The Blogging Nurseryman by Trey Pitsenberger

October has been a good month for sales. Up from last year. We did have some deep discounting with some of our plants. People are shopping for plants, but it seems right now you have to offer them at reduced prices just to get them in the door. Sometimes that leads to sales of other items not on sale, sometimes they just want the sale plant. Either way it’s cash flow during what is a very slow time in retail.

I heard about a well known nursery approx. 15 miles from here that is reducing their operating hours from 7 days to 4 days a week! This place has (had) large landscape crews that helped landscape the lower foothills, while the housing market boomed. People paying for their landscapes with home equity. Now all that is gone, including  most of the landscape crew. I think the nursery was funded with the landscape operations, and with that revenue dried up they are depending on the nursery to pick up the slack, yet they are reducing the store operating hours. Ouch. This was a award winning, very popular garden center for the last 10 years. The manager say’s tongue and check that they are doing their best to drive business to another garden center, which seems to be doing much better. I can’t see how reducing the hours will help the business.

It’s just so easy to keep cutting expenses, since it seems at times that’s the only thing you can do.  Trying to increase revenue sometimes seems like a loosing situation. Self fulfilling prophecy. You get in a funk, customers pick up on the vibe, and it just goes down hill from there. Attitude is so important. A positive outlook is so needed right now. People are migrating towards positive messages with all the negative news these days. I believe that you can change the world with your attitude. It will be those businesses that maintain a positive outlook, a upbeat attitude, and work to spread that message, that will emerge better off when the economy finally turns around.

Our Linkedin group has grown to  94 members! There are numerous discussions going on including, “What’s been your most Successful Advertising Campaign?”, “What point of sale and back office accounting systems are you using?”, and “Homeowners online experience-interaction with your website”. Once you have joined the group you can start you own discussions. Most important, in my mind, is we now have a place for those who see the need for change in our industry to meet. Not everyone agrees how we need to change, but most agree we need change.

Since the group has grown to 94 members I thought that the 100th member should be profiled here. Of course being the 100th member is mostly luck, but it might be nice to find out more about that person and their reason for joining.  I find it quite interesting to read the backgrounds of the people involved. Presidents of companies, managers of garden centers, media representatives, television personalities, nurserymen and women, garden bloggers, and others who share a love of gardening, garden centers, and the use of new media to get the word out.

What I would like to do is introduce some of the people in the group after we introduce the 100th member. You might learn more about our garden businesses, our motivations, and hopes for our common gardening future. No one has to be profiled if they wish, but if I think most of us are dying to tell our story. We have all been through so much change during the last few years, it will be an invaluable resource for us, and those interested in pursuing a future in horticulture.

Speaking of our LinkedIn group I started a new discussion. “Monrovia, Proven Winners, and Hort Couture are examples of branding in the garden center world. Brands are seen as a way to inspire customer loyalty, and create easily recognizable attributes in a crowded market place.

During a downturn in the economy do branded plants appear too ‘expensive’, or a ‘luxury’ to be skipped by the public in favor of ’seemingly’ less expensive alternatives? Alternatives like eating out, shopping at the ‘cheaper’ box stores, taking that vacation, or just not spending at all?” If your a LinkedIn member or not your comment here, or at the group is appreciated.

We are working on our new project, “Miss Monica’s Garden Valley Pre-School and Daycare”. I have had to move my vegetable garden to make way for a playground for the kids. Over all the nursery will shrink by about 10 to 20% in size. Still plenty of space for what I need to do. We also started a webpage for the daycare. Starting a web page or blog is so easy that it was one of the first things we did. I want a place for potential customers to go and find out more about the new business.

One of the things I realized over the last few weeks is I have had “nurseryman” blinders on. Everything we have done over the last decade has been through the prism of being nursery people. Rather than see the big picture of possibilities that are out there, we looked at the possibilities only if they advanced our garden center business. I had always thought that the rental units we have in front would be part of the nursery one day. Turns out it will be nursery, just not plant nursery. Why didn’t we see this before?

The reason we didn’t see the possibilities is what I think is holding back a lot of small businesses.  Not seeing the BIG picture. Lately economic events have forced a lot of us to really dig into what’s important. As a garden center owner I read about how we need to re-invent our business to better reflect the the current trends. One such trend is putting a coffee shop in the garden center. Or perhaps a pet center. Maybe a wine bar. Another nursery sells jewelry. So I, like you think, “would this work here.”

