Stein on a common sense approach to business management

The title of my latest blog is ‘On The Road’ not because I have been inspired by the Jack Kerouac novel of the same name but because I have organised and led 4 study tours this month.

Nev’s tours took in garden centres in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Cheshire, Lancashire and South West London. Here are the highlights ….

1. Best evening meal – a little know restaurant on the second floor of the Polish Centre in Hammersmith. Classic Polish dishes served as usual with polite, attentive and pleasant Polish staff.

2. Best lunch – a Persian restaurant next door to the goods inwards entrance at Clifton Nurseries, London. Good job I don’t work at Clifton’s as I would be in this restaurant every lunchtime! Actually the food was great but the lunch was made even better because I was with a bunch of Scottish Garden Centre owners – this is the fourth study tour we have all made together and over the years the group has bonded well.

3. Can’t recall where I saw it but one garden centre was offering customers a ten year guarantee on hardy plants. Brilliant. If you are going to offer a 5 year guarantee why not make it ten. I reckon that’s a powerful message to the customers. After all who is going to even bother bringing a plant back after ten years? Even if someone does isn’t it great service to replace it with no quibble. Other companies offer lifetime guarantees on their products – check out LL Bean for an example of this.

4. Noticed that John Stanley was at the same exhibition as me in Warsaw, Green is Life. So, I will not go on about heather balls. Email me if you want to see a photo.

5. JS also spotted the pink bike which was used imaginatively on a suppliers exhibit – again email me if you want to see a photo

6. You don’t have to go all the way to Poland though to see imaginative and creative merchandising. Saw some great examples of VM at the new Squires, Shepperton. Got a great welcome too from Dennis Espley and his team and I was particularly impressed with the enthusiasm of the plant area staff.

7. We don’t really want garden centres to be stuffy boring places do we? Good, glad you agree. Well, certainly John Paisley of Wych Cross Nurseries agrees. I saw plenty of funny posters dotted around the business and I particularly liked the photo of all the staff in front of an old Route Master bus.

8. Also went to Gordale Garden Centre – is this the only garden centre in the UK with a petrol station? Loved the centre and really enjoyed spending some time with Jill Nicholson.

9. After Gordale we went to Port Sunlight Garden Centre – built on the site of an old swimming pool. I think there are 3 other garden centres in the UK built in or on swimming pools – the old Kennedys at Purley Way, Croydon (pretty near the fabulous art deco terminal building for the old London Airport), Sunshine Garden Centre at Bounds Green, London and Mill Hill Garden Centre.

10. Now planning the next tour – looking at the Christmas offer on garden centres

1. Reading in the Sunday Telegraph today I see that it is the start of National Allotment week. I’m not getting to excited as there is a 20 year wait for an allotment in Woodbridge . Get my name down now and I might be enjoying a surplus of fresh produce by the time I am 71! In fact, I’m not going to bother – my wife’s attempts at GYO this year have been very successful which means I am already fed up with eating runner beans. Now clearly there are some fantastic benefits in GYO – getting fit, enjoying fresh veg etc (and we must as an industry promote those benefits more) but for me the economic argument doesn’t stack up. Particularly when I picked up a huge bag of onions for £2.75, a cauliflower for 60p and a stonkingly large red cabbage for 60p from a road side fruit and veg market in Lincolnshire. You may know the market – its opposite that really quirky cafe on the A17 just outside Kings Lynn, the cafe with the Hawker Hunter in the car park. That particular spot on the A17 appeals to me enormously – an opportunity to save money whilst ogling at military vehicles.

2. Just back from Ibiza – managed to visit only one garden centre this year. For a small island it is very well served with garden centres. On the 20 km drive from the airport to Santa Eulària des Riu there must be at least 7 garden centres – this road must be the Spanish equivalent of Crews Hill. Also spotted a superb cacti nursery between Cala Carbo and the airport – the owner of which spoke a limited amount of English but I was able to glean that he exported all over Europe.

