Kelly Schultz was 37 years old when he told people he was going to start a pumpkin farm. He had no farming background, no agricultural loans, and no proof of concept. He had an 85-acre cow farm next to his antique store in Clarence, New York, and a memory of a pumpkin patch he had visited in the early 1990s.
“Everybody laughed at me,” he told CNBC Make It.
Nobody’s laughing now. The Great Pumpkin Farm, which Schultz opened in 1996, generated $2 million in annual revenue in 2025 — and the farm is open just seven weeks a year, from late September through Halloween.
What This Actually Means
This is not a story about pumpkins. It’s a story about white space, timing, and what happens when you take a well-worn idea and execute it at a level nobody else in your market is willing to.
Schultz didn’t invent the pumpkin patch. He visited one, recognized an underdeveloped market, and made a bet that families would pay for a premium fall experience — not just a muddy lot with gourds. The original pumpkin patch he visited had “muddy parking lots and not a whole lot of restrooms,” he recalls. But there were “a zillion people” walking around. That was his market signal. He didn’t need a focus group. He needed better execution.
The distinction matters for every small business owner. Most business failures aren’t idea failures — they’re experience failures. Schultz entered an existing category and won by building something worth returning to. Today, some visitors come “almost every weekend” during the seven-week season.
The Numbers Behind It
The financials here are genuinely striking:
- $2 million in annual revenue from a 7-week operating window
- $650,000 was the original cost of the 85-acre property, purchased in the early 1990s
- $20 weekend admission ticket covers both days — all core activities included
- 100,000+ visitors drawn each fall
- 100+ seasonal workers hired for the 7-week run
- 25,000+ pumpkins stocked on-site each season
- The farm hosts a World Pumpkin Weigh-Off each October — this year’s winner: 1,908.5 pounds
For context, U.S. Halloween spending is expected to hit $13.5 billion in 2026, according to the National Retail Federation — with 42% of celebrating Americans planning to carve a pumpkin. Schultz positioned himself inside one of the most reliable consumer spending windows of the year, three decades before everyone else figured it out.
The Hustler’s Library Take
Here’s the part the CNBC story doesn’t spell out: Kelly Schultz built a defensible business by engineering a reason to come back. He didn’t just sell a product — he sold a ritual. Fall at The Great Pumpkin Farm is a repeating calendar event for families across Western New York. That’s not a transaction. That’s a subscription without the software.
The other underrated move: Schultz got earned media at launch by hosting the World Pumpkin Weigh-Off and paying out a $50,000 prize (covered by prize indemnity insurance). That stunt got him into “magazines and newspapers all over the world” in his first year. He spent marketing dollars like a founder, not a farmer — on coverage, not impressions. Thirty years before “earned media strategy” was a LinkedIn post, he was executing it with a 1,061-pound pumpkin.
Most business owners overthink the model and underthink the experience. Schultz did the opposite.
What You Should Do
1. Audit what part of your business could run on a compressed calendar. Schultz earns $2M from a 7-week sprint. What would happen if you concentrated your best offer, your best marketing, and your best customer experience into a single high-intensity season instead of spreading effort evenly across 52 weeks? Scarcity drives urgency. Urgency drives revenue.
2. Steal his launch playbook: fund a stunt, get the story, own the category. The weigh-off prize cost Schultz real money. But it got him global press in year one — before he had a brand, before he had a track record, before he had proof. Think about what you could put on the line to make your launch impossible to ignore. The prize indemnity strategy (paying an insurer a fraction of the payout in case someone wins) is still available and underused by small businesses today.
3. Design for return visits before you optimize for new customers. The Great Pumpkin Farm doesn’t need a massive ad budget because families are already planning their return before they’ve left. Your best marketing investment is in the experience that makes someone want to come back — not in the ad that barely gets them there the first time. Schultz keeps adding “something new, something fun” every year. That’s a retention strategy masquerading as a capital improvement.
The business has been profitable for over 25 years. Schultz’s son Ben now runs it alongside him. His grandkids are already helping out on weekends. That’s not a lifestyle business — that’s a legacy play, built one season at a time.
Read the full CNBC Make It story here. For more on building businesses with strong seasonal models and experience-first design, start thinking in longer cycles and learn how smart operators find asymmetric opportunities before the market catches up. For more analysis on how founders are building profitable businesses in 2026, visit the NRF Halloween spending data.
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