Why teach workshops when you run a small business?

Or how to learn to do your own job better.

In order to become a better flower farmer I teach many workshops. And today our first at-the-farm teaching session of the year will take place. For this we not only have a big tidy up, so that the students will not be distracted from their learning by piles of finished-with-by-builders' detritus, but I take out my notes and consider how I can improve a day I’ve been teaching as an evolving subject since I started growing flowers for sale in 2010.

‘You started teaching flower farming as soon as you started growing flowers for sale?’ I hear your indignant cry.

Well, yes, almost. Perhaps it took me three or four years to begin to have workable systems and see where profits could be made, but as soon as I began to understand how you could combine growing flowers for sale, with marketing those flowers, and pricing them to make enough profit to pay the electricity bill, I started to teach others how they could do it.

I was no expert in those days, but I was not stupid either, and the lightbulb moments that went off in my head as I learned were so astonishing to me, and broke so many rules that I had thought must be obeyed in order to make a successful business, that I was in a hurry to share them.

Why should I be the only person to be a flower farmer? Why should I be the only person to live what I have always thought was a life both challenging and satisfying, a life in which patience is the virtue, in which I can work outside, exercise my creativity, grow flowers which feed the environment and pay the bills? This way of life seemed revolutionary to me. So as soon as I could translate what was happening to make the business work into sentences that I could teach, I did.

And in doing this I learned another invaluable thing.