What Hybrid Seeds Taught Me About Business
It must be Spring because the seed catalogs are piling up on my coffee table.
As we celebrate Beltane, the midpoint between the winter and summer solstices, I find myself thinking about something that seed catalogs reveal surprisingly well: why some businesses thrive season after season while others slowly lose their vitality.
Each year I’m amazed at the new varieties available. This year’s stars include Kalahari F1 Watermelon, Blue Tonic F1 Tomato, and Buhl Sweet Corn - each promising remarkable results: fewer seeds in your watermelon, more amazing tomatoes, and disease resistant corn.
And these hybrids will likely deliver on those claims because they were all bred to produce.
Hybrid seeds are created when breeders cross two varieties to produce a plant with specific desired traits.
While I prefer open-pollinated seeds—what I call true seeds—my garden still welcomes hybrids because they serve a purpose: reliability. The tradeoff is that hybrids don’t reproduce true seeds for the next season. If you want the same results, you must buy the seeds again each year.
Hybrid seeds solve a short-term problem. True seeds carry a stable internal pattern that reliably reproduces season after season.
I see the same thing in business.
Hybrid Businesses Are Not Sustainable
Many entrepreneurs build their businesses using hybrid models — a mix of strategies, systems, and advice borrowed from other people’s playbooks. At first, it seems to work. But over time something begins to feel unstable. The business becomes harder to sustain and the results inconsistent.
Once you understand your natural blueprint, something remarkable starts happening.
You’ll notice a tension between how you truly want to operate your business and how you have been told to function.
This is why knowing your S.E.E.D. Code™ is so important.
When you know the natural SHAPE of your business,
have identified your ENTRY POINT that leads directly to your signature offer,
understand and use your ESSENCE as the basis for your messaging,
and truly DIFFERENTIATE yourself in the marketplace, your business can continue to produce quality results year after year.
Your True Nature
Knowing and living from your True Nature are two different things.
Your business DNA will help you envision your potential.
Living in accordance with your True Nature is what happens when your S.E.E.D. Code™ is allowed to fully express itself.
Just like true seeds hold all the natural intelligence they need to sprout and grow, you know your business needs to thrive.
But knowing and trusting that inner wisdom are two very different things. Most of us have spent years absorbing advice about how a business should operate. The pressure to follow proven formulas can be intense — marketing templates, pricing strategies, funnels, launches, and growth models that promise predictable results.
Many of these tools are helpful. But when we build our businesses entirely from those external models, we end up creating something that feels strangely disconnected from who we actually are. It works for a while. But over time the strain begins to show. Decisions become harder. Momentum slows. What once felt exciting begins to feel like work that must constantly be forced.
That’s the moment when it’s obvious that you’ve been growing a hybrid business and trying to replant the untrue seeds year after year.
The good news is that the intelligence of your True S.E.E.D. Code™ is never lost.
It is simply waiting to be recognized.
Doing Business In Accordance With Your True Nature
When you connect with your S.E.E.D. Code™, something subtle begins to shift.
You’ll see your work differently. You’ll recognize the natural rhythm of how your ideas develop. You’ll be delighted with the kinds of clients who respond to your message. Your offers and messaging become simpler, more powerful, and your business begins to align with its True Nature.
And when that happens, growth becomes less about pushing and more about cultivating.
This kind of realignment, however, is difficult to do alone.
We all need Mentors & Models
When I was learning how to garden, I read books, attended workshops, and asked a lot of questions. One of the most important questions I ever asked was “why.”
I wanted to know why they planted certain varieties and why they designed their gardens the way they did. I didn’t want to just copy what they did; I wanted to understand how it applied to my garden. I do the same for my business.
The challenge is that we are all too close to our own businesses. When you’ve been busy mimicking and copying the trends and tricks that you learn from others without discernment, it’s hard to connect with your True Nature.
We all have blind spots.
We all carry assumptions about what’s possible, what’s practical, and what the market expects from us. Those assumptions can quietly steer our businesses away from their natural design.
This is why having a trusted facilitator can be so powerful.
A skilled guide helps you step back far enough to see the underlying patterns — the structure of your ideas, the natural entry points into your work, and the qualities that truly differentiate you.
They help you see the S.E.E.D., not just the plant you have been trying to force into shape.
True Nature is what happens when your business stops trying to imitate someone else’s model and begins growing from its own true S.E.E.D.
You might recognize that your business has become a hybrid if:
Your offers technically work, but something about them no longer feels natural.
You’ve accumulated strategies, systems, and advice from many sources, but they don’t quite fit together.
Marketing feels like something you have to force rather than something that flows from your work.
You sense there is a more authentic way to operate your business, but you can’t quite see the full picture yet.
When those signs appear, it means your business is ready for a deeper alignment.
Come Discover Your True Nature
This is exactly the work we do together at the True Nature Retreat.
Over the course of our time together, we step away from the noise of daily business and look deeply at the natural design of your work.
Through guided conversation and the lens of the S.E.E.D. Code™, you’ll begin to recognize the intelligence that has been quietly shaping your business all along.
For many entrepreneurs, it is the first time they have seen their work clearly—not as a collection of tactics or offers, but as a coherent ecosystem that reflects who they truly are.
During the retreat we explore:
the Shape of your business and how your ideas naturally develop
the Entry Point that allows the right clients to access your work
the Essence that makes your message unmistakably yours
the Differentiation that allows your business to flourish in its own way
And once that clarity emerges, something remarkable happens.
The business stops feeling like something that must constantly be managed. Instead, it becomes something that can finally grow according to its True Nature.
The most resilient gardens are not created by forcing plants into unnatural conditions. They flourish when each plant is allowed to grow according to its own design.
Businesses are no different.
When you understand the DNA of your business and allow that design to guide your decisions, you stop trying to recreate someone else’s model and begin cultivating something far more powerful. A business that is authentically, sustainably, and unmistakably your own.
You might be wondering:
Is my business growing from its true design…
or am I still trying to sustain a hybrid?
If that question resonates with you, the True Nature Retreat is designed to help you answer it.
At the retreat we step back from the day-to-day mechanics of running a business and explore the deeper structure of your work through the lens of the S.E.E.D. Code™.
If you’re ready to rediscover the natural intelligence of your business and cultivate something that can thrive season after season, I invite you to join us.
→ Learn more about the True Nature Retreat ←
Gratefully,
Markey Read
