8 Strategies for Improving Your Greenhouse Business for the Long Term
December 24, 2022 
Walters Gardens Executive Team
Greenhouse Grower’s GROW initiative is a community for greenhouse growers, suppliers, and industry professionals to collaborate on strategies and solutions critical to sustainable growth in today’s unique business environment. In 2022, this meant a wide range of information available to the industry.
GROW Executive Series
This digital content program provides advanced-level business-management information for owners and executives in North American greenhouse operations. In 2022, we presented roundtable discussions on:
- Selling Direct to Consumers
- How to Stop Gambling and Start Winning With Your Sales Forecast
- Pricing Strategies for 2023: Balancing Your Inputs and Your Product Prices
Sign up here to gain access to each of these presentations.
GROW in Action
Throughout the industry, you can find great examples from growers on running their businesses efficiently, as well as tips from market experts.
Tips on Managing Your H-2A Workforce Alongside Your Domestic Workforce
Far from taking the jobs of domestic employees, H-2A workers often save domestic jobs. Some agricultural businesses, due to workforce shortages, simply could not operate on domestic labor alone. Bringing in H-2A workers has the effect of keeping the business going so that it can continue to support domestic employees alongside the seasonal, foreign employees. Learn more in this article from Dr. Richard Stup, who leads the Ag Workforce Development program in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Comparing Pay by Scan vs Purchase Order Greenhouse Business Models
A greenhouse grower and a customer can transact business in many ways. When a grower is selling to larger regional or national retail chains, there are two dominant models: purchase order (or PO business) and Pay By Scan, which is also known as vendor managed inventory. Each of these models has its own processes, data needs, timing, and pros and cons from both the grower’s perspective and the retailer’s perspective. John Beauford, President and Chief Technology Officer at Advanced Grower Solutions, digs deeper here.
What’s Going On with HR in Horticulture?
Human resources includes anything that impacts the people working in and around the business and may even impact the vendors, clients, customers, and consultants to the company. But even that does not quite capture all that human resources is and does. So, to ask, “What’s going on with HR?” you can quickly see how expansive of a question that is. Learn more from BEST Human Capital here.
What Walters Gardens Has Learned From its Leadership Transition
Earlier this year, we caught up with the management team at Walters Gardens to learn more about the process behind their ownership transition, what they learned along the way, and what growers facing their own looming decisions on succession planning can learn from them.
Looking for New Leadership? Think Outside the Plant Box
Since June 2021, Hoffman Nursery has added a number of names to its senior management team. The common theme of each new hire: vast experience across a wide range of industries, all of them outside of horticulture. Even if it wasn’t intentional at first, Hoffman’s decision to enlist management talent from outside markets could become a model for the rest of the horticulture industry to follow, whether by choice or not. Learn more here.
GROW Executive Summit
The year concluded with Greenhouse Grower’s second-annual GROW Executive Summit. You can learn some of the key takeaways here.
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