What we came up with is most likely the only such operation in existence. The businesses will operated separately, so it’s not quite like putting a wine bar in the nursery. Never the less we are likely some of the only people who will own and operate two nurseries each raising different things all together. Plants and kids. I have found it liberating! For years we have been building our garden center business. It’s fun and challenging. But now we see just how needed daycare is in our area. Monica has already signed up a couple of customers, even before we open. It’s quite possible that the kid nursery will one day be as profitable or more so than the garden center.

Look out upon the scene and think like the entrepreneur you are. Not as a nursery man or woman, but as a person who looks out and see’s a need, then builds a answer. Is the nursery failing? No. Here in the mountains winter time is very slow, and we need a more steady cash flow, which the kid nursery will provide. This will take the pressure off the nursery to supply us with our sole income.

These days with the slowdown in the economy it would be a great time to re-evaluate who you are, and what you expect to accomplish with your business. Look beyond your industry to see if there are any other possibilities for you.  Maybe you can connect the other possibilities with your garden center business, maybe not. Just don’t be so tied to one idea that you don’t see all the wonderful possibilities that are available in these most interesting times.

Here is an update on The Victory Garden in San Francisco. We read about it at Garden Rant, where Amy rightly said it was a publicity stunt as opposed to a real attempt to encourage sustainability. She said, “Any Friends of Rant in San Francisco want to keep an eye on that garden for us? I can’t wait to see what $180,000 worth of produce looks like come September.” Well Amy, I can’t report on what $180,000 in vegetables look like but here is a report.

It appears the cost keep rising. According to SF Gate “San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is paying thousands of dollars a week in city money for private security guards to play scarecrow over the ‘Victory Garden’ growing in Civic Center Plaza.” It seems that The  Mayor decided that the garden shouldn’t come down until December, at the cost of $2,200 a week in security.Very sustainable. Why? What purpose is there in keeping the garden up? What an incredible waste of taxpayers money. Where is the outrage? What do the volunteers who kept the garden going think of this?

What’s next for the Victory Garden space. Not a vegetable garden. That was to0 much trouble. Instead,  “Newsom’s new acting Rec and Park director, Jared Blumenthal, has been asked to work up plans to give the plaza a bit more European flair - possibly with a Parisian-style cafe, a flower stand, a travel kiosk or other amenities.” Gee, I thought The Plaza already had a European flair.

So we went from growing vegetables on concrete, in soil trucked from 40 miles away, and protected by security guards to a European style plaza. Where is the sustainability in any of this?

The moral of the story. Keep politicians out of the garden.

We have a e-newsletter that we send out to just over 900 e-mail addresses. You sign up for the e-mail either at our web page, a forwarded e-news, or at the nursery by writing your e-mail down, which we then enter. Now a lot of those e-news go to people who may never visit the nursery. They live outside the area and are just interested in what we have to say. Out of those 900+ e-news about 39% on average open the e-news. This is a good rate as far as e-news campaigns go! Now out of those 39% of people who open the e-news how many react to our message? 29% of the 39% click on links in the e-news. So about 250+ people on average are interested enough to read more information on what we have sent. How many of those come into the store and actually spend money?

I don’t know how many people actually respond to the e-mail by spending money at the nursery.  It’s a small number of people, but a very important group of people. What we are finding is a certain small group of people consistantly respond to our message. They just don’t delete the e-news when it shows up in the in-box. We all know how easy it is to delete e-mail that seems to be spam. Why such a large group of people sign up for a e-news and then don’t bother to read it is a mystery? The fact is it happens and that’s the nature of e-news. What’s more important are those few people who do read it and respond.

It seems  more and more that our business success is because of a small group of powerfully influential people. People who open the e-news, forward the e-news to friends, and bring friends into the store. This is one reason I beleive that mass media advertising is not the way to go for small garden centers. Better to find the people who like what we do, and allow them the means to spread the word.

My guess is that most nurseries have a core group of people who support the business and spread the word. This is where the small and medium sized garden stores have it over the giants in the industry. Scotts Miracle-Gro tried it with their customer written blogs.  While the blogs are still there but many are written by Scotts and the rest are just kind of there. No passion. How passionate can one person get about spreading the word about Scotts?

The future of our business involve being passionate about what we do, find others who share our passion, and give them the means to spread the word.  It’s not easy being passionate about running a business during an economic slowdown! Yet, it is the key to making it through the current economic cycle. The passion you show for your business is a direct result of the passion for life that you have. People want to hear a positive message, and we have the ability to provide that message. Let’s take this opportunity between all the negative news people hear each day and insert our positive message. Gardens and gardening can change the (your) world.

