To Hunt or To Garden

Sales is the lifeblood of your business. A business, whether flying solo, have a small team, or there’s 100+ employees — functions like a tribe. It is its own society where time and energy is converted into value through expertise. For the tribe to survive, there must be nutrients collected to sustain life. Nutrients are gathered through sales. Here, a tribe (and business) is given two options. To hunt or to garden.

Look at your sales and look at how the business sustains its life. Is it through hunting (constant sales, advertising, marketing, etc.) or through gardening (overall brand, long term investments, relationship building, etc.)?

Typically, the businesses who feel they need to always be throwing money into advertising to generate sales are ones who have leaned too heavily into hunting. While those who haven’t made really any progress have leaned too far into the passive gardening.

The perfect blend is a balance of both hunting and gardening. While hunting keeps you and your team fed for the today (sales), gardening will feed them tomorrow (brand). The problem with hunting is that it isn’t perpetual. This is why some predators in the wild will go days without eating until they catch a new prey. Tribes would run into this as well when having to track their prey for days before finding the opportunity to strike. Hunting is more hit or miss. You may not get the kill and it might get away. Your customers may not click, they might not purchase. But the rewards of hunting is sustenance for the business and is something that it needs to do.

Gardening — on the other hand — is longterm thinking that lends itself to future-proofing your tribe. Gardening can plant multiple seeds that can grow at different rates and be gathered separately. Most of these harvests will produce more seeds that can be planted and compounded into larger gardens and larger future harvests. While the garden continues to grow with the majority of work on the front end, it does take patience. Your garden is your brand. It’s longterm, perpetual, and leads to more sales in the future. It only continues to grow, compound, and benefit your tribe/business.

In order for your business to thrive you need to balance both approaches. Your business will need to hunt to keep stomachs full, but your business will benefit in the longrun by focusing on brand and future returns that gardening brings.