DESIGN YOUR ONE PERSON BUSINESS GARDEN
Design your business garden.
Your business is an ecosystem that you get to design, grow, and enjoy spending time in every season.
But most of us aren't designing it. We’re in reactive mode; over-tending the parts that shout loudest, ignoring the parts that matter most, and wondering why the whole thing feels off balance.
This is the self-guided strategic framework that helps you to see the reality of your garden today, expand your vision of what you could grow, and make a plan to bring the next season of your garden to life.
Visualise your one person business as a garden.
An ecosystem that you get to design, grow, and hopefully enjoy tending to every season and a container to express and explore your multitudes.
🥕 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.
Some zones are thriving. Some are overgrown. Some you've quietly abandoned .
You want your creative ambitions and financial reality to coexist rather than compete.
You're ready to see fresh potential in your business and expand your view of what’s possible.
You want a framework that fits the way a one-person business works. Scaled-down versions of big business playbooks be gone.
What’s inside
Design Your Business Garden is a self-guided strategic framework, delivered as a Notion template for you to duplicate into your own workspace. It has two parts:
🌿 Part One: Your garden as it is now
An honest audit across all seven zones. Where is your time and energy currently going? What's thriving, what's neglected, and what have you completely forgotten to tend to?
🌸 Part Two: Your garden as you want it to be
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 zone has:
A short video intro from me (3–5 mins), giving you the context and framing before you dive in
Audit prompts to guide your Part One thinking
Design prompts to guide your Part Two decisions
Examples so you're not starting from a blank page
Unearth the potential of your one person business
Gain a clear, honest picture of where your time and energy is going right now
Expand your understanding of what your business is
Design a work life that inspires you
Set specific commitments per zone to turn design into action
Meet Matilda Lucy
I'm Matilda. I'm a strategist, startup advisor, and fractional marketing leader based in London.
I've spent 10+ years working with brands like Lime, Sonos, and Weleda — launching into new markets, driving millions of app downloads, building growth strategies that led to multi-million pound acquisitions. I got quite good at growing things.
But after several years of running my own consultancy, the voice in my head questioning “growth at what cost?” just kept getting louder.
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.
It's now at the heart of the Creative Growth Strategy Sprint, the quarterly group programme that I run for solopreneurs.
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.
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.
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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Item descrNo. The Sprint is a six-week live programme covering your full growth strategy — special sauce, market context, growth ecosystem, and integration. The Business Garden workbook goes deep on one framework from the Sprint. It's a complete, standalone product, and a natural entry point if you're curious about the Sprint but not ready to commit yet.iption
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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 workbook 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