Monique Allen
Author of Stop Landscaping Start Life-Scaping &
CEO + Creative Director of The Garden Continuum
Jack Jostes:
All right, everyone. Today, I'm excited to interview Monique Allen. She's the author of Stop Landscaping Start Life-Scaping, A Guide to Ending the Rush-rush, Humdrum Approach to Landscape Development and Care. Monique has been in the landscape industry for over 30 years, and she currently runs the Garden Continuum. Monique, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Monique Allen:
Hey, thank you. Yeah, my name is Monique Allen. I own the Garden Continuum. We're a multiple seven figure, award winning landscape company out of Massachusetts. Our specialty really is in doing what I call Life-Scapes.
Jack Jostes:
Why do people need to stop landscaping? Everyone's listening and they're currently doing a lot of landscaping. Why would somebody stop landscaping and what does Life-Scaping mean to you?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, awesome question. To set it up initially, landscaping is something you look at. We landscape and we look at a landscape. Life-Scaping is something that you live in, something that absolutely transforms how you are being in the land that you're in.
Jack Jostes:
Great. Before we started the recording today, you and I were catching up a little bit . You launched your book on March 23rd of 2020, really great time to start a book launch, right?
Monique Allen:
Yep.
Jack Jostes:
Everything, all of your live events were canceled and that's ... A cool thing is part of that's how we connected, because you started looking for podcasts. Tell us a little bit ... I really enjoyed reading in your book about how you and your husband bought your property. Was it about 30 years ago that you bought it?
Monique Allen:
23 years ago.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. 23 years ago, you guys bought this property and it was not because of the home there, but really because of the land and you envisioned a garden, and you talked about how you started designing that really the day that you signed the papers, and that you built a homestead there. I'd like for you to share your screen. Tell us a little bit about what your Life-Scape look like? What does your homestead look like, and how has it played out with the whole social distancing thing that you've had to shift to, that we've all had to shift to lately?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I'll give you a little setup to start. Basically, my property's two and a half acres and I had an acre before that at another home. I knew that I couldn't go down, I had to go up. But in order to go up, I didn't have the money to buy something that was finished. I went out away from the metropolis, to find someplace where I could find land. I found a little peanut of a cape on two and a half acres, with pretty much dead flat land in the front, and a huge slope and woodland in the back and I thought, "Yeah, I can do something with this."
Monique Allen:
We made a list. I have this thing about, a list of all the things you want. We got everything on the list, everything on the list, except the things I didn't ask for. I didn't ask for a deep rich loam, so I got sand. I didn't ask for water, so I got a town that always had water bands and whatever. What ended up happening is, I ended up trucking in tractor trailer loads of compost and loam to build soil. I had to drill a pretty big well. There's this whole thing about a homestead, which starts with the vision. The vision really was, how do we develop a place that can follow us in the evolution of our life?
Monique Allen:
It ended up being an amazing exercise that I was able to use to write the book, but also to use throughout my whole career to help other people do the exact same thing, whether it was a quarter acre or five acres. Now, do you want me to show you a picture?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, let's take a look at it.
Monique Allen:
Okay. All right. I'll show you a picture just to get you started. I'm going to show you this one first, because this is my pride and joy this year. This is my, I call it the Mariben Pottenger Garden. It's my vegetable garden and, I'm of a certain age and my back is getting certain creaks and I didn't want to bend over. This whole place was rolled out like a real vegetable garden in the past, and I decided I just wanted something different. I built this up. It has produced so much food. It's still producing food. It's incredible.
Monique Allen:
When I designed it, I had no pandemic in mind. I was not thinking about the pandemic. These two blue chairs have absolutely become my visiting space. I hang out with my kids there. I hang out with my friends there. It has just been so much fun. Those chairs are nice and big and they're perfectly, physically distanced so that we're really socially connected and together. To me, this really embodies how a Life-Scape functions. As your life changes and evolves, that Life-Scape feeds you and gives you the opportunity to still be hyper engaged in your life. Who would have known a pandemic would have come?
