How I Built My Garden Consulting Business

Today I want to tell you a story—my story of how I started my business. I've never laid it out with quite as many details before. This is basically my version of the "How I Built This" podcast. (Guy Raz, if you're reading this, I'm happy to come on your show.) 

I couldn't have written the story of my entrepreneurial journey if I'd dreamed it up myself, but I got to live it, and you can relive it with me now. I'm not telling it to boast or brag or toot my own gardening horn, but instead to inspire you and show you what's possible.

Have you heard the expression You cannot be what you cannot see? Many of us are stuck in a rut of possibility—we wake up, we see the same people, we do the same thing, and we just end up living the same day again and again and again. It's like Groundhog Day. No one is coming into our earbuds or getting in front of us in a video and saying, "Hey, there are actually so many possibilities for what you can do."

And so this is a story of a real-life entrepreneur—that's me—who built a business from the ground up with just a few hundred dollars. Grab a cup of tea, a coffee, a green smoothie, whatever your choice of beverage is. I'm going to give you all the details of how I turned $450 from a preschool refund check into over $100,000 in revenue in just 15 months.

It Began with Me Asking for the Impossible

Up until the fall of 2015, I'd been homeschooling my four kids. My oldest was going into 3rd grade, my second into 2nd, my third into kindergarten, and my youngest into preschool. This would be the first year where all my kids could be attending some kind of formal school together, so I decided to wave the white flag and say, "I did my best for five years, but I cannot homeschool anymore. It's just not for me."

My husband and I decided to put our two oldest children into private school to help them adjust to the school system. So we suddenly had a bill for $18,000, and I felt responsible for it because I was the one who had agreed to homeschool and then changed my mind.

As soon as school began, I started hunting for a job. I applied everywhere. I even looked into being a teacher at the private school so they would waive the tuition for my kids, but I didn't see how the timing would work. My preschooler was done with school at noon, and I really didn't want to have her in daycare all afternoon. I wanted to spend that time with her during those last precious years when I could.

The other jobs I applied for were development jobs, so they were going to have me on the road and working nights and weekends. I still wanted to be a mom first; I wanted to do pickups and drop offs and after-school snacks. Nothing that I found would fit my crazy schedule as a mom of four.

That's when I realized, if I'm going to work to pay for this private school bill, I'm just going to have to come up with my own business.

Could I Make Money Gardening?

I immediately considered something garden-related for my business because I loved gardening. It was my getaway when I couldn't get away, and I felt strongly that everyone in the world needed to have a garden. I googled "how to make money gardening". I found a way to grow $40,000 in garlic on your property; I looked at different ways to preserve and sell your harvests. I thought about starting my own backyard orchard.

Still, none of those ideas seemed like a good fit for me. I lived on a small suburban lot in Houston. I didn't have a ton of time or space, and I didn't know the first thing about canning and preserving. The one thing I was really good at in the garden was growing lettuce. So I thought, Maybe I'll sell my lettuce harvest. My harvests were, after all, prolific. If I could sell 20 boxes of lettuce for $5 each, that would be $100. I did the math for how many beds of lettuce I would need to grow in order to make $1,000 every week or so.

I decided it was possible, so I went down to the county clerk and registered the business name Rooted Garden Goods. The name was inspired by rooting plants, something my mom had taught me way back when I had $0 to spend on plants but wanted to landscape my front yard. She showed me how to take cuttings from plants in my yard, put them in water or sandy soil, nurture them while they developed some roots, and then boom! Free plants. Rooting plants was at the heart of what I loved most about gardening. Naming my business Rooted Garden Goods meant I was going to sell things from my garden.

I go home, so excited to start my business, and call up my friend Teresa, a fellow homeschool mom who also has her own business. I was asking her whether my business should be an S corp or LLC, when she interrupted me and said, "Let's not talk about the structure yet. I don't know if the business concept is great. No offense, but I don't really want to buy your lettuce. I could go to the farmers' market and get great lettuce."

She continued: "What I do want is to know how you grow that lettuce. I'd love to have you come teach me what you know about the garden, like a garden consultant."

