Farmers think about growth a lot. We plant seeds in the spring and plot their trajectory to harvest. We watch baby animals turn from bits of fluff and twitching tails into majestic livestock. We monitor the yearly surge in our trees, watching the tender shoots harden and mature after the reckless push of spring. We understand that some growth is cyclical while other growth builds on itself year after year. We spend time calculating the carrying capacity of a meadow, or a barn, or a row of seedlings. What is harder is matching the farm’s growth to that of your dreams. Sometimes you dream big but have only a certain amount of space with which to work. Other times you dream too small and struggle to make ends meet.
We have expanded and contracted several times over the years, in several ways. In the beginning, we were entirely focused on growth, as there were always more overgrown sections of grove to rehabilitate and I had nothing else to divide my time. Year after year we sold more and more trees from the You-Cut grove, and we started taking over the remaining sections of trees from Al after a couple years. Word of mouth and our website and flyers led to new customers, a high percentage of whom became repeat customers.
We’ve seen similar growth in the sale of our wreaths and greens. For the first few years, our wreaths sold almost entirely at the farm, to only one large account. But when some of the larger CSAs in the valley started building farm stores, and wanted wreaths to sell over the entire holiday season, the number of wreaths we made more than doubled over the course of two years.
After my initial excitement at finally having some money coming in, it became clear that my body couldn’t keep up with the pace. An old injury flared up and I started getting numb hands from squeezing clippers all day, harvesting greens and breaking them down for wreaths. I would wake up at night with my hands completely asleep, and would have to shake them and beat them on the bed to get the blood recirculating. Clearly, this was an untenable situation.
The truck rack is specially designed to handle two tiers of wreaths, allowing me to deliver up to seventy-five wreaths in one go.
At first we thought an assistant might help, so we hired a friend to come and cut greens a couple days a week while I tied wreaths. However, it didn’t really solve the issue because I still had to use my hands to tie wreaths all day and to harvest greens on the days my friend wasn’t there. Since cutting the branches off the trees required the largest cuts, whereas breaking the branches down into the appropriate sizes required relatively small, easy cuts, having someone just helping to break down greens that had been harvested was missing the point. I tried to save my hands using a billhook, a sort of short, heavy machete, but even though the billhook allowed me to keep my hand more relaxed, it was slower and less versatile than clippers, and in the end I returned to using clippers. Similarly, I tried using much larger clippers rated to a wider-diameter branch, but found that not only did the larger size require more effort to squeeze shut, they encouraged me to cut larger branches than I otherwise would, further exacerbating the issue. Cecilia keeps suggesting I try getting battery-powered pruners that would do much of the work for me, but I suspect I would compensate for that, too, just as I did with the larger clippers.
During such a busy season, you do what needs to be done, which sometimes means working in wet, cold conditions.
In the end, two things unrelated to technology have helped my hands. The first is that increased spoon carving has left my hands stronger and more resilient. Instead of going into the Christmas season with relatively weak hands and building the strength over the course of a couple weeks, I essentially train year-round to be able to do this marathon injury-free. This should be common sense and come as a surprise to no one, and yet it was a surprise to me.
The second thing that continues to help—and this is the kicker—is to do less. No matter what else I’ve tried, whether hiring extra help, equipment hacks, or any change in operations that gives me a break, I’ve compensated by doing more. Over the last three years we have hired significant amounts of help, both full- and half-time employees; if anything, the responsibility of having to pay someone made me take orders that I might otherwise turn down. In the end, I found that doing less has had to come from within, and from saying no to opportunities rather than figuring out a workaround.
Employees
Over the years we have hired a number of people to work for us, usually for just one season. Sometimes we get along famously and chatter away for hours, and sometimes we just plug in our earbuds and listen to our own music or podcasts. Training different people has made me aware of how much nuance goes into this work, and how fast I have gotten at it. Some people, we’ve found, have the knack for working swiftly and smartly with their bodies, on practically a microscopic level. Others do not, and it is almost impossible to tell which is which until they are in it.
With the right person, the days fly by and the work seems less. With others, you mostly ignore each other, which can make the days seem longer because you also don’t enjoy the complete freedom that comes from working alone. I quite like the balance of having help for half the days of the week and then working alone for the other half, but it does mean that there is less flexibility to adjust the schedule around the weather. When I have full-time help (or no help), we work outside in nice weather when jobs like cutting and hauling trees to their staging points are best accomplished, and if it’s cold and rainy or snowing we work inside tying wreaths. But when I have help only half the time, I sometimes end up needing to do two-person tasks such as cutting and hauling in bad weather, simply because of the other person’s availability.
