Will you look at that? In just 5 short days, these veggie seeds I planted on Saturday have sprouted! And while I had no intention of directly linking this activity to my new venture, there is a connection. It’s sprouting too! I’ve had a great first week of making connections and test-running my new product. It’s received a great response and I think I have some “takers”. More than a few meetings from that stack of business cards – even if I only convert two of those meetings in to clients – that’s a good success ratio for me.  I can’t wait to share my idea with all of you next week! One of you already guessed it – thanks Joel Oine for not telling the world!

These little seedlings are fragile, and growing perilously fast.  You gardeners know, the issue at this stage – they get so tall (or leggy) so quickly, the stem actually collapses under the weight of the new sprout.  Next week, I’ll need to go through with a small pair of scissors and cull out the weak sprouts. That’ll give the healthiest the best chance of flourishing.

Sounds a lot like business doesn’t it? With finite resources of a single person start-up, there are only so many leads that I can invest real time into. Eventually, I’ll be able to tell if a lead will result in a revenue opportunity, or if the person I just met was being “nice” and offering to meet with me.  I’ll need to narrow down my audience eventually to make sure I’m not parsing out my time too much.  There’s a lot of curiosity and demand for information on the service that I’m offering – but the real question is can I turn that into enough cash to make a living? I have developed a model, but I am far from being able to prove it out.  Give me 60 days and I’ll be able to tell you if THIS big idea from the little box of ideas is a winner. In the meantime, it’ll take about that long for these seedlings to turn into food.

I swear, I did not set this up to be such a direct metaphor. But now that it is – you’ll get to know these plants over the summer! We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll rejoice together – you, me and these plants.  Some won’t make it through, and others will thrive and feed my family well.  When you next hear from me, I’ll be spilling the beans on my business – I’m sure you are all on pins and needles (NOT!)

Enjoy your weekend everyone!