I can still remember standing in my kitchen, holding the cell phone and cooking dinner, when she said these words. It was such an aha moment for me. Teaching people how to garden would be so much more fun and easier than washing pounds and pounds of lettuce to put in a plastic box.

I returned to the county clerk and bought back the name Rooted Garden Goods for $25. (This is something you actually have to do.) Then, I registered a new name: Rooted Garden.

Here's something I always tell new business owners: You don't have to get it perfect. You just have to get it going. That first trip down to the county clerk was so important because I put my mark in the sand and said, "Hey, I'm starting a business," even though I came back and changed it just five days later.

How I Started My Garden Consulting Business Out of My Backyard

Now it was time to figure out how to do this whole business thing. I didn't do social media at the time. I didn't text. I had just gotten an iPhone. That's right, I was a flip phone girl until 2014. I mean, I was practically a Luddite at that point.

I also didn't have a big networking circle. I had my homeschool friends, my neighbors, parents from my kids' activities, and a small group of people we knew from church. That was about it.

Fortunately, my cousin, Laura Kelley, is an entrepreneur and an amazing woman. She offered to come down to Houston and take photos for me to help me launch my business. We took loads of pictures all around my garden using her husband's camera (he's a photographer). "Now you're set for Instagram," she said.

"Instagram? What does Instagram have to do with my business?" I said. "I've never used it."

Laura showed me a couple gardening accounts and explained how the app could be a great fit for my business. But I was terrible with tech at the point. She sent me 200 beautiful images on Dropbox, and I didn't use a single one on Instagram. I thought Instagram meant you had to take the photo inside of Instagram. It's an "instant gram", right?

I do use her photos now for promotions, but the poor thing did all that work for me and then I didn't even utilize what she created to launch my business.

My First Garden Consulting Client

In October, I was riding on a bus for a field trip with my daughter's class, when I met another mom, Michelle. She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, "Well, actually, I just started a business, a garden consulting business."

"What?" she said. "You can garden in Houston?" She had just moved from Colorado.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "It's actually amazing to garden here."

"You've got to come to my house, in that case. I need help setting up my garden."

So I charged her $25, went to her house, did a consultation, and then proposed to put a garden together for her. My plan was to do a 12ft. x 1ft. raised bed for her and to plant it up for the fall. She signed on. I can't remember how much I charged; I think it was like $500 (a really good deal for her). So I went to Home Depot and started researching ways to make a raised bed without having much by way of carpentry skills or power tools. My husband Jason was the one who bought and built all of our beds previously.

I loaded up my ol' minivan with 12-foot-long boards. If you're not familiar with Honda Odysseys, they are 12 feet long, barely. So of course, the back of my van wasn't closing. I thought I was being clever by sliding the boards all the way up and propping them on the dashboard. Just as I pushed the back door down, I heard a spsh sound. I ran to the front of my van. My windshield was shattered. Shutting the door had put too much force on the boards at the front.

My life as an entrepreneur was off to a great start.

I drove home barely able to see through the cracks and parked my van in the garage. I was too humiliated to tell my husband what I'd done. I had already been feeling self-conscious about my ability to start a business, and now I felt like a complete loser.

The next day, I went straight to the car repair place and spent $350 to replace my windshield. Then, I did Michelle's garden. I built the bed, picked up soil, drove it all to Michelle's house in the minivan, placed the bed, filled it with soil, and then planted plants I'd brought from my own garden.

Michelle absolutely loved the result. When she handed me the check, I realized I'd maybe made a dollar on the project after paying for all the materials and my windshield repair. Nonetheless, I took a picture of the check and sent it to Jason, saying "I just got paid to garden." That was a bit of an exaggeration, of course, because I'd actually done a lot more labor than that, but still... It was a wonderful, pinch-me moment. I was doing something I loved, even if I had to sacrifice my windshield in the process.

My First Months in Business

Throughout October, I did several small projects like replanting gardens or giving my advice in consultations for people who were connected to me in one way or another—a fellow kindergarten mom, friends from church, people from my old homeschool group. Any growth was just from word of mouth.