Monique Allen:
I certainly didn't know it was coming. This totally followed and was able to provide such an amazing space for us to just be in. That's that one.
A Sneak Peak Of Monique's Arrival Experience
Jack Jostes:
One of the things that you mentioned in your book, and that you were telling me about your home landscape is the experience of arriving at a home and the role that landscaping plays in that. Tell us about why that is? Why does that matter in design? Then what were some of the choices you made in your own personal life?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, the arrival experience to me is huge. The picture that I'm trying to pull up right here is, I'm going to pull up a couple of pictures that show this arrival experience. Basically what you can see and I'll just scroll through, you can see that there's this building that looks like it has a barn door on it. That's my garage with a loft. Then here is my house. You can see the juxtaposition now in this picture where the garage is off to the right. You can't even see my driveway. This is an entry that we did as an add on.
Monique Allen:
Then the original house which is the main house on the left there, and then the dormers. Interestingly, this house was nothing more than that cape with no dormers. What I was trying to do, and the driveway let me just tell you, the driveway literally went straight up from the front to where you can see the electric meter on the little bump out, the drive ... It went right like that, like a runway and Norfolk airport was close to me. It was over 200 feet long. It was so unsexy. Let me tell you I was like, "Boring." The arrival experience has two main components. One is invitation. The second is comfort.
Monique Allen:
When we have mass construction of a lot of houses, driveways are a means to an end. Normally, driveways were used by the construction teams to build the house. Especially if it's a longer driveway, they end up being unsexy. It's probably ridiculous for me to using sexy and attractive in the same sentence. But if you really do arrive well, then what you do is, you create this experience of somebody entering a property that invites them comfortably to go there. One of the key components of comfort is that it is wide enough, it's navigable, and it's very easy to park.
Monique Allen:
You do not create stress for the person who's driving and going, "Oh, my God, how am I going to get out of this driveway?" We've all had that feeling, where you feel you don't know where to put your car. You don't know if you should do a 27 point turn and then back in so that when you leave, you can drive out. I think that driveways are one of those forgotten element. That for me was a huge part of the Life-Scape experience in the homestead experience, because it makes visiting my house really comfy.
Jack Jostes:
Cool. Yeah, it looks great. I'd love to hang out and just look at all your photos.
Monique Allen:
We'd be here for a week.
How To Publish Your Book To Become The Ultimate Authority + Close Deals Faster
(and how to make an e-book even if you hate writing)
Jack Jostes:
Monique, it has been six months since you launched your book and I'm curious, from a marketing perspective for your landscaping company, what are some of the impacts of becoming a published author? How has that impacted your business? How are you using the book to market to your landscape clients?
Monique Allen:
The book has solidified for me my own personal clarity about my brand. As I was developing the brand of my company, and when I came upon Life-Scape, as what I wanted to have be the central theme of what I was doing, I realized that I was creating friction in some senses to people working with me, because I didn't know what a Life-Scape was. I realized that I now had to educate people around what Life-Scape was. I was doing that in the website. I was doing that on all of my assessment meetings and using the terminology. But when I wrote the book, I had to dig in really deeply into all of the facets of Life-Scape.
Monique Allen:
Now, when I talk about Life-Scape, I can say to people, "Well, in my book I ... Or, you should get a copy of my book, and working ... My whole Instagram account, every Sunday I do a book reading. What's happening is, people now are using my language back at me and that is the coolest thing. When somebody actually calls me first time I've ever talked to them, and they say something like, "My arrival experience is just awful." All of a sudden, it's like I've pre-educated my audience through my website, through my eBooks, through my blog, and now through the book.
Monique Allen:
They're pre-educated and they're pre-qualified when they come to me. They know exactly what they're talking about using the language that I've given them. I have found that it's up leveled, not only the sales closure because sales close much quicker. The other thing is it's like up leveled my experience because I'm having fun. I'm teaching to the next level, as opposed to always teaching from the base level.