Crew members Maria Darrow and Kyle Farr overlooking the lower field and farmhouse. Just behind them is the stack of cut trees we just hauled to the edge of the driveway and staged for loading.
As a boss, I have tried to follow the example set by my favorite captain from when I worked on sailing ships. Captain Ryan was generous with praise and gratitude, read the pulse of his crew, cheered us up when our energy was flagging, and while he was never afraid to be goofy was all business in a crisis. I am grateful for the chance to try to emulate him, and I am grateful for the hard work our crew has put in each year, but I have come to the realization that at least for the next year or two, I need to step back from employing others and just work solo.
Being a Good Boss
Being a boss is one of the most rewarding things in life if you approach it with the right attitude, and one of the most frustrating if you don’t. Here are the things I keep in mind when I’m in charge of other people.
Communicate constantly. Give both positive and negative feedback. Communicate your gratitude, and immediately address things you would like to be different, before you have time to dwell on them and get resentful or grumpy or dread having the conversation.
Set the tone. Remember that you’re in charge of the overall mood! Bring special snacks. Choose good music to listen to that will bring people together. Don’t be afraid to be goofy.
Set the pace. Don’t expect other people to work harder than (or even as hard as) you. After all, it’s a job for them, but it’s your life. Instead, set an example by being an absolute ninja at what you do. Never ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t ask of yourself. Share the tough jobs and the fun jobs.
Take care of people. Send them home if they’re sick. Let them leave early if they need to. But demand clear communication. If they need to arrive late for some reason, that’s fine, but they need to let you know in advance or move heaven and earth to arrive on time. Their role is to take the job seriously. Your role is to be flexible when possible.
Pay people on time. I will admit that I have not always been good about this. Not because I didn’t have the money, but because sometimes I didn’t submit their hours to the bookkeeper on the day I should have, and that is unacceptable. Employees are people who exchange their time and effort for your money. Treat this exchange with dignity by being scrupulous about paying them on time.
Pay
Part of why our farm needs to step away from hiring help goes back to the idea of doing less, and part of it has to do with profit margin. We start pay at $20 an hour, a high wage in farming. The one time we had someone come back a second year we paid her $22 an hour and offered her a cut of the business to stick around after that, although she ended up starting her own venture elsewhere. One of the reasons we pay so well is because we are offering work for only a month and a half, so we need to entice people to disrupt their other opportunities to work with us. But we also pay high wages because I demand a lot from people. Twenty dollars an hour is real money, and I require real effort in return. Our work is fast-paced, detail-oriented, and sometimes unpleasant.
The third and most important reason we pay as much as we do is because $20 an hour, where we live, is a living wage. A real, afford-your-rent kind of wage. I have a big problem with the low wages agriculture as an industry pays its workers. Even groovy small farms pay a pittance, justifying it by calling it an internship or apprenticeship, by saying they can’t afford to pay more, or by pointing to their own tight belts as proof that they are being fair. There is nothing fair about employing someone for an hourly rate that damages their own ability to succeed in life. If you can’t afford to pay someone well, figure out how to farm so that you don’t need help. Earn less yourself. You own the business, and are building equity and opportunities in a way that an employee never can. You are in charge!
I worked for years on both sailing ships and farms that paid very little, and as a result my own sense of self-worth was skewed for a long time, in ways that impeded my ability to provide for my family. I just didn’t value my time at $20–$50 an hour the way I do now. Until someone else tells you that you are worth that much, you don’t believe it. Partly I felt that because I was young. Is a twenty-year-old’s labor worth that of a thirty-year-old, all else (responsibility, temperament, work ethic) being equal? Not in my view. Experience and maturity are worth a lot. But when it comes to hiring for our farm, I feel strongly that by paying $20 an hour for our help, we raise the bar on our employees’ self-worth, pay fairly for a fast-paced, brief window, and push back against the low standards of our industry.
There are other costs to hiring someone in addition to their wages. In the state of Massachusetts, when we employ someone for more than $600 (the limit for “casual labor”), we need to pay half of their Social Security payments (the other half gets withheld from their wages), hire a bookkeeper to manage the system (although honestly this cost is minimal and our bookkeeper, Kara, does a phenomenal job), and purchase Workers’ Compensation and Liability Insurance.
