Am I leaving $90,000 on the table?

I thought I left #bossbabe culture behind, but do I actually need it to compete?

My family and I just took a road trip down through Oregon to the northern part of California and Lake Tahoe. We did a lot of off-grid camping and hiking, but as with any travel I do, on I insist on checking out the cities and towns we drive through to scope out the small business scene. Show me the storefronts!

Of course I visited a couple plant shops, always fun because meeting another plant shop owner is like meeting a half sibling you just found out existed through a DNA site and realizing you share so many of the same traits and struggles.

It's life affirming.

However...

I noticed something interesting at one of the shops I visited, and I can't stop thinking about it. After I left the store I followed this shop on Instagram and saw a prompt in their bio: "Sign up for the Houseplant Side Hustle Course." The course landing page claims you'll learn "everything you need to know to earn extra $$$ from home by growing and selling houseplants."

Is this weird?

I mean, look, I'm not asking if it's weird because I don't know what online courses are. Sadly, I spent time dabbling in mid 2010s boss babe land, building landing pages that offered free resource downloads and hosting free webinars designed to get you to upgrade to a paid course offering. I went to a conference in 2017 with Seth Godin and James Clear as keynote speakers.

I’m somewhere in this sea of hopeful content creators at a 2017 conference in Boise.

I spent hours listening to Pat Flynn. I paid A THOUSAND DOLLARS (god help me) for a Caitlin Bacher masterclass. I was obsessed with Mariah Coz. I am not above this shit! For years I mopped up passive income from two "books" I wrote about starting businesses in niche industries (subscription box businesses, fashion trucks) until I finally shut it down because it all felt a little gross to me.

So when I ask, "is this weird?" I'm not asking as if I'm some outsider to passive income streams and course creation. I am embarrassingly familiar with how it all works. Embarrassingly familiar.

I also have zero judgement of a plant shop—or any independent retailer—generating side income by selling courses. What is it that the folks at Convertkit say? "Teach everything you know"? If it works for you, go for it.

But still... something about this bothers me.

I think it starts with the very obvious fact that if you run a plant shop, you might not be interested in equipping potential competitors with the exact roadmap you followed to make money selling plants. And look, I don't believe in closely guarding trade secrets. I support the open source model of entrepreneurship and I'm happy to tell you anything I know, even if you're interested in starting a similar business that could ultimately compete with mine. At some point I might even charge a consulting fee for that kind of work. Dare to dream!

It's when you couple that knowledge with a sales funnel that I get suspicious. I have to believe that you're either not actually giving me "everything I need to know to make $"orthat"everythingIneedtoknowtomake$" includes getting in your down line.

What do I care if a retail plant shop in a small Western town in wants to fire up a multi-level marketing scheme selling plant care products? Am I worried that this might spark the LuLaRoe-ification of the plant industry, decimating the business model I rely on by democratizing it to the point where every church parking lot rummage sale has several vendors in 10x10 tents selling orchid bark and root hormone?

Maybe?

Maybe it's a deeper fear that there is no place for independent retail without scaling, because there just isn't enough money in it on its own. And that at some point every quilt shop, every bakery, every florist, will have to supplement their earnings by teaching courses not about quilting, baking, or floral design, but about how to make money quilting, baking, and flower arranging. And that inevitably one of the entrepreneurs who teaches these courses will have the idea to sell not just the information, but the products you need to get started, and the next massively predatory multi-level marketing company will be formed.

Lots of business owners teach. Many consult. Many host podcasts and write blogs. Hey, I'm looking at myself here. There's nothing inherently wrong with creating content for an industry, but I would argue the difference is that the "right" industry content producers are not coupling their content with a promise. They might hawk conference tickets on a podcast, but they're not falsely generating a sense of scarcity by telling you the conference content will transform your life by giving you, "more freedom, more money, and less overwhelm."

The Slow Flowers Summit (left) isn’t promising to transform my life. The 1-Day Business Breakthrough (right) is. Which conference is more real? Which one probably generates more revenue? (p.s. I hate everything.)