In November, I made things public, not quite by choice. Remember my cousin who'd taken all those photos? I think she was a little bitter I hadn't used them because she created a post on Facebook and tagged me in it. So excited about my cousin's new business, Rooted Garden. I'd been keeping my business pretty under the radar, embarrassed to admit to everyone I was trying to build something on my own.

I instantly started getting texts and calls. What's this about? What's Rooted Garden? Tell us more. So I sent a group email to everyone in my Gmail contact list. I'm not even sure that was legal. I said, "I love two things in this city: the people and the gardens. My new business combines the two." Then I stated very boldly that I wanted to start 100 new gardens in Houston by 2017.

This public announcement helped me get a little bit more traction. I got more jobs with friends, and I was making a couple hundred bucks for each job. I increased the price for my consultation from $25 to $50, and then I added a markup on each of the things I sourced for their garden spaces. I'd get beds for 25% off retail price thanks to my wholesale license, so I'd make a little margin there by charging them retail price (the exact amount they'd pay if they went out and bought it on their own). I could do that for trellises, plants, soil—all the components of the garden. I could even add a little more for the service of delivering it and then either setting it up for them or coaching them through the process. The clients were happy to pay a little extra in order to have my help selecting the best products for them and ensuring a great end result.

I would gather all the materials during the day while my youngest was in preschool and deliver them in the afternoon after I'd picked her up. I got into a flow.

I watched as my business bank account began to grow. I think I made about $10,000 that fall. So I wasn't exactly raking it in, but my goodness, I felt like I'd unlocked something really magical and fulfilling. The people who bought from me were getting a steal of a deal on a product that was so good for them, and I had a nice little source of income for my family. The only thing my husband was worried about was me maxing out the weight in my minivan by trying to carry too many bags of soil. ("Twenty-seven bags, Nicole, that's it.")

I was excited to enter December, gift-giving season. I wanted to come up with a gift idea that could help promote my business for the new year. I landed on salad planters. I bought these little steel containers from Home Depot, added drainage holes to the bottom, filled them with soil, and planted them up with lettuce plants from my garden. I also created gift cards and little seed packets that people could give teachers and family members. I sent out some emails and posted about my planters on Facebook and Instagram.

I didn't make tons of money, but I learned that this type of marketing could seed the success of my business. One of my friends bought six planters for all her kids' teachers. She told her friends about what a cute present it made for the teachers—those friends could be clients. Each teacher who received a planter now knew about my business; plus, they had this cute planter sitting on their desk for other faculty to see. I didn't realize at the time quite how strategic it was, but it ended up launching and growing my business into the new year.

My First Stranger Client

By December, I had a little website on Google Blogger with a space to checkout for a consultation. This was when the first stranger on the internet made a purchase. She sent me an email that said, "Hey, my name's Jenny. I just heard about you and would love to have a garden for my family. I don't have a green thumb, so I've been looking for a service like yours."

Her email was like music to my ears. You have this idea for a business, and you think it's a good idea, but you're not sure any other human being is going to like it. So to have a random person on the internet say they've been looking for something like this brings so much affirmation.

I went and met Jenny, and she was the most wonderful human being. I was really nervous to do a consultation for a stranger, so I printed out 10 pages of color prints from my garden and stuck them in those plastic covers high school kids use to turn in school reports because, you know, I was fancy. Along with the pictures, I brought a bowl of lettuce harvested from my garden so she could taste homegrown freshness. I also brought—don't laugh—a bucket of soil. I dug up native Houston soil to show her why I use raised beds.

I knocked on the door of her beautiful home, which was in a really nice part of Houston. Three people came to the door. Turns out, Jenny had been having a little breakfast with friends. Jenny said, "Hey, y'all, you have to meet Nicole."

I'm standing there with my bucket of dirt, like, "Hi, yes, I'm a very normal person."

Jenny was so gracious and told her friends what I was doing. All three of them were like, "Oh, that's so cool. Do you have a business card?"

