Optimize Your Garden With These Simple Tricks
Dearest reader, consider this inquiry: You are the sole proprietor of a home garden (a real one, not in Animal Crossing or wherever AOC makes her press releases nowadays). You own the land free and clear. You go out for mocktails every week with the two other gardeners in your market, and you talk about your businesses and why you love your family (ugh). You have a good reputation. Every week, a nondescript hooded figure stops by and buys 24 watermelons, and their purchases only seem suspicious like half the time. You pay the neighborhood kids twice minimum wage to do - I don’t know - whatever happens in a garden. (I’m an expert, not a day laborer - I have no idea what actually goes on.) You have a quality work-life balance. Yadda, yadda, yadda, sunshine and rainbows, insert more boring stuff here.
Sounds like you’re doing great, right? Wrong. Consider the alternate hypothesis that you are stupid and spineless and have no idea how to derive a competitive advantage, optimize for cost, increase your return on investment, discount your cash flows, penetrate your market, or let alone commit white-collar crimes. I know, I know - the fun ones are the non-white-collar ones, but bear with me: white-collar crimes can be fun too.
You said you own the land free and clear? That’s stupid. You’re tying up so much money in the land that you could be spending to, I don’t know, buy a yacht, donate to a presidential inauguration, or contribute to your divorce legal expenses. The real strat (yes, ‘strat’ is the formal business term - it’s what I hear at the business parties all the time) is to constantly borrow mortgages against the land you own, and borrow again immediately once you’ve returned the money. It’s just like when you borrow Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance from the library over and over again.
You go out for mocktails and boring conversations with your competitors every week? That’s also stupid. One of your competitors is stealing your business secrets and plans to put you out of business, and I saw the other kissing your mom the other day. Although you shouldn’t have wasted your life on things like hanging out with friends, but I can offer you a small consolation: Now that they think you’re stupid (you are, but that’s beside the point), you can abuse their stupidity by framing them for tax evasion and/or stealing the overpriced purple chairs from Tepper - in that latter case I’d appreciate if you could send the disappeared chairs my way. And then voilà , your competitors are in jail and you can jack up your prices to $69 a watermelon. Although the nondescript hooded figure surely won’t like those prices (they’ve never had much of a sense for business), where else are they supposed to get 24 watermelons a week?
You claimed you had a good reputation? That one’s smart, actually. But you’re doing it stupidly, because you’re stupid. Here’s a revelation: you don’t have to gain a good reputation from honesty. In fact, that’d just be a waste of your money. Are you telling me in order for your customers to think you’re philanthropic you actually have to donate money to the children’s cancer center? Of course you don’t! You just have you say you did it, and blackmail anyone who dares to question you with stupid things their kids have done. See, I told you white collar crimes were fun!
And worse yet, you pay the neighborhood kids twice minimum wage? I’d tell you to pay them only minimum wage and then deduct from their pay for a white-collar charge, but you don’t even have to do that. Just feed them a watermelon per week of work - it’ll pale in comparison to how many watermelons that nondescript hooded figure buys.
I hope I have sufficiently convinced you of your poor business sense. You may be thinking that you’ll be exchanging general life happiness for your business’s cold-blooded growth. If so, you’re already on the right track.