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Harvie is Hiring a Business Development Representative (Remote)

About Us

Harvie (http://harvie.farm) connects local consumers with local farmers. Harvie is revolutionizing how local food is distributed by relentlessly focusing on the consumer experience. We believe that it should be as easy to buy local food as it is buy from Amazon.com.

Our company was started in 2006 to meet the technology and marketing needs of local farmers across the US, Canada, and internationally and has served 1000’s of farms in the last 14 years. The Harvie platform was introduced in late 2016 to address the changing landscape of food buying and to help farmers grow sales and profit by making local food more accessible. In 2020, Harvie will help 200 farmers serve approximately 100,000 end consumers.

About the Position

In the business development role at Harvie you will be responsible for prospecting, consulting with, and bringing new farms and distributors on to the platform. You will need to learn about the platform quickly and communicate effectively with prospects. You need to qualify leads and only bring the best suppliers on to the platform that will be good long-term partners for Harvie’s growth. You are the front line of Harvie so you need to communicate what you learn, objections, and potential growth opportunities back to the product team, the success team, and leadership. You will work directly with Harvie’s CEO, Simon Huntley, to achieve the sales goals.

Responsibilities:

  • Quickly become an expert on what Harvie can do for farms and distributors
  • Identify new prospects and respond to inbound requests
  • Qualify leads and lead them through the decision making process
  • Hit daily, weekly, and quarterly sales activity goals
  • Record all sales activity in our CRM
  • Communicate with success, product, and leadership on how to improve the overall quality of the service

Important details:

  • Full-time position
  • Salary range: $50,000-75,000 + goal bonus
  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company!
  • Work remote at your home office
  • Remote work office stipend
  • Equal Opportunity Employer

About You

  • Ability to explain technical concepts in a non-technical manner
  • Amazing writing skills
  • Comfortable running demos and speaking on the phone
  • You have the hustle to consistently build your pipeline, close deals, and hit goals
  • You have experience in a fast-paced sales environment
  • Ability to multi-task, prioritize, and handle time effectively
  • Not afraid to take risks
  • You will start outreach on Day 1 at Harvie!
  • You are relentless, but not annoying

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to simon@harvie.farm with subject line “Business Development at Harvie”.

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Making connections between farmers and consumers in the midst of a pandemic

(For those that want to get right to the point…. we are taking sign-ups for home delivery in Pittsburgh via Harvie Farms Pittsburgh and also we are shipping meat to a 5 state radius of western Pennsylvania now via our Stockman Share if you are not in the Pittsburgh metro area. For a longer story, see below!)

Jubilee Hilltop Ranch, one of the farms that supplies meat for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh boxes, lost 97% of their revenue when COVID-19 related shut downs closed restaurants across Allegheny County. With Harvie and the support of our members across the region, we were able to fill many of those orders for Neal and his family at Jubilee Hilltop Ranch. Neal talked about this experience recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Biiu9JmAZY

When we launched Harvie Farms Pittsburgh in January, we had no idea what was coming in March, but our work felt more important than ever this year. In the middle of a pandemic, it felt good to be of use: supporting farms and distributing food directly to the door.

My vision with Harvie since we launched four years ago has been to make buying from local farms as easy as buying from Amazon. The benefits of local agriculture are many: fresh and delicious food, less transportation in distribution, growing the local economy, building community, and supporting farms that are taking care of their land in a responsible manner.

However, we recognize that the experience of buying from local farmers must be more convenient. There has been a missing piece between the farmer and the consumer. Part of it is technology that can serve as that bridge (and that is what we worked on for the first few years of Harvie’s life) but there is also distribution. As a local food system, we have not figured out how to make that direct connection in a way that works for farmers, distributors, retailers, and consumers at large scale. I believe Harvie and especially the model we are piloting at Harvie Farms Pittsburgh is part of that answer.

In essence, we help small farms beat the big guys.

Although our overall food supply was never really in doubt this Spring, the sight of empty grocery store shelves got us thinking as a society about where our food comes from. This resulted in a huge sales increase for the local food economy. Our network of farms across the United States and Canada saw a 500% increase in year-over-year sales.

