We are busily preparing for Spring here at the nursery. Mostly this consists of going over the cash flow to see if we can make it through the year and how many tractors we can afford to buy and how much gravel we can get to fill the potholes and what to do about drainage. One of our big improvements that has been going on over the last year is our sales yard. Back when we started, we had one location and no Worker Protection Standards about re-entry times after spraying. No one seemed to drop dead during this time, but we are following the rules these days anyhow.
Once these re-entry rules went into effect we had to have a sales yard because we could not trust customers to stay out of labelled houses when there were attractive plants in them. Also, about that same time, we started to have multiple locations—we now have six farms—which is not a sign of intelligence but a sign of over-aggressive sales people who had no understanding of the fact that it takes polyhouse room in order to produce plants. Therefore, we needed a central location that we could stock with plants from the other locations. It is right beside our office. And then, historically, our sales yard was too small and our sales yard manager was a different person every year because they were either not competent and did not come back or they were very competent and got stolen by another department, so we had trouble getting the yard staffed with people who cared. So, we needed a day’s advance notice of what the pickup customer wanted so we could get it hauled over from the outlying farms.
Things are changed because we have a very good garden center trained person who takes pride in her sales yard. So, it is stocked with some plants from the other locations for better quicker service. It is also stocked continuously with good looking bloomers for impulse purchases. Actually, we do not think of it as being a completely impulse purchase because plants for landscapers are an inelastic commodity, generally. Smaller landscapers are, by definition, design-build people and so they can install whatever looks good that week and hope that it continues to look good until they can collect on the job. We are always hoping that our landscape customers are sophisticated enough to look for mature plants with good roots and lots of stems or buds or eyes or whatever and so they can take trimmed back plants and tell the customers that these will look really good the next year and that they were done blooming anyhow and trust me. Needless to say, I have not had a history of success with this line of reasoning; I keep trying though. I think it will be easier to sell home landscaping jobs if the install consists of larger, fuller, and more floriferous plants.
After writing this blog it slowly dawned on me that most of our customers do not live within a one hour radius and thus they will never see our sales yard, let alone, purchase from it. It is too late now. I wrote it, we are going to print it. For our more distant customers we deliver most of our product in our own trucks and some of it is delivered in semi’s with contract drivers. Every so often we have to make lots of excuses about how these drivers behave, and then we switch carriers. Anyone can come and pick up if they have their own trucking and if they can do it cheaper than we can, or if they think they can do it cheaper. We are not getting rich off the delivery charges as it is. If anyone is coming to pick up with their own trucks we will need enough lead time to get the plants moved over to the loading dock from the five other farms.
The sales yard looked quite good last year and we expect it to look good this year. We spent the winter schmoozing the woody shrub and roses growers up in the Grand Rapids to Grand Haven region with the goal of stocking our yard with their products. That will save a lot of driving an hour and a half each way by the local landscapers to get a few shrubs. Let us know what you want us to stock. With a few days’ notice we can get anything to the yard although we expect to have the standard stuff in stock all of the time. Also, we have found an extra poly house to dedicate to the yard. We are potting up lots of 2 gallon perennials there for summer sales through the yard and we will be looking at some of our other locations for larger pots of vines for the yard.
We have not had enough local customers to put together a good sales yard, but these days the South Bend-Elkhart metropolis is booming and enough Chicago people are coming into the Lake Michigan shoreline area to get us some good business here. We hope to continually improve our service. Maybe that will help our customers to get rich.
