Mission Empty Greenhouses

The graphic above is taken from the Mission: Impossible television series from the 1960's. If you're not familiar, the show was about a small team of secret government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force. Later, in 1996, the first movie came out starring Tom Cruise.

What's this have to do with us? This spring we are a large team of horticultural agents who will accomplish the amazing Mission of emptying the production greenhouses down to a 10% inventory level by June 15. Impossible? No! Our Mission is totally possible but isn't easy. It will take our entire Team, every single one of us including the Landscape Team, to accomplish our Mission. From watering and plant maintenance, to the giant feat of moving everything from the back greenhouses to the retail, to making sure that the best retail-ready product is on the sales floor at all times, to merchandise displays, to sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms, to answering the phone and helping customers, to counting the items in a shopping cart accurately, to providing the friendly service that keeps customers coming back, to making boxes, to selling our homegrown plants in landscape designs,... it ALL works together toward our one Mission.

Why is our Mission to have 10% of our homegrown plant inventory left by June 15? This is the key to getting the margin that we need to pay the bills and then have profit at the end of the year. Margin is the difference between the price that you pay for an item and the price at which you sell the the item to customers. Our Managers and Supervisors take a lot of time and careful attention to calculating all of our costs-- pots, soil, fertilizer, chemicals, plant material, freight, tags -- and from there determine the price that each item needs to be to get the margin needed. Margin erosion happens in many ways, including not selling through all of the inventory during the peak selling season, which then leads to the need to sell plants at a discount, plus the labor to maintain older product-- trimming, pest & disease issues.

Our goal is to move through all of our spring crops and have another fresh, summer crop behind it, and then another fresh fall crop after that. By moving through our spring inventory by mid-June, we will have the best chance of getting the margin that we need to pay the cost of goods (growing supplies), wage & wage benefits, and our operating expenses (fuel to heat the greenhouses, marketing, building & grounds repairs and maintenance, insurance, etc).

If we do our job really well, we will have at least 10 cents left on every dollar that comes in the door, which then goes to investments back into the business to keep it healthy and strong-- like new vehicles, building improvements or expansions, greenhouse production technology upgrades, and so much more! Are you ready for this? You're about to be a part of something special. In the next weeks we do 3/4 of our business for the whole year. Working in a garden center during the spring rush is not for wimps. That's why you are here, because we know that you have what it takes.