Mother Nature And Father Time

We survived spring 2006. It rained, it did not rain. It was coldest spring ever. It was a great spring. Frost, drought – thank goodness it is over.

How come we do this to ourselves? We have a death wish? We love thrills? We thrive on stress?

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Well darned if I know! My best guess is we are a bunch of farmers and can’t help ourselves. But this spring around the country we saw all sorts of weather, not all of it good. 
If you had a great spring, well done. If your spring was less than perfect, we all know your pain.

OK, now what? Thoughts in no particular order:

In the good old days, a lot of folks said we expect bad spring weather one year out of four – so just plan for it and all will be OK. But we have shrinking margins, dramatically spiking costs and larger and more focused retailer customers. We have evolving consumers who shop differently than 10 years ago.

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What does this mean? We may have shifting weather patterns. No one seems to really know, although it seems we have many “experts.” Global warming, El Niño, New Ice Age – yikes!

What is real is that the business environment has changed, and with more business risk we can take fewer chances. So here are my official cures to the weather blues, a.k.a. let’s all get good at selling in the rain.

1. ‘Turns’ are critical.

You must be able to turn your benches faster. If we are planning on poor weather, when the sun is shining we had better be selling. All those annoying marketing programs – POP, tags, logo pots – they work. They turn benches much faster. So they help make you more weather-proof. Inventory control becomes 10 times more important in a poor spring. So are turns. You are probably tired of hearing all that “pretty packages turn faster on benches,” but they do. If you are not looking into better tags, pots and POP, you can bet your competitor is. 

2. Quality is more important than ever before.

It is always better to have good quality plants, but let’s face it, in the old days we could afford to not be perfect. Not today. I don’t care if it is global warming or just too many politicians. If we are going to have a shortened selling season with starts and stops in weather, you’d better have exceptional quality material (it is hard to do in dark and cold rain, I agree).

The grower with top quality in that kind of season will win. That means we cull more before we ship. It means we push and reward our production staff to hit new highs. Look at new car quality and what it did for Honda and how shoddy quality hurt GM, and they do not have to sell a perishable product in a six-week spring season!

3. Right product mix – by color by store.

Spring 2006 saw even more pots versus packs. Consumers want nice big plants. What else? In a shorter season you’d better only have the right stuff. You don’t have the time to let those extra marigolds sell. We see top growers spending all their time in the stores seeing what is selling today and making sure that the afternoon delivery truck is full of the right plants. Critical ­­– not just with what type of plants, but this extends to color mix as well. You’d better not have too much yellow or not enough basil. (Warning: I have no color sense, so disregard any reference to specific colors!)

4. Logistics rule.

I would be a bad logistics expert. Me and maps and timetables have never clicked, but the need to micromanage the product mix means you need to be able to turn on a dime and flow product better than ever before. What is important in a good spring becomes critical in a poor one. Are you good enough? Technology has helped us here – GPS and Nextel push to talk phones – but if we have to compress eight weeks into four, this is huge.

5. Customer service

We have come a long way from last decade’s “I ship the retailer plants, then it’s their problem” attitude. In a short selling season, we’d better be able to be attached at the hip with the retailer. If the weather is not good, then we are slowing deliveries before we are asked. We are changing out plants and working with retailers to help their business. Not easy, and yes, we are touching the plants a tad too often, but the proactive growers are winning here.

6. Other ideas include working with retailers to better promote during good weather and maybe try different approaches in bad weather. How come we don’t offer coupons to shop on rainy days? Offer free ponchos. Have staff give lectures on rainy days. Those ideas are all fraught with peril, but so is dumping too much product due to poor weather. If we have to merchandise staff in stores, why can’t they hand out rain sale coupons on rainy days? Why can’t retailers have fun with the “wet duck club?”

I bet there are 20 more ideas to help with better planning winding its way through many ideas. I do not know if we are heading toward Armageddon and the next big flood or if Mother Nature is just doing her thing. I do think we need to get better at this poor weather thing. If we can handle bad weather better think how much easier it will be to handle good weather!

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