3. Continuing with an international theme I was pleased to be able to host a 2 day tour for the Polish Garden Centre Association to Devon where we visited 6 garden centres. Thankfully among the 26 Polish garden centre owners was a very good translator. Although I did take the opportunity to improve my command of the Polish language which now stands at 15 words! I have a further opportunity to add more words to my vocabulary at the end of the month when I visit the “Green is Life” exhibition in Warsaw. I was particularly proud to introduce my Polish colleagues to some fabulous garden centres and was very impressed with the welcome from all six sites. Further proof that our industry is very friendly and that garden centre owners on the whole are open and generous by sharing their time, knowledge and expertise. A big thanks to all those owners that hosted our party. There were loads of highlights – as always visiting Avon Mill Garden Centre, but also having Tiffin at St Johns Garden Centre. I love garden centres and I love Indian food , so what a great combo. Only thing missing from that visit was a few military vehicles.

4. Start of the football season – and my first game will be Ipswich v Northampton in the Carling Cup on Tuesday. Already I am planning my work schedule around the games I want to attend! I was reminded yesterday whilst listening to Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live that we have just begun a period of 2 years uninterrupted football (for those unaware the Euro Championships are next summer followed by Olympic Football).

1. My second blog posting in two days – I have discovered the teenage art of double screening. In other words working on my laptop whilst watching TV. Apparently there is a new term for the act of sitting on the sofa and communicating with friends via Facebook and Twitter etc – its called sofalising.

2. Just bought the new iphone4 and have been downloading free Apps including the Aldershot Town Football Club app. I also download a great app from a USA magazine Garden Center and immediately saw that the magazine had done a feature on the top 100 garden centres in the USA. The feature makes a good read and can be viewed here.

3. If you do read the feature you will notice that a name sake of mine has a garden center listed in the top ten. So I checked out their web site and was particularly impressed with the way they have created their own branded fertilisers.

4. I took some clients to the USA last year to look at some of the best retailers in Massachusetts. We visited Jordans Furniture Store, Wilson’s Farm Shop, LL Bean and Bass Pro to name but a few. We did go and see a few garden centres and I noticed that one of the businesses we visited, Briggs at Attleboro are listed in the top 100 centers in the USA. This was a great center with fantastic visual merchandising standards. I might put some of the pictures up on my Flickr account.

5. Talking about apps, I came across Leafsnap. This has been developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. The app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves. Could be a great tool for the garden retail sector maybe?

6. My wife is having a go at GYO – tomatoes and runner beans. She did mention that a friend of ours commented on how expensive it is to GYO what with all the organic pesticides etc that they were buying.

1. Not sure why I have called my blog “A common sense approach to business” when I have decided to blog about other things as well! Yes, business is important to me (some may say I have an obsession with work) but there are other things that float my boat as well.

2. So, playing football floats my boat. I recently went to buy some shin pads and the guy in the shop said I shouldn’t be playing footie at my age. I now agree with him as I dislocated and fractured my elbow recently and was in plaster for 5 weeks. Couldn’t drive, so really couldn’t get out and see clients. I can tell you I really missed the buzz of working with horticultural businesses and it made me realise what a great sector it is.

3. I reckon I damaged my arm because the pitch was so hard – we have not hard serious rain for weeks in Suffolk. Maybe it is an urban myth but I once recall hearing that Suffolk gets less rain than Jerusalem.

4. The garden is still in a state – I’m too busy to do any gardening so it was delegated to my father in law, a neighbour and my wife. Not going to bother doing too much to the garden this year as we have another building project going on and the scaffolding will ruin the garden anyway. When the building is finished I was planning to get a deck built but I see in the Daily Mail (not my paper of choice) that “decking dies out in a green revival”. A guy from the franchise Green Thumb says that people missed the pleasure of the lawn. My dogs would certainly miss the lawn as they seem to enjoy ruining it with their wee. Any tips on how to stop them weeing on the lawn would be appreciated.

5. Got a visit planned to Tom Hart Dykes garden in October. Looking forward to seeing him again and getting another burst of his addictive enthusiasm. I am sure I have said this before but he has to be one of the great modern plantsman. Others – Roy Lancaster of course, any suggestions who else?

6. Went to Ipswich Town FC loads of times this season. Years ago there was a feature in Hort Week called “My favourite Place”. You might remember it? I was once featured and said that my favourite place was Portman Road (Ipswich Town’s home ground if you are not a football fan). However it wasn’t my favourite place recently when we lost to Norwich 5:1. Still, the pitch as always was in great condition. Well done to the grounds staff.

