A Day In The Life Of A CEO And Founder At Revival Roots Nursery

My week varies. I would say if I could carry that into the day or into a week, Monday starts off with an All-Hands meeting at 8 AM. We have a full agenda and schedule for the week, so everyone on the team feels really prepared.

It's also a great time to encourage everyone on the team to ask questions and bring up any issues. We can then work as a team to resolve them, especially with plants, as they are living entities. Things can die, the weather can affect them, or we can have pest issues.

It's typically not the fault of the team member that there is an issue, but something we have to deal with. So, I always really encourage everyone to bring up any issues that they're having at clients' homes so we can fix them as a team and put that in the past.

After that, it's a mix of meeting with prospective clients, working on proposals, and designing future garden layouts for them. As we go through the week, I'll probably stop by a few of our clients' houses to check on the gardens.

We try to get to all of our gardens. We are the garden specialists and go every week, but our head of Maintenance and I will go every so often to check up on things and chat with the client. Often, some of our clients want to expand their gardens, so I'll meet them out there for that.

There's definitely part of the week that we deal with vendors on reorders, making sure inventory is up to date and fully stocked. Those vendor relationships are really important to me. We try to source as much as we can locally.

This is what I would tell anyone: if you can find a handful of really great vendors that produce really great products, those relationships are some of the most important in your business. They will get you the products you need quickly, with good quality and a good price.

Maintaining those relationships is like maintaining any relationship, whether it's with friends, a significant other, or family. It takes work, but it's really important and will pay dividends.

Then Thursday and Friday are really focused days for new installations. For prospective clients that we've sent proposals to that get approved, we'll install those new gardens, edible landscapes, and fruit tree orchards on Thursday and Friday. If there were any issues earlier in the week that hadn't been addressed, we may revisit those gardens on those days as well.

And then, honestly, at the end of every week, it's catching up on email, invoicing, accounting, and organization.