I think what it all boils down to for me is the very obvious evidence that if I just compromised my values a little more, if I hustled just a little harder, I could pull my business out of the trough of sorrow so much faster. You're looking at a gal who knows quite a lot about monetizing content online, so if I wanted to, I could throw up a Leadpages landing page, create an email sales funnel with Convertkit, design a downloadable PDF in Canva, and start selling courses and coaching on Teachable. (See what I did there with the software name dropping? Do you doubt I lived this landscape?) But I can't. I can't! I just... can't. And I fear that if I can't, if I don't, someone else will, and I'll be the broke, principled, out of work business owner.

Even when I was deep in #girlboss territory I had a strong sense of irony (self loathing?) about it all. These were the business cards I had created by this super old school storefront printing company in Chicago. God these cards were amazing.

(I probably won't be out of work, but sadly my career history qualifies me to do content marketing, so I'll probably end up working for Convertkit helping quilt shop owners monetize their "how to start a quilting side hustle" content.)

True confession time, though.

Maybe it wasn't the plant side hustle course that really bothered me, actually.

Maybe it was the watering cans. I didn't tell you about the watering cans.

Let me tell you about the watering cans.

[Sits back deeper on therapist couch and firmly clutches mug of hot chamomile tea.]

This plant shop was also selling watering cans. I hadn't seen these watering cans before. They had a decent design, cute colorways, and were $12 retail. I flipped the can upside down and noticed the shop had also used a Cricut machine to decal their logo onto the bottom of every watering can.

The watering cans. It’s actually a great design: thin spout, wide handle, handle does not cover opening to block water fill from faucet. See? I think about these things.

So I asked the shop owner about the watering cans.

"These are nice," I said. "I haven't seen these before."

"We wholesale them," she told me. She told me they also wholesale two different plant misters, which I immediately recognized as being widely available on Amazon.

The thing is, if these designs are available on Amazon, it means they're designed and mass produced by factories in China. Fernseed could wholesale these products, too, if we were to purchase them in bulk directly from the factories using a platform like Alibaba. I know this because we've done it before. We've done it because I couldn't find a modern watering can design with a price point under $20, which is about all our retail customers are willing to pay. (In fact we get complaints about defects with the more expensive watering cans produced by seemingly reputable companies like Blomus, so we stopped carrying those.)

I shared some of this struggle with the shop owner, about buying in bulk on Alibaba, how much upfront capital it takes, and wondered aloud of wholesaling half of the lot helps mitigate the upfront cost of holding all that inventory. She didn't really want to share that information, which is fine. Not everyone wants to share sources. But the conversation I was really hoping to dig into with this shop owner, this half sibling of mine, was this:

Are we all just buying this stuff in bulk on Alibaba and then reselling it on Faire to other shops, acting like we partnered with a manufacturing facility (in the U.S., right? hah!) to create an original design and calling it our own? Is this what we have to do to stay in business? Have you also noticed that some of the tried-and-true designs we do sell from seemingly independent designers are either being copied by Chinese factories and sold on Alibaba or... actually originated there, and are now being sold to us under the guise of authenticity but are actually just a really successful white label? Are you actually making money doing this? Am I stupid not to? Am I too principled? Do you sell on Amazon, too? Did you also used to listen to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast with Steve Chou? Have you noticed that half the interviews they do on the Shopify Masters podcast are with entrepreneurs who found and exploited a niche, with no real interest in the actual industry they built a 7-figure e-commerce business around? Do you think they do 7 figures gross but their costs are 6 figures so they're only making $90k in profit? Wouldn't you kill for $90k in profit right now, though? Am I leaving $90k in profit on the table? Are you? You seem to be hustling, you're probably doing $90k in profit. Am I just… stupid not to do this?

This shop owner was not on that wavelength with me, but she was so nice and gave me a free box of their wholesale samples to take with me. I bought the watering can.

It's really a great watering can.