Thankfully, I'd just had them printed, so I ran to my minivan and grabbed my new cards. Her friends left, and I did the consult with Jenny. I talk about it in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, because Jenny told me she wanted her garden to look French. I had no clue what she meant. It was my first indication that I was working with people who saw the garden completely differently from me—more ornamental, way less utilitarian.

I figured out what a French garden should look like and ended up doing several projects for Jenny. It was a wonderful first connection with a stranger on the internet and gave me a huge confidence boost.

How I Started a Gardening Subscription Service

The buzz around my business was growing, and I was meeting new people. In January, all three of Jenny's friends—Stacy, Julie, and Ann—gave me a call. Stacy's husband already had a garden, but he wanted me to completely overhaul it and make it better. Ann wanted to turn part of her yard into an in-ground kitchen garden, which was going to be a challenge for me, and then Julie really wanted to become a gardener that year. She's the one who introduced me to the idea of having a subscription model for my business. I spent the day with her planting up her garden, and then she said, "Okay, so when are you coming back?"

I was like, "Umm, never?"

"No, I really want to know how to do this long term," she said. "Can you come back every two weeks and coach me through the process?"

This was another eye-opening moment for me. She was going to pay me for my time... repeatedly! The garden, as I discovered, is ready-made for a subscription service, which is so wonderful and dependable when it comes to building a business.

My business was slowly gaining some traction throughout January and February. I did some work in my kids' school garden and threw some workshops to spread the word.

My First Garden Event

One day when I was working with Jenny and Julie, they said, "Is there a way we could help you spread the word and grow your business?" I have to say, there are no words more incredible to hear as a small business owner than these.

"Of course, I'll take your help. How about we do a party together?"

They loved the idea, so we got Julie's garden ready to host a brunch. They invited about 50 people, and we had about 25 people say yes. I promised that I would feed all these people a garden-to-table brunch. I called my mom, thrilled, and she said, "But, Nicole, you don't cook."

Here's a rule of entrepreneurship: Everything is figure-out-able.

My mom came into town to help me with the event, and we bought loads of food from a local farm that supports refugees to show what can be grown locally and seasonally. We made beet green frittata, braised greens, sweet potato waffles, rosemary shortbread. It was fancy, you guys, and I was so proud. I stayed up till midnight the night before trying to get my old printer to print some brochures with my prices for the event.

All these people came and toured Julie's garden and enjoyed fresh, seasonal food, and I just knew my business was about to absolutely blow up. My phone would be ringing off the hook. How was I even going to keep up with the workload once all 25 people ordered garden installations?

"That was lovely. Thank you so much," they all said on their way out.

And then it was crickets.

One lesson I've learned since is that big events have more of a long-tail effect. The success they bring is a slow burn, not an explosion. Instead of getting called by all 25 people or even 10 people, I got called by two. But those two made all the difference.

How I Found a Business Mentor

In March, my husband was traveling to San Diego for a business trip, and my mom and dad were going to keep the kids so I could go with him. I knew California was way ahead of Texas in terms of kitchen gardening, so I started calling around, trying to find some garden business owners that would meet with me. Most people hung up the phone or just didn't take my call, but two people agreed to meet with me in person.

I paid them for their time and heard about their experiences. Talking to professionals who'd been in business for five to ten years fast forwarded my business growth. They told me mistakes they'd made, ways they'd wasted money, barriers to entry. An hour with each of them probably gave me a year's edge in my business. You can even see a difference in the work I was doing before March and after March.

I'll be forever grateful to those mentors who gave me their advice.

How My Business Took Off

One of the wonderful women who called me after the garden party was Lori. Lori lived on a gorgeous corner lot, and she was a really refined woman. We walked out to her space, and she said, "How about this whole area right here?"

Up until this point, I'd only ever installed one box at a time. Bring the box, fill it with soil, and add the plants. Lori wanted me to fill a large space in her side yard. I tried to act like it was totally normal for someone to give me an entire piece of their very expensive property for a kitchen garden. "Oh, it would be so gorgeous." I showed her how we could line the garden up with her beautiful porch, and she loved the vision and signed on.