Fast forward to August and we are delivering over 500 boxes per week to our Pittsburgh community and we are working on our logistics so we can serve more people. We are opening a third delivery day to keep up with demand, so as of today we are open for sign ups again!

To sign up for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh visit:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-pittsburgh

We have been sold out most of the year and we expect these new slots to sell out quickly!

If you are outside of Allegheny county and the delivery area for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh, or know someone who is, I encourage you to check out our new option that we call the Stockman Share. It is a meat box delivered straight from Jubilee Hilltop Ranch. For delivery, we are using the FedEx network so we can serve a much larger population base. Here is a map of the delivery area:

Sign up here:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-stockman-share

Thank you for your support of our “Harvie farms” in these strange times. I continue to believe that buying and eating local food is one of the most concrete acts you can take to make a difference in the world and in your own life. Every dollar that you spend in the local food economy is a vote for this kind of agriculture.

-Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie

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Harvie is Hiring a Farm Success Specialist (Remote)

We are hiring for a Farm Success Specialist in our Farm Success Department (Remote) 

About Us

Harvie (http://harvie.farm) connects local consumers with local farmers who deliver shares of farm fresh products customized to their personal preferences.

Our company was started in 2006 to meet the technology and marketing needs of local farmers across the US, Canada, and internationally and has served 1000’s of farms in the last 13 years. The Harvie platform was introduced in late 2016 to address the changing landscape of food buying and to help farmers grow sales and profit by making local food more accessible through a customer friendly CSA / farm share model. The concept has grown rapidly. In 2020, Harvie will help 200 farmers serve approximately 100,000 end consumers

About the Position

The Farm Success Specialist is responsible for ensuring every farm is successful on our platform. This means managing the entire farmer lifecycle starting with initial implementation and onboarding, providing training and resources, conducting needs analysis, new season set ups, and ensuring our farms reach their goals. You’ll work side by side (virtually of course) with a team who is as passionate about the success of farms as you are. 

We are an all remote team so collaboration, communication and the ability to document and manage tasks are key!

Responsibilities:

  • Become an expert on what Harvie can do for farms. 
  • Manage assigned farm accounts with focus on growth, retention and training.
  • Act as the key point of contact for assigned accounts.
  • Handle a high volume of requests from farms, provide appropriate solutions and follow up as needed. 
  • Keep up to date with documentation on all interactions.  
  • Conduct various calls with farm accounts throughout the season to include new season set ups, auto renew, software training, end of season calls, etc. 
  • Responsible for all assigned accounts onboarding and implementation on the platform.
  • Provide marketing consultation services to key farm accounts.
  • Track and meet KPI’s 
  • Work with the dedicated support person to identify issues and work with the farm to resolve

Important details:

  • Full-time position
  • Competitive salary adjusted upward with experience
  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company! 
  • Work remote at your home office or in our office in Pittsburgh
  • Remote work office stipend if working remotely
  • Office on North Shore of Pittsburgh, 10 minute walk from downtown, free parking
  • Regular weekday schedule with some regular weekend coverage required (typically one weekend per month)
  • Equal Opportunity Employer

About You

  • Highly organized to manage multiple goals simultaneously
  • Puzzle-solving — deductive ability to get to root causes of problems
  • Comfort with friendly phone and email support — farmer support is unscripted and requests are often unique
  • Ability to explain technical concepts in a non-technical manner
  • Comfortable running demos and speaking on the phone
  • Ability to write courteous, friendly, and clear support emails
  • Ability to handle a high volume of communications from various channels 
  • Ability to learn or have experience with web-based utilities such as Google Suite (Gmail, Google Docs, Hangouts, Google Sheets), Zendesk, Atlassian Suite, Slack, and Zoom
  • Ability to work independently yet collaboratively

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to stefanie@harvie.farm with subject line “Farm Success Specialist at Harvie”.

