Money is Made Picking Fruit NOT Growing Trees

Imagine yourself driving along a picturesque highway on a sunny fall afternoon.  You spy an absolutely beautiful fruit orchard.  Its trees spread out before you almost as far as you can see.  You are so stricken by the beautiful sight, you quickly stop your car and go into the orchard.

As you walk into the beautiful surroundings, you notice something doesn’t seem quite right.  Although you’re not a fruit farmer, you can’t help but thinking there seems to be a whole lot of fruit that seems very ripe on the trees.  But there are no workers around picking fruit.  In fact, you can see where ripe fruit has started to fall to the ground and go to waste.

You keep walking, and finally you hear the sounds of workers and equipment working.  You follow the sound over the next hill and are amazed by what you see.

There must be several dozen workers and several different types of machines all working at a feverish pitch.

But all the workers and equipment are working in the dirt.  They scurry around the orchard, digging in the earth, and using the equipment to move dirt and dig holes.

You wonder why on earth all this activity is being focused on putting stuff into the ground.  After all, there’s all that fruit ready to be harvested further up the orchard.

It’s too much for you to take so you walk over to the man that’s obviously in charge (the owner of the orchard you find out), and ask him what he and his workers are doing.

“Can’t you see?” the orchard owner asks in a hurried tone.

“We’re really busy trying to plant these new trees.  Trees take several years to grow before they put out fruit, so we’ve really got to get going.  I don’t have any more time to talk with you now.  Good day.”

“How can this owner of the orchard be so blind?” you ask yourself.  He’s got all those wonderful trees with all sorts of fruit just ripe for the picking.  You wonder to yourself about how much effort, and how many resources he’s wasting by refusing to take advantage of his obvious assets.

Does the orchard owner sound familiar to you?  Sound like anyone you might know?

Does he sound a little bit like, maybe, ummmm, you?

It’s a fact that most businesses have a tremendous “orchard” already established.  There are many customers who have purchased in the past.  And those same customers would very likely purchase again if given the chance, and a bit of a nudge.

But the paradox is that many business owners instead spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to “plant more trees” in an effort to get more fruit (clients).  And they spend much less time and effort simply “picking” the fruit that’s already ripe (going to back to customers they already have).

That’s a lot like walking by the apple trees in the orchard, picking only the largest apples that happen to be ready for picking on any particular day.  And then never returning to those same trees again later to pick the apples that have subsequently become ready to be picked.

So stop ignoring your “apples” in favour of trees.

Put your creativity to the test.  Try to come up with at least one different thing you can offer your customers each month.  Plan a marketing campaign to “harvest the fruit” in this way.

Your profits will make some tremendous leaps forward.

And you will find yourself needing to spend less time “planting new trees”.  Instead you will find yourself simply harvesting more apples.

Go ahead.

Continuing to grow trees is important.  But don’t forget to pick the fruit that’s in front of you, ready to pick, too.