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What Growing a Giant Pumpkin Can Teach You About Growing a Business

Giant pumpkin illustrating focused business growth

Growing a giant pumpkin and growing a successful business have more in common than you might think.

If you’re trying to grow a prize-winning pumpkin, the goal isn’t to keep every pumpkin on the vine and hope they all get bigger. You identify the strongest one, remove the weaker ones and concentrate your time, attention and resources on the pumpkin with the greatest potential.

That’s the idea behind The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz, and it’s one of his business lessons that has stuck with me. I’ve had the opportunity to hear Mike

speak at business growth conferences over the years, and I like the pumpkin comparison because it takes something business owners struggle with and makes it very easy to picture: you can’t grow everything at the same time.

You Can’t Grow Everything

Especially when you’re building a company, saying yes can become a habit. A new customer calls, so you take the business. Someone asks for a service you’ve never offered, so you figure out how to provide it. An opportunity isn’t exactly what you do, but there’s revenue attached to it, so you make it work.

Before long, the business may be doing more than ever while the team is stretched in ten different directions.

Mike’s point is that growing a business sometimes requires doing the opposite. Just as the giant-pumpkin grower removes smaller pumpkins that are competing for nutrients, a business owner has to decide which opportunities deserve more attention and which ones are taking resources away from something with greater potential.

Listen To Your Best Customer

One place to start is by paying close attention to the parts of the business that are already working particularly well.

Who are your best customers, and why are they such a good fit? What problems are you especially good at solving for them? Which services are profitable without creating unnecessary headaches, and which customers genuinely value what you do?

Those questions can reveal patterns that aren’t obvious when you’re focused only on bringing in more business. Your best customers often have things in common, and understanding those similarities can help you decide where to spend more of your time and resources.

It also means looking honestly at the other side. Some customers, services or projects may generate revenue while requiring so much extra effort that they

keep the company from doing its best work elsewhere.

You only have so much time, money and attention to distribute. Putting a little of each into everything doesn’t necessarily produce the strongest business.

Growth Doesn’t Always Mean More

I think this is especially hard for business owners because we’re conditioned to think growth means more customers, more services, more employees and more revenue.

Sometimes it does, but being busy and building a stronger company aren’t always the same thing.

I’ve seen this at Computerease over the years. As we’ve grown and technology has changed, we’ve had to get clearer about the types of clients we’re best equipped to help and where our team can provide the most value. Saying yes to every opportunity would certainly keep us busy, but it wouldn’t necessarily make us better at serving the clients who depend on us.

That’s what I like about Mike’s pumpkin analogy. Pay attention to what’s growing well, give it the resources it needs, and be willing to stop putting time and money into something simply because you’ve already spent time growing it.