Jack Jostes:
That's amazing. That is an incredible experience that I've had as well having published my book is that people actually read it and listen to what you say and will use your words back to you and it's spooky, at first almost. It's like, "Oh, yeah, I guess they ... Yeah, I wrote that." For the people who are listening, the landscape business owners who are watching or listening, thinking, "Oh, man, how could I possibly write a book?" The fact is, it is a lot of work and it's amazingly powerful. How did you get it done?
Jack Jostes:
What tips would you have for small business owners, especially landscapers listening, who have thought about writing a book? Maybe they're starting it, but they haven't quite finished? Do you have any tips for them?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, I absolutely do. I would say that if you're not already a writer, that, writing a book is a big undertaking. I would start with eBooks, because I think eBooks are so powerful. I think that from a marketing angle, an eBook is something that you can get help writing. It will not break the bank and it is such a credibility builder. You got to remember too, I'm going to back up to one of your earlier questions when you said, why would you say stop landscaping? I was being playful in the title, because whenever you're trying to sell a book, there's a little shock and awe. I landscape every day of my life, so I'm not going to really stop landscaping, right?
Jack Jostes:
Right.
Monique Allen:
Then I go into it in the book that it's really about shifting perspective. Let's say, you've decided to really take on organic lawn management, and you really, really want people to start building deep soil so that they can get deep roots, so that they don't have to water all the time, then you might write an eBook on the benefits of organic lawns, but you would come up with a cool title. If they were working with you, you guys would do title searches, and you would come up with something really neat.
Monique Allen:
Then the key points to organic lawn management, the key points to organic lawn development, putting those in a book, and then if you the owner are writing it, then also putting in some of the flavor of you into that, so that it's differentiating between awareness and consideration. It's differentiating between, are these people even aware that organic lawn care exists? But once you've made them aware and educated them a little, you must put them into the bucket of considering you. That's why the personal stories that we get woven into that eBook are so, so important.
Monique Allen:
You do a 15 page or a 25 page eBook, I'm telling you right now, that is going to be so powerful and then do another eBook. If you are already a writer and you want to write a book, absolutely do it. But understand that that the usefulness of a book is different than the usefulness of an eBook, something that you can maybe even give away.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, well, definitely, I love the idea of making an eBook first, and even a 15 to 25 page eBook, depending on what photos and graphics you have in there. Might not even be that much writing, but it could still be very helpful. It's something that you could put on your website as a lead magnet, like download the top five things to do for organic lawn maintenance, or whatever the topic that you're selling.
Monique Allen:
I have an example. I'm going to give you an example, just a quick one, and then I'll let you keep going. I have an eBook called The landscape Business Owners Survival Guide. It's a 15 page eBook. Oh, it might be a little more than 15 pages, but there are 15 financial considerations. It's free. That eBook is downloaded probably ... I don't know, it's got to be downloaded at least 20 times a week. It's amazing because it's been such a lead magnet for other parts of my landscape business coaching.
Monique Allen:
I think if you can do something that doesn't cost you a ton of money, and that you can give a ton of value and like you said use it as a lead magnet, it will definitely connect you to the clientele that really need that through organic search.
Jack Jostes:
Definitely. For people who are interested in those 15 numbers, where can we get that eBook?
Monique Allen:
Oh, right on my website. You can get it. It will be right in my store. If you pop on to the garden continuum.com on the upper right, it's going to say shop. You just go to the shop and there's a whole bunch of free stuff. There's classes. There's eBooks to buy, eBooks to get for free, like books bucks that you can get for free.
Why Landscaping Businesses Should Be Using Video
Jack Jostes:
Great. https://www.thegardencontinuum.com and continuum is tough to spell, so we're going to put the link to that in the show notes. Great. For those listening who are like, "You know what, I am not good at writing. I'm not a writer. I don't have any books. I haven't even thought of that. The idea of writing something is just terrifying and daunting to me." Some people are much better communicating on video. I've noticed you have talent both in writing and doing video. Your YouTube channel, the GardenContinuumInc, has had over four million views since you created the channel in 2011.
