the layers underneath, paid amplification, email, and the daily math, so that one quiet week stopped meaning a quiet month.
Four moves, working together:
Jenni's photography and video background had already produced thousands of strong assets. We pulled the reels and posts that resonated organically, packaged them into paid creative, and ran them in front of cold audiences that had never heard of the farm. The best-performing organic content became the best-performing ads, with very little new production required.
This is a handmade product, made by a family. The constraint isn't always the ad, it's the inventory. We set daily spend caps tied to what the farm could physically produce and ship, with ROAS targets that protected margin. When stock was healthy, we scaled up. When stock got tight, we pulled back without losing the audience we'd built.
She knew email was supposed to be the most valuable asset she had. She also hadn't had the bandwidth to build it out. We added welcome sequences, broadcast campaigns timed to drops and seasonal pushes, and a back-in-stock flow tied to product availability, so the list she'd been growing for two years finally started doing real work.
ROAS, CPM, daily revenue against daily target, all in a format she could read between farm chores and shipping orders. Within a few weeks Jenni was asking about ROAS on our calls before we got to it. The honest math made the next call easy: what to push, what to pull back, and how much to put into the daily budget tomorrow.
A 30-minute conversation about going from organic to paid, what predictability actually looks like, and the part of running a family business no one warns you about.
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