131 From Horse Poo to Harvest: Cultivating Long-Term Growth in Business

Every day, I pull a wagon full of horse poop out to my future garden —a ritual that's not just about cultivating plants, but also about nurturing my entrepreneurial spirit. This episode is an invitation into that world where the principles of regenerative gardening intertwine with the art of growing a sustainable coaching business. From fertilizing with horse manure to the strategic choice of crops, I share how these actions parallel the careful nurturing required to ensure your business's roots are as healthy as those in your garden.

We will explore the realm of sustainable growth, contrasting it with the allure of artificial, rapid expansion that tempts many a coach. I lay out why a slow, regenerative approach, focusing on deep-rooted connections and trust within your community, is akin to the patient tending of a garden—both leading to a bounty that is not just successful, but also truly fulfilling over time. Join me as we explore these rich metaphors and take away practical wisdom for cultivating a coaching practice or any spiritual entrepreneurship venture with the same dedication and passion as a thriving garden.

If you are a visual leaner, I recommend watching this episode on Youtube so you can actually see the garden I am tending! You can find my Youtube channel HERE.

Kat HoSoo Lee is a trauma-informed Spiritual Business Mentor and host of The Rooted Business Podcast. She uses the tools of somatic and emotional alchemy to guide soulful entrepreneurs to approach their business as a spiritual practice. This allows them to cultivate businesses that are rooted in conscious values, ethical marketing and purposeful service.

Connect with Kat:

• Book a Free Connection Call
• Business Alchemist Mentorship
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• Youtube

This podcast is made possible with sound production by Andre Lagace.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 2:37

Hello, my friends, I have just taken my daily walk out to my future garden. I come out here every single day and dump a wagon full of horse poo and wanted to give you a little bit of a just peek into like a minor part of this homesteading project that we've got going on here, and I thought of a really cool metaphor that relates to spiritual entrepreneurship, so I wanted to show that with you as well. It's going to relate back to looking at your business in these like long-term phases and like what phase is your business in right now and can we sort of accept that that's the phase that you're in right now, instead of trying to like over, push and over speed up the process? So I'm gonna show you the garden and tell you a story about the garden first. Okay, so if you were to walk up to this little patch of my property, you would look at this and be like cat. This just looks like giant, giant pile of poo and you would be absolutely correct. This is three piles of horse manure and the first layer for all these is a layer of like just sticks and wood that we found around the property and that's kind of the basis and the structure at the bottom. Here you can sort of see it poking out like there's a piece there and there's like still a randomly wood or randomly green, that piece of pine tree right there. So we're doing a style of gardening called Hugo culture and the idea behind this is that we're piling up all this organic matter and over time it's going to compost and break down and turn into really really beautiful, nutritious soil that we can then plant lots of different things into and it's gonna support a really beautiful and nutrient dense garden.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Here, and this is where you know I'm looking at like five, six years down the line, I would love to be eating produce mostly from my own garden here, but you're looking at the first like baby step towards that right now. The first baby step towards that is every day I come out and I dump a wagon full of horse poo. And the thing to understand about gardening with horse manure, which is what I've chosen to do, you know we can bring in a bunch of dirt, we could artificially fertilize it, but that's really not my speed. I really love looking at what we already have on the property, what can we utilize and yes, I know we've artificially brought in horses on the property, but they're working for us as well here.

Speaker 1: 5:24

So the idea with horse manure and gardening with horse manure is horse manure is quite alkaline. So if you remember back to chemistry lab, that means that on the pH scale of zero to 14 it's going to be on the higher end of that scale. Lots of plants actually most plants really enjoy being in the neutral phase or just slightly in the acidic zone. So lots of plants tend to grow in the like six to seven pH scale and horse manures. I don't actually know how high it is, but it's it's quite high.

Speaker 1: 5:57

So the plan this year knowing that that is a very real and important limitation and I want to set myself up for success this year is we are going to cover all these with a bit of topsoil and we are going to plant very specific crops that are going to do well in alkaline soil and also help us actually change the pH content and the nutrition content of the soil that you see here. So things like peas and things like beans and things like beets actually do pretty well in alkaline soil and that is going to be most of what I'm planting this year. There's gonna be a lot of peas, a lot of beets and a lot of beans. So what that's going to do is a lot of those are nitrogen fixers, and so it's going to bring the pH balance of that soil down so that next year I'm gonna be able to plant things that I think are more fun, like tomatoes and strawberries and oh man, I get really excited about like broccoli and having kale all the time. So how does this relate back to business?

