The Squash You Didn't Plant

This is not a gardening blog. Give me one paragraph and it will feel like one, and then it won’t.

I don’t garden. I have killed a basil plant that came with instructions. But I know the word, because a friend who does garden taught it to me, and it has been rattling around my marketing brain ever since. The word is volunteer. It is what gardeners call a plant nobody planted. A seed that survived the trash, found its own light, and grew without permission. The squash sprawling out of the compost pile, fruit the size of a forearm, fed by nothing but rot and indifference, while the peppers somebody actually labeled and watered sulk in their tidy row.

Businesses grow volunteers too. We just don’t notice them, because we are busy staring at the beds we planned.

I was talking recently about a slice of a business that had no team, no owner, no quota, no goal anyone was accountable for. By every org-chart logic it should have been a rounding error. Instead it was quietly outperforming. Customers in that category kept showing up, kept fitting, kept staying, and nobody had told them to.

The lesson for anyone doing positioning: demand you did not manufacture is the most honest signal you will ever get. A campaign tells you what happens when you push. A volunteer tells you what happens when you don’t. One measures your budget. The other measures your fit.

When a segment converts without a single ad aimed at it, when customers invent a use case you never built a deck for, when a vertical keeps closing with no rep assigned, that is not a curiosity to file away. That is the market voting before you asked the question, and the vote is cleaner than anything your funnel will hand you, because nobody coached it.

The danger comes in two flavors.

The first is neglect. The volunteer has no sponsor, so it gets no water, and one quarter you look up and the thing that was growing on its own has finally given up on you. Plants you ignore long enough learn their lesson.

The second is stranger, and it is the one I watch smart teams walk straight into. We find the volunteer, get excited, and immediately try to civilize it.

We hand it an owner, a target, a roadmap, a set of OKRs, a name with a color. We move it out of the compost and into a raised bed. Sometimes that move is right. Sometimes it kills the exact wildness that let the thing grow. Structure is not free. Attention has a metabolism. Every hour you spend dressing up the volunteer is an hour stolen from somewhere else, and the volunteer was, by definition, the one thing that did not need the hours.

The skill is neither neglect nor conquest. It is noticing.

Stay Positive & Some Of The Best Things You Will Ever Ship Are Already Growing