It's like I almost know you.

And to cut a long story short, it goes something like this.

You've always loved plants. You've always been the one people told, you're so good with plants. So somewhere along the way you started growing a few of the cool ones. And they grew. And you made babies off them. And before long you had more than you knew what to do with — and the next step, the obvious one, was to sell a few.

At first you didn't even notice it. The expenses. The little things quietly eating into your margin. The pots, the postage, the heat mats, the hours. Did you even know what your break-even was? Do you know now? Do you know, today, the exact number you have to sell a plant for just to not lose money? Hold that thought — there's that phrase, break even. We'll be coming back to it. More than once.

You went out and bought the cute boxes. The stickers. The nice little touches, so your plants would look like the ones you see everyone showing off on socials. (And between you and me — most of the time, that's all it is. A put-on for the camera. The customer very rarely gets something that looks anything like the reels we all sit there judging ourselves against. Oops.)

You spent a good chunk, because you're proud, and because you were going to be different from the rest. And for a while, it worked.

But somewhere along the line, something changed.

The buyers just... stopped coming the way they used to. The honeymoon was over.

And this is where the shit hits the fan. Where the fun turns to shit, if I'm being honest. This is the exact moment the thing you started for love quietly becomes worse than a job. Because a job, you go home from. You switch off. If there's no money in the till, that's not your problem — you still get paid Friday. But this? This is yours. It follows you to bed. There's no clocking off from a shop that isn't selling.

So you start to doubt yourself. Because you don't have the experience. Because you don't know how to sell. Because you were just a — [insert your old job here]. A teacher. A nurse. A sparky. A mum. Whatever it was. And none of it, not one single day of it, had anything to do with selling a plant for the right price.

Which brings me to the next one. What's the right price?

Yeah. I know. Another one of those gotcha questions.

How do you get what you deserve? What the plant is actually worth? What you need to sell it for just to break even — there's that phrase again — when you don't even know what your break-even is?

And how do you do any of it if you've never been given the skills? If you don't know what to say, how to say it, how to write a description that actually moves a plant instead of just listing it. And — most important of all —

how to sell it anywhere other than Marketplace. eBay. Etsy. Gumtree. A Facebook group.

Why does that matter so much?

Because those places are too easy. And that, right there, is exactly why you're not getting what you should. On those pages, the only person walking away a winner is the one walking away with your plant. That's not a sale. That's robbery. But what else did you expect, when you took your special plant — the one you fussed over for months — and chucked it into a washing machine packed full of plants exactly like it? Someone searches "albo," and boom: there's your listing, drowning in a hundred other albos, all on the one page, all racing each other to the bottom on price.

Now imagine the opposite.

Imagine you were the only one on that page. The only albo on Marketplace. The only one on eBay with that plant. Can you feel how different that would be? How different the price would be? How different you'd feel?

Now — here's the part where you get to know who's saying all this to you.

I've stood exactly where you're standing. I've had my own plant shop, more than once, and I've felt every single thing I just described. So none of this is theory. But here's the difference between me and most people handing out plant advice: long before any of the plants, I spent thirty years as the bloke companies sent into the room when nothing else was working. Door to door first. Then running the floors. Then flown around the world to turn dying offices around — vacuums, alarms, pay TV, gyms, mortgages, and then plants. Six industries. The product changed every single time. The one thing that never changed was the selling. Selling is the one art I actually mastered, over thirty years, the hard way, the only way there is.

So when I tell you that your problem was never the plants — that you can grow circles around almost anyone and still go broke — I'm not guessing. I know it in my bones. The plants were never the problem. The selling was. And nobody ever taught you, because you were never a salesperson. You were a grower who got thrown in the deep end of a trade that takes most people years to learn — and you were expected to just swim.

That's what this book is. Those years. Handed to you straight.

And it starts with the one idea you just felt land in your chest a minute ago: stop fighting in the washing machine. Be the only one.

I have never — not once, not a single time — sold a plant on Marketplace, or in a Facebook group, or anywhere other than my own page, my own group, and my own website. Never. And if I can do that, so can you.

Which leaves you with one question. And it's a fair one.

How? How do I get people onto my website, when every last one of them is sitting on Facebook?

And here's my answer.

I only ever go fishing on Facebook.

So grab your gear. Let's go fishing in the next chapter.

Boom boom boom.

— ClaudioThe Prof