Do you nurture your giant pumpkin seeds as best you can?
There are lots of interesting analogies about how to grow a business.
One of my all-time favourites comes from a farmer who grows gigantic, prize-winning pumpkins:
Step 1: Plant promising seeds.
Step 2: Water, water, water.
Step 3: As they grow, routinely remove all of the diseased or damaged pumpkins.
Step 4: Weed like a mad dog. Not a single green leaf or root permitted if it isn’t a pumpkin plant.
Step 5: When they grow larger, identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins. Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.
Step 6: Focus all your attention on the big pumpkin. Nurture it around the clock like a baby, and guard it like you would your first Mustang convertible.
Step 7: Watch it grow. In the last days of the season, this will happen so fast you can actually see it happen.
This simple plan inspired a popular business book titled The Pumpkin Plan, by Mike Michalowicz. In case you don’t get a chance to read it, here’s the main takeaway from Mike’s book: you can’t grow a giant pumpkin with a regular pumpkin seed. Only some seeds can produce giant pumpkins.
Back to you. Your business has some giant pumpkin seeds. Do you nurture them as best you can?
Oct 15, 2014
p.s. For the best actual giant pumpkin seeds, look up Dill’s Atlantic Giant seeds, started by the late Howard Dill of Nova Scotia. Their seeds are behind every world record since 1979.