Book of the Week: The Pumpkin Plan

13 Apr 2015

the_pumpkin_plan The Pumpkin Plan is geared toward entrepreneurs (small business and lifestyle) who can’t scale their business, because they say yes to everything. They spend lots of time and effort working while realizing minimal returns. The Pumpkin Plan uses an analogy to giant pumpkin farmers to help entrepreneurs prune their patch in order to make their pumpkins grow. Pumpkin Growing Process

  1. Plant promising seeds.
  2. Water, water, water
  3. As they grow, routinely remove all the diseased or damaged pumpkins.
  4. Weed like a mad dog. Not a single green leaf or root permitted if it isn’t a pumpkin plant.
  5. When they grow larger, identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins. Then, remove all the less-promising pumpkins. Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.
  6. Focus all of your attention on the big pumpkin. Nurture it around the clock like a baby, and guard it like you would your first Mustang convertible.
  7. Watch it grow. In the last days of the season, this will happen so fast you can actually see it happen.

The Pumpkin Plan

  1. Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths.
  2. Sell, sell, sell.
  3. As your business grows, fire all your small-time rotten clients.
  4. Never, ever let distractions-often labelled as new opportunities-take hold. Weed’em out fast.
  5. Identify your top-clients and remove the rest of your less-promising clients.
  6. Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and product them; find out what they want more than anything, and if it’s in alignment with what you do best, give it to them. Then, replicate that same service or product for as many of the same types of top client as possible.
  7. Watch your company grow to a giant size.

If you list your clients by revenue, you will notice it will follow a long-tail distribution where the majority of the revenue comes from a small subset of clients. The other clients could actually be a net loss. By supporting many different types of clients, you are never doing a great job with any of them. By saying yes to everything, you end up having a large support burden, which does not scale. Nothing can move the needle anymore and you’re stuck. If you start pruning your client base and identifying the types of client that you can serve better and scale with, then your company can grow.