When Fred and I put our lives together, I moved from an apartment to a home with an extremely mature and under-managed yard. Before that, my “garden” consisted of a Jade plant that I decorated with lights at Christmas and a ragged fern in a raffia pot. I didn’t know a perennial from an annual or a bulb from a corm. I was ignorant of the effects of sun and shade and which plants should go where, so this yard was my education. Self-taught, I did a lot of research and made a lot of mistakes, but the discovery process was great fun. I trimmed a shaggy bush and found a Pieris Japonica. I added a walkway bordered by Impatiens to a dark area under a Magnolia tree. I pruned overgrown greenery and found a lovely Weeping Birch. I pulled out a lot of stuff that I threw in a pile for mulch. When I realized that it would probably be best for the little Lilac to stay where it was when we moved, I wept.
In an earlier blog, I recounted my response – the same. I wept – to our buck naked, rocky-soiled yard. This was a new challenge, the opposite of the merciless I-need-a-machete editing that I’d done before. This was about starting from scratch, with planning more detailed, moves more deliberate. It also meant spending more money. I needed capital to create a garden. I also looked to friends with well-established yards to provide me with starts.
These landscapes presented different challenges, and it’s much the same when you own a business. If you purchase an existing one, you have some working capital and customers and an engine that’s already running. Now you get to edit and prune and fix the things that you don’t like and add the things that you do. If you start a business from scratch, you need more planning, more working capital, and more time before you’re established with a customer base or employees.
Part of the reason that my current garden turns heads is because I had the chance to learn my craft in a garden that had existed before me. I think it’s the same with a business. You can do it either way and there’s fulfillment in both, but if you’re interested in buying something that’s already running, get in touch and we’ll have a cup of coffee. In a garden.
Cheers!
Pat