Nicole Burke charges $3,000 to teach people how to run her exact business.
Almost 2,000 of them have paid to be a part of it.
They open up new businesses in cities across the country, sell the same services she sells, put her brand on the work, and she promises them in writing that they’ll earn their money back.
And every new rival she trains makes her richer.
This year, with more trained competitors on the ground than ever, her business is heading for its biggest year yet, on track for $6 million.
The whole operation traces back to a woman raised in a family of Southern gardeners, who hated yard work so much she swore her dream yard would be one filled with gravel.
A Career, Four Kids, and a Driveway Full of Lettuce
For most of her adult life, Nicole kept the vow to stay as far away from gardening as she could.
She studied accounting and mathematics, then spent close to a decade working in international philanthropy, including two years in rural China.
Then came four kids in four and a half years, and the career came to a halt.
Somewhere in that child-rearing haze and being home all day, the family pastime caught up with her and gardening became her escape from what she called “nap jail.”
She grew a few herbs at a Virginia townhouse, then when they moved to Nashville, had her first attempt at in-ground rows (only to find half of it washed downhill by rain).
After that, she had her husband Jason build raised garden beds so she could keep going.
By 2013 the family had landed in Houston, and Nicole was growing three beds of lettuce on her driveway, harvesting them every day for six months straight.
Two years later she raised the white flag on homeschooling and enrolled the kids in private school.
The bill for the school was $18,000, and because she had been the one to pull the pin, she felt the expense was hers to cover.
The only work that could flex around four kids was what she was growing in the garden, so she registered a lettuce business with a $450 pre-school refund check and started hustling.
Then one day, a friend named Teresa reached out with a request. “I don’t really want to buy your lettuce. What I do want is to know how you grow that lettuce.”
Within five days, Nicole had re-registered the company and was charging $25 to walk people through her garden skills in person.
The “consults” started selling, so she raised the price.
When clients went through the consult but then asked her to ‘just build the garden’ for them, she did that too, at thousands of dollars per install.
In its first year, that little business ended up making over $120,000.
But earning the money would turn out to be the easy part.
Three ER Visits and a Course Built in a Minivan
It was the hours that were killing her.
By spring 2017, the install calendar was so full that Nicole put herself in the emergency room three times before the season ended.
She described what came next as a fork in the road: hire crews and trucks and go big on the service business, or keep it small and grow some other way.
A mother of four who had already lost one career to the clock chose the other way.
That summer, she listened to a course-building podcast on a cross-country road trip with four kids in the back, and came home to record her first online class from slides and photos of her own garden.
It sold for $97.
Within months though, the feel of the online business started to shift, and she noticed as many people wanted to start a business like hers as wanted to grow lettuce.
So within her first year of teaching, she built an online program that trained people to become paid garden consultants and priced it at $600.
Thirty-five people bought it bringing in $21,000 in a single launch, and the professional side of Gardenary was born.
Then in 2018, a move to Chicago cut her off from her Houston install clients, which forced the whole business online.
She built the audience the slow way first: a blog tuned for Google searches, free garden workshops that traded an email address for a seat, and a weekly newsletter to sell from.
Then a book deal landed, and Kitchen Garden Revival published in April 2020, just as people were stuck at home in Covid and desperate to grow food.
It sold out its first day.
In 2021 she poured fuel on the fire, spending over $600,000 on paid ads.
One January launch alone pulled in 30,000 leads and Gardenary crossed $1 million that same year.
Then she walked the spend back below $25,000, and made even more money.
In place of the ads, she started posting three short videos a day to her own social accounts, aiming for 100,000 views daily across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Under those videos ran a comment automation: type a keyword, get the free guide via DM in exchange for an email.
In eight months, 46,000 comments became 32,000 email addresses.
Those emails fed a low-ticket ladder that sold $9 guides through to $27 classes to a $297 flagship course to a $29-a-month membership.
On the checkout page, small add-ons and upgrades offered at the moment of purchase lift the average order by 20 to 30 percent, worth more than $300,000 a year from buyers she’d already won.