Jack Jostes:
I was just learning about how to deadhead all different kinds of things. We've got videos on how to deadhead salvia that has been viewed over 80,000 times. I recommend all my clients make video and I honestly, I make a lot of my video on an iPhone. Putting it on a tripod, I have a little mic, that's good enough, honestly to get started. A tool that I use for the podcast is rev.com. We make our video, and then we transcribe it with rev.com, edit it and now I have a video and some written content. That's another way that you could get your eBook started is through making a video first, editing it.
Jack Jostes:
Tell us, why do you make so many videos and what are some of the impacts that it's had on your business?
Monique Allen:
I started making videos probably back in 2010 or '11, or maybe even before then. I made a video in 2011 called How to Deadhead a daylily with an iPhone 5 with my 11 year old daughter holding the iPhone. You can tell because it's got a little shake to it. That video went crazy. It went around the world. It got so many views and people were mentioning it and we got a ton of comments. I thought, "Wow, I wonder if had a deadhead is a thing or how to is definitely a thing." I decided to do how to deadhead a salvia using the same method, but with a better camera, with more fore planning.
Monique Allen:
That one then skyrocketed over how to deadhead a day lily. What I realized is that one of my specialties is fine gardening. Fine gardening is much more popular now. But when I started, I've been in the business for 35 years. When I started it really wasn't a thing. Still now people don't really know, like if I said that I did maintenance people would think I was mowing a lawn. But because I fine garden, I need to use a different word. But if I say I'm a gardener, they think I mean vegetable gardens.
Monique Allen:
The videos helped to demystify the core of my service, which is fine gardening. It gave anybody who worked with me or for me. I even used it as training videos internally to train my gardeners. But anybody who was my client, who had an interest in gardening, it was empowering people to garden for themselves. I think that sometimes in business, there's a fear of arming the DIY-er with too much, because we feel like they'll take it away from us. But what I've found is exactly the opposite. I think the pandemic has been a very, very good test for this.
Monique Allen:
Everybody's home, people are more able to garden for themselves, but there's a limit to what they can do. If you can teach them clearly how to do what they want to do, and then they start reaching and doing a little more and a little more, they go. "Oh, Okay, enough. Call Monique," right?
Jack Jostes:
For sure. Absolutely. Yeah.
Monique Allen:
Yeah.
Jack Jostes:
Who are they going to trust more? Somebody who has helped them, they've spent several times listening to maybe even hours, or someone that they don't know at all? Personally in my own business, I've been doing that for about 10 years of making video content about how to do stuff. The other amazing thing that I love about video, is that the point that you mentioned about training your people, because there's going to be a certain way that Monique Allen wants to deadhead a lily. I'm guessing that you're going to want your people to do it that way, so why not make a video that has the dual purpose of marketing for clients that can also be used in training.
Jack Jostes:
The other thing that I found about video, everyone listening and if you're listening, you're not having this problem, call me. I want to know what you're doing. You should be a guest on the show. Everyone's having a hard time finding people to do work, to work for their team. Recruiting is always a challenge in the green industry, and by putting yourself out there as an author and you're making yourself out there on YouTube, you're on social media, people are going to want to work for you. I know that part of your business, in addition to running the Garden Continuum is business coaching.
How To Lead Your Landscape Company Culture, Mission, & Vision and Why It's Essential To Thriving In Weird Times
Jack Jostes:
One of the topics that you coach on is building culture. Tell us a little bit about building culture and how has video ... First, I wanted ... All right, two things. First how has video impacted your company culture? Then what are some of the things that you end up coaching people on?