The other day Seth Godin ran an post titled, “Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love.” He say’s, “That blog you’ve built, the one with a lot of traffic… perhaps it can’t be monetized. That non-profit you work with, the one where you are able to change lives… perhaps turning it into a career will ruin it. That passion you have for art… perhaps making your painting commercial enough to sell will squeeze the joy out of it.”

So many of us start in the nursery business because we love the work. It seems that if you do what you love the money will follow. Not always. The nursery business is no longer what it use to be. The days of people waiting outside the gates on a Saturday morning are all but gone. I know some places that may still exist but not here in northern California. It’s not that the nursery business really did anything wrong, but rather the times have changed. Maybe we didn’t change fast enough along with the consumer. We just assumed that gardening would always be Americans number one hobby. Now we have an infinite choices of where to spend our time and money. Some people just don’t think gardening is all that cool.

Are you depressed yet? I’m not. Sure I remember “the good all days”. Gone. We are entering an era where really none of us know what tomorrow brings. The only thing for certain is change, and more rapid than ever. So what’s a small garden center to do? Roll with the punches. That’s one of the benifits of being a small business. You can change on a dime. What takes large corporations months and years to do we can do in a few days or weeks. We have been making changes here at our nursery.

We talked about how my wife Monica is opening up a day care in two of the rental units we own in front of the nursery. We made the decision because the reality of these days points out that in our area day care is needed. Monica went to a meeting last night with the other day care business in the area. They are full! They, the competition, said more daycare is needed in our area. The comment Angela made at one of my last posts said it all, ” I think your instincts are right-on on this one. Every time I peruse the Classifieds for ‘nursery’ jobs these days, virtually the only companies hiring are the ones that take care of kidlings, not plantlings. If Monica has the credentials, hey, why not?!”

Are we closing the nursery? No. Are we readjusting what we do with our property. Yes. The nursery is a seasonal business, and here in the mountains winters are pretty slow. By opening the day care we will be able to take some of the presuure off the nursery to “do it all”. We are entruprenus. And that’s my message to you. Sometimes we define ourselves by what we do. “I am a nurseryman” was the way I thought of myself before. What ever I did was looked through the lens of being a nurseryman. Come “hell or high water” a nurseryman was what I’ll always be.  Well something changed recently. It has a lot to do with the economy, but also the times we live in. If your going to be nimble and fluid in your life don’t be so focused on one tree that you don’t see the forest all around you.

The nursery industries are involved in some of the biggest changes they have seen in a long time. Many nurseries are going to be gone by next year, and the year after. They remain too focused on trying to do business the old way. What’s the new way? Heck if I know. Every business and owner has a unique set of circumstances to deal with. Each will respond differently to the challenges. What’s that crazy idea you have?

I wanted to fill you in on our latest venture, the daycare preschool we are opening. My friend Sid worries about burn out and the stress of running a child care center. Monica ran a day care for two years, and was a child care teacher for eight years. For a number of years she worked at a day care called Happy Kids while I worked at a nursery called Happy Frog. We always found it interesting that we both worked at nurseries with “happy” in the name. Both of us are aware of the stress and tensions that are involved in daycare. It’s a lot like the stress in the nursery during spring. The difference is the stress at the daycare is year round. Of course that’s why we are interested in it. Year round income as opposed to the up’s and down’s of the nursery.

There comes a time when cutting back on expenses just doesn’t cut it. You have to increase revenue. While normally the Fall would be a boost to sales, this year it’s a mild boost. Here in California the housing price decline has affected sales more than the banking problems. I talked to a fellow the other day who is walking away from a $600,000 house in The Bay Area. They cannot sell it!

We decided that starting a new business that seems to be needed here was a smart move.  Sid is concerned that we are getting involved in a business we don’t know enough about. Don’t worry Sid, we have been through this before. The long hours and wild kids. I will say though that in the dark of winter I will do a dance of joy when I see the daycare filled with light and kids, while the plant nursery is covered in frost. Monica is excited about the possibilities and we are no strangers to long hours and repetitive tasks.

Shirley’s comment’s are right on when it comes to what we are trying to achieve. We are serious about the need for educating kids about the environment and gardening. The parents of the children we will care for are from Generation X and Y. These are the generations we in the nursery industry worry about being non-gardeners. I believe Gen. X and Y feel they didn’t get a chance to learn about, and enjoy the garden. They will be excited that their children are learning about nature and will want us to continue the process as the kids get older. Get the children interested and they will drag the parents to “their nursery”.

