I have a picture in my head of what 2030 looks like.
It is not a big company. There is no warehouse, no staff meetings, no logo on a fleet of trucks. It is still my yard in Saukville, still the greenhouses, still the 5b/6a line running right through everything I do. What changes is not the soul of the thing. What changes is how much of my life it gets to hold.
Here is the honest starting point. I planted my first windmill palm in the ground in 2008. I put the name Northern Tropicals on this in 2014, back when it was more of a dream identity than a business. I sold my first windmill palm in 2023. Nine years from a name to a sale. Nobody would call that a rocket ship, and I would not trade the pace. Every one of those years taught me something the fast route would have skipped.
So what does 2030 look like?
The palms still ship in their pots, in their soil, the way they grew. That is not changing. It is the reason customers keep telling me their palms arrive looking like they never left the greenhouse, and I intend to keep it that way.
The knowledge finally lives somewhere outside my head. Right now, more than fifteen years of trials, failures, and protection setups exist as memories and as this blog. By 2030 there is a written guide people can keep, a YouTube channel that shows the work instead of just describing it, and consultations for people planning their own zone-pushing projects. The plants will always be the heart of this, but a plant can only teach the person who buys it. The knowledge can teach anyone.
There are more hands. Not employees in the corporate sense. I picture local high school kids watering, potting, and packing on summer mornings, learning something about plants and work while they are at it. My job becomes the part only I can do: the experiments, the writing, the decisions about what to try next.
And the failures still get documented. That will never change. If the 2030 version of Northern Tropicals stops telling you what died and why, then it stopped being Northern Tropicals somewhere along the way.
What I am not chasing is scale for its own sake. I have watched this thing stay small for a long time, and the smallness protected it. The goal is not to get big. The goal is for the work I love to carry more of the weight, so more of my time goes to the thing I have been building since I was a kid staring at majesty palms in a garden center, knowing there had to be a better answer.
You can't control everything. But you can build a system, protect it, and see what's possible if you stay consistent. That has been true for every palm I have wintered over. I figure it is true for the business too.
2030 is not that far away. Neither was 2008, once.
Until next time,
— Tim
