Author: Devid Hoeur

The first year of starting a new business is a battle against your own doubts. In 2018, I planned to start a flower attraction business called “Dream Garden.” But thoughts like “The timing isn’t right” and waiting for perfection got in the way. Fear of failure is real in agriculture, and I let it run me. I wasted over a year just waiting. The words you say to yourself every day are the first thing that must change when you shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Here are six hard-won lessons from building Dream Garden, and the…

By 2021, my garden venture, Dream Garden—a landscaping and floral destination—had failed. I had spent the entire run trying to do everything myself, and when I decided to try again, I knew one thing for certain: I would never build a business alone a second time. Learning how to choose a business partner for a garden business became the single most important lesson from that failure, more important than any marketing decision I made along the way. After two years of entrepreneurship training and an honest analysis of what went wrong, I relaunched Dream Garden in 2023. I knew I…

I was never trained to be a manager, and if you’re trying to figure out how to lead a garden business team with no management experience, that’s exactly the position I started in too. My training consisted of sweeping yards, cutting grass, and planting flowers while riding in my uncle’s trailer since I was a teenager. Leadership was never part of my plan, yet it happened anyway: first with two employees in 2015, and later in 2023, when I had to learn how to co-lead alongside two business partners instead of doing it all on my own. If you’re running…

When I started my first residential landscaping business in 2015, I didn’t think about managing people. I thought about mowing lawns, cleaning yards, and planting flowers well enough that clients would call me again. Then, about three months in, the business grew faster than I could handle alone, and I had to figure out how to hire my first landscaping employee with almost no plan in place. I made a few good calls along the way. I also made mistakes that cost me time, money, and eventually an employee. Here’s what actually happened, and what I’d tell any landscaper standing…

When I first started Dream Garden, I never expected to need a plan for how to hire and train seasonal staff for a flower attraction or glamping business. As we finished planting sections of the attraction, I began opening the venue for visitors, and the guest volume grew faster than I could manage alone. Between welcoming visitors, keeping the flower gardens photo-ready, and prepping glamping tents for new arrivals, I quickly realized I needed help I had never had to hire before. My previous landscaping team only knew how to mow lawns and plant hedges, which is a completely different…

When we first opened Dream Garden, we did not know how to price a flower field attraction. Early on, we focused on getting guests through the gate. We had not settled on a specific ticket price. We had barely settled on the idea of charging at all. Our first plan was to skip admission entirely and focus on brand awareness. That plan fell apart once we thought it through. If we did not charge from day one, introducing a fee later would feel like a bait-and-switch to our early guests. Charging a full market rate from day one, while Dream…

When we first launched Dream Garden, figuring out how much to charge for a flower attraction business felt like guessing in the dark. As entrepreneurs, pricing a brand-new experience is one of the most intimidating hurdles you face. We initially set general admission at just $3 per person and rented our tiny homes for $15 per night. However, those numbers were never meant to be permanent. They were introductory prices designed to attract early visitors while we tested our core business model and confirmed the concept was viable. Key Takeaways Launch Pricing Strategy: Why We Started So Low Setting a…

A flower attraction business does not fail simply because flowers stop growing. It fails when the landscape turns desolate during months that should be vibrant, and visitor numbers drop before anyone spots the real problem. Learning how to keep a flower attraction blooming year-round in a tropical climate became our top priority the moment we saw this happen. By mid-March 2024, right in the middle of our peak dry season in Asia, guest attendance at Dream Garden had unexpectedly dropped by 2.8% compared to previous reports. Dismayed, I climbed up to our elevated Paradise Bridge to inspect the whole property.…

Most articles about flower attraction business startup cost hand you a single bottom-line number and call it a day. We can’t do that in good conscience, because we actually built our flower attraction business, Dream Garden, twice: once in 2019 and again in 2023, and the budgets for those two builds were drastically different. Below is a detailed breakdown of the actual costs from both attempts, including the financial mistakes we made the first time around and the additional investments that made the relaunch work. If you’re researching flower tourism startup costs or trying to put together your own flower…

If you saw me crouched alone in a dry field at dusk, you might think I was admiring the sunset. I wasn’t. Nearly every flower in my Dream Garden had died, and I was too exhausted to keep fighting. That single afternoon is exactly why I now tell every new grower the same thing: you need a business mentor for your garden business, because the lessons that rebuilt mine came from one honest conversation, not a textbook. In mid-2019, I opened Dream Garden. By 2021, it had failed. What brought it back wasn’t more money or more labor. It was…