Herbal Collective Source

By Marilyn Zink

I gave a speech this past Saturday to members of the Therapeutic Touch Association at their spring conference in Burnaby, B.C.  The speech was the same title as this blog post as I want to share some of it with you.

I have been growing a garden, particularly a herb garden, for 17 years now.  I started soon after we got our first house and our son, now a strapping teenager, was born soon after that. I started a business when our son was six months old, so I guess you could say I saw the similarities between business and gardening as I grew both at the same time.

Whether you grow a business or a garden, it helps if you have a plan to be successful. Simply putting plants randomly in the ground without giving it much thought doesn’t make sense.

So when you start a business, you need the ’seed’ of an idea, you need to lay the ‘groundwork’ and you need a good location for your business to take advantage of the sun (customers). But of course that’s not enough to make it grow.

You need two other important ingredients. You need ‘rain’ which is the advertising to let customers know about you and you need ‘fertilizer’ which is the specialized marketing - such as networking, social media, business associations.

Just like a garden - things aren’t going to grow right away. You have to tend the garden of your business. It takes a lot of initial effort and time, just as it did for my garden, before things start to pay off.

When your business does start to grow, the weeds will grow as well. These are the weeds of laziness, procrastination, fear, doubt and overwhelm. You have to pull those ‘weeds’ while they are still small or they will take over your garden.

A business has seasons, just like a garden. There is a period of rapid growth - the springtime, followed by a levelling off, summer, followed by another burst of growth, fall, followed by a dormant period, just like winter.  A business person needs to expect these periods and plan for them, as they will happen.

Finally, when your business is established it takes on a life of its own and grows without your constant care. But you still need to pay attention and maintain it so your business can flourish and be healthy for many years to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Moments with Marilyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.