Sedan Floral, a Greenhouse Grower Top 100 Grower in Sedan, Kan., was faced with some tough decisions seven years ago. After losing most of the business from two major chain store customer accounts and struggling to pick up the pieces for several years, Sedan’s leadership cut production significantly and reinvented the operation to appeal to a much broader customer base of independent garden centers.
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Life After The Chain Stores
Top 100 Grower Sedan Floral built a solid business working with chain store accounts, including Kmart. Most of the business from those accounts eventually went away, leaving the survival of the company in doubt, and Sedan Floral in need of a new business model.
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Rebuilding From Scratch
After losing two major accounts representing 75 percent of Sedan's orders, president and CEO Jonathan Cude realized starting from scratch was the best option to save the family business.
"I took everything I knew about Sedan Floral and set it aside and said, ‘I don’t know that anymore.’ What I do know is I have a greenhouse and there are people out there I want to sell to. That’s the new reality,” Cude says.
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Starting Fresh With Staff
Sedan cut production by 60 percent to get in line with what it could sell to existing customers. Unfortunately, that meant losing much of the greenhouse's staff. But starting fresh did have a silver lining, in that it made implementing changes easier, Cude says.
"The company lost most of its personnel. When everybody left, we lost all of the procedures, policies and ideas of the team. So when somebody new came on, they didn't know the old way," he says. "That allowed us to do it the new way."
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"We literally changed everything."
To appeal to a broader customer base of independent garden centers, Sedan Floral went out and asked potential customers what they wanted. Then they made changes to fulfill those needs.
"We literally changed everything," Cude says. "The size of our flat, the plants we grow and the colors we grow. We changed our tagging, the way we ship and the time it takes to ship an order. We changed all of this out of necessity to serve these customers."
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Diversified Crop Mix
Sedan Floral also diversified its crop mix. Production is divided among seven categories important to customers: pack material; premium annuals; products between the basic packs and premium annuals; hanging baskets; herbs and vegetables; products specifically for the landscaper market; and perennials and grasses. "We have lots of parts and pieces. Some are significant, but when I look at the pie chart, there's not a single category that is the category. Each is instrumental to the bottom line," Cude says.
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Upgrading Facilities
Sedan Floral has consistently made upgrades to the business to better serve its customers. Over the last few years the company purchased box trucks to supplement its trailer shipments and also added a new loading dock to improve shipping efficiencies.
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Managed Growth For The Future
Sedan Floral is back to 70 percent of its peak production and still has room to grow. But Cude is in no rush to return to the heights of the early 2000s.
"My goal is to be as big as we need to be," he says. "If we can continue to add customers and take care of them in the way we are currently servicing them with our current quality, I don't care if we're 5 acres or 500 acres."
That strategy has slowly but surely returned the operation to profitability. A willingness to change everything was necessary for the long-term survival of the company, says Sedan president and CEO Jonathan Cude.
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“If the current business model you’re using fails to work, be willing to stop, press reset on your brain, erase everything and start over,” Cude says. “Be open to change. “It’s cliché. Everybody says it. But that’s what we did. And it’s working.”
In the slideshow below, get a look inside the operation, including Sedan Floral’s new philosophy for serving customers, updated crop mix and facilities upgrades including a new shipping dock.
015Sedan Floral Reinvents Its Customer Base And Its Business [Slideshow]
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Richard Jones is Corporate Content Director for Meister Media Worldwide. For more than two decades he served as an editor for brands in Meister's U.S. Horticulture Group, including Greenhouse Grower®, American Vegetable Grower®, American Fruit Grower®, Western Fruit Grower®, and Florida Grower® magazines. See all author stories here.
February 18, 2014 
