Falling Short of my Own Expectations
Over the past few weeks, I have been working to launch a digital marketing business. It has been a lot of work to try and learn how google ads work, let alone all of the other platforms. Between my day job, launching a side business, being in a long distance relationship, and taking care of my cats, I have been a bit overwhelmed.
Sometimes I worry that I am too hard on myself. I tell myself a story that if I was smarter and better I would already have my company set up with 5-10 clients. I push myself extra hard to learn as much as I can in a short period of time to get the business up and running, but I also want my service to provide high levels of value to my customers and I need to prove to myself I can do that first.
So not only am I trying to learn digital marketing, but I am also attempting to run advertisement campaigns and reach out to business owners to work for them. It’s a great opportunity to learn marketing, sales, and how to run a business all in one go, but it is tiring.
How to Grow a healthy Forest
My day job is in forestry and I spend most of my time around trees rather than people. Currently, a colleague and I are working on a project to create an uneven aged forest to promote biodiversity, climate adaptation, and forest resiliency. You don’t need to know what any of that means, but what you do need to know is that this project has a time line of 100 years. Our project will likely outlive us and see one or two more generations of foresters working on it.
Trees don’t track time like we do as humans. Seconds, minutes, days, they’re all meaningless to a tree. Forest management is not tracked in days or months, it is tracked in years, tens, sometimes even hundreds of years. We slowly implement our plans to create healthy forests.
Forest management can seem a bit counterintuitive, as we usually cut and remove trees from the forest. This article is not about the intricacies of forest management however, I was simply giving context that forest management involves cutting trees. All of that to say the timing of our projects is quite important.
Go too quickly and you will dwindle your resources, plus you create a forest that doesn’t have the right structure to be strong against natural disturbance. Go too slowly and again your resources start to dwindle as the once healthy, large trees are now dying. There is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. You go just fast enough that you can get value from the resources, but slow enough that you aren’t leaving the forest vulnerable. Having the right timing allows the forest to have a strong healthy structure of mature trees as new life begins to grow.
Learning From Mother Nature
I think the same principles of forest management can be applied to starting a business. Grow to quickly and your business has a shaky foundation. Grow to slowly and the customers you were looking to provide value to have moved on to something new.
Why do I put all of this pressure on myself to grow my business quickly? Mostly because I am impatient and want this business to work, or fail quickly so I can move on to the next project.
The goal of forest management isn’t to grow quickly, it is to grow sustainably. Without sustainable growth the forest would start to deteriorate until eventually there was little to no growth. If I rush my business, it is likely to fall apart as I stack more and more on top of my shoulders without the strong foundation to support me.
Not only is my business likely to crumble if it grows to quickly, but I am as well. There would be immense stress involved with trying to run a business that is constantly on the verge of collapse. It would prevent you from scaling the business any further as all of your time would be spent running around and putting out fires.
Building a slow, sustainable business more aligns with my goals of personal freedom. I think it will also allow me to build a more successful business in the long run.
How to Grow a Healthy Business
Just like growing a healthy forest, growing a healthy business takes time. It seems clear to me now, that pushing myself to learn as quickly as possible and to acquire as many new customers as I can reach in a matter of weeks, isn’t the most sustainable business practice. It seems much more logical to chip away at learning digital marketing and starting with one or two clients and focusing my attention on them.
I think for many of us, we see what other people are doing on social media and believe that is what success has to look like. Delving into business related content, I have been surrounded by videos of multimillionaire entrepreneurs talking about how they scaled their businesses from 30 million to 80 million in just two years. Is that really the success I want?
The whole point of me starting a business was to have more freedom over my time, to be able to spend time with friends and family and to do things I enjoyed rather than what I am told to do (not that I don’t enjoy my job now).
I need to reevaluate what a successful business looks like to me and I need to realize that growing slowly is not only alright, it is actually the goal. In growing slowly I can build a strong foundation and have good systems in place for the business to run smoothly.
What lessons can you take from nature to put into your own life?
Remember, the goal isn’t growth, it is sustainability.
