Success Stories in Profitability From the Past Year

Making a profit is one of the goals for any greenhouse business, and who doesn’t like to hear success stories in profitability from their peers? In Greenhouse Grower’s 2025 State of the Industry survey, we asked about the best thing you did to improve profits in 2025.

Keep reading for just a sampling of some of the great ideas we heard (beyond raising prices, which was a strategy for many and certainly a fail-safe option).

• Acquired new customers aligned with how we do business
• Quickly and effectively rebuilt after significant damage from a hurricane and then a fire.
• Competitive pricing
• LEAN production
• Installed capillary mats
• Hired more qualified staff
• dividing plants instead of relying on TC.  Trying to get more turns of inventory.
• Held pay by scan product back until the weather was more favorable.
• It was an impossible year to budget due to input increases, tariffs, and transportation disruption.
• Try to control shrink
• Inventory and product mix refinement
• Developed new software to manage our fundraisers and keep that program more organized.
• Maintained an availability of blooming crops for a long window to maximize impulse sales.
• Fired bad people
• Aligned our staffing plan to the production plan.
• We hired a part-time social network/digital media person who kept up with postings on our accounts. It led to a significant increase in engagement with customers.
• Automatization in production lines
• Get new people that are positive and growth minded
• Grow more rare crops with longer growing times.
• Switched to a different fertilizer program
• Streamline varieties and stopped growing niche varieties for small sales
• Added events
• Use more H-2A staff
• Pot size/shape adjustments for higher pots/cart
• Kept as many good returning employees as possible, and we pay the good ones well so they stick around. Five good employees do the work of 10 so/so employees.
• Hiring more seasonal full-time employees than part-time worked out very well for us! The production was smoother and more organized, which meant quicker turns.