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Greetings!
The bank manager wasn't shouting. He just looked across the desk and said it plainly: you need to stop.
The nursery build had been budgeted at £450,000. It was heading toward £1.2 million, and there was no clean way back.
He didn't stop. The family had already moved into a half-derelict farmhouse next to the site, sewage pouring out the back of it, and there was only one way through: figure it out.
That's Andy Nimmo, who co-founded Muddy Boots Nurseries with his wife Anna fifteen years ago on a combined household income of £18,000 and a stretch target of £60,000. The business now runs multiple sites built around outdoor adventure and risk-taking play. Andy still tells the story of nearly losing it twice.
A few years after the build, a staffing quirk led him into a second site almost by accident. Within a year, a basic confusion between profit and cash put the business on track to run out of money, with a £75,000 overdraft. Then the phone rang at 3am: one of the nurseries was on fire.
In this conversation, Andy talks through what actually happened across both near-collapses. How the first six years were survival, not strategy. The moment he realised he didn't understand the difference between making money and having money. How Gino Wickman's EOS framework pushed him to set a ten-year vision that felt genuinely embarrassing to say aloud. Why he stopped measuring Muddy Boots against competitors. The finance director hire he admits he made years too late. And how a single book recommendation from his coach took £200,000 off an acquisition price.
If you're running on instinct and haven't looked hard at the gap between your profit and your cash, if you've hit a growth moment that's forcing you to rebuild systems that used to work, or if you're putting off the specialist hire because the wage looks like a cost rather than a solution - this conversation is worth your time.
Andy isn't presenting a tidy turnaround. He's talking through the parts that went wrong as openly as the parts that worked.
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