 

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Harvie is Hiring a Head of Customer Support

Harvie is seeking an experienced and passionate customer support leader for our high volume support department. Our support desk currently handles over 200 email tickets and 70 calls per day from both farm suppliers and consumers. We are looking for a candidate with vision who can help us create amazing customer experiences by putting into place best practices around customer support. You are someone who can get their hands dirty in the day-to-day of support while building an effective team and planning for the future. You can effectively communicate with the product and development team to support continued growth of the software to reduce customer support requests, and have the experience to operationalize our efforts with best practices in documentation, support operations, and Zendesk administration.

Responsibilities

  • Establish required measurement criteria and KPIs to track customer support performance
  • Lead and manage customer support team employees and provide direction and support to successfully enable their responsibilities
  • Communicate with leadership and the wider organization on customer support challenges and successes
  • Establish training program for customer support employees
  • Resolve complex customer support issues

Requirements

  • 3+ years experience managing customer support teams, ideally in a rapidly scaling startup environment
  • Expertise in managing Zendesk Professional, and ability to identify best practices (And anti-patterns) in configuration and use.
  • Enthusiastic and creative leader with the ability to inspire others
  • Analytical and process-oriented mindset
  • Extensive and proven skills in account management, business development and generating revenue
  • Experience and interest in agriculture and food is a plus!

Why Work at Harvie?

  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company
  • Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 20 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to simon@harvie.farm with subject line “Leading Customer Support at Harvie”.

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Harvie is Hiring a Senior Symfony Developer

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven PHP/Symfony lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the performance, maintainability and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards, execution and testing, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

  • Develop new features and assist in their design
  • Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
  • Maintain high code quality standards
  • Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for development

Requirements

  • A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
  • Expert in PHP7 with strong knowledge of Object Oriented concepts
  • Experience in Symfony, or another PHP framework (Zend, Laravel, etc.)
  • Excellent relational database skills with MySQL
  • Experience with building restful JSON web services
  • Experience writing automated tests with PHPUNIT, Codeception, or another testing framework
  • Passionate about code optimization

Why Work at Harvie?

  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company
  • Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 20 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “Symfony at Harvie”.

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Harvie is hiring Support Specialists

We are hiring immediately for our customer support team. This will be a contract-to-hire position for a 3-month contract with the option to extend at the end of that period if we like working together. Remote OK.

Harvie (http://harvie.farm) connects local consumers with local farmers who deliver shares of farm fresh products customized to their personal preferences.

Our company was started in 2006 to meet the technology and marketing needs of local farmers across the US, Canada, and internationally and has served 1000’s of farms in the last 13 years. The Harvie platform was introduced in late 2016 to address the changing landscape of food buying and to help farmers grow sales and profit by making local food more accessible through a customer friendly CSA / farm share model. The concept has grown rapidly. In 2020, Harvie will help 200 farmers serve approximately 100,000 end consumers.

To keep up with growth, the Harvie Team is hiring a Harvie Support Specialist.

The Harvie Support Specialists work as the front line of customer support for both assisting our partner farms as well as their customers. Support requests come in through several channels, primarily email, but also phone and online chat. Support for our partner farms includes everything from setting up new accounts to training farm employees on software features to everyday problem solving. Supporting our farmers’ end users often involves more mundane tasks such as helping them get signed up, scheduling vacations, billing questions and other account management issues.

As with any small company, this position will be multidisciplinary and will occasionally include work involving other aspects of the company including marketing, product development and testing.

This is an exciting opportunity for independent, self-starting individuals who are ready to grow with Harvie.

Requirements:

  • Highly organized to manage multiple goals simultaneously
  • Puzzle-solving — deductive ability to get to root causes of problems
  • Comfort with friendly phone support — support is unscripted and requests are often unique
  • Ability to explain technical concepts in a non-technical manner
  • Comfortable running demos and speaking on the phone
  • Ability to write courteous, friendly, and clear support emails
  • Ability to learn or have experience with web-based utilities such as Google Suite (Gmail, Google Docs, Hangouts, Google Sheets), Zendesk, Atlassian Suite, Slack, and Zoom

Important details:

  • Full-time position
  • Competitive salary adjusted upward with experience
  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation (after going full-time)
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company! (after going full-time)
  • Work remote at your home office or in our office in Pittsburgh
  • Office on North Shore of Pittsburgh, 10 minute walk from downtown, free parking
  • Regular weekday schedule with some regular weekend coverage required
  • Equal Opportunity Employer

Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to simon@harvie.farm with subject line “Work at Harvie”.

