The Business Allotment: tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life

“Starting a business is much like working an allotment. You have a seed of an idea; you nurture it in a little clay pot until it struggles into the daylight; you try to provide it with enough shit in the form of funding so that you can eventually transplant it into the wicked, wider world of the adult vegetable patch: only to see it fail due to several hostile attendant predators, parasites and pitfalls.“

The Business Allotment is not a business manual.

It is a book about starting things — businesses, projects, lives — and the quiet misunderstandings that surround how we imagine success, growth, and independence.

Using the extended metaphor of an allotment, the book reframes entrepreneurship not as heroism or hustle, but as:

• shared labour
• mutual dependence
• patience
• manure
• seasons
• and survival

Business here is not a private garden. It is a communal patch, exposed to weather, pests, neighbours, and compromise.

This book was written in response to a particular kind of noise:

• the language of boot camps
• the mythology of founders
• the fetishisation of pitches, algorithms, growth curves and magic DNA
• the idea that entrepreneurship is an individual triumph rather than a social process

Against that noise, The Business Allotment offers something quieter and more durable: a way of thinking about work that accepts uncertainty, failure, collaboration, ageing, and ethics as structural features, not personal weaknesses.

As the introduction makes clear, this is as much a book about life navigation as it is about business start-ups .

The book is organised into short, essay-like chapters (“tips and tricks”) which operate more like parables than prescriptions. Across three broad movements, it explores:

• starting up
• becoming (or resisting becoming) an entrepreneur
• doing the work without losing yourself

Each chapter uses anecdote, satire, and fictionalised case studies to dismantle clichés and replace them with something more human.

Who this book is for

This book tends to attract:

• first-time founders who feel uneasy about the startup “script”
• artists and cultural workers navigating enterprise language
• educators and mentors working with young entrepreneurs
• readers interested in ethics, labour, ageing, and work
• people who suspect that “growth” is not the same thing as progress

It is frequently discovered via search by people who are already sceptical — which explains both the steady impressions and the quiet, thoughtful traffic you’re seeing.

Like much of Nick Owen Publishing’s catalogue, this book:

• resists instruction
• distrusts certainty
• prefers metaphor to framework
• and allows humour to carry serious ideas without flattening them

It does not promise success. It promises companionship.

Where to go next

If you arrived here looking for:

• reflective writing about work → explore the NOP Blog
• narrative obsession → Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player
• cultural satire → There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman
• the thinking behind the publishing → About Nick Owen Publishing

5.0 out of 5 stars It is a must read for young entrepreneurial spirits

The Book “The Business Allotment” shows Nick’s vast experience with people, business and money. It is a very easy read with dry English humour and at times very poetic. The analogy with the allotment is the perfect one for the entrepreneur and the start-ups. It gives a clear guide to when, what and how to begin the journey of an entrepreneurship. I particularly enjoyed the chapter 6, “the role of the Artist entrepreneur” under the part of eight more tips and tricks for business start-ups. I see that it is very relevant today to “F” word, the Funding as Dr Nick Owen puts it teasingly in his one of the chapter. It is a must read for young entrepreneurial spirits who wants to see their seeds of the idea becoming a strong bushy plant. (Review by Yogi Bhatt, entrepreneur)