When The Levee Breaks
October 21, 2009 Imagine your customers bailing on you. Or worse, what if your one and only customer – the one you trusted and built your business around for years, maybe even decades – told you they no longer needed your services.
To whom would you turn? How much production, if any, would you plan for the upcoming season? Would your business survive?
Questions are bound to swirl if you ever find your greenhouse operation in that predicament, one more growers are finding themselves in these days as a result of tremendous industry consolidation. Consolidation is unfortunate for many growers, but it’s a reality that must be dealt with.
So, what steps should be taken if you ever get that dreaded phone call or visit from your buyer telling you you’re no longer needed? Below, I list a few simple suggestions.
Survival Guidelines
• Stay positive. You’ll feel like your world’s crashed. Your business, after all, is your livelihood, and your family and the people you’ve surrounded yourself with are relying on you to work the business out of the jam.
Maintaining a positive attitude is easier said than done, but remember you’re good at what you do. If you were bad at your job, your former customer wouldn’t have picked you as a partner in the first place. And your customer is moving on because they’re finding ways to operate more efficiently with fewer growers. So it’s not you. It’s them.
• Reignite old ties. Don’t wait around for new customers to come banging down your door. Go out and find them.
You can’t expect to approach strangers and earn their sympathy, especially if you’re a victim of big box consolidation. But you’re bound to know your community and region well enough that meeting with a few old faces could be the spark your business needs. The beauty of our industry is everybody seemingly knows everybody. So there must be an old friend or a former customer to whom you can turn to keep your business moving forward.
• Explore emerging markets. The growers who don’t supply box stores tend to frown upon the growers who do, just like the growers who do supply box stores frown upon growers who supply others. Competition is fine, but in our industry it often leads to resentment – and that makes the establishment of new customer relationships a challenge.
Still, the industry has changed enough recently – and it still is – that there are opportunities that don’t even require retail shops. Green roof projects are on the rise, e-commerce is an option and branded floral displays are an emerging market.
California grower Altman Plants supplied plants this year in Los Angeles for roadside displays that promote the launch of Toyota’s 2010 Prius hybrid vehicle. The displays are living billboards, and they beg the question: Is there room for more growers to explore branded floral displays as a market? I say yes, and it’s your task to find the companies that buy into living billboards. Can’t you see the displays along freeways in your city or on hillsides in your community?
If customers do cut ties with you, I hope you’re able to find enough success to keep your business rolling. More importantly, I hope you enjoy operating a greenhouse business, growing or whatever your job may be. Why do it otherwise?
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