Quick Take: The fastest way to become a garden consultant is to learn a repeatable system for assessing a garden, teaching clients, and running the business side, and that's exactly what Gardenary's Garden Coach Academy trains you to do in 12 weeks.

How to Start a Garden Business

Up until 1954, no one thought a person could run a mile in under four minutes. Scientists and serious runners had theories about exactly what it would take: perfect 68-degree weather, a hard dry track, a huge crowd cheering someone on.

Then Roger Bannister ran a mile in three minutes and 59 seconds, on a cold, muddy track, in front of a small crowd at a local meet.

What happened next is the real story. Within a few years, dozens of other runners broke the four-minute mark too. As Bill Taylor writes in "What Breaking the 4-Minute Mile Taught Us About the Limits of Conventional Thinking," it wasn't that human ability suddenly changed. It was that the mental model changed. Once one person proved it was possible, everyone else believed it too.

When I started Rooted Garden, no one thought I could make six figures a year as a garden coach and designer. My own lawyer told me, "Good luck making any kind of money in the garden industry."

I made money anyway. I wanted to teach others how to do the same, but I worried it wouldn't work for anyone else the way it had worked for me. What I didn't realize was that I'd already changed the mental model.

People will tell you a business only works with the right revenue, costs, and leverage. But it's mental models that let leaders stop copying everyone else and start doing what only they can do. Like Bannister, successful businesses show others what's possible.

My purpose in training garden consultants is simple: to show you that you can build a business you love and earn financial independence doing it.

Keep reading to find out how I did it.

Step One: Hone Your Purpose

When I first started a business in the garden industry, I called it Rooted Garden Goods, thinking I'd be selling bags of lettuce and other produce from my garden that I was growing in abundance. Shortly after, however, a friend of mine said, “Nicole, I don't want to buy stuff from your garden nearly as much as I want to learn how to garden the way you do.”

A light bulb went off in my brain. I realized, Oh my gosh, that sounds so much more fun than washing lettuce. I want to teach people; I want to be a consultant and a coach! I changed the name of my company to Rooted Garden and began to advertise my company as a garden consulting company. 

Clarifying my purpose proved pivotal to not just the success of my business, but also to my enjoyment of being a small business owner. Instead of packaging lettuce, I get to have way more fun sharing my gardening skills with people just like me who want to learn how to grow a bit of their own food but feel overwhelmed and confused. To be a garden consultant is to watch the art of gardening bring a spark of joy to clients.

Part One of How to Become a Garden Consultant explores how I went from starting a business where I would sell produce from my own garden to starting a consulting business where I would teach others how to garden like I do.

Step Two: Find a Mentor

Rooted Garden took off so quickly that I was desperate for a mentor, someone who was already running a business like mine. The problem was, businesses like mine were rare at the time.

When I finally found a fellow garden consultant willing to meet with me, the advice he gave me proved priceless. He walked me through the different aspects of his business, how he hired people to help him, and the types of gardens he was designing.

Part Two of How to Become a Garden Consultant explores how having a mentor gave me a deeper understanding of the possibilities available to me and the direction I wanted to go. I'd been given a mental model by spending time with someone who was five to ten years ahead of me in their business.

Step Three: Have a Business Model

As I was growing Rooted Garden, I realized that a key to my success was filling a critical piece missing in the billion-dollar garden and landscaping industries. So many gardening products are sold each day, so many landscaping services are hired, and yet, the average person still doesn't know what to do in their own garden.

The missing piece is education and training from a knowledgable garden consultant.

In Part Three of How to Become a Garden Consultant, I explore how I built a business model around taking your own experiences and knowledge in the garden, turning them into a teaching system, and then passing that on to clients and students who are right in your hometown or city.

The best models are plug a play, meaning you can take the instructions and the directions to then go and start a business of your own. This is the type of model I've created for my students. I've built lessons that give gardeners who are interested in starting their own small consulting companies all but a turnkey business.

A lot of my students do a model similar to mine with Rooted Garden—raised bed kitchen gardens. But we also have plenty of garden coaches who focus on other aspects of garden consulting, such as these 12 inspiring garden coaches, who've branched out into compost, permaculture, food forests, container gardens, restorative gardens, native plants, cut flowers, and more.

Step Four: Find Your Community to Help You Grow

Many small businesses fail because they don't have support systems. Rooted Garden didn't thrive until I built a community of clients and employees who helped me iron out my business systems, create frameworks for clients, improve my product, market my business, and most of all, stay sane.

Part Four of How to Become a Garden Consultant covers how I built an online program to be everything I wish I'd had when I was first starting out. The Garden Coach Academy teaches you how to use the Gardenary framework with clients to develop a clear, easy-to-follow plan for their success—all based on my own experience as a garden consultant.

The Gardenary Coach Academy Is Accepting Applications

Think of the Garden Coach Academy as steps one through four wrapped in a tidy package for you. Our mission at Gardenary is to make the garden an ordinary part of life for everyone, and our passion is to help gardeners like you create profitable businesses that can accomplish this throughout the world.

Garden Coach Academy provides thorough and hands-on training for gardeners at all experience levels to start a profitable business doing what you love and helping others learn to garden too.

However you decide to grow yourself or your business, don't grow alone. Gardenary has all the resources you need to bring your dream garden coach business to life!

Learn more and APPLY HERE.

LEARN ABOUT SOME OF OUR TALENTED GARDEN CONSULTANTS AND HOW THEY GREW THEIR OWN SUCCESSFUL GARDENING BUSINESSES:

• Lindsay Graves of Fourth Street Farm in Eagle County, Colorado
• Crystal Jarvis of Lettuce Grow Something in Austin, Texas
• Katie Oglesby, the Garden Girl, in Walworth County, Wisconsin
• Sheridan Boyle of Dweller’s Place in Tampa, Florida
• NaTasha Lax of 31 Eden in Fayetteville, North Carolina
• Annie Chubbuck of Seed and Vine in Columbus, Ohio
• Steve, the Optimistic Gardener, in Novia Scotia, Canada
• Sara Cory of Revival Garden Co in Grass Valley, California
• Courtney Johnson of The Kitchen Garten in Kinston, North Carolina