Growing my Business organically (and other adventures in Gardening).
You may not know this, but I’ve been trying to grow Ron Nicole from the day I started it.
I had big plans for this business.
Here we are 7 years in, and my ideas of growth have definitely shifted.
It’s like when you first decide you want to start a garden. You pin all these ideas onto your vision board, and spend hours daydreaming about it. At some point you have to put your vision into action. A few hundred pounds of dirt later you realize you are in way over you head. It’s at this point you begin to chip away at most of the things you thought you wanted in your garden. You realize that your vision was grander than your current reality. You realize a garden needs a lot of work. Constantly. Like every day. Some of you would say “f” it at this point. You might throw a few seeds in some pots, and walk away. Giving up is easy. It requires a lot less imagination than sticking with it. I can’t tell you how many other businesses I’ve started and given up on before Ron Nicole.
You have to expect that this is going to be an ongoing, continually evolving process that takes years. Every gardener I’ve ever met has told me that it takes a long time to grow a garden. Many of them have been working on their gardens for decades. And over the years, they’ve had to make changes so that their garden flourishes.
This is why comparing organic growth in a business to growing a garden is so perfect.
Gardening keeps you honest because you can’t outwit Mother Nature. She is the master of her domain and you must learn to abide by her rules if you want to have a successful garden. You can have a great plan, and then you get a freak hail storm that destroys everything, a very late spring freeze that kills your tender young plants, or a storm that floods your new home town. Yes… those things have all happened to me. These things will pop up in your business, too.
My plaster and paper artworks are very similar to gardening. The work I made 7 years ago was in many ways just me imagining the work that I would be making today, just as a gardener imagines how their new plantings will look when grown in and mature. It took years of refining, tweaking, learning, and improving. I understood early on that I didn’t have to be great at my art immediately. I just had to work at it everyday. Growth naturally happens over time. The more time you put into your garden the better it will look over the years. A garden that is not tended to will not give you the flowers you want. I tend to my art every single day. That’s why it looks the way it does. You can tell how old a garden is based on the roots. Sturdy, thick roots means strong plants. Every year you put into your business your roots get stronger.
Over the years, I’ve learned that my plaster and papers can’t be scaled up. Trust me. I’ve tried. They are like the Titan Arum, a flowering plant that blooms only once every seven to ten years. The conditions needed for my artwork have to be perfect, and don’t lend themselves to creating an abundance. People are generally shocked when I tell them I don’t have any inventory, and barely even have any pieces for myself. My work is all made from scratch. It’s like being a painter but having to make your canvas from scratch before you start painting on it.
Don’t get me wrong, I could scale up, but they wouldn’t be as good. If organic growth is your philosophy then you would never scale up something knowing it would reduce its quality. Yes - that’s absolutely what a lot of businesses do. Squeeze every penny of profit out of it they can until the product is a watered-down, sad version of its original self.
I worked far too hard to refine these beauties to just drag them at the end like that. So Ron Nicole Plasters and papers will never be mass-produced or sold.
Demand for Ron Nicole jumped off a few years ago. Every person in the industry wanted me. People I had been a fan of were suddenly asking me for work.
Deciding not to expand my plaster and papers has been soul crushing because I know it’s the thing that everyone wants from me. There has been potentially a LOT of money left on the table. So where did that leave me? I decided that organic growth is the answer. And with organic growth it’s about what you can do, not what you can’t. And that is something I can work with.
So what does organic growth look like for Ron Nicole? It’s growth that can’t be rushed. It’s working with what we already have internally. This requires honest self-evaluation.
So what does Ron Nicole already have in its favor internally?
An already established brand
A supportive community of thousands of email subscribers and devoted social media followers
An in demand product of plaster and paper fine art that can carry my business while we expand into other areas.
Relationship with editors, artists, supporters, & many other creatives
A gorgeous art studio where I can feel inspired to make the artwork every day
With all that in mind we have started to create some scaleable products….
As you may know we purchased a commercial printer this past year so that we could start printing my Her-barium plaster prints in house. It takes a shit-ton of work and many steps to get the print looking just the way I want it, but it is still far, far easier than trying to make more plaster. Once I have the design I want I just hit print.
But even with this scaleable product, we still understand that we can only sell that which we can physically manage to process out. We do cap how many we sell because we are not ready to be in non-stop order fulfillment.
Selling lots of stuff is awesome, until you realize that you have to pack and ship all those things. You wouldn’t believe how much time and space that process occupies. I mean really. Everything else has to grind to a halt when it’s time to push things out the door. In the future we will scale this up, but for now this is still a literal mom & pop shop y’all.
We are already working on our Newsprint publication so that we can get art into everyone’s hand at an affordable price. Making Ron Nicole accessible is important to the growth of our business. Having different price points is key if you want to grow. As demand for them grow we will invest into another employee to help us process them and ship them out.
The business cannot be built solely on my ability to hand make things. Collaborations and partnerships on Ron Nicole inspired products is another path to growth that I’m starting to explore. My business has a clear style so even if I can’t sell my plaster and papers to the masses, we can partner with other companies to sell items that have a Ron Nicole look and feel.
We currently have a tablecloth collab happening. Mitty over at Fox and Brindle approached me with the idea last year. She took the design from one of my plaster wall candies, and created a truly inspired look for the home. We expect that this will be the first of many more of these to come. I can already see napkins and other linens in our near future.
We know that if this business is to continue to grow we will ultimately need a much larger workspace with more room for multiple different projects to be happening at once. We intend to raise the capital on our own and have no plans on getting a loan. While we will work on raising the money, we will continue to seek out new opportunities with other makers and creators. We have so many ideas for ceramics, housewares, linens, and other home goods.
Although the vision we have for Ron Nicole is always for what’s next, way, way down the road, we are still continuing to take our time getting there. Since I plan to do this my whole life, there’s no need to rush through and skip to the end. I have a ton of seeds to plant along the way. And just like your dream garden can takes decades, its okay to spend years doing the thing you love while growing it slowly and organically over your lifetime. The work I put in everyday will decide the garden I will have 10 years from now. That’s how you should always think of your business and its growth.
What are some thing you are doing or have done to grow your business?
