The Power of Reverse Engineering Your Goals

Plant for Profits Column, Leslie F. Halleck

Where do I start?

Where do I start? This is THE question most often asked of me by horticulture business dreamers or owners, students, and career transitioners. My answer to this question is always “at the end!”

What do I mean by “the end?” Well, it’s tough to know what choices and decisions to make along the way with your botanical business - or horticultural and gardening projects for that matter - if you don’t know what your end goal is.

While I’m a big fan of flexibility, I also know the value of planning. If you don’t define a tangible target, be it revenue, experience, or aesthetic - it’s tough to ever manifest what you hope to. Without a defined goal in mind it’s very easy to just get caught up in the day-to-day and not realize you’re missing out on key opportunities to move yourself forward.

Raise your hand if you’re one of those gardeners or houseplant lovers who ends up buying a bunch of plants they have no particular place for (Guilty!) Sure, it’s an exciting rush to buy those plants on an impulse, but then what do we do with them when we get them home? Stash them in the side yard for months (or longer) until half of them are worse for wear, or dead? Stick those succulents on that dark bookshelf until we figure out if we actually have a space with enough light? I have plenty of my own plants-without-a-purpose stories of shame, but nowadays I do (mostly) enforce my own rule of having a purpose for whatever I buy before I buy it even to plants. A quality over quantity mindset adjustment, if you will, with a defined end goal or experience.

You need to take the same approach when it comes to your botanical business or career goals. It’s all lovely and romantic to think about working in the plant industry - having your own plant shop or design business - but what is it that you actually need to earn, and what do you want your work and lifestyle to actually look and feel like while doing it? These are important planning questions that, whilst not terribly romantic, will help you make much better choices along your business or career transition journey.

Reverse Engineering

My solution? Reverse engineering! Start at the end…where it is you hope to be, and work backwards to make the best decisions along the way. By definition reverse engineering means taking something apart to figure out how it works. This helps you understand functionality, find weaknesses (opportunities), plan for alternatives, and the like.

Reverse engineering triggers the reticular activating system (RAS) in your brain, or a least that's what I feel it does for me. Once I have a clear target, my brain is notified that it should now pay attention to and focus on related data, which then strongly informs and influences my decisions moving forward. Having a defined goal puts your brain to work on relevant subjects, instead of getting distracted by all the shiny objects.

For example, when you’re running a business but you haven’t created a budget or a revenue and profit target, you’re essentially leaving your success, or failure, up to fate. Not that I believe in fate, but you get my gist. I’m all for boots on the ground and figuring things out along the way, but you’re much more likely to be profitable in a meaningful way if you actually set a profit goal, versus not planning and hoping things just work out at the end of the fiscal year.

By setting a specific measurable time-sensitive goal of a specific revenue amount, with a specific net profit dollar and percentage target, you now take those numbers apart, and plan for all your monthly sales and expenditures through the year by working backwards from them. It’s not that anyone expects you to hit all those sales and cost numbers exactly all the time. You won't always hit them, and that's OK. If you got close and you're happy, that's a win! If you were way off, then we know we need to plan differently moving forward. Having the numbers defined enables you to track in real time if you're on target to hit the goal, or if you need to make changes or pivot in order to do so.

If you’re a career transitioner, it’s not all about where you start. It’s about where you want to end up. What kind of job, specifically, do you want to have in the horticulture industry? How much money do you need to make in order to make the transition possible? Once you start defining and setting specific goals you may discover that what you thought you wanted to do in the horticulture industry, isn’t something you really want to do after all.

By having a defined end-goal you can now work backwards to figure out what actions to take in order to point you in the right direction.

Make the plan, work the plan, change the plan.

So what about that flexibility I mentioned? Make the plan, work the plan, change the plan. I think sometimes fear of either failure or success can get in the way of goal setting. But guess what? You can just change the plan anytime you need to.

Same goes for budgets - too often businesses in the horticulture industry treat budgets as set in stone. If the budget says they can only spend a certain amount of money in a given month, they may stop buying inventory even if their turn rate is higher than expected. That means they are likely missing out on a lot of potential sales that could have happened if they’d gone ahead and spent more than their budget stated. You can’t sell what you don’t have. So, on the flip side you don’t want to get handcuffed by a plan if it no longer makes sense. Change the plan.

You can equate reverse engineering to something like creating a vision board. When you can see what you want, you have a much better chance of making it a reality.