Every morning at around 7:45am I go outside and sit in my garden. Growing flowers, tropical plants and succulents in the ground and watching them over a cup of coffee or tea while the sun emerges from the wet okayness of the Florida skies that early in the day.

This is easily one of my favorite parts of each day. Some mornings, I  will water my gardens in the traditionally inefficient way of using a watering can. Other times, I simply walk around with my bare feet experiencing the wet earth and dew covered grass.

In the morning, sometimes there are morning glories in blues and pinks that show themselves for a few hours and crumble away as the sun begins beating down on them later on. In the evening, we have the elegant flowers I love to refer to as unicorn flowers, as they look just like a unicorn horn before they bloom. These flowers smell so wonderful and look like a flower made of silk. There are 3 rose bushes in various pinks, a philodendrum, a Florida cactus tree, marigolds, rosemary, elephant ears in abundance, fern, Hawaiian tuberose, basil, and many more plants growing in my beautiful yard and every day a few times a day I will always sit with them and think of them.

The parallels between growing plants and businesses have always been evident to me, as you cannot grow something if it is not planted in the right environment and has all of the needs of a plant of it’s type. They are so fickle and yet, when you know how to care for them and what they need they can prosper. Seeds plant more seeds, just like customers plant more customers.

When the coffee is all gone and the beauty of growth observed through the new shoots of my banana tree or fresh buds of roses on my rose bush every day I go inside and grow something else entirely.

With the year 2017 here, it is more important than ever to continue to foster this nurturing relationship with plants while society exists more and more on the internet in an open and connected way.