Speaker 1: 7:14

A lot of times when I am talking to newer coaches, folks who are just starting their spiritual entrepreneurship business, or folks who haven't had a chance to really build up a community, and I really think about the community that I've built here on this platform in my newsletter within the BAM space, as being the soil of my business, and so lots of folks come into this space being like hey, I wanna run group programs, I really wanna be teaching retreats and I wanna be creating online courses and creating all this material that's gonna bring in passive income, and I love that vision. For you, it is a very similar vision that I had several years ago, and I want you to also just take a moment and take stock of where your business is at the moment, because what you don't wanna do is forget that perhaps your soil hasn't been developed yet, perhaps it's a little too alkaline, like my soil is here, and you're trying to plant a tomato where a tomato is not going to thrive, and so when I am chatting with folks who are early on, or rather in that stage of their business, I mean it doesn't really matter how long you've been in business, as you know, if you have the community to support it, then you've got the community to support it right. And before you have like that like nutrient dense soil, that, like you know and trust that you can like put almost anything into and it's gonna do well in, I always recommend that you start out doing one-on-one work. I think that there is so much beauty in doing one-on-one work. It's something that I tried to actually move away from last year and I missed it too much, and so now I'm back to doing a lot more one-on-ones. But you know, in terms of like building up the soil levels, it is the most energy efficient and smart thing to do at the very beginning of your business.

Speaker 1: 9:30

So what you get from one-on-ones is you start learning if that thing, whatever that thing is for you, if that thing is actually something that you can talk about for several hours a week. You know, I think that I didn't realize that I could talk about spiritual entrepreneurship like ad nauseam, like you put me in a room and you start asking me questions. It's gonna go back to spiritual entrepreneurship in one way or another. And I didn't really realize that I started coaching one-on-one with people. So it's gonna help you really figure out like, hey, is this a thing that I'm not gonna get sick of? The other thing it's gonna help you do is it is a much more flexible system and so you can make these changes that would be really difficult to do in a group scenario. And so, having that nimbleness where you can, you know, maybe shift your coaching style a little bit, shift the curriculum, you know you can sort of hone in and track someone else's nervous system a little bit more skillfully in that space, and so then you're gathering information about what's working and what's not working in a one-on-one setting.

Speaker 1: 10:36

And you know, I think that the best time to actually transition and shift from one-on-one work into group work is if you start noticing yourself, and this is exactly what I did with BAM, is if you start noticing yourself saying the same thing over and over again, like several times a week. You know I'd be like, oh man, like I've talked about niching like five times this week. How fantastic would it be if I could just get all five of those clients together in one room and we could actually create a lot more magic by being in that space together, by co-regulating and co-creating what the curriculum is going to be. And that is where BAM came to be. And so it's this like organic growth that happens.

Speaker 1: 11:18

You know, I think that if we're going to like sort of just keep honing in on this garden metaphor, I think it is totally possible and I've seen tons of online coaches out there who have done it this way it's totally possible to bring in you know soil from outside and then artificially fertilize everything, and you know you could probably grow some tomatoes out of here in the first year.

Speaker 1: 11:46

But for me, it's less about how much fruit can I get in the shortest amount of time in the shortest window of time, and it's more about is this going to be a sustainable thing that continues to grow?

Speaker 1: 12:00

I know that I have met people through my coaching practice and through coaching BAM, like I know I've met folks that I'm going to be in contact with for the rest of my life and, to me, like that is the sustainability and the relationship building that I value. And so you know, I really think that, again, no right or wrong way to do it, it's just that this is the way that I feel the safest and the most regulated and the most rooted and grounded and actually, like if I can use the word trust here I feel like I can trust my business more because I know I've tended to it in a really slow and methodical and tried and true over long, long periods of time. I tried and true in those methodologies versus jumping on the latest hashtag or jumping on some sort of trend or trying to create this artificial growth in a way that's not rooted in connection. So I'd love to hear your thoughts.