So at the time of this writing, I’m planning to go solo in the coming year to see if running a smaller, more streamlined operation will be more profitable. On paper I should save between $6,000 and $8,000 in costs, while losing much less than that in revenue. My hope is to net an additional $4,000 to $6,000. The big question is whether my body can hold up, although this last year leads me to believe that it can. It was the first year that I didn’t wake up with numb hands, and I have been carving even more this year than the previous one, building the hand strength that carving demands.
Limits
The other reason I’m going solo is to make the farm more profitable on a smaller production base. Because the amount of land in trees is fixed, there is a real limit to what the farm can produce year after year. While plenty of land still remains to be brought into stronger production, this takes time, and we are near capacity for areas that can be improved quickly.
At this point, there are three main reasons why some of our trees become overgrown. The first and most noticeable is color. Certain areas of the farm suffer from poor drainage, resulting in yellowing of the balsam needles starting around Thanksgiving. Adding nitrogen had no discernable effect on this yellowing, although it did double the amount of growth produced. As mentioned earlier in the book, I intend to supplement a test plot with iron to see if that helps; if it doesn’t then it will be time to think about digging ditches. About 4 of the 10 acres are affected by yellowing, although trees and greens can still be harvested for wholesale in November before the yellowing occurs, since the color of the needles remains fixed after harvest. Of those 4 acres, 2 have become overgrown to the point where some sort of intervention is necessary.
After a long day of working with balsam, your hands are black with pitch. The best way to get it off is a hot shower followed by washing a load of dishes.
The second reason is inaccessibility. A number of areas have become overgrown because they are difficult to reach, either because the ground is steep or because they are simply far from any point of access. Taking trees down once they become large, even if the branches can be harvested for greens, requires a chain saw. The smallest chain saw I can find would likely be a better choice than using the Stihl Farmboss chain saw I currently use; another instance where spending $400 on the right tool would save me thousands of dollars in time and effort. But cutting down larger trees reveals an additional hurdle: Big stumps have often aged beyond the point where they can resprout, and so the area would need to be replanted.
For the last eight years, rehabilitating the balsam groves has meant dealing with the low-hanging fruit. Every step of the way, I’ve asked myself, “What area has the greatest production potential for the least amount of effort?” Then I’d go put in the time there. But at this point, all the low-hanging fruit is gone, and the next several years will involve tackling areas where there is much less to salvage and much more to be done. My hope is to be able to harvest enough greens from this salvage and from the stump rotations of the more productive areas to meet demand, but this potential constriction in balsam supply is another reason I want to make the operation leaner.
Finally, the biggest constraint to growth on the farm is the limited window during which most of the work takes place. For instance, rehabilitation necessarily involves cutting down overgrown trees and clearing paths; it’s best done during the harvest season simultaneously with harvesting greens, but this also means there’s a limited window for this kind of work each year. Similarly, because balsam harvested before the first couple of hard frosts won’t hold on to its needles, there is a limited amount of time during which to harvest greens, tie wreaths, and cut trees. I tend to shift to working full-time in the trees in the last week of October, and spend a week, more or less, cleaning and preparing the You-Cut hut, setting up the tarp barn, spreading wood chips, cutting multiflora rose, and clearing trails. As soon as the third hard frost hits, I drop what I’m doing and start cutting greens. This first date has ranged from October 25 to November 2 in the years I’ve been doing this, and in a season where all of my wholesale accounts want their orders before Thanksgiving, that extra week can mean the ability to handle several thousand more dollars of work.
There is only so much time—in the day, the growing season, the year—and so the name of the game for working on the land is to prepare as much as possible beforehand. I wire clusters of pinecones for decorating wreaths; I tie as many bows as I can store under the bench (about 25 percent of what I need for the season); I order all my supplies and make sure my tools are ready so that when the time comes to finally cut greens, that’s all I need to do.
In terms of squeezing more out of each day, the most recent big example was replacing the sheet metal roof of the hut with polycarbonate paneling, effectively turning the entire roof into one big skylight. This move keeps the inside as bright as the outside, allowing us one extra hour of work each day we are tying wreaths, as we need to stop when we can no longer see the true color of the greens, and the sun sets early in November and December. If we tie wreaths for half of the days between the beginning of November and mid-December, that means twenty-two extra hours of work, or almost three days. Since for each seven-hour workday this time of year I earn at least $350 depending on what I am doing, that extra twenty-two hours means an extra $1,000. The polycarbonate roofing cost $160 and took five hours of my time and $80 for four hours of someone else’s time to replace. You do the math.
