It’s All Business to Me
by James Duquette
There’s a trick to running a successful flower operation like Legacy Farms: once you’ve grown the flowers, you actually need to sell them. As we move towards this year’s Flower & Garden Festival, I am reflecting on how we prepared last year and how we’ve grown.
When I first began working here, I was a little more than perplexed about why I was asked to join Legacy’s Entrepreneurial Business Group. I’m not really an economically minded person. My talents, I have always thought, lay in crafting the piece, not selling it.
Yet here I was, in the hour after lunch, sitting in a small cottage where the business meetings are held. It used to be a chicken coop, or so I hear, and I can believe that given its cramped interior, slanted roof, and the overall lack of comforts I’m used to (like a desk for my laptop). It may have been refurbished, but it’s still not exactly an office.
I’m sitting across from Diane, our Director of Programming, and Simon, an entrepreneurial junior staff member, while they review tasks.
Junior Staff, Caleb and Simon, delivering products to a local business.
Simon may be a bit rambunctious, but he’s got a knack for knowing everything that goes on around the farm. He’s currently reviewing the list of supplies for the Leesburg Flower & Garden Show. They’ve just discussed product pricing.
As I understand it, the Flower & Garden Show is a highly important event to us; we attend every year and attempt to draw in customers who gather in the name of petal and leaf. What’s amazing to me is how much work goes into preparing, coordinating, and orchestrating it all.
Chalkboard, displays, products…onload, offload…I can barely keep up…tent, staffing, staging, tech, design, inventory….
Even though everything had been mostly set up before, we’re now double and triple checking it all. Everything from who will staff our tent to making sure there is a tent in the first place. It must all be accounted for and signed off. Participants must be trained on how to use our credit card-reader app. The design for our price list signboard must be drawn…. It’s all so much.
Junior Staff Emma, selling our flowers and products at Leesburg Flower & Garden 2025.
Photo by Emmi Myers
In this world, I am as a cat watching a keyboard. I see the clacking of the keys, but I barely understand how they relate to the movement on the screen. And yet, I am asked to contribute to the world of finance and logistics that I am so ill designed for. As the rest of the crew prepares I ask myself, “How can I?”
Eventually, to sort it out, I had to sit down with Diane and my boss, Laurie.
“I feel like I can’t contribute to the business meetings. I never feel like I have anything useful to add, and I don’t truly know why I’m there.”
The first thing they told me was that I did have something to contribute, and that my contribution could indeed help with the business team’s work. I should try my best to relax, engage and integrate with the group while experiencing as much of each project as I could. And also, that I should just be who I am–the new Staff Writer, trying to understand this organization and learn how to use my own talents to further its mission. My presence here was important.
FlowerFetti next to our tulips!
Photo by Emmi Myers
And so I returned to the team, who were still preparing for the Flower & Garden Show. In winter, the entire Legacy apprentice crew worked on creating a new product that we’re showing off this year: FlowerFetti, environmentally conscious confetti made of dried flowers with seeds mixed to be used for planting a summer cutting garden. We needed a place to display it, and Laurie had bought some wooden shelves requiring assembly.
This was not a menial task; rather, it was an experiment. An old adage from farmer’s markets is “pile it high and watch it fly”! The idea being that eye-level displays attract more customers. Experimenting with different ways of presenting our products, as I found out, is as much a part of business as keeping records.
I looked at the setup and instructions for these shelves and said to myself, “This doesn’t seem that much different from building LEGO®.”
For the first time, I actually led the team on a task; I was able to quickly grasp the instructions for the shelves and demonstrate how to build them. I felt confident, proud, invigorated to know that I had something to contribute…not just in putting together the shelves, but in figuring out how to feature the product, and hopefully sell more of the flowers our team had worked so hard to grow.
Not every neurodivergent person is going to have a head for business. Some, like Simon, have a passion for entrepreneurial ventures. Others, like myself, are happy to have figured out how to build a shelf. The key, in business as in life, is to give us the chance to figure out what we’re good at.
I’m still attending the business meetings. Sometimes I do have a flash of insight or an understanding of what’s going on. Other times, I just do my best to follow along. Because it’s all just business to me.
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Legacy Farms will be selling tulip bouquets, live plants, dahlia tubers, FlowerFetti, and more again this year at the 2026 Leesburg Flower & Garden Festival.
Our booth is in the lot behind Lightfoot Restaurant. More informatioon can be found here: www.legacyfarmsvirginia.org/our-events/2026/4/18/leesburg-flower-amp-garden-festival
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Thank you for reading! When you support Legacy Farms through donations and floral purchases, you nurture all of our apprentices' work and growth...our gardeners, aspiring photographers and entrepreneurs, and writers like James! Each program we offer and every flower we grow is part of something bigger.
Legacy Farms provides vocational training and meaningful work experience for neurodivergent young adults — building pathways to confidence, independence, and community connection.