Founder & Chief Executive Officer
I spend a lot of time at our community garden, and I keep catching myself thinking about business while I am out there.
Everything I have done in that garden, I would do in my business. There are beans and peas and radishes coming up beautifully right now. There are tiny lettuces that will eventually turn into something worth harvesting. And there is a whole section where nothing has appeared at all yet, which may or may not change.
Gardens work exactly like businesses. You plant the seed, you wait, and some of what you planted comes up spectacularly while some of it never shows. Both outcomes are worth paying attention to, and both deserve celebrating, which is the part people skip.
The hardest part of gardening is the stretch where nothing visible is happening.
You put seeds in soil, you water, and for a long time you are looking at dirt. The work is happening underground where you cannot see it, and your only options are to keep tending it or to dig everything up out of impatience and guarantee that nothing grows.
Marketing has exactly the same shape. You publish content, you build the website, you start showing up consistently, and for a while the results look like dirt. Business owners give up constantly during this stage, usually right before anything would have appeared, because the absence of visible progress feels like proof that it is not working.
The lettuces I am excited about were invisible for weeks. They were not failing during that time. They were establishing roots, which is unglamorous and entirely necessary.
Summary Seeds spend a long period doing invisible work underground, and digging them up out of impatience guarantees nothing grows. Marketing follows the same pattern, and owners often quit during the stage right before results appear.
Here is the part of my garden I find most instructive. There are rows where I planted carefully and nothing has emerged.
That happens every season, to every gardener, and it is not a character flaw. Conditions were wrong, the timing was off, that particular seed was not viable, or something I will never identify went differently than expected.
Marketing works the same way, and the research on this is blunter than most people expect. A Harvard Business School analysis of 6,375 online experiments found that only around 10.7% produced a positive, statistically significant result. Other benchmark data across testing programs puts win rates somewhere in the 20% to 37% range depending on how a win is defined. Whichever figure you take, the majority of deliberate, well-reasoned attempts do not produce a measurable improvement.
That is the actual baseline. So when a campaign lands flat or a content format goes nowhere, you are not discovering that you are bad at this. You are experiencing the normal distribution of outcomes that everybody experiences, including the people whose results you admire.
Summary A Harvard Business School analysis of 6,375 online experiments found only around 10.7% produced a positive significant result, with other benchmarks ranging from 20% to 37%. Most well-reasoned attempts produce no measurable improvement.
A row that produces nothing is still giving you information, provided you treat it that way.
Something about that approach did not suit the conditions. Maybe the timing was wrong, maybe the audience was not there, maybe the format did not match what people wanted from you. The lesson sits inside the failure, and it points toward what to adapt.
The gardeners who improve are the ones who notice what happened and adjust next season. The ones who stay stuck either blame themselves and quit, or plant exactly the same thing in exactly the same spot and expect different results. Both reactions throw away the only thing a failed attempt actually gives you, which is the information.
So when something in your marketing does not work, treat it as a prompt to adapt rather than a verdict on your ability. That reframe is the difference between a season of losses and a season of learning.
Summary A failed attempt contains information about what did not suit the conditions, which points toward what to change. Blaming yourself or repeating the same approach unchanged discards the only thing the failure gave you.
The other half matters just as much, and people rush past it.
When something comes up beautifully, the instinct is to enjoy it and move on to the next thing. The better move is to work out why it worked. What was different about that post, that offer, that approach? What conditions made it succeed? Then do it again, deliberately, because something that worked once will usually work again.
This is how a marketing strategy actually gets built, through accumulated evidence about what your specific audience responds to rather than following what worked for somebody else. Every success is a data point telling you something true about your own market, and most businesses collect those data points and then fail to act on them.
So when something lands, examine it before you move on. Then replicate it.
Summary When something works, identify why before moving on, then repeat it deliberately. Accumulated evidence about what your own audience responds to is how a real strategy gets built.
I meant it about celebrating both. The failures and the successes.
Celebrating a success is obvious enough, though plenty of business owners skip even that and move straight to the next worry. Celebrating a failure sounds like nonsense until you consider what the alternative does to you. If only wins feel acceptable, then most of your year feels like failure, since most attempts do not win. That is a reliable path to giving up entirely.
Treating a failed attempt as a completed experiment that taught you something keeps you planting. And staying in the game is the whole requirement, because the gardener who keeps planting through the bad rows eventually gets the good ones.
Summary If only wins feel acceptable, most of the year feels like failure since most attempts do not win, which leads to quitting. Treating failures as completed experiments keeps you planting.
Every garden has fast crops and slow crops, and the slow ones feed you longest.
Radishes come up in weeks. Something like asparagus takes years before it produces, and then it produces for decades. Both belong in a garden, but confusing one for the other causes real problems, which is where a lot of marketing frustration comes from.
Paid ads are the radishes. Fast, predictable, and finished as soon as you stop. Your website and your search engine optimization are the slow crops. A blog post you publish today may do almost nothing for months, and then quietly bring in the right people for years. That is why I ask clients to keep publishing through the quiet stretch, since you cannot harvest something you never planted, and the waiting period is exactly when most people give up.
Good website design is the soil preparation nobody sees, and a capable web developer builds the plot properly so everything you plant afterwards has a chance. A good SEO company keeps tending it through the seasons where nothing appears, because they know what the dirt is actually doing.
Summary Paid ads are fast crops that stop when you stop, while your website and search engine optimization are slow crops that produce for years. The quiet stretch is when most people give up, and you cannot harvest what you never planted.
The lesson the garden keeps teaching me is the one I find hardest to practise.
You need patience, because the timeline belongs to the thing you planted rather than to you. You need perseverance, because some rows will disappoint you and you have to plant the next one anyway. You need willingness to fail, learn, and adapt. And you need to keep going despite everything working against you, which in a garden means weather and pests, and in business means competitors, algorithms, and the general difficulty of being noticed.
None of that is a technique. It is a temperament, and it is the thing that separates businesses that compound from businesses that restart every few months. If you want help holding a long-term plan through the quiet stretches, that is much of what a marketing consultant or fractional CMO is actually for, and some marketing support can keep the tending consistent while you run the rest of your business.
We are putting up signs at the garden soon, and we are calling it Limitless Gardens and Growth, which feels about right for everything I have just described.
Summary Patience, perseverance, and willingness to fail and adapt are a temperament rather than a technique, and they separate businesses that compound from those that restart every few months.
Plant the seed. Wait. Accept that some of it will never come up and that this is normal rather than evidence against you.
When something fails, take the lesson and adapt. When something grows beautifully, work out why and do it again. Celebrate both, because treating only the wins as acceptable will make most of your year feel like failure and eventually stop you planting altogether.
Gardens are exactly the lesson we need in business and in marketing. Patience, perseverance, and the willingness to keep going regardless of what is working against you.
Sources:
Harvard Business School working paper, analysis of 6,375 online experiments run on a third-party A/B testing platform (approximately 10.7% produced a positive, statistically significant result), reported via Convertcart. https://www.convertcart.com/insights/why-ab-testing-fails
Convertcart, 1,103 client experiments conducted between June 2025 and June 2026 (37% win rate); additional benchmark data placing typical win rates between 20% and 30% depending on how a win is defined. https://www.convertcart.com/insights/why-ab-testing-fails
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