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Front End Web Developer, ReactJS / React Native

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven ReactJS lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the user experience and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards and user experience, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

  • Develop new features and assist in their design
  • Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
  • Maintain high code quality standards
  • Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for front end development

Requirements

  • Design oriented developer with a passion for elegant code. 
  • Understand of object oriented CSS, LESS and/or SASS
  • A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
  • Expert in React
  • Typescript
  • React Native and experience developing native mobile apps is a plus
  • UI/Component Library (blueprintjs.com, bulma.io)

Why Work at Harvie?

  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company
  • Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 15 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “ReactJS at Harvie”.

 

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Harvie Farms Local: An open-sourced model for online, home-delivered farm distribution in the age of COVID-19, and beyond

In January, I launched a partnership with a Pittsburgh based farmer and local foods distributor, Neil Stauffer, called Harvie Farms Pittsburgh.

The concept, that I call “Harvie Farms Local”, is about more than just Pittsburgh and is rather simple. It is a multi-farm local food distributor using the customer-friendly power of the Harvie platform and delivers direct to the consumer’s door.

The model has been very successful from a sales point of view. We have far surpassed our yearly goals already with very little marketing spend. In fact, we are working hard to just keep up with the demand for the program.

We have already started delivering, though the main season will start in late May. We are using Harvie’s “pop up farm stand” tools to run sales right now. The demand is huge. Last week, we sold out of farm boxes in 45 minutes.

My goal is not to compete with farms or existing distributors: what I want to do is build a successful farm product distribution system on top of Harvie that can then be used by farmers and other local entrepreneurs anywhere. In my view, figuring out this problem is what will truly change the game for local food economies. If we can perfect a distribution model that pays farmers to be farmers, rewards the costs of distribution, and serves the consumer well, local food can compete against national and international distribution.

In short, we need a viable business model for local foods distribution and I believe Harvie Farms Local can become that model. It is a business model, a spreadsheet, and a way of thinking that invites you to build a scaleable local foods distribution business from your farm or as a distribution business.

I conceived of this model before the threat of COVID-19 became apparent. In the meantime, this model has become even more relevant as demand for local food has surged, restaurants have closed, and online sales with home delivery is the preferred method for distribution.

Some key aspects of the “Harvie Farms Local” concept:

  • Multi-farm to fulfill a larger percentage of food for a household: a farm or small-scale distributor could fulfill this.
  • Goal of $1 million+ sales per farm distributor, because that is where the economies of scale start to get interesting
  • Thinking about distribution from a cost-of-goods-sold model — whether this is run by a farm or a distributor. 50-60% of the retail dollar goes to farm production, the rest needs to be allocated to the costs of distribution because it is costly and complex to run distribution as a stand-alone distributor or as part of a farm operation (ie packing materials, warehouse space, marketing, software, delivery, manager salaries etc). If a farm is running this program, there are essentially two distinct businesses: a production business and a distribution business.
  • Marketing is built into the model: 10% of revenue is ear-marked for marketing spend. This is very important for long term competitiveness in the marketplace.
  • Home delivery via a courier service
  • Simple for consumers to understand: One single large “farm box” with add-ons and a separate butcher box
  • Fully customizable to consumer via Harvie
  • Subscription + farm stand sales for one time boxes (with upgrade path and upsells for customers)
  • The free trial version of the program is that the potential customer simply puts in their email address, we give them a coupon code off their first delivery, then they get emails when a box is available for purchase. Harvie takes this raw traffic to the website and turns them into customers.
  • A packaging system using cardboard boxes with ice packs, liner bags, and insulating liners.

I want to “open source” the model to encourage you to build your own business in your local area. I want to share what we have learned so far, but understand that the Harvie Team will learn a lot more over the next 6-12 months. We want to learn beside you while we continue to develop the Harvie Farms Local concept and continue to develop the underlying Harvie software to further support the business model.

Let’s grow this model together. We can connect virtually and share a set of slides describing the business model, and a toolkit you can work with to adapt this to where you live.

