Now that I am running a nursery again I am starting to think. Firstly, I am thinking that I should have spent my younger years thinking instead of just working hard. It took me many years to get past the management model I inherited from the parents. They only knew how to work hard, and thus, considered that to be the right thing to do. Maybe they thought while they were working. Anyhow, a few years ago I spent $50,000 on a management consultant who taught us that evaluating and firing, interviewing and hiring, were the most important things for a business owner to do. Along the way there were hints that training and planning might be of some assistance. The management consultant was a little biased in his views and the reason was because the only small businesses who could afford him had, clearly, been successful because of the intelligence and hard work of the founders, also combined with their good fortune of picking a dynamic business to be in. Once the business expanded until it was impossible to manage with the old techniques the founders retreated to just working harder and longer. That is what they knew, so that is what they did.
One thing that I learned for my $50,000 was that I had no idea how to run a business. I had always thought that all one had to do was to discover a market for a product that was in short supply and then to make that product like mad. I guess that was a good start. What we learned is that we should be organized, that time is in short supply, that the management team should be spending their time thinking and analyzing instead of micro-managing and putting out fires. In order to have a more profitable use of time, the management needed to develop regular procedures for each and all of the processes that go into running a business, and then to train and stick with these procedures. The most difficult part of this for a smaller rapidly growing business to do is to not keep tweaking the processes every day to get just a little more efficiency going. It is better to just blindly follow the plan than it is to always be making adjustments. In the long run time was saved and success was achieved. And so it was an education.
These days we are recruiting and hiring. When the previous manager left, many of his team left also. The reason was because the employees had been chosen to work with his personality type and now we have a different personality type in charge. Many of the employees were smart enough to figure this out and they bailed. Some of them did not think that Dianne and I knew how to run a nursery, so they sought other employment opportunities. And so I have been watching how other, very successful, nurseries are doing things. In one example that I noticed one of their recent employees had been acquired through on on-line employment service. This middle-aged fellow was now a propagator and had been a high school teacher. From what I sense about what a high school teacher puts up with I think that being a propagator who stands out in the poly houses watching drops of water drying on leaves and adjusts the mist timers and then checks to make sure that nothing is broken, is a welcome improvement.
I also noted that this same successful nursery put up a ‘Help Wanted’ ad at a recent nursery convention with a job description calling for a person with a college degree in horticulture and several years’ experience in the field. Maybe there are some of those people out there. Maybe this nursery is successful because they aim high in their recruiting. Maybe there are good people out there wanting a slight career change.
This past winter we attended a career meeting at the big trade show in Chicago. I wrote up a general job description to hand out at that occasion. The discipline of writing something down tends to sharpen the thought process and so I wrote that we were not likely to find someone with the experience needed to do the jobs we wanted; in fact the last few people who were hired for specific skills had not been easy to get along with. They are now pursuing alternate career paths and we, at the nursery, are now looking for reasonably bright and self-disciplined people who are easy to get along with. We will train. I was even tempted to name names of those who were difficult to get along with, but refrained.
It is interesting that four year horticulture programs are shrinking while most of the people in the programs appear to want to design pretty plantings or to restore natural habitat and make the world a better place with more bugs and butterflies and tweety birds flying around, whereas we want someone who is interested in walking around looking at the plants for mites and aphids and chlorotic conditions and we want people who like to work with several different cultures and train and supervise taking an interest in setting up efficient work procedures. I do not know how to write up that job description.
While thinking about the college degree qualification I came across an opinion piece in the April 3, 2018 Wall Street Journal entitled “Degree Inflation and Discrimination”. This op-ed piece starts out by saying that many employers are requiring a college degree unnecessarily—that many of the employees presently working at jobs do not have degrees, yet new hires for that same position are required to have them. For one thing: “Employers presume that a college degree confirms the baseline verbal and written skills required for many jobs,…” and that “College degrees can be an expedient shortcut to weed out applicants.”
What is really happening is that employment law is getting more and more complex while: “On the left, a thriving cottage industry for social-justice lawsuits uses identity-group quotas to sue employers for disparate impact.” There are now government restrictions on everything from giving intelligence tests to asking about prior earning history to inquiring about criminal history. And so it is easier to go with the degree requirement because ,college degrees are the only remaining proxy for aptitude that doesn’t carry a risk of litigation.
We are now starting to look at Junior Colleges on the theory that their hort and ag programs have already sorted out those interested in that kind of work. We will see how it goes. Anything has to be better than what we used to do. A long time ago we hired for very fast good workers. This did not work out well when we attempted to promote them to being crew leaders and new employee trainers and organizers. I remember several of our very good workers looking at me with puzzled expressions on their faces that I would expect them to take some initiative and responsibility—this is not what they had been hired for at all. And then, more recently, the management had gone with one of the internet job listings and hired people from another state who had done the Junior College thing on the theory that they had specific propagation and growing skills. That is how we got the people we just got rid of who were difficult to get along with, and try to not remind me of the details. I am still shaken from the experience.
We will keep you informed on progress. In my job description, right after the requirement of civility and joviality I suggested that things would be much easier if the job applicant had some understanding of the fact that each year had four distinct seasons. And during each season there is such a thing as variable weather. The work at a nursery varies widely and wildly throughout the calendar year. I did not want to be the person who broke the news to the new employee about how this worked. I can handle only so much disappointment.