The Seed.
The Business Garden Series – Part 2The ideas, the visions, the experiments
You stand in your business garden, full of excitement, your eyes wandering across the flower beds and vegetable patches. Sowing season is about to begin, and you have tended to the foundation, ready for the great experiment to start.
I think back to the time in spring when I had prepared it all. When I was done pushing one wheel barrow load of horse manure after the next from my neighbour’s house down the narrow gravel track back to our place, mulling it into the soil, arms sore and sweaty. When I had unloaded packs of fresh planting soil from the car and got the potting station behind the house ready for action, and, to my surprise, found dozens of old but beautiful flower pots in the earth cellar beneath the house, ready for planting.
The moment when you sense that your foundation is ready to move on to the next step is exhilarating. The story is about to begin, or a new chapter is about to be written. You are ready to start laying the first brick to what is to become a new aspect of your world.
And so you gather your seed packages – or, in terms of your business, your ideas.
If you’re like me, you find yourself with an avalanche of ideas rolling over you on a daily basis, and have a list of them on your phone that, by now, is so long that you get a sore thumb scrolling to the bottom to add yet another one.
And now that the soil is prepped, you’re ready to grab them, sow them, and can’t wait to see them grow.
In theory, it seems so simple.
But then you find yourself with the first questions that roll in: What do I begin with? Where do I plant what and when? Which plant will thrive next to another, which idea will make sense to pursue within the big picture of what you’re creating?
That’s the moment where the excitement plummets. What felt like a sea of potential suddenly feels like a tsunami of overwhelm. And maybe, like I did, you react by just doing something. Aimlessly chucking some seeds in the soil. Forgetting to water them. Then remembering, then overwatering, then panicking.
Maybe you seek out advice online, lose yourself scrolling, and suddenly find yourself ten steps ahead, already thinking about the heirloom tomato sauce you could make from tomatoes you haven’t even planted yet (but the recipe sounds so good!).
Eventually, you come back to the now. You take a breath. Sit down. Gather your seeds and begin to plan. Not to have a perfect strategy, but to have a rough map to follow. So that you understand the ecosystem you work within, before you begin to co-shape it.
After building up the foundation, this is the next step towards building a regenerative brand: getting intimate with the ecosystem of your business, and choosing carefully where to plant which seeds – how to bring your ideas to life.
And just like seeds, some of these ideas will take root in unlikely places, some will thrive, some will simply not grow at all, despite your efforts to create the best possible conditions.
New ideas land all the time, and your work’s ecosystem evolves continuously. Each day you learn something new about it. And yet, if you listen closely, there is an underlying feel of what the ecosystem is. Just like a garden that you enter, getting a sense of its character, your business’ and brand’s ecosystem has an essence to it that underpins the ongoing process of change. That red thread is deeply connected to you, to your people and to the vision and mission you have for your work. And it is crucial to the process of branding that you identify it, and walk with it. It is the very thing that will help you decide over and over again which seeds to plant, which ones to store away for another time, and which ones to let go of.
To grow a thriving garden you don’t need to plant everything you can. Quite the opposite. You plant what organically fits into it, not what requires an excess amount of fertiliser, extracting from both you and your foundation beyond its limits.
What ideas will you plant next in your business garden?
I don’t want to grow a tropical garden in the Nordics with you, I want to find out what is actually true and natural for your ecosystem, and build a brand with you that enables organic growth, restoring work for you and your team to become something that adds to life, rather than taking from it.
Join me for a free 30 minute call to discuss your vision and your ideas, and how they fit into the ecosystem of your business – and find out if your business garden could benefit from a (re-) branding process with me: