Survive In The Industry By Looking Outside It
March 21, 2012 
The other day, my friend Mike, who owns a retail florist shop and a small greenhouse, called me and said, “Everybody says we have to change, but I don’t know what to change! What if I change what is working well and mess it all up?”
Both of us have been sharing sob stories lately (i.e. shrinking margins, soft sales and rising expenses). Mike knows he needs to keep evolving and change up his products and displays in order to keep his businesses fresh, open and solvent. We also both know it isn’t always clear what to change and how to do it.
So I gave him some advice: read the The Wall Street Journal.
No, I am not selling subscriptions to The Journal (calling it “The Journal,” by the way, makes you sound really cool and raises your perceived intelligence level by at least three points). Each week, there are many articles about businesses from all sectors of our economy. These articles explain how they are solving the very same problems we face in the greenhouse industry. Stories of business owners and their ingenuity are encouraging, and they provide me with a tremendous number of ideas and examples of how to run my own garden center business better.
Take for instance a story by John Bussey titled, “The Anti-Kodak: How a U.S. Firm Innovates and Thrives” (Jan. 13, 2012). Bussey writes about a textile company, Milliken & Co. of Spartansburg, S.C., that should have gone out of business in the late 1970s and early 80s like many other clothing manufacturers did after facing a flood of cheap imports from China. Is your business challenged by the flood of cheap imports? Mine is.
Milliken & Co. realized that if it continued to make its core products, it would lead the company to the grave. Instead, the company “diversified rapidly out of traditional textiles and moved deeper into niche products that built off their knowledge of textiles.” They survived because of a willingness to change. How many of us loathe change and have a fatal attraction to what we have always done? Are we willing to change yet?
Bussey goes on to say that the patriarch of the company, Roger Milliken, set the bar high by constantly “pounding the drum for new products, new ideas and better manufacturing techniques.” Are we doing this? When was the last time your small business created a new product or repackaged an old one? How many years have you been selling that same size geranium or spring pack? The leadership at Milliken & Co. realized they had to “climb up the value curve.” Are we raising the value of our products each year so we can get a higher price and better margin?
Today, Milliken & Co. is adding jobs and seeing sales and profits rise. It is because they dared to do something different. Some of the products they have diversified into are the fabric that is in duct tape, the additives for clear food containers, the treatment that makes countertops antimicrobial and a host of other products.
What can we take from this one article? Change is good and will bring us different results. Aren’t we tired of numbers in brackets or red at the bottom of the column on our profit and loss statement? We need to create an environment that encourages change and creativity and find niche markets and products that will help us climb the value curve. This great advice for every business is why I read The Wall Street Journal.
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