Why building a business is like growing a garden

Last week we talked about the struggle to get clients. And you discovered that underneath all of it is hiding a gap in your sales chain.

Today I’ll show you the four parts of that sales chain. And for that, I need to take you into a garden.

This is a garden with rows of vegetables, fruit trees with herbs tangled in among them. Some things in the garden you can pluck and eat this week. Others you won’t taste for another year or two.

That’s not so different from running a business. It grows. It has seasons. It needs tending. You plant seeds, some sprout, some don’t. The same goes with clients, some conversations turn into work, others don’t. Others just take time.

A garden isn’t only beautiful to look at. You grow it to eat. To feed yourself, month after month, through summer and through winter. That’s the whole point of it.

But most traditional start-up business advice is optimised to grow a monoculture. You plant one crop at scale and harvest it all at once. Then you’re left with bare soil until you start again. That’s the feast and famine so many of us know. A big project, then nothing, then the scramble.

And what you need to grow your business is a big garden full of food. Something with enough variety that it keeps feeding you. The anchor client on a retainer. The steady referrals. The smaller pieces growing alongside. Things ripening in different seasons, so you’re never staring at an empty field wondering where your next meal comes from.

You already know a seed doesn’t sprout the day you plant it. Some seeds take a season, some take years. And you have to water what you’ve sown, and rushing it doesn’t work (it can even harm it often). So you don’t panic when a garden takes its time. Instead you tend it, and you trust the season.

And that patience is most of what separates growing a business from burning out trying to force one.

So over the next four letters, we’ll walk the garden, one part at a time.

Designing it. Are you growing the right thing, for the right people, in the right climate?

Sowing it. Do the right people know you exist?

Tending it. Are you nurturing the relationships, so trust has time to grow?

Harvesting it. Are you turning that trust into work?

Someone in the four parts above is where your sales chain breaks today.

So today’s question for you is this: when you picture your own garden, which part feels overgrown, and which one have you barely touched?

I’ll help you find the answer to that question on my upcoming workshop on 5 August. We’ll map your garden together and find the part that needs you most.

For more information about it, follow this link.

Come find your gap.

With you in this,
Lilli

P.S. Next time we start digging into the first part of the garden. Designing it. Because before you worry about anyone finding you, you have to be growing something people actually want.