October officially marks 2 official years in business for us! Isn’t that wild? This whole thing started back in October 2019 and we had a dream to change the game for women working in the landscape and other similar industries. Our journey looks something like this: spend every moment together for our entire childhood… we shared clothes, friends, drove the same car, worked the same jobs. The only thing we didn’t share was boyfriends! We attended the same college and got the same degrees (horticulture and turfgrass) but this is where our paths diverged. Heather picked up a camera and built a wedding photography business and Fawn managed high profile athletic fields.
We feel like we were meant to use our time apart to pursue individual paths so that we could come back together. For a long time, we didn’t know exactly what that meant. We always said we’d start something together when we turned 30. But what?! While our careers took us to different places, our hearts kept us together… and we talked on the phone every day. Through a series of phone calls, we knew what we were being called to do: merge our worlds of rough and dirty with soft and curated. To join forces to create Those Plant Ladies.
Year two has been a year of open hands and giving God the space to do with us as He would orchestrate. This year has been full of lots of excitement, joy, successes, and also coupled with doubt, fear, exhaustion, and defeat. It’s been a journey, to say the least, but we are in it for the long haul!
Digital Education Resources
One of our major focuses for year two was to start building a library of digital education resources for our community of Plant Ladies around the world. Since our mission includes education, we plan to always spend lots of time and energy on this each year, but we really wanted to ramp it up during our second year….and did we ever! From October 2020 through September 2021, we published 78(!) blog posts on everything from fall lawn care to fashionable workwear for women. We are so proud of the content that we have provided and can’t wait to continue expanding our blog and adding more and more resources to serve our community with all of the Plant Lady knowledge they need!
Want to be the first to see what’s new and receive exclusive educational resources? Be sure you’ve joined our mailing list! There will be plenty of updates and exclusive resources coming to our list in the coming year!
Terra the Tundra
In January of 2021, after feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders, a bit of winter blues, and barely enough dollars in the bank to pay our team, God provided above and beyond our expectations! We were feeling burnout. We prayed together for opportunities to connect with other businesses to reach more people with our mission to inspire, educate, and empower women and the next generation. We had put ourselves out there to our online community about how amazing it would be to have a truck to haul our equipment, tools, and plants with instead of cramming them all inside of a tiny SUV. The response of Mike Johnson Toyota, our local Toyota dealer, reaching out to chat with us on how they could help had us feeling like it was too good to be true. We ignored the message and it wasn’t until they reached out again that we called and chatted to Andy, the GM, about meeting to discuss our mission and brand with them. You can read all about that experience here and part II here.
Being Intentional
So much of year one was full of events, workshops, one on one connections, and excitement from our community. It literally fueled us in more ways than you will ever know. Meeting so many new faces and building our tribe of women in our community is what has stuck with us and given us momentum to push through the harder times. While these events and networking opportunities connected us with you, they left our team and ourselves feeling a bit exhausted.
Our goal for our second year in business was to be more intentional. We actually started with this back in early 2021. We wanted to be more intentional with our time, energy, and resources, When we said yes to something we wanted it to be because we knew it was a good fit for us. This meant that we had to also say no to things that weren’t a good fit for our mission, our team, or sometimes we just didn’t have time in our schedules to add one more thing in. With the world in the climate it was in, we decided to focus our attention and energy on our online presence. Through our social platforms and blog posts, we wanted to connect with our community in a way that was authentic but didn’t limit our time with our families.
Installations
We had some amazing installations in the spring of 2021 that gave us the opportunity to work alongside our amazing installation crew of women and welcome new volunteers alongside us to come and learn. We really want to highlight the women that take time out of their schedules and often commute long distances to be a part of our team. They bust their butts to help get the job done and to give it their all to be a key piece of seeing the job through to completion! We still feel like we need to be pinched that people want to volunteer their time and energy, to do a manually laborsome job, and do it with a smile on their face! No other explanation other than… God!
Total Transformations
One of the visions that Fawn had as the designer for our landscape projects is for the business to be a part of seeing a project through from design all the way through to completion. TPL’s business model was started around landscape installations and this has been what we have invested and pushed, but we wanted to show what it would look like to complete an exterior transformation too. In February, Fawn had the opportunity to design an exterior transformation for Claire. They wanted this older house house to feel fresh and updated. After the design was complete, we started envisioning what this would look like for our business to see the vision through. We reached out to many contractors within our area and asked our local community who they would recommend to help with pieces of this project. Concrete work, exterior painting, garage doors, front doors, basketball court, patios, and more were all on the wishlist so we needed to rally local businesses to make this transformation go from a design on the screen to a reality. It was our ultimate goal to connect with businesses that wanted to grow and to collaborate with them in order to bring this project to life.
Collaboration over competition is our motto! We’ve been blessed by these businesses and also our community in the involvement to see this project almost complete… we’re literally so close! We want to be able to offer this kind of full-service package to our future clients, and just as we intended, we have learned so much in getting this one under our belts! We are so excited to dive into this more as we approach year three.
A Purpose-Driven Team
If you hang around us long enough, you might hear us say, “Teamwork makes the dream work!” Leading a team of women who come from different backgrounds, experiences, have different skillsets, education, and passions, and who all have different working geniuses and personality types has been one of our very top priorities to unite into one purpose-driven team. In September, we took an amazing trip to Willow Falls in Hendersonville, NC for a team retreat. One thing we all instantly felt when we got out of our vehicles… God. The peace of this place is unreal and the stories and wisdom that the owner, Michele, and her team, Donna and Miriam shared as they poured into all of us was something we’ll never forget.
The journey that they have all been through and where they are today speaks to The One who has guided their path every step of the way. It looked messy, tough, troublesome, but they all had an astounding amount of peace through it all! We are so glad our team had the honor to be surrounded by these strong, encouraging, kind women! There is no doubt that this is only the beginning of our time at Willow Falls. We already have our bags packed for the next trip!
Thank you all so much for your encouragement and excitement through year two of business with us! Bring on year three… ready or not, here we come!
