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How To Grow Your Business Garden

When you’ve been in control of every aspect of your business and you’ve been handling every little thing, you’re on the tools and working on as well as in your business, it can be hard to let go. 

Obviously you need to let go for your business to grow and scale. But how do you do that?

The problem for a lot of people is that they see their business as an extension of themselves. They have a lot of identity tied up in it. In other words “I am my business”. So for me, if asked what I do I could answer “I work as a business coach” or “I am a business coach”. It’s quite a different way of seeing things. 

If you see your business as an extension of yourself you can face lots of extra challenges. If it’s not doing well for any reason (and there can be lots of reasons outside your control like covid and the GFC) you might see yourself as a failure rather than the reality your business is not doing as well as you’d like. 

If you see yourself as the failure, you’re likely to get disheartened and feel less motivated. You might stop enjoying your business as much. And maybe even let your attitude spill over to your team. 

One of the ways to start to see your business as separate from you is to look at it like a garden. You can plant things, you can feed them, you can do your best to nurture them but it doesn’t necessarily turn out exactly as expected. And that’s ok. 

If you see your business as a garden to tend, you might be disappointed if something doesn’t work but, like a gardener, you would be thinking more like “that thing didn’t work – maybe it needs more nurture or maybe I tried it at the wrong time, or didn’t provide the right conditions for it to grow.”

In our garden we’ve had things not do well in some areas and flourish in others. We’ve had some things take ages to grow and some take over. Some plants are more needy than others and take more effort, especially in the beginning, until they establish themselves. 

Think about your apprentices – they’re like little seeds when you get them. Not much good in their current form but full of potential. You nurture their growth and eventually you get a good strong team member. If you let them try to manage on their own you might get lucky and have one that thrives all by themselves or they may never sprout and you wonder why they’re not going well. 

That’s why it’s important to keep this garden metaphor in mind. If you know you need to nurture the seeds, you won’t resent having to spend so much time on your apprentices in the beginning.  

Just like a garden, your business will behave in some ways that are predictable and some that are not. You will try things that turn out differently than you expected. You will have some aspects that seem to be a grind to get going but you shift your perspective or you use a different approach and they flourish. 

Not only is it important to get that separation from your business to help you keep challenges in perspective, it will also help you make better decisions, ones for the benefit of your business – more big picture. 

You will be able to think about what your business needs and prioritise those things. It’s often the background stuff that really makes your garden thrive. It’s not pulling out that pesky weed the minute it raises its head. It’s the fertilising and the mulching and the watering. 

Try to think about what those things are for your business. They are quite individual to you and where your business is at on its growth journey right now. 

But you might have guessed that the obvious one is business coaching. Another important one is systematisation; having automated processes for every aspect of your business. Another is structure; having a structured business so it can run without you present in every part of it. 

These are just a couple of the ‘background’ parts that a business needs to be consistently tending to for it to grow properly, like those vegetables in your garden. 

Want your business to flourish like a properly tended to and cared for garden? 

Need some help doing so? 

Get in contact with me. I’m happy to have a chat about how I can help your garden flourish. 

There are four ways you can engage with me:

1. Subscribe to these emails and get them once a week in your inbox so you never miss a video from me.

2. Join the Trades Business Toolshed Facebook Group where you can watch these videos, ask me questions or talk to your peers.

3. Attend my next Tradie Profit Webinar.

4. Book yourself a 10-minute chat with me. We’ll talk about whether coaching is right for you now and if it is, we’ll go further into the process before you have to make your mind up.

See you later.

Click here to book a money maker call with Jon.