Monique Allen:
Okay, so where video has impacted my culture is that if you go on to the website and you go to our careers page, one of the things you'll see right away is a really wonderful video of my team, and all these quotes of things that they say. There's also a slider that has pictures of my team and their quotes. The idea is that, I have really leaned into making this company their company, that the culture ... Culture is one of those things that unfortunately, we try very hard as owners sometimes to get people to toe the line, "Just do what I say, do it the way I want you to do it." Just toe the line.
Monique Allen:
It's not because owners are bad people, it's because they are driven and they want to get stuff done and they want it done right. The problem is with culture, when we try to shove culture down people's throats, you get resistance. It took me a long time to learn this because I was so idealistic, and I really wanted this wholesome culture and I was shoving it down people's throats. I realized that it wasn't working. What I needed to do was I needed to become more observant, and more curious about my staff, and then really embrace them into what was needed to build the culture.
Monique Allen:
When I teach them through video, it's fun because they're immediately empowered and they can do it in their own space. When we ask them to be on video and to speak up as an advocate for the company, we're feeding into their personal pride. I think it's really, really important for personal pride when you're building a team. Then thirdly, when people are looking to find a job, and they see your people and you see the smiles and you read their quotes, they think to themselves, "Wow, that looks like a fun place to work."
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I love that. The last, one of those points that you made about them when they see the people when they're thinking of working for you and your careers page, you guys all need to see it is the gardencontinuum.com and go to the careers page, there are ... I'm going to share my screen, so that way people watching can see. There's people in branded uniforms, they are smiling, they're still doing work. It doesn't make it look necessarily easy. But there are great photos, branded vehicles, branded shirts, people having fun here.
Jack Jostes:
There's a video. You're doing a lot of these things well that I'm actually giving a presentation with the landscapes virtual conference for the NALP, about recruiting and how to do digital recruiting. One of the things is make the benefits really clear. What are the benefits? Many landscaping career pages are like a wanted ad. They sound awful. It's like, "Wanted: Someone to dig a hole in the sun." You're talking about some of these things about relationships, monetary benefits, eye care insurance. How many of you listening have eye care insurance? Thrill though. You're doing a lot of things really well here and ...
Monique Allen:
Thank you.
Jack Jostes:
What are some of the other ways that people can discover even what should your culture be like? I know that in my experience, and I would think that most of the people listening have had this experience, where I don't know, you're good at something, whether it's landscaping or lawn care or whatever. You don't maybe want to work for other people, so you start doing your own thing. Then you're like, "Yeah, I'm pretty good at this and you start hiring people." Right? You may not even really have a vision of the company that you're building, you just started building it. These things like company vision and culture sound like business consultant jargon.
Jack Jostes:
They seem unimportant when there's so much work to do. Why is having a vision and a culture important if you're really trying to grow a team?
Monique Allen:
Well, I'm going to cycle back to something that's going to make total sense to you. Early on, in my business building career, I read Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth, The E-Myth Revisited. Then many years later, he decided to work with all different industries. I know you've just interviewed Tony Bass, and Tony Bass wrote The E-Myth Landscape Contractor. The basis really of The E-Myth is saying that, it's the entrepreneurial myth, is that if you're a technician and you're really, really crushing the work, you can so do the work, the first thing that comes into people's minds is, "I should be a manager.
Monique Allen:
They should pay me to be a manager." You get paid to be a manager, and you realize that you've got all these annoying people that are getting in the way of doing the work that you're so good at. Then you say, "Well, forget this. If I'm going to do that, I might as well own my own company." You go out and decide to own your own company. Now, not only are you a manager, but you're also a leader, and you're also a salesperson and you hold that office.
Monique Allen:
What I love about the way The E-Myth works, and then how when it was written again with Tony, is really that it demystifies ownership, and that if you want to own a business, you really must be interested in business. To determine that it's time for me to own a business, because I want to make more money is very short sighted. The reason why a vision and a mission are so important is because, just like nature, just like the landscape, evolution is something that will not be held back, not by anybody, and your business will evolve.
