A few weeks ago I was in a session with a new client, Brad, in the conference room here at the office in Lakewood. Brad spent decades building actual ecosystems in Central America. Now he’s chief of staff and finance for a really cool, growing organization here in Dallas, and he was talking about the lessons he learned building ecosystems and how he applies them now.
Since I started Green Thumb Consulting, I’ve had this idea that businesses aren’t inanimate objects. They’re living organisms. They aren’t widgets out of a factory that just sit there. They’re subject to their environment. They’re affected by the economy, by the other products sitting in their space, by the people moving in and out of the company, and by the health of the company itself. They change, they grow, and sometimes they atrophy.
So I’m talking with Brad, who literally built ecosystems for decades, and he recommends a book called Permaculture, which I’ve since finished. It’s the playbook people use when they go build real ecosystems: the principles and ethics that go into helping one thrive.
One of the ideas he said was most powerful, and one he’s used in his own organization, is this: when you’re building an ecosystem, you think you have a snail problem, but you actually have a bird problem.
If you go into that ecosystem thinking “snail problem” and start eliminating snails, there’s a compound effect. Now you’re affecting other parts of the ecosystem, and you’re tackling three or four problems instead of one. What you needed to recognize was that you don’t have enough birds, or something is keeping the birds from doing their normal snail hunting. (I don’t know what birds do. I’m a city person.) Diagnose it correctly, fix the bird problem, and you solve one thing that helps the whole ecosystem thrive, instead of coming back to eliminate snails forever.
Since moving into consulting and working with companies of all sizes, I’m seeing that this applies a lot. The first step to having a green thumb for your own business is being able to diagnose the right problem.
I’ve worked with plenty of clients who think they have a marketing problem, a revenue problem, a sales problem, a team problem. And it could be one of those. But if it’s a product problem, no amount of marketing or sales fixes it. And if you’re a product-development person, your intuition might be “let’s make the product better, let’s build the next iteration,” when the product is plenty good and you’re just not spending enough time telling people it exists in a compelling way. Or not reaching out to the right people to get them into discovery calls. Or not staying close to customers so they buy again.
Something I’ve learned is that it’s important to have the self-awareness to know how we’re wired, and to take the time, care, and attention with the businesses we work with to diagnose the right problem. Because if we diagnose it right, we can invest our resources and time the right way to fix it. That’s the work of scaling a company. If we diagnose it wrong, we create three or four problems we didn’t have before we started, or we waste time, energy, and money fixing something the wrong way, and end up further behind.
Green thumbs can diagnose the right problem, so they can invest the right resources to fix it.
— Craig