business development

What Pruning My Shrubs Taught Me About Business

Last Friday when my family and I went outside in an effort to tame our wild land, I didn’t expect to get business education.  But I am grateful that I did!  We have 10 acres of land.  9 acres or so are forest.  And Everything is wild! Even though we worked hard last weekend, it barely made a dent.  So here’s my words of wisdom from my weekend in gardening.

1. Nothing major gets fixed in a day, or even two:  It’s going to take months for our forest to be clear enough to walk through without getting tangled up in bushes and shrubs.  It’s going to take years before our land is exactly what we want it to be.  We spent Friday night and Saturday working on the yard and yes it would be great if that took care of everything.  But that is simply not realistic.  Success happens as we create consistent effort over long periods of time.  Next weekend, we will work on some more projects.  (This time armed with a machete.  It really is that wild!)
2. Celebrate the little stuff: Even though we didn’t tame the land in a weekend, that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy and celebrate what we got done last weekend!  We accomplished a lot! We (meaning my husband) fixed the lawn mower and mowed the lawn.  We (meaning me) pruned all of the shrubs in the front of the house and pulled weeds in the flower beds.  We installed our fence for the goats and bought all of the materials to build their shelter.  That is worth celebrating.  It’s not done, but we made progress.
3. Pruning is essential: We’ve lived here for 2 months and the shrubs were long over due for some pruning.  They were wild, too tall and had no shape.  As I was pruning them, I talked to the shrubs.  (I am weird like that.)  I told them how much I valued their growth but that if they were going to be the beautiful shrubs I knew they could be that we would have to get rid of what was not serving them well.  In my mind I was thinking of all the pruning I had done and still needed to do in my business over the last few months.  I’ve had people leave my team.  I’ve had to make changes to my programs and my systems.  Sometimes those changes are hard to make.  And they can be emotional.  It is hard to let people and things go that you love and have served you well.  But if you are going to be as amazing as you can, you must be willing to prune.  I got emotional while I was cutting my shrubs.  I wondered if it hurt the shrub as much as it sometimes hurts me to go through the pains of managing growth.  But when it was all done, and I was looking at my beautiful, shapely shrubs, I was reminded that the end goal makes it worth it.
4. Enlist support: there is no way I could have done everything we got done last weekend on my own.  I am so grateful for my teams.  I’m grateful for my family team who can get in there and get the job done and be cute while doing it. And I’m grateful for my business team who see things from a different perspective than I do.  They think of new ideas.  They are more skilled than me in many areas and they manage areas I cannot manage on my own so that we can serve more people. For more details: http://amywalkerconsulting.com/