How gardening teaches you this crucial lesson about scaling your business

Build it once and sell it unlimited times

My husband has green fingers.

He loves nature and enjoys gardening.

Indoor, home gardening to be specific.

Not the wide space 10000 acres type of gardening.

We are living in Singapore and physical space will always be limited, vertically or horizontally.

So the cost of renting a land space here is jacked up pretty high.

Therefore, he scratches his itch with tiny pots stationed where the area in our house is the sunniest.

Every morning, I know where to look for him.

His daily routine will be to go to the backyard and check out his plants, one pot at a time, making sure no pests like aphids are feeding on the leaves and fruits.

Then he will do some watering and give them so much love, that I get jealous.

To me, it’s a lot of hard work and time. The worst thing is to spend all of that effort to see your plants wither and die.

Especially you will have to be physically present to “feed” and water the plants all the time.

If you are not there, they die!

I shouted at him from across the living room:

“Why don’t you set up something to water your plants automatically, wouldn’t that be cool?”

I was just acting smart, giving him my ideas without having to do anything. He has a degree in Engineering, surely he can come up with such things.

“I love doing this, I don’t see it as work at all. Setting up something automatic takes up more time!”, he shouted back.

Fine, I thought, if that’s what he wants.

One day, a group of friends invited us to join them for a road trip to Malaysia.

My team is running my business like a well-oiled machine and my kids are on a school holiday.

So we didn’t need much planning.

We agreed and left on a Friday and planned to return in two days.

148 miles away from Singapore, my friend’s car bonnet started spewing smoke and steam.

We were lucky it was still functional to get us to the nearest hotel to stay for the night.

But, the next day we couldn’t start the car.

There was nothing we could do on our own, so we had to hire someone to tow it to the nearest mechanic to get it fixed.

It was fixable, but not something that can be done overnight.

We ended up having to stay in Malaysia for four days.

It was meant to be a relaxing trip but turned out to be a panicky time for my husband.

He was worried for his plants.

He spent months and years cultivating them.

Whenever he had to travel, he would ask his sister for help to pop by and water the plants.

But this time, since it was a short trip, he thought the plants would be alright.

Now, four days? He wasn’t sure, so he was in anxiety mode.

Lucky for him, we got back to see his plants doing fine.

This time, without thinking, he quickly set up a watering system.

Now, his plants are watered automatically every day, without him to be there.

Here’s the thing, you may love what you do and wish to do it every day.

But no matter how much passion you have, life happens and there will be a time you may not be able to do so.

What you will want instead, is to have the choice or the option to do what you love doing whenever you want.

You can by setting up the right systems to deliver it. That will help you design your business to scale.

Start by asking yourself this question:

What is the one task you need to do every day repeatedly that takes more than 10 minutes?

Then, either hire someone or leverage tools to complete it for you.

This is better than having to rely on yourself all the time to do the same thing over and over again every day.

It’s upfront work, but you only need to build it once.

Marilyn

P.S.

I’m creating a step-by-step guide on how to go from burnout to building a service business that runs without you.

Productized Kit will be available for pre-order with early bird pricing.

The target launch date will be 17 October 2024 with a price increase.

The guide is not ready yet because I want to make sure I’m creating something you want.

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