Monique Allen:
It'll evolve because, one year you have no employees, and the next year you have three. It will evolve because one year you have five employees, and the next year you have a pandemic. If you don't have a vision and you don't have a mission, you don't have clarity of purpose, then what will happen is that when life throws you curve balls, you are going to get hit in the head as opposed to go, "Whoo, sideswipe that one," Because you're nimble, because you have such clarity. Here's the kicker.
Monique Allen:
If you've spent the time to build a culture and build a team, a team that will be behind you, the team that will be behind each other, that when, pardon my French, the shit hits the fan, everybody's out of the way or running block for everybody else. You find that, what I found in this pandemic is that the culture in my company is so solid, it surprised me. It surprised me. I just love my people. They're just so cool. Man, I'm telling you, that's something to strive for in business. Yes, you should make money. Yes, you should think about how to scale.
Monique Allen:
Yes to all of that. But to be an owner and to be able to go through what we've all just gone through and be like, I have got a killer group with me. That's satisfaction.
Jack Jostes:
That's absolutely right. I love The E-Myth. I remember reading The E-Myth Revisited, was life changing.
Monique Allen:
Yeah, right?
Jack Jostes:
It really was. I my business was such a state of chaos and I had a business coach who was like, "Oh, you got to read The E-Myth." I finally did. I know that I'm Tony Bass, I loved interviewing Tony and I loved reading his book.
Monique Allen:
That was cool.
Jack Jostes:
We actually read his book as a team here. We have a book club at Ramblin Jackson.
Monique Allen:
Yeah, so do we.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, right on! For him the experience of reading The E-Myth was life changing. Then he built his company and was eventually able to sell it. I love that and I found the same thing about the culture and the people here at Ramblin Jackson. I feel blessed that we were able to keep working. One, we're a remote company. I know you checked out our podcast last week and we did that six months ahead of the whole pandemic thing by choice. We decided to go remote.
Jack Jostes:
When it happened, we were like ... I don't know, it was this weird situation we're like, "Hey, we are ready to really help." Everyone stepped it up here to help our clients. There was a lot of work to be done. There was a lot of work. It was a chaotic time, but we were really excited to help our clients and everyone here ...
Monique Allen:
Yeah, that's a good feeling.
Jack Jostes:
Everyone here was on board with that. What are you reading now in your book club?
Monique Allen:
I can tell you, I'm going to tell you a couple that we just read that have been really good. A couple years ago, I read Ownership Thinking, which was a very dense book but really, really good. It really helped me to see how everyone can have their own little entrepreneurial bubble, and how valuable that is not only to the functionality of a company, but to bottom line. That gave me a lot of language to use with my team. We read The Energy Bus. It's a short book, Jon Gordon. He's like the master of positivity.
Monique Allen:
That book was fun. We had fun with that book. It was like such an easy read, so we all flew through it. It gave us again, language to use about certain behaviors. Then this year, we read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown. I'll tell you, that is like a rulebook. It has been so amazing, because it has given us language to use when it's really hard. Something like, "Hey, do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about something. I'm feeling like it might be a little bit of a rumble, so I just want you to hear me out. Then we can either rumble now or rumble later." You're basically saying somebody I want to fight you. It is a really safe way, because the whole idea is about leaning into discomfort.
Monique Allen:
None of us want to be uncomfortable. If you give permission for discomfort and then you give tools to navigate it, people behave so much better.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, that's been something I've been working on here as part of our book club. I haven't read Energy Bus. But you're the second person who recommended that recently, so I might have to check that out.
Monique Allen:
Yes, definitely.
Jack Jostes:
I'm a big fan of Patrick Lencioni.
Monique Allen:
Yes.
Jack Jostes:
He wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Monique Allen:
Dysfunctions of a team.
Jack Jostes:
One of them is the avoidance of conflict. That's been something that we practiced here and gave people scripting. Getting people to do it is always a challenge. But it has I feel like lead to some of those, we call it rumblings here, that are really productive and need to happen sooner than later.
