Lawn Care Lessons for Entrepreneurs

A business is an organization that grows together, covering a territory of society, and produces enough resources to recover from failure, provide a wide support network, and reach new heights.  Just like a lawn.

Lawns have a lot to offer, it turns out.

Starting, growing and managing my lawn has taught me a great deal about business over the last several years.  Seriously, the two have things in common.  And these lessons are reinforced by experience in starting, growing, and managing my business.

‘Little Bit Goes a Long Way

When I mow my lawn every week, fertilize two times a year, and make sure it’s watered well enough – for the weather – everything is great.  Great doesn’t mean perfect.  But these simple, repetitive tasks make sure that brown spots grow green again, pesky weed infestations are resolved by next season, and my clients stay happy.  (My lawn “clients” are family, visitors, and the scary neighborhood association elite police squad, by the way.)

Who knew that running a business is similar to your maintaining a lawn?

It’s not that great ideas or efforts aren’t effective – they are in both lawn care and in business.  That’s not the point.

The point is that great business leaders do a little bit all the time.  They also do heaving lifting at times, but that’s not what makes them great.  It’s the little things that make their organizations grow and thrive.

No businesses will be perfect over time, but entrepreneurial leaders that do the simple, repetitive tasks to keep on track cause their business can grow and overcome obstacles.

Simple Repetitive Tasks:

• Sample your product quality
• Employ good management techniques
• Develop and coach your team
• Reconcile accounts monthly
• Review financials regularly
• Recharge – find time to clock out 

Mow Every Week – or – Consistency is Greatness

My lawn has taught me that consistent effort pays dividends and that super-effort is not as lucrative. When I go to great lengths with my lawn to fix things, that great effort usually results short-term gain and long term loss.  With my lawn, I’m talking about recovering from poor maintenance and affecting minor changes, mostly – but it’s applicable to most business needs and situations.  With additional effort, my lawn can get fixed, but that super-effort is rewarded with persistent inaction.  Maybe this persistent inaction phenomenon isn’t true at first -because I want great lawn – but, over time, my efforts drop dramatically.  I don’t know exactly why this, but it always happens.  Maybe it’s burnout.

On the other hand, when I do a little bit every week, things stay green, soft, and the lawn is able to recover from the normal mistakes and “abuse” that occur.  (Face it:  Lawns are meant to be abused, right?)

Adding low frequency, high energy (E) into the system results in low consistence (c) over time and less gain.  Adding high frequency, low energy into the system (e) results in high consistency (C) and results in huge gain.  This is proven by experimental method; so don’t try to argue the empirical science.

In fact, when my business is suffering, I can usually trace the cause back to this simple principal and it makes me wish that I followed my own advice.  Consistently do the small things and save the super-effort lifting for very rare occasions.

Be great!  Make time to do the simple little things all the time.  How hard is that? 

Use the Right Tools

You’d think that this right tool concept would be simple to grasp, but years of not using the right tools and watching others do the same teaches me that we have much to learn about tool selection.  My lawn made this lesson simple and clear for me, but it is also applicable to business on any scale.

With respect to my lawn, I really want a combination of things: inexpensive, reliable, powerful, and sexy.  If you’re keeping score here, you know that that list is impossible to achieve.

Where do you compromise?  This is the art.

In business, choosing the right tool can be the difference between profits and losses – I know this from laboratory experimentation.  Every situation and business concept is different, so it wouldn’t help anyone to list my good tools versus my bad tools, but here are a couple of conceptual things that I reconsider on a regular basis.

• Perception and High Cost/High Value vs. Low Cost/Low Value
• Shiny Things: Computers, gear, signage, ads, website – the black hole of thought
• Revenue Generators:  People cost, procedures, sales costs, marketing budget, key partners
• Expenses:  Experts (Attorneys, Accountants, Janitors), Service Providers, Key Partners
• Paperwork:  Lending methods, banking relationships, insurance policies, internal controls
• Mundane Things:  Desks, Chairs, Paint Colors, Filing Systems

Wow.  What a list. 

Buy the right lawnmower for your business and reap the rewards.  Buy the wrong weed-eater and loose your ass.  Choose wisely. 

Watch Out for the Weeds

Doing a little bit consistently over a long period of time get’s you most of the way there in terms of building an organization that can tolerate a wide variety of conditions and threats.  But, as my lawn continually teaches me is that no matter how good and consistent your efforts, you still have to keep a diligent lookout for weeds.  Weeds can take over and when they do it’s not pretty.

Weeds in business are unavoidable.  They can take the form of internal culture changes, product quality issues, competitor challenges, and a very wide family of money weed species.

How do you find the weeds in business?  You have to go and look for them, stupid.  Weeds don’t look like the rest of the lawn.  They show up in irregular actions by team members, loss in revenue in a particular market sector, or as an expense spike.

Keep a close eye on weeds in all levels of your business.  Pull the weeds as soon as you find them and your consistent effort will automatically make sure that no weeds grow in its place.

It might be simplistic to correlate maintaining a lawn to managing millions of dollars, peoples’ livelihoods, and huge personal investments, but I believe in learning lessons everywhere that I can.  And this simplistic corollary proves to be spot on.

So, go walk your lawn and see for yourself what’s growing.