How I Think About Business Planning to Get the Best Results for the Least Effort

My sister and I run a native plant nursery, Hickory Town Gardens, and our mission is to cover Lancaster County in native plants. It’s a pretty lofty goal, especially for two people working on the side who have full time jobs, but native plants are good for pollinators, and they save people time and money.

As you can imagine, we don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to tasks that don’t make an impact, so we are really careful around planning and strategy. If you’re a business owner, you know what I’m talking about.

So after our first season, when we were doing our post-mortem and planning for the off-season and how it could support an even better selling season the next spring, I was reminded of a phrase I read in graduate school: “Don’t manage for the resource; manage for the health of the system that produces the resource”. 

Wise words. This is from a book about ecosystem management, but I feel that it applies to system management in general, which is what a business is.

Before we get into it, let's talk a little about short term vs long term thinking.

Today, a lot of businesses are criticized for thinking too short term - they think in terms of quarterly goals, stock value, and are willing to make tradeoffs that are good for their bottom line but hurt the planet.

As a consumer, you can feel it when your favorite foods don’t taste as good because the company wanted to save money on ingredients, your shoes don’t last as long, clothes need to be repaired more often.

Apart from the obvious consequences, it just sounds exhausting to maintain. It sounds like you’re always making compromises to get good numbers and putting out fires. I personally can’t live like that and I hope you also choose not to.

What I’m interested in is how businesses can change the way society functions, which requires trust built over time.

It requires high quality at affordable prices, personal relationships, being able to convince others that there is another way of being besides what they’ve become used to. And it requires that I can live my life and support myself without always feeling rushed or behind or like I’m compromising on my values.

That to me is the bare minimum, and I hope that’s also your standard. This is where long-term planning comes in.

“Don’t manage for the resource, manage for the health of the system that produces the resource.”

What this is saying is that if you optimize for a resource (in business, it could be sales, customers, website views, follows, an email list), you risk falling into the trap that the system depends on you and can’t operate without you, which directly contradicts our standards for work.

For example, say you know you need an email list of 2,000 to meet your income goals next year. A way of managing that resource might be to do a sprint or a campaign where you put all of your effort into getting 2,000 people signed up for your list. You can ultimately meet your number goal this way, but it’s unsustainable and leads to burnout, not to mention it only works if you are committed to it and it risks you finding people who aren’t good customers in an effort to reach your number.

A way of managing the health of the system that produces that resource might be to create a lead magnet that other people can share. This might be slower than a sprint, but allows your list to grow organically, filters for people who want what you offer, and saves you time and effort. It also continues to run long after you meet your goal of 2,000 people.

It ultimately comes down to whether you are putting a bandaid over the symptom, or directly treating the root cause of the issue in a way that’s sustainable for your business.

So how did we apply this thinking to our own business? While going through our spring post-mortem process, we determined a lot of symptoms would be resolved by investing in connections with people: creating more partnerships by regularly attending local sustainability events, having more personal touch points with customers by asking questions or scheduling visits with our customers, and really trying to understand their needs better and what they need more information on.

Ultimately, we’re trying to move people to convert portions of their turf lawns to native plants, which requires having a really deep understanding of people and their needs. Many of our problems disappear once we build in mechanisms to make connection a standard of our business operations.

Businesses shape the reality we live in. They decide what’s available to us, what’s unavailable, what we believe is possible. Now, more than ever before, we need responsible businesses that are doing good work that can work for you, your clients, and the planet.

As a sustainability business owner, you have a responsibility to make a business that can function outside of you, where you aren’t the bottleneck. That means you need to think long-term and in terms of systems, not just targets. It might seem like more effort now but will pay off in the future and will make it more likely you actually achieve your business mission.