Scale
One of the trickiest things to balance on any farm is a scale that works for you, for the land, and economically. For most farms, this balance shifts from year to year as the business grows, and it is a better fit at some times than at others. In 2007, Tim Wilcox and Caroline Pam started their farm, the Kitchen Garden, with 1 acre. Since then they’ve grown in leaps and bounds each year; now, a dozen years in, they farm 50 acres, cobbling together a number of fields in several towns. When I worked for them for a season many years ago (when they were a fifth the size they are now), Tim told me about how growth can affect the economics of small farms. When scaling up to acreages that require switching from hand labor to tractors, or from small tractors to bigger tractors, for example, the revenue from the increased size may not be as much as from an even slightly larger increase in acreage where you would use the same new equipment. Certain large scales also require more bodies, but then that same increased number could handle a further increase of just a couple of acres more. Seven acres could therefore be more efficient than 4 acres, if it can be farmed with the same equipment needed for 4 acres, and only one or two extra people, since in theory you can produce almost twice as much produce.
Price and Growth
My land is a fixed variable, but two major things I can change are the amount of labor I bring to bear on the land in relation to demand for our products, and the amount of growth the trees will sustain (or excess growth that needs to be removed). These last two are moving targets: Demand for our greens and wreaths and trees has slowly risen over the years, while the amount of excess growth that can be easily harvested has declined. For a while it made economic sense to bring more labor into play to handle the demand. At the time of this writing, however, I’ve decided to increase our wholesale balsam price, which has remained the same for eight years, by 20 percent. This should drive down demand a bit and also make it more worth my time to pursue greens from less efficient areas of the grove, where there will be chain-sawing involved.
In general, we have used price as a means to depress demand, although it is only somewhat effective because there is an upper limit that feels weird to cross, given that we want to keep our trees affordable. When we took over the farm, we had a non-compete agreement with Al whereby we would keep our tree and greens prices the same as his. Al had been selling trees for a flat $20, but the year before we took over half the farm he raised it to $25, and that is where the price sat for seven years. This last year, with Al no longer managing any of the trees and some concern that we needed to depress demand, we raised the price to $30. No one batted an eye.
Our wreaths started out even lower, and have been more responsive over the years to customer demand. Our strategy is to raise prices piecemeal, rather than across the board, so first wreath prices responded to demand, then tree prices, and now wholesale greens. Wholesale pricing is the most brittle, because businesses lay out more money at once and also analyze their margin. A You-Cut customer just makes a fairly small adjustment in their mind, and they’re also usually already at the grove when they realize the price has increased, although we do announce it on our website. So until now we have held off increasing the price for our greens, anticipating that we might lose a few wholesale customers. Now is the appropriate time, however, because the grove needs a couple years of harvesting less of the easy stuff and more of the hard-to-reach stuff, which means there will just be less of it.
I like to let naturally occurring patterns inform the timing of price increases, so they don’t feel arbitrary to customers. Telling wholesale partners that the greens price has increased because I’ve run out of easily harvested greens and need to start harvesting overgrown stuff has a logic to it that increased cost of living or some such justification never could. Most will probably buy into the vision of rehabilitating the grove, and stay. Similarly, with the tree price, waiting to raise prices until the grove was clearly getting harvested heavily helped people value the trees more, seeing the demand with their own eyes.
With my wooden spoon prices (more on this in chapter 7), I’ve decided that October is the perfect time to raise my prices across the board, as it’s when I close my waiting list for the year to pivot to the farm and start taking spoon orders for the following January. That timing allows me to announce it multiple times leading up to the cutoff date, perhaps driving a bit more business from people wanting to get in under the wire, and then by the time I start filling people’s orders in January the new prices have been in place for several months and feel normal. Spoon pricing is tied to a long-term strategy that I will lay out in the next chapter, but the plan is to increase prices each year, doubling the original price in about five years. By announcing the increase in advance and having a lag time after the increase before I produce any spoons, and by having it fall at a time of year when money seems looser in general (Christmas), this price change has so far been frictionless and largely unnoticed.
