Last week I harvested my very first honey. Nine kilograms in my first year of beekeeping. I stood there with sticky hands and a full bucket, smiling like an idiot.
A few days later I gave up on another hive. The colony split I had tried to make weeks before failed. I made a crucial mistake: I placed the new hive right next to the old one. And as you probably know: bees can fly. And they flew right back to the old hive. Only the little ones stayed. No queen, no future. I shook them out and let that hive go, hoping they’d be welcomed in the other colonies.
Your marketing plan has these hives too.
I didn’t bet on one colony. I ran two paths at once:
One got room, got care, got it right. And gave me nine kilos of honey.
The other failed. And that failure is the most valuable thing I own as a beekeeper. I will never place a split next to the original hive.
Now, imagine I’d only had the small hive. One path, fully committed. I’d be standing in an empty garden right now. No bees, no honey. And worst of all: no next season to learn and grow further.
I created The Grower’s Method. Four stages: Choose, Cut, Learn, Live. Each has its own power, and I’ll tell you more about them in the coming weeks.
This week is clearly Learn. And that’s why it’s a stage in the method, not just an afterthought. You will never know upfront what will work. So don’t go all-in on one thing. You choose two or three paths, build them in small stages, one step at a time, and collect real feedback along the way. Not opinions in the boardroom, signals from customers. By that you will get the answers to your questions: Does this fit the organization? Does this fit our customers? Is anyone buying? Is it growing?
If yes: great. You found your working beehive. Scale it.
If no: congratulations, even better. Now you know, at an early stage, you have to adjust. Discovering this at an early stage is the win. If you already had spent three years building and then found out the fit wasn’t right, you’d have lost three years. Now your input is small, the win is even bigger: you can adjust in time.
The failed hive didn’t cost me bees. They will find their home in the colonies. It brought me one lesson. The best deal possible.
One question for you: what mistake are you about to make? Pick the plan you’re working on right now, split it into two or three segments and test. Let real customers tell you which one is ready for a flight.
🍒 If you want to run this way of working on your own marketing plan, I’m opening my very first cohort, The Marketing Harvest, soon. Put your name on the waitlist and you’ll be the first to hear.
Yours,
Stefan “creating bee-buzz” Verhoeve
Even my background is bee-style ;-)
