DESIGN YOUR BUSINESS GARDEN // SELF GUIDED TOOLKIT
Design Your One Person Business Garden Toolkit
Design and grow a business that is a home for your creative ambitions and financial success.
This self-guided toolkit helps you see your current garden clearly, and bring to life your dream garden deliberately.
Being a freelancer or consultant can feel like you are always putting other people’s businesses first, with no bigger vision or plan for the business you are growing.
Client work always takes priority so your own business gets whatever's left over
You're financially stable but creatively under-stimulated — or creatively alive but financially anxious
You're not sure how the different things you do add up to one cohesive business
You have ideas about branching out from time-for-money gigs but haven’t mapped what that could look like for you
You don't have a framework for deciding what to grow, what to maintain, and what to let go of
By designing your business as a garden ecosystem, you intentionally plant seeds for your long term creative and financial goals.
But before you can grow your dream garden, you need a clear picture of where you are standing today; and a plan of the garden you truly want to grow.
Design You r One Person Business Garden Toolkit
This self-guided creative framework, delivered as a Notion template for you to duplicate into your own workspace.
You will unlock a clear picture of where your business is today, the design of the business garden ecosystem you want to grow, and an action plan to bring your vision to life over the next 12 months.
Part One: Your garden as it is now
The toolkit guides you through an in-depth audit that allows you to see what’s thriving, what's neglected, and what you have completely forgotten to tend to.
🥕 The Veg Patch — your reliable income streams. The work that pays the bills.
🍽️ The Dining Area — your people, relationships, and network.
🌷 The Flowerbed — less well-paid, but more enjoyable work. Passion projects. Creative fulfilment.
🎨 The Play Area — new ideas and experiments. Things you try without immediate ROI.
🏡 The Garden Studio — learning, research, skill-building.
🪑 The Bench in the Shade — rest, time out, inspiration gathering.
🌳 The Big Old Tree — long-term thinking. Reputation, intellectual property, a body of work.
Part Two: Your dream garden
Now time to design. Zone by zone, you decide what role each area will play in your business over the next 12 months. You get specific with goals, how they translate into concrete commitments, and how to know if you’re on track.
Each part includes
A short video intro from Matilda (3–5 mins), giving you the context and framing before you dive in
An honest audit across 7 zones of your business garden
Design prompts to map your next 12 months zone by zone
A summary table for you to capture where your time and energy is going now
A design table to plan what you want to grow, maintain, rest, or plant from scratch (with examples to give you ideas)
A visual garden template to download, design and display wherever you'll see it regularly
147 GBP / ~199 USD (Tax included)
Instant access (you will be emailed a link and instructions to access the Notion doc as soon as you have purchased). Self-guided. Yours to keep forever.
Please note that as this is a digital product there are no refunds.
Hello! I'm Matilda.
I'm a strategist, startup advisor, and fractional marketing leader based in SE London.
I've spent 10+ years growing startup and scaleup businesses; launching into new markets, driving millions of app downloads, and building brands from scratch to acquisition.
But after several years of running my own consultancy, the ubiquitous goal of “more” stopped making sense to me, especially, for one person businesses like mine.
We have the freedom to design a business, and therefor a life, that is creatively fulfilling and financially rewarding. But working out what that looks like easily falls to the bottom of the to-do list. You end up questioning whether you even have a business or are “just” a freelancer.
I am here to tell you, you are a one person business owner, and you get to design exactly how you want your business world to look, feel, and grow.
The Business Garden is the framework I wish I'd had earlier. It came out of my own attempt to design a business that was financially sustainable AND creatively alive and is now at the heart of the Creative Growth Strategy Sprint, the quarterly group programme that I run for one person businesses.
This is the self-guided version of designing and growing your own garden. You can do the thinking in your own time, at your own pace, in your own Notion.
Unearth the potential of your one person business
Gain a clear, honest picture of where your time and energy is going right now
Weave creative ambitions and financial reality into the fabric of your business planning
Design a work life based on your own definition of success
FAQs
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Yes, the tool is built in Notion. You'll need a free account to duplicate it. If you've never used Notion before, it's straightforward to get started and I include instructions in the email you receive post-purchase.
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Most people spend 4–8 hours working through the framework. You can do it in a day or spread it across a few weeks. You will probably want to keep returning and tending to this document as your garden evolves.
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No. The Sprint is a six-week live programme covering your full growth strategy — special sauce, market context, growth ecosystem, and integration. The Business Garden framework is a complete, standalone product.
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The workbook works best if you've been running your business for at least a year and have a solid sense of what you offer. If you're earlier than that, come back when you have a bit more to audit, it will be more useful then.
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Yes. The Veg Patch is the first zone we look at and being honest about your income streams is often where the most immediate clarity comes from. The framework will help you see your revenue picture clearly alongside everything else.
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No, this is a digital product there are no refunds. If you are unsure whether this is right for you please feel free to email me with your questions! hey@matildalucy.com
Want to go further?
The Business Garden is one part of a bigger strategic picture.
Once you've mapped your garden, the natural next questions are: what's my special sauce — the through-line that makes my work distinctively mine? What's my market context, and how do I stand out in it? How do I build a growth ecosystem that doesn't rely entirely on social media?
Those questions are what the Creative Growth Strategy Sprint is built for. Six weeks, a small group of fellow one-person business owners, and a complete creative growth strategy you'll actually use. The waitlist is now open for Autumn and Winter cohorts. Join the waitlist here.