Pricing is always a balance between the money you hope to earn and the level of demand you hope to retain or create. Your price is informed by the nature of the business (how much of your business comes from repeat customers?), your long-term strategy (are you building a reputation or skill and using low prices to create demand that you can leverage later?), and your gut (how are you positioned within your community?). I have found success in starting with low prices and increasing them as demand surpasses my ability to keep up. If the time you have to pursue a farming venture or business is seriously limited by another job, however, or if you are extremely skilled at what you do, or if you already have the demand in the form of a strong following in your local community or on social media (depending on which is more applicable), then you might find it a better choice to set high prices. Just don’t put the cart before the horse. The trick is to match the price to your ability to meet demand at whatever scale that is for you. If you are looking to sell only a few of something at a high price point and the demand meets the limited time you have to put into it, that is probably a good fit. If you have nothing but time and no one knows who you are yet, then use a low price to build a base of customers.
An Alternative Model of Growth
Cecilia and I met Tim Wilcox and Caroline Pam of the Kitchen Garden when we had side-by-side booths at a farmers market, and we became friends over the course of a season of hanging out and waiting for customers. Two years after leaving our vegetable farm and moving to the tree farm, I worked for Tim and Caroline for a season leading up to our first year taking over the trees. They have grown their farm almost every single year, and as such their example provides a good counterpoint to our own example of restrained growth.
The Kitchen Garden started out on 1 acre, and when we first met our farms were roughly the same size, 3–4 acres. When I worked for them a few years later, they were farming 7 acres and had a crew of six. The following year they entered a short-lived partnership with another farmer that gave them access to equipment and land that allowed them to more than double in size, and now, nearly a decade later, they are farming 50 acres. Tim and Caroline divide the farm into production and harvesting/sales, with Tim managing a team of eight on the production side and Caroline managing a team of sixteen on the harvest side. They have thoughtfully and aggressively used a combination of bank loans and state and federal grants to achieve this growth, and have shown a willingness to invest in technology and systems improvements every step of the way.
It would be easy to look at the Kitchen Garden and see a farm very different from ours in terms of trajectory and scale. But I would argue that our two farms are actually making very similar strategic decisions. In the last three years, for example, they leveraged their interest in hot peppers to start an annual Chilifest and then leveraged that reputation and momentum to start making sriracha and other hot sauces that are sold across the country and have appeared in cooking magazines and in the kitchens of celebrity chefs. While still a relatively new part of their business, the value-added products account for about a quarter of farm revenue and they are investing in building their own certified kitchen space to give them more flexibility than the community kitchen they use now.
Tim and Caroline also offer above-average compensation and have worked hard to create a cohesive farm culture. The crew takes turns preparing a sit-down midday meal to share with everyone (I still dream of the amazing food I ate when I worked for them). It is a testament to their management and leadership that many of their crew have chosen to return for the last five years, and that as the farm has grown they have been able to give people expanded roles with more responsibility.
The Kitchen Garden is extremely diversified in its crop production, specializing in many heirloom varieties that chefs want, and their customer base is built around these relationships. Caroline is a food writer and went to culinary school while Tim is an equally passionate cook, and so the farm is an expression of their love of food.
In terms of nimble infrastructure, before they built large packing and storage space and greenhouses, they retrofitted and utilized some of the existing structures on their farm. When they finally got around to building their current arrangements, they knew what they wanted and needed more clearly than if they had built something at the start. They are also practicing the principle of land rehabilitation with their current construction of a new certified kitchen space; rather than plop it down somewhere new, they are demolishing an old falling-down barn and reclaiming that space.
Of course, not everything they have tried has worked out. Over the years, the Kitchen Garden has participated in a number of farmers markets, operated a boxed delivery CSA, and delved into catering. But by throwing a lot of mud at the wall, they were better able to run with what stuck, including wholesale relationships with stores, distributors, and restaurants, and the prepared hot sauces. These efforts provided the best return on effort and potential to grow, but this only became clear because they tried all the other stuff.
Lastly, Tim and Caroline have always been extremely savvy with their use of their website, newsletter, social media, packaging, and brand in general. They use all of these tools to share their ongoing story with customers and are always looking ahead to what changes are coming over the horizon, both externally that they need to react to and internally that they can create for themselves. Tim mentioned in a recent podcast interview that after passing through a period several years back where they were both considering leaving the farm through burnout, they got to a place where it feels very settled and clear that they will continue. This change seems more internal than external, driven by a shift in mindset rather than circumstances. They will continue to grow the farm on a number of different fronts, and while their growth seems steep now, I suspect it will seem like just the beginning when looking back in another ten years.
