Over on the business blog.
There's a little metaphor about gardening and business.
I thought I'd extend it here today, though, because I've had a week this week which is relatively unscheduled (It's actually a half-term holiday week, but I don't have any children at school anymore, so it's just fallen in).
My option was to do nothing to do with work whatsoever, but I find that tricky at times like this, particularly when Alison is working and things are going on.
And so, I wanted to extend the metaphor here a little bit about gardening and planting and the long term and what happens when you're building, designing, executing and creating a garden.
First of all, it's important to let you know here that I know nothing about gardening and actually it doesn't interest me a great deal.
Over 10 years ago, though, Alison and I found Charlie.
Charlie is nothing short of a genius, but as with all great men, in front of Charlie is a great woman called Norma.
Charlie and Norma are what you would call an elderly couple.
When we first met Charlie, he was stacking shelves in Morrison's after having retired from a long career in different areas, but he was ‘getting into gardening’.
He came to us at our previous house that we lived at 18 months ago and spent 10 years with Norma, designing, executing and creating a beautiful garden.
Please don't mistake this for something like Kew Gardens; it was just a lovely garden where there were different colours at different times of the year, and the grass was cut, and it was tidy and clean and lovely, and people would come to the house and say "You have a lovely garden".
I would walk into the back garden in the early mornings and marvel at how beautiful it was, even though I really knew nothing about it.
And then we moved house and left it behind.
And Charlie mourned the fact that the garden he'd built for us for over 10 years was lost, but then he embraced the project here at the new place.
Just for context, the garden space that I have in the new place is probably 3 times the size of what we had in the last place, and that doesn't include the 9 acres of space that we have beyond the garden for horses.
(to completely understanding how privileged I am.)
But we're right back to the start.
We had something like 30 tonnes of bushes, brambles, trees, and stuff removed from the garden a few weeks ago. We are so far away from where we were before; it's extraordinary.
This is what it's like, though, isn't it, when you're running a business, and this is what it's like this week for me when I'm not scheduled to do any of the weeding or the grass cutting in my business, and therefore I'm thinking about planting.
Things I planted this week were as follows,
Number one, I planned our November strategy meeting, which is a whole-day meeting with my senior leadership team and my non-exec director.
Number two, I went back into consideration of a strategy and a budget for AI for my business. If I don't have that now, it's soon going to be too late.
Number three, I made space for difficult conversations with people whom I needed to have difficult conversations with.
To have the space to think about this and think about where we're going is a joy; that's planting.
I'd scheduled them throughout the week, but it turned out I had them all in one day.
They all went better than expected, and I've moved things along.
They'll certainly all 3 impact significantly and positively on the business, but perhaps some time from now.
Back to the garden at the house,
We have a new path, and some grass seed has gone down, which is just showing some roots. I know that we've got some tiny little daffodils that will be coming up probably in February with some snowdrops, and so things are starting to happen.
You can't rush 10 years in a garden, though, so it won't be good until I'm 65.
It's probably the same for the business, though, isn't it?
The short term is short; the long term is long. Choose your weapon.
Blog Post Number - 4703
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