This was my first significant project—a far cry from the DIY stuff I'd been doing. Lori lived on a busy street in her neighborhood. I'd seen at least 15 people walking by just during our hour-long consult. She had a wrought iron fence on this corner lot, so everything I was about to do was going to be on display in this well-to-do area.

So I went home and started calling people. The mail-order beds I'd been using weren't going to cut it, so I needed to find someone to build the beds and someone to install the beds. I found a raised bed supplier and a landscaper who agreed to install the garden for me, so it all started to come together.

We finished the garden in May, and it was so beautiful. Everyone who walked by went wild for it. I was ready to do more big projects.

Andrew's Stone Garden

The night after I finished Lori's garden, I got a phone call at 8:30. "Hi, my name's Andrew, and I'm a friend of Lori's. We were at a function together tonight, and she showed me pictures of her garden. I'd love for you to come do a consult for me."

I walked onto his property in a beautiful neighborhood of Houston I didn't even know existed, and he handed me a crisp $100 bill for the consultation. "Work your magic," he said. "Let's make this whole space a garden. Can you do a stone garden?"

I pretended that I could (Everything's figure-out-able, remember?) and got to work. I called the contractor who'd done the stone on Andrew's house and asked if he could do the raised beds for me. He agreed, and we got to work on the design. It was going to be a circle in three sections. Andrew was a devout Catholic, so I wanted the garden to reflect the Holy Trinity.

While the landscapers were ripping up grass on the day of installation, Andrew and his wife Shana invited my inside. We started talking about our families, and I told them Jason works at MD Anderson Cancer Center doing drug discovery for rare cancers. We made a lot of progress on the garden that day, and then I got another late night call from Andrew. "I would really like to talk to your husband," he said, "because I've just been diagnosed with a rare cancer."

Andrew had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He wanted to talk to Jason about the drugs they were working on because he didn't have a lot of choices for treatment. It was right around the time that he started feeling sick that he called me for a garden consult. For someone who's facing a serious disease to ask you to create something for them in the days that may be their last—it's really sobering and also challenging. Andrew and his family would be facing difficult times ahead as he underwent treatment, and I wanted to over-deliver for them.

Andrew loved the garden we created. He would send me pictures from the garden. One day, I was working in his garden, and he came down with a bucket of water. "This is holy water," he said. "I'm putting it in the garden so that it'll be in the harvests." He saw the garden as part of his healing journey, which made it all the more meaningful to do that project with him. It really hit me that the thing I was now creating for a living is something that someone facing mortality wants to have in their life.

How I Ended Up Gardening for Johnny Carrabba

Right around the same time that I was doing Andrew's garden, the landscaper who helped me with Lori's garden contacted me. "Would you be willing to do a really big vegetable garden?"

"Yeah, of course!"

"Would you be willing to do Johnny Carrabba's garden?"

"Who?" Remember, I was a homeschooling mom. I had zero pop culture. Actually, I had zero culture period. I'd been teaching my kids about the Renaissance and helping them memorize multiplication tables. If you also haven't heard of Johnny Carrabba, he's a famous restauranteur. He started Carrabba's Restaurant, which is a nationwide franchise now, and he has a whole line of restaurants here in Houston.

He had about 600 square feet of vegetable garden at his home that the landscaper did not enjoy tending and was happy to pass off to me. The same landscaper also referred me to a school for special needs students called the Joy School when they wanted to create a vegetable garden. Meanwhile, Lori referred me to a friend name Reena, and I got to design a really cool keyhole garden for her.

You can trace all these incredible jobs back to that Rooted Garden brunch I threw with the help of Julie and Jenny. That's how powerful word of mouth can be. You really don't need a dozen or even five great clients to start a business. You just need one.

Making My First $100,000 for Garden Consulting

By August of 2016, my company was making about $20K a month. My kids were back in school, and I was really getting into a routine: running around, picking up my daughter at preschool at noon, delivering materials to clients, picking up the rest of my kids, driving to soccer practice, making dinner, one day after the next. I had several big jobs under my belt, and my confidence was growing.