Monique Allen:
I'll tell you the one that I got queued up just to tell you, to geek out on books. The one that I've cued up right now is The 12 Rules of Life by Jordan Peterson. My son was reading it. My son's 17 and he's just smart and just chewing on all this culture stuff and told me to read it. I was blown away. I thought it was going to be a big eye roll, but it was really pretty good. That's what we might be reading next.
Jack Jostes:
Monique, another aspect of your business is you actually do business coaching with landscape business owners. You have a division of your company, what is it, artisan coaching?
Monique Allen:
Yep.
Jack Jostes:
What are some of the challenges that you found that landscape companies, maybe they haven't quite reached the million dollar mark or maybe they're just over at ... There are certain challenges that businesses face. What are some of them and how do you help people with that?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, so one of the interesting things having gone through all of these markers myself and having worked with coaches, there is a certain pain that happens at about a half a million dollars. Then there's this nother pain that happens just before a million and in breaking through it. That happens all the way up the line. But what I was noticing is that the coaches that were working with me that wanted multimillion dollar companies to be in their coaching family, that there was a gap. My focus in my company is fine gardening and design, and custom landscape development in the organic sustainable marketplace.
Monique Allen:
What I was seeing is that the standard landscape model had a lot of coaches, but the fine gardening designer businesses that were like five, six, 700, 000, maybe a million, maybe a million two, they didn't have any coaches. If they did have coaches, then they couldn't afford marketing. If they got marketing, they couldn't afford coaches. I saw this gap, and really wanted to work with the artists and brands. The designer or gardener, fine gardener that wanted to develop something, that was more than just what they could do as a solopreneur, which means they were now going to have the problems of back office, of policy procedure, of marketing, of branding.
Monique Allen:
While I don't specialize in the actual marketing work like you do, what I do is I help people find their own voice so that they can find the clarity, so that they can develop the service set of what they want to put into the market. Then I send them to you, because now that they have clarity, and they have the language and the content of what their business is, they're going to need a pro to help them put it out in the world. That's really my goal is to help them move into clarity and then get visible.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, that's so important. One of the things that you talked about I think in the book, and we were talking about in marketing is getting clear on who is your customer is really important, and what service do I actually offer them that's my main focus. I think for those of you listening, definitely reach out to Monique for that if you'd like to.
Monique Allen:
Can I add one other thing? The other piece of it is, when you add clarity so that you understand who your client is, and what the services you're selling, what that does, it shines a light. It helps you to shine a light internally now, so that you know who you are, and who your team needs to be. That's the next piece of the puzzle and that's where culture comes in. My work really helps them find that clarity so that they can find you and get the business.
Monique Allen:
Then we continue to work together, shine the light on the inside, so that they can find the right people to work with, have them stay there, build a culture build an organizational chart and now they can scale.
Jack Jostes:
Right on.
Jack Jostes:
Cool. Well, I have one last question for you. We could hang out all day talking about books and everything.
From Dancer To Landscape Expert
Jack Jostes:
I found it interesting that you were a dancer, and that you studied entrepreneurship, and then got so bored. Were you working at Macy's? Where were you working?
Monique Allen:
I was working at a place called T. Edwards. It's gone now. It was a like a mall store.
Jack Jostes:
You were studying entrepreneurship and then working at some retail job and you hated it, and someone asked you to spread mulch and that led you into landscaping. You wrote in here that you wanted to, what did you say? It was so great. Basically you were doing mulching and you wanted to make sure that you were balancing the work on each side of your body.
Monique Allen:
Yeah.
Jack Jostes:
I was curious, what was your background in dance? Do you still dance?
Monique Allen:
Yeah. Okay, real briefly, I grew up dancing. I was a ballerina. Then when I got to high school, I found jazz. There was no hip hop back then. I would have definitely done that. Then it was jazz. Then when I got to college, it's very hard. If you're not going to study and become a dancer, it's hard to find grownup dance classes. If you want to keep taking dance as you get older, you got to take dance with kids and that's not fun. I started bodybuilding. I started spending a lot of time in the gym. I was a total gym rat. I was teaching aerobics and just ...