Customer Service
Making sure your customers remain loyal is the key to building price leverage; while this comes down to the quality of what you are selling, equally important is the quality of the service you provide. You need to be growing amazing vegetables, unsurpassed fruit, top-quality meat or dairy, or making really excellent wreaths (imagine that!), but you also need to be diligent about returning every phone call, responding to every email, delivering on time, and accommodating the timing needs of your customers. The ease and responsiveness of working with you is just as important as how good your product is, if not more so.
I will admit that I was not always as good at customer service. It’s a commonly held idea about farmers that they are hard to get a hold of, out in the field, slightly taciturn, and a bit awkward from being alone all day. None of these stereotypes are helpful when it comes to building a customer base. You need strategies for keeping on top of customer service.
For me, this started with just a big sheet of paper taped to the wall. As wholesale orders for the trees came in, I would write them on the sheet along with billing information, quantities, delivery dates, and anything else that seemed pertinent. With my spoon carving, I handled orders in the same way when rising demand began to outstrip my ability to get by with scraps of paper. Pretty soon, however, this system became cumbersome, and I found it easier to enter orders into a weekly planner, which allowed me to estimate wait times on a rolling basis. Just recently, I have switched to a larger planner to give me more room to write down details as I push more work into each day. I like using analog planners because they provide a secure backup to the information that is on my phone. To this end, any information customers choose to give me gets written down with their order, so that I am not reliant on my phone working to know their address when the time comes to box up an order.
The lead-up to Thanksgiving involves an awful lot of standing at the bench, tying wreaths as fast as I possibly can. Photo by Meghan Hoagland.
Opportunity Costs
One of the trickiest things about growth is analyzing the opportunity costs of one decision over another. Opportunity costs are all the things you aren’t doing in order to do the thing you are doing. For instance, if I say yes to a large order of roping (which has the lowest profit margin of anything I make for the farm), that represents time that I can’t spend filling another order at a higher profit margin. But what if the roping order is so large that I’m not sure if I will get enough orders to make up for not taking it? What if the roping order is so large that I hire another person specifically so that I can take it? What are the marginal returns on that? What if I take on a really huge wreath order this year, doubling the number that I do, and jump the business to a whole different size (this offer has been on the table multiple times, by the way), and then next year, I think the same order will materialize but it doesn’t?
I also think about this when balancing one of my business’s opportunities against another. I could do a lot of holiday fairs selling spoons but I don’t, because I will obviously make more money pouring that time into the grove. But what if there was a teaching gig in Australia that would conflict with the Christmas trees? What if there was a book deadline? What if I just had a huge month with the scientific manuscript editing and needed to back off the trees to do that? Opportunities are easy to analyze until your time is full. Then they start competing with one another, and the more moving parts there are, the more complicated the balancing act.
__________
The biggest factor I have found over the years that contributes to growth is consistency. That’s really it. Just being present, doing your best, year after year after year. If you use social media, do it consistently. Post every day, or every week, and be disciplined about it. Figure out how you can best bring value to your customers. Maybe that takes the form of one recipe a week, or writing honestly about what it’s like to be a farmer, or maybe it’s a funny newsletter that they will look forward to reading. Maybe it’s physical changes, like spreading wood chips or gravel on muddy paths. Or adding a portajohn, or better signs.
I used to hate that the goal of capitalism is to constantly grow. What was wrong with producing just enough? A plant grows and then dies (or the leaves fall, or it goes dormant), and then grows again the next year, right? I have come to realize, however, that this view is too simple. An annual plant grows and dies and grows again each year, but depending on changes to the soil, it finds it easier or harder to grow. A perennial plant grows and grows and grows. Nothing in life is just cyclical, just doing enough and no more. Everything is also either improving or declining. That is just a natural fact. Soils improve or decline. Wood rots. Species evolve. Stars form and then, billions of years later, they collapse.
There is nothing inherently wrong with growth. My guess is if you have taken the time to read this far in a book that gets this nerdy about business, then you agree. But there are many ways to manifest growth, and the trick is to determine the one that is right for you. It is not always about getting bigger. Often it is about getting smarter, commanding a higher price, improving what you have, building a reputation, and leveraging what you know to grow income on the side. But every year, I expect and plan to do better than the year before. And then I execute that plan, and react and adjust and make a new plan based on what worked and where we ended up. I don’t try to get it perfect right out of the gate. Instead, if I want to do something I just start doing it, and trust that so long as I am thoughtful and observant, and don’t create a definitive win/lose situation for myself, I will eventually win.