From there, an additional income stream was created.
Students going through her program wanted to know where to buy all the equipment they needed, so she found manufacturers and started selling it all herself: beds from $199 to $1,650, trellises, soil.
Every lesson writes the student a shopping list, and her shop is where they fill it.
By 2024, the business that started with lettuce had passed $5 million a year, and it’s on track for $6 million this year.
The revenue now splits into rough thirds: the courses, the physical garden products, and the certification arm that trains her consultants.
Underneath it all, the original install business still runs in her old Houston market, a seven-figure company in its own right.
And the whole operation is carried by a team of ten full-time staff and two contractors.
The certification sits at the top of the ladder, sold a few times a year through live launches: days of free classes, thousands in attendance, then the doors open.
Once certified, graduates pay another $50 a month to be listed in her consultant directory, the place her audience goes to find someone local to build their garden.
Her biggest launch, in 2025, had 14,000 people registered, 1,800 live when carts opened, and brought in over $500,000 in 24 hours.
Why She Wants You to Steal Her Job
“Garden consultant” is a job title Nicole made up.
Before her, the trade split two ways: landscapers who mowed and mulched, and designers who worked estates.
Nobody taught a family to grow food in their own backyard, and nobody would train you to do it for a living either.
She invented the work, did it herself for years, then hit the limit of her own hours and faced the question every service business faces: how do you grow past one person’s calendar?
Her answer was to hand the work over to others, selling the gardening method and the business model.
She’s not concerned about creating more businesses like hers.
A certified consultant in Denver isn’t taking a client Nicole could serve because she was never going to drive to Denver anyway.
Every graduate extends her method into a city her calendar could never reach, carrying her brand into backyards, dinner parties, and local press she would never touch on her own.
And the exchange runs deeper than reach.
Her money-back guarantee promises new consultants they’ll earn their fee back, which sounds like risk until you understand that her own business is creating the demand.
Two million followers watch her videos, land on her site, and ask for help in cities she’ll never visit personally, so her team hands those customers to her graduates.
By referring out the enquiries, she can guarantee her students’ income because she’s the one sending them customers. She effectively becomes a lead generation machine for her students.
The hobby side of her business sells the same message.
Gardenary’s stated mission is to make gardening ordinary, “whether you think you have a green thumb or not.”
Most people in her market believe they kill plants, and that belief stops them buying anything.
So her videos hammer the opposite idea every day: she was the woman who wanted a gravel yard, and if she can learn this, so can you.
When To Lettuce, When To Listen
Nicole’s numbers come from a decade of compounding, and her audience took years to build.
The two moves underneath, though, work at any size, and neither one needs a following to start.
1. Sell something, then listen to what the market says back.
By all means go out and sell something to the marketplace, but make sure you’re listening to what they say.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone thought they were selling one thing and realized the market was asking for something else.
Nicole went to market with lettuce, and one phone call told her the real product was the knowledge behind it.
Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush hit the same moment from another angle. They sold a writing course, then noticed their students kept asking how the free email sequence promoting it was built. The answer became a program that out-earned the course itself.
Whatever you’re selling right now, the questions coming back at you are the market’s counteroffer.
Read your DMs, your replies, your customer emails from the last month, and write down every question that asks how you do something. Each one is a product request.
2. Squeeze every asset you build.
Nicole has taken advantage of every single asset she’s created along the way.
She sold the lettuce, then the skills to grow it, then the garden installs, then the courses that taught the installs, then the planter boxes the courses called for, then the business model itself, and now her audience feeds her graduates the leads they need.
Nothing she built stopped earning. Each asset opened the next sale.
So audit your own stack. List what you already have: the audience, the method, the results, the tools you use, the systems running your own business.
Then ask what each one could sell that it currently doesn’t.
The overlooked answer is usually the one your buyers are already asking about.
And through all of it, keep one of Nicole’s own rules in play: “Sell something as soon as you can.”
Nicole was charging $25 for consults within days of her friend’s phone call.
Don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. Start creating to fill the need.