In October, I was introduced to a Houston architect through Julie's brother. I got to create a garden for him, and then he spread the word to his clients. I'd finally gotten a bit more business savvy by then, so I started handing out cards for $50 off their consult if they shared it with friends and family.

I was also building my system. I'd gone from building the raised beds myself (and smashing my windshield) to having someone create beautiful, handcrafted raised beds for my clients. Things had really turned around for me in just one year. I was focusing on the parts I enjoyed most about the business—namely, talking to clients, planting their gardens, and helping them find success.

By November, my company had made over $100,000 in 2016, and it wasn't even Christmas yet.

In December, I decided to make holiday wreaths instead of salad planters. I made a wreath for myself, posted a picture of it on Instagram, and a company called Better Homes and Gardens—you may have heard of them—reposted my wreath with the caption "Can't stop staring at this wreath by Rooted Garden." I'd been doing these gorgeous gardens that were worth $40,000 at that point, and Better Homes and Gardens noticed me because of a $100 wreath. Such is life.

I found myself in the middle of December with my dining room covered in wreath forms and driving all over the city to deliver wreaths to clients. This was before I read The E-Myth Revisited, a great book about entrepreneurship, which teaches you that every time you add a new product to your business, you add a whole new host of challenges. The wreathes weren't even very profitable because the materials themselves were pricey. Lesson learned.

How Much I Earned in My First 15 Months of Business

Even with the wreath fiasco, I closed the year with over $120,000 in gross revenue, and I got to keep a good bit of that. Of course, a lot of it went to pay for the materials like the raised beds, the soil, and the labor. But I made a little bit of margin for each of those products for every single project. Every time we delivered a raised bed or planted a plant, I got to keep a little bit. In addition to charging for my time as a consultant, I was making a really nice salary, especially considering that I was still working part-time and had taken almost the entire month of July off to be with my family.

I had finally done it. I made my dream come true. I got to be an active mom to my four kids and work around their schedules. I got to spend time with my preschooler in the afternoons. I didn't quite hit my goal of creating 100 gardens by 2017, but I'd built dozens of new gardens around my city. And I definitely made $18,000. I more than paid for that private school tuition, and I got to keep some money for myself.

Looking back on those early months of suddenly having my own business is so special to me. I think of all those people who trusted me and gave me a chance when I was really a nobody, just some self-proclaimed garden professional. Honestly, I have so much gratitude for Julie and Jenny and Lori and Andrew and the Carrabbas and the landscape company and all of them. They changed my life, truly.

How You Can Take the Next Step If You're Interested in Starting YOUR Own Business

My story is one I will keep telling because it started from nothing and grew into something in a very short period of time. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this—I mean, hopefully you have more than one—it's that you should just go after what you want. I looked like a complete mess if you just peaked into my life at any given point during those first 15 months. I was late for things, I was making tons of mistakes, but I didn't quit. I just kept going, and I said yes to every opportunity that came my way. I learned so much so quickly because of that.

I started my business with $450. That money came from a refund check I received when I decided not to enroll my youngest in a certain preschool. They were nice enough to return my deposit to me, and I took that money straight to the bank. I've never used a cent from my family's bank account for my business since. So I turned $450 into over $120,000 in a little over a year. Tell me another investment you can make with that kind of return that also allows you to create beautiful things for people. I mean, I still can't believe I did this.

Thanks so much for reading my story. If you're a gardener and this story inspires you, you can write your own story just like mine. If I can do this, you can do it, too. I actually teach gardeners how to do this exact same thing all across the country and around the world. I've taught consultants who started with zero, just like me, and grew their businesses to six figures. Around 95% of small businesses fail in the first five years, but I've helped business owners stay alive for more than five years. You could be next.

Thank you for being here and being part of the Gardenary story. You're just as important to me as Andrew and Julie and Lori and Jenny. You being here makes a huge difference and means that the garden is once again becoming part of our lives.