Let it grow

This is the year we decided to fight back. When Maura and I bought our current house we were happy to get a decent sized piece of land while still being close enough to downtown for my occasional cycle to work. 1.59 acres might not seem like much until you mow it. Never the less, we think it’s plenty big for us. When we bought it however, nearly a tenth of the property was covered in kudzu. Living in Georgia most of my life, I have only recently had to tell someone what kudzu is. For those of you not familiar, here’s my description:

Kudzu is a green sewer rat with leaves. It is a parasite of a vine that grows a foot a day (no joke) and wraps itself around trees, trailers, satellite dishes (yes, the big ones) and many other places that country teens go to make out. It will grow over top of, wrap around and strangle the life out of your trees. It is a dastardly vine made even more repulsive with the local transplants who’ve had some sick infatuation for the leafy invader and who have taken to letting the kudzu overtake their hovels.

So, the kudzu took over a portion of the yard that was too uneven for the mower and in an area that the former residents saw fit to litter with bricks, rebar, beer bottles, coils of metal wire and if I eventually find one of those canisters with a zombie in it (like from the Return of the Living Dead movie) I can’t say I’ll be that surprised. My grandmother would politely describe the way this part of the yard was kept as “rustic”.

Maura and I were not and are not content with sacrificing this portion of the yard so we worked up a plan of attack. Napalm was too expensive and the barrel wouldn’t fit in my Subaru so instead we decided to mow it, hoe it and till it until we could make the jungle wasteland into our garden. Now you must know I am a man who must have the right tools for the job even if I don’t really intend on doing the job. We have the mower and the hoe (no jokes). What I didn’t have was a tiller.

For those who don’t know the whimsical intricacies that separate tillers, let me be the first to welcome you to the machine. A tiller comes in two sizes. There are the ones that barely work and are best suited for tilling a potted plant. These tillers can be gas or electric and cost about $300. Then there are the real tillers. These tillers have rear, counter-rotating tines, brush guards and run on gas or plutonium. These kudzu devouring monsters cost more like $800. Knowing my love of tools and toys, Maura has me on a strict budget and without divulging my toy budget; I’ll just tell you that if I showed up with an $850 tiller, I’d have to return the new digital camera to the store.

So one day on an errand, Tatarski and I were wandering through the Sears and I wandered over to the lawn and garden department. I explained my dilemma to the sales associate and he made a recommendation: rent a big tiller and do the yard once. Then, buy a small tiller for maintenance. I didn’t want to say that I would be embarrassed if the neighbors saw me with the “kiddy” tiller. I walked off and sulked in spirit of those regulated to paying kudzu a land tax. I moped around to see what other fun lawn toy could lift my spirits when low and behold; I came upon the biggest, meanest, knarliest tiller Sears sells with a price tag of $207. “What’s wrong with it” I asked the associate. “Nothing” he said. “This happens every year, somebody buys a tiller, does their yard and returns it to the store”. I asked Tatarski to keep his hand on it while I checked out. I wasn’t letting somebody sneak in and get between me and kudzu-destroying bliss.

The next weekend was everything I dreamed it would be. Maura and I scalped the area with a small push mower then we hacked the kudzu at its roots with a hoe and machete (everyone should have one). Finally, I roared out with the tiller like a drunken funny car driver and digested the kudzu into a rich, beautiful garden. All the while I was grinding away at this scourge of a plant, once praised and encouraged for its erosion combating traits, I was thinking; good strategy is like a good tiller. And I have a good tiller.

Business opportunity is out there but you’ve got to till it up. Its not just going to sit their on the surface without someone else to come along and get it before you do. I know. There’ll be rocks and beer cans and the occasional discarded badminton net that gets wrapped around your tines, but a good tiller can power through all of that and leave you standing on fertile soil. I'll stretch the metaphors just as far as I can before they break so put your hat on and pull your boots up. Let’s do some yard work.

Get the right equipment.

If you fully understand the task to be undertaken, you will be better equipped to choose a wise strategy. Or tiller. Knowing what you’re getting into can help you do a thorough job of choosing what resources and efforts you’re going to need to be successful. A funny thing about providing resources for efforts is that investing half of what it takes to be successful does not yield half successful results. Had Maura and I bought one of those junior tillers we would not have done a half good job. The job would have never gotten started as the ground and kudzu would have been too much for the pint-sized effort.

Only when a company fully appreciates the pervasiveness and competitive advantage afforded by a good strategy can the adequate appropriations of resources and efforts be made.

I doesn’t matter how big the tiller is if you’re not willing to walk behind it.

A common misconception is that when a strategy is adopted or initiated that it needs no further care. This is untrue. Strategies have an uncanny knack of drifting which sets up an even worse situation than before. Managers will blame the strategies without seeing or acknowledging the drift. The result is total loss of the value of what might have been a great idea simply because the people carrying it out did not understand and the person who should have been following behind the tiller left it to go on its own to run over the garden hose.

Every time you till it correctly it gets easier.

The way things were always done can be a stubbornly dense layer of soil riddled with the remnants of failed efforts and the intertwined vines of bad ideas and bad intentions. My advice is: don’t be timid if you are looking to create fruitful ground. Get in and bust it up. Cut vines; throw out the useless junk that’s not part of a thriving garden.

Good strategies are pervasive. Turn up the soil now and it will be easier every time you need to do it again. You never know; the ideas, opportunities and staff you wish to cultivate might begin to blossom in an atmosphere that breaks up some soil and works some fresh nutrients into the mix every so often.

You reap what you sow.

I am constantly surprised how many business tasks plunge headlong into efforts and budgets without the correct amount of preplanning. Just like the garden, everything in marketing does not thrive equally across geographies, seasons and degrees of attention. Treat your tomatoes like your cucumbers and you’ll be substituting pickles for tomatoes in your salad.

Growing business from strategy takes patience and good old-fashioned hard work. There will always be a tough row to hoe, the occasional intruding vine but then again, there’s the situation when you look up one day and see everything begin to bloom. Be smart and nature will work with you. Put a good strategy to work and you never know what you might grow.