There is also the case of plant nursery burn-out. I would say it’s just as easy to become burned out at the garden center as the day care.  It all comes down to attitude. We are all having to make decisions that we wish we didn’t have to make. The times call for it. The difference between those that will weather the storm and those that won’t is “attitude”. You cannot wait around and hope next year will be the magic spring. What happens if California goes into a serious drought next year, which is quite possible? Sure, we will do our best to maximize the possibilities, but having all our eggs in one basket makes it harder. Some garden centers have maintenance accounts that are more or less steady. Others do landscaping. We are opening another nursery. For some reason we are good at raising young things. My youngest daughter will be helping mom full time in the day care. She was raised by Monica at the day care where she worked. We go forward with our eyes wide open.

Our last venture, The Happy Frog Garden Center was started in the middle of the last recession. No one was opening anything and I thought it was a good sign that we we’re boldly starting a new business then. It grew to become one of Northern California’s leading garden centers. Remember that Google was started during the dot com crash. What about garden centers with Cafes? Who would have thought that would work? Garden Centers that sell wine? Garden Centers with a grocery store attached? Garden Centers that have pet centers (Bone Bar)? Garden Centers that sell high end jewelry? All those are being done as we speak. Why not a Garden Center with a kid nursery?

Those of us that keep a steady hand on the wheel, chart a good course, and have fun all the while, will weather the storm and find safe harbor.

We have been getting ready for our 4th Annual Scarecrow Contest and Pleasure Faire. We have local vendors and artists as well as the scarecrow contest. I’ll cook hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. It’s suppose to be about 70 degrees and breezy, perfect fall weather. It’s a way to showcase the local community and gives people a reason to come to the garden center. You can’t just open the gates and expect people to come anymore. Too many priorities for their time and money. You have to have something going on that sparks their intrest. I think being the venue for all things local is a great way for us to show our community spirit. These are the day’s to focus on local!

Weekends have been o.k. as sales go. Weekdays can go either way depending on just who walks through the doors. Never before has it been so important to realize who your best customers are, and treat them as such. It’s so important to have a positive outlook while all around you people are playing the blues. I believe people migrate toward a positive outlook, and if we are that positive place, they will come. People want to feel good and connect with others in the community. Let’s be that place.

Monica and I are opening a new nursery! A nursery for kids. “Miss Monica’s Garden Valley Preschool and Daycare“. Monica was for years a day care provider. We own a small retail mall in front of the nursery. There are six units, most of which are leased out. We have a masseuse, photographer, and video store. There are now two units, 1000 sq. ft. available. That’s where Monica will open her business. The nearest daycare to here is five miles away and the next one is 12 miles away. Both are filled to capacity. There is a need for daycare in our area! Our great location is on the way “down the hill” to jobs in Placerville, Folsom, and Sacramento.

How did this come about? We are trying to figure out what business will stay busy in a down economy. Daycare is something that people will sacrifice for since usually both couples have to work.  So it’s a new venture for Monica, and I’ll have to run the garden center. That’s o.k. because we need to do something. Winter is closing in and the garden center business is seasonal, even here in California. Daycare is a year round business.

We came to this decision because these days you have to “think out of the box”. Actually we have always tried to think out of the box, but this year and next it will be those who implement the changes necessary that will be in business next year.  We have the commercial space available, we have great landlords (us), a need for daycare in the area, and Monica has the experience and requirements necessary. Plus my daughter Sheala will be an aide, making it a family business. A desire for a more steady cash flow is a major portion of our thinking. Sure I’ll miss Monica in the nursery, but she will only be 100 yards away and I can hire help for the nursery next year.

I like the idea of starting a new business now! It goes against the “pull back and hunker down” mentality that I think stifles business, at a time when bold action and ideas need to come into play. Now is the time to prepare for the eventual rebound in the economy. It will come, it just might be awhile. So pull out all the stops. Think about it. Everyone wonders how to appeal to Generation X and Y. We are going to the source, the children of generation X and Y! We will have a learning garden at the preschool. Nature and gardening will be taught to the children as part of the curriculum. If we can’t get Gen. X and Y to embrace gardening will get their kids to drag them in.

You have heard in the past how the garden center business is recession proof? Is that true today? I certainly don’t think so, but we are here and the circumstances we face may be different than other garden centers face. I will say this last week has been one of the slowest I have seen when it wasn’t raining. To be fair it’s been quite hot here as of late. Temperatures in the high eighties does not make one think of fall planting. Never the less you can almost taste the fear out there. People are pulling back and making important financial decisions.

Is this what’s happening in the rest of the country? What is your take on what’s going on and what the future has in store? What are you doing to stand out and get people to think of the garden center?

We have found that you have to give people a reason to come to the nursery. It’s easy to say, “no, I don’t have the extra money to spend, why go there?” We know that we are like a candy shop, once your in you can’t resist. How do you get them in? And is it working?