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It’s a tough time for the world, but an exciting time for local food

In over 15 years working on farms and around farms, I’ve never seen anything like the last few weeks in the local food market. As restaurants close and cities shut down, the local food market is booming.

Our farmer’s sales at Harvie are up almost 200% in the pandemic crisis. If you are in the business of selling local food to consumers, you know how in-demand your products are right now!

It seems like a convergence of factors: people want to be closer to their food producers for perceived safety; they realized that maybe the grocery stores won’t always be full of food; they want to support their immune systems to fight this virus; they are cooking at home a lot more so they want great ingredients to cook with.

It all has resulted in a surge of demand for our food.

To be fair, this is also a difficult time of change. For farms that relied on restaurant or wholesale sales, there is a lot of pain ahead. Some farmers market are shutting down or requiring online pre-orders — many farmers are using Harvie for this. Many farmers are starting to do home delivery, which comes with many challenges — and Harvie is also built for this.

I have put everything on the line — financially, emotionally, and professionally — to build Harvie over the last 5 years. So to have worked on this problem of direct-to-consumer farm sales for years and now to have Harvie be part of the solution, it is gratifying to me. In times like these, it feels good to be useful.

One question I have: how long will this surge of demand last? Once we get beyond the crux of this crisis, will the demand continue? I think to an extent it will continue, but it is important to build systems on your farm that are habit-forming for these new customers, like building a subscription/membership program into your business like Harvie is built on. I think this is really important for long term business sustainability.

I wrote up a press release about the surge in demand which I will paste to the bottom of this email or grab it here:
https://www.harvie.farm/blog/press-release-demand-for-local-food-skyrockets-in-pandemic-crisis/

Please share this story with anyone you know in the media so we can get some press about what is going on in our industry.

I also want to put a huge shout-out to the team here at Harvie that has been working long hours since the beginning of this crisis to on-board new farmers, support new consumer members, set up pop-up farm stand sales, and build new tools into the Harvie platform. They have shown their commitment to this work and I couldn’t do it without them.

I’m interested in your stories. Are you seeing demand spike in your neck of the woods? What factors do you think are contributing to this increase in interest?

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Press release: Demand for Local Food Skyrockets in Pandemic Crisis

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 3/29/2020

Contact

Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie
412-352-9673
simon@harvie.farm
http://harvie.farm

Demand for Local Food Skyrockets in Pandemic Crisis

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Demand for local food on Harvie’s farm-to-consumer platform is up over 200% in COVID-19 crisis.

“It’s a convergence of factors,” says Simon Huntley of Harvie, “all of a sudden as grocery stores have been emptied, restaurants are closed, people are cooking at home more, and people want to take care of their health. In response, they want to secure local food directly from their local farmers.”

Harvie works with over 150 farms across the United States and Canada helping farms run a farm share which is a farm membership program (inspired by Community Supported Agriculture – CSA – programs) where local consumers can buy a flexible, customizable membership from a local farm and get deliveries throughout the growing season direct from their local farm. Consumers also have the option of purchasing one time orders through the farms.

“We’ve never seen demand quite like this for food from our farmers. We sent out an email to a few hundred people offering a home delivered farm box and ended up receiving more than an order per minute until we had to shut down sign ups. We originally weren’t planning to make deliveries until May, but circumstances have changed. For now the demand is outstripping the infrastructure for deliveries. We are working to expand our capacity to meet the expanded demand,” says Neil Stauffer, General Manager of Harvie Farms Pittsburgh which organizes home deliveries from multiple farms in the Pittsburgh area.

Buying a Harvie farm share or a CSA box from a farmer is a concrete way to support individual health, support a farmer, and ensure high quality food in the kitchen all season long.

Lisa Duff from Oak Spring Farm in Freeland, Maryland says, “There is an outburst of demand by customers who’ve never purchased from us before. People are grateful, thanking us for selling food direct and earlier in the season than we ever have. First time customers are marveling over the beauty of our fresh harvested greens, beets and radishes from our high tunnels. It feels good to provide our healthy, nutrient dense food in these uncertain times. It feels good to be part of the solution. Food is medicine!”

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