Monique Allen:
I was just always very physically fit, very focused on my center, very so focused on structural balance in the body. I'm at this job and basically I'm a mulch monkey. And they kept bringing it on the seats. I just was like, "Dude put it over there," and he's like, "What?" I'm like, "Put it over there and when you come back, put it over there." He thought it was out of my mind. First off, I'm the only girl on this crew. I don't think they'd ever worked with a female before. I just had them alternating it, and so what I did was, I started to act like I was doing squats.
Monique Allen:
I was starting to really engage my thighs, my butt muscles, my lower back. I was trying to engage my chaps and my ... Anyway, it's just, I'm a total geek that way. I saw landscaping, I was 18 years old and I saw landscaping as like, "Oh my gosh. I'm getting paid to suntan and train. This is so cool." That's how I saw it. No, I don't dance anymore. But I just finished my 200 hour yoga certification. My whole physical focus now is on yoga and emotional and spiritual. It's all yoga.
Jack Jostes:
Wow. Okay, so you've published your book, you finished your 200 hour yoga teacher training, what else are you up to?
Monique Allen:
Well, I'm going to focus on Yoga Nidra, which is another kind of yoga, which is a relaxation or they call it the sleep yoga. I'm going to focus on that training and yoga, and then also anatomy, because I love that stuff. Then with business, we stopped blogging and videoing and everything because it was all COVID all the time. I took six months off from all writing. I just went, I don't know, if you go to INBOUND ... I don't know if you know about the INBOUND conference.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I spoke there in 2016. Yeah, it was really great. I think they did it all virtual this year.
Monique Allen:
They did. Yeah, so I've been going for four years. I must have missed you the first year. We just did that. We have a bunch of really cool ideas for amping up the blog, adding more video to email. We've been using Vidyard in HubSpot. We work on the HubSpot platform.
Jack Jostes:
One to one videos to clients?
Monique Allen:
Yeah, so I started that at the beginning of the year with COVID to deal with the angst in my clientele as well as the angst in my employees. We were embedding video and it was really working well. But I had a hard time keeping those things going, when what I really had to do is figure out how we were going to be in trucks, and I'm sure all your listeners felt the same. We'll pick all that back up. This fall we're going to pick up blogging again, pick up the video work and see about just amping all that back up again.
Jack Jostes:
Good. Well, Yoga Nidra is really an interesting topic. We have donated to the Give Back Yoga Foundation. Have you heard of them?
Monique Allen:
Oh, I have not.
Jack Jostes:
Yep. You should check out the Give Back Yoga Foundation. They do yoga for PTSD. They work with warriors. They do yoga for prisoners. They do yoga for first responders. It's a really interesting nonprofit that they have several people out near you. You might even be able to get involved with that.
Monique Allen:
Yeah. Thank you. I definitely will.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, cool. Well, Monique, thanks so much for being on the show. Where can people get a copy of your book and connect with you? Tell us a little bit about how we can do that.
Monique Allen:
Absolutely, thegardencontinuum.com, just click on the shop on the upper right corner. You can go right there and you can get my book. You can even get it autographed, which I love sending autographed books. You can follow me on Instagram, The Garden Continuum on Instagram. I think we post just about every day. We have a team of people who help me post which is awesome. I do a book reading every Sunday. That's a lot of fun. Then the blogs are free. I have a business blog and I also have a fine gardening blog. Both blogs are on the website and you can just get on those and comments and let us know what you think.
Jack Jostes:
Great, Monique. It's been such a pleasure interviewing you and everyone who's listening, if you want to see a transcript of this interview and links to everything Monique just mentioned, you can see that at landscapersguide.com/podcast. Thanks so much for tuning into the landscapers guide to modern sales and marketing, and hope to see you next Friday.