The three sisters

The three sisters is an amazing concept from permaculture. You can grow sweetcorn, runner beans and squash in the same space and they all support each other.

• The corn grows and provides a supporting beam for the beans to grow up.
• The beans add nitrogen to the soil which helps the other plants grow.
• The squash provides ground cover to shade out the weeds.

They all support each other and the output of each plant is an edible vegetable. It’s cyclical, amazingly simple and very productive.

Natural ecosystems like this are balanced, supportive and they thrive.

When I think about how Ticket Tailor should grow I often think about how we can get the benefits of permaculture so that we can thrive too. Our three sisters are service, customers, and team:

• Our service makes customers lives easier and therefore they use it.
• Customers enjoy using the service and tell others. Having a growing number of happy customers provides opportunities that attracts and retains team members.
• Team members make the service better, and help us find new customers.

I think this creates a healthy, thriving business.

If you were growing sweetcorn, beans, and squash you probably wouldn’t plant the seeds in spring and expect a healthy garden come the summer. You would nurture them with things like food, water and shelter (probably, I’m not a gardener) and this will increase the chances of success.

Now let’s say the sweetcorn really thrives. This will create a really strong support for the beans, and allow them to grow taller giving you more beans at the end of it. Or, let’s say you neglected the sweetcorn and it’s not strong enough to support the beans. You could still make the garden work to a degree but you would need to put a stick in place to support the beans and you wouldn’t get any sweetcorn.

I apply the same logic to Ticket Tailor. For the analogy above, instead of sweetcorn, I’m going to use our customers. These guys really enjoy using our product. Really enjoy it. Take a look at our reviews, or our incredibly high NPS score. It’s not an accident. We have worked really to nurture this. This in turn motivates us to keep striving to improve the service, and allows us to attract top talent. It’s possible to grow a business and not care so much about your customers, but you will need to compensate to support it, such as a very high marketing spend (I’m thinking TalkTalk), or a very high staff costs (I’m thinking British American Tobacco). These are extreme examples but it’s easy to see that when you don’t get the benefit of a system supporting itself you end up working against the grain.

There’s another principle that attempts to defy the grain and that’s striving for eternal growth. The idea that a business should be constantly growing and strive to win an industry is very bizarre when you think about it. Imagine if each year you want to keep growing taller and taller sweetcorn plants, and not only that but have the tallest sweetcorn plant ever. Firstly, you would probably have needed to make some compromises in your growing ethics, secondly the sweetcorn probably wouldn’t taste as nice as if it grew to it’s natural height, and thirdly what’s the point aside from the accolade. The fact that the record was last set eight years ago kind of proves that eternal growth is impossible. How tall is a sweetcorn plant going to get?

We are growing at Ticket Tailor and doing so intentionally, but I think of it as reaching our potential, not for growth’s sake. Imagine that you were only using a quarter of your plot to grow vegetables and you would probably plan to start using the full plot eventually.

The three sisters are not totally isolated and independent. They benefit from their environment by taking energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil. In exchange they absorb co2 and [other benefits]. It’s a microsystem that complements its environment.

I think about this too with Ticket Tailor. There are many external things that we benefit from, whether that’s the local community, the services we use, the people we learn from, or the planet’s resources that we are using. In the short term it’s possible and easy to overlook these benefits to take what we can from them, but to take a long term selfish view isn’t sustainable. Where we are taking, how can we give back to ensure there is …

I actually wrote this 5 years ago and never finished it so thought I’d just hit Publish.