1. I’m going to attempt to write my blog in the style of Matthew Appleby and Gareth McEwan so here goes ….

2. Talking of Matthew Appleby I notice that he slipped into a seat on the back row at a recent prestigious meeting of garden centre owners at Wisley. Ian Boardman was giving a superb presentation at the time on Christmas retailing. True to form Ian was fantastic and really put the pressure on me to deliver an equally good presentation. Mine was on visual merchandising. Now of course, you would all say that I am biased but I think the presentation went down well – the bad news is that Matthew slipped of early and missed it.

3. Ian’s presentation got me thinking about the Christmases of my childhood. I was wondering where we bought decorations from before garden centres started offering such a great range? I guess we didn’t buy many, we must have hand crafted some I suppose, but certainly they came out year after year and we never bothered to take account of fashion trends. Well done to the garden centres for making a market – perhaps they have been helped in part by the rise of cheap manufacture products in China but maybe the biggest driver in creating this market was the need to generate profit in what was a very traditionally slow month for sales in garden centres. So, what will be the next market that garden centres develop? Cook ware? Any other ideas where the opportunities are? Actually, that was a stupid question because you will probably keep the ideas to yourself!

4. My last blog posting was about the government spending review – I talked about the party we all experienced during the Blair years being over. It’s difficult at this stage to still really know what effect the spending review will actually have on our sector – more importantly it seems that immediate sales in garden centres are being hampered by this bad weather. The sharp retailers have responded positively and ordered appropriate products to sell – sledges etc. There will always be opportunities in the market place and these can be capitalised on by the retailers that move fast.

5. I have been clearing out my Mothers and came across some old RHS books that I bought when I first started in this game in 1977. After I graduated to the Hillier’s Manual Mum started reading my books and writing notes in them. On going through some of her notes I became aware of her in depth horticultural knowledge which had been acquired through 50 years of gardening. My Mum’s generation leant basic horti skills such as propagation because they didn’t have a garden centre to go for advice and even if there were garden centres they couldn’t afford to shop at them!

Reading this mornings edition of the Financial Times (post the announcement of the spending review) reminds me a bit of that feeling when you have had a stonking holiday in the sun for two weeks only to come home to find that the credit card bill has arrived and the holiday needs paying for! My parents generation would of course have saved for the holiday first, then spent the money. Today it feels like a massive credit card bill has arrived in UK plc – we now need to pay for our past spending habits. But didn’t we have a good time? Until recently we have had a fantastic ride – lets face it over the past 15 years a lot of us have benefited from the boom – here are the facts as I see it. My children have been in the smallest class sizes ever, I have been able to borrow money at a very low interest rate, there is a new school built in Woodbridge, an extension to the hospital in Ipswich, my business has prospered, it’s never been easier to be an entrepreneur, my Dad had unbelievable good (and expensive) hospital care courtesy of the NHS, and Ipswich Town got promoted to the premiership (and then relegated) … I could go on. For me, it has been great. I do recognise of course (and am deeply concerned) that for others it has not been so great. Like all great holidays, the good times of the past need to be paid for. Looking back on the past 15 years would I have had the economy any other way? I think the answer is no. Have there been mistakes? Yes, undoubtedly. Blair and Brown should have used their mandate to govern in 1997 – they should have been bolder – regulated the banks, eased back on public spending and put some money aside for a rainy day . Where do we go from here? Well as always there will be winners and losers sadly – but perhaps the best way out of this massive debt is to look to the private sector to create worthwhile quality jobs, lets get some niche manufacturing going and lets start exporting. Long term this debt may be good for the country as it may turn us into a more entrepreneurial nation.

You might have noticed that a few people have disagreed with my suggestion that plant retailers should definitely offer a 3 (at the very least) year guarantee on sales of hardy plants. Despite some opposition to my insistence (which was made whilst I was leading a plant merchandising gig at Eastgro) on offering a guarantee I still stand by my suggestions and actually believe that retailers should be even bolder and offer a 5 year guarantee. But hang on, I hear you say, “What do I know; I’m a consultant and not a retailer.” Well, lets get the record straight – I have of course worked on garden centres but perhaps more importantly I have owned and operated 3 retail stores in Suffolk. So I can of course empathise with hard pressed retailers. Just in case you are wondering what happened to my retail business – well it was very profitable but I decided to sell it in 2006. Why? Well that’s a long story and best discussed over a glass of wine or two. So, the point of all this is that I know first hand what it is like dealing with customers and I can categorically say that if you over a plant guarantee this shows the customer that you have confidence and belief in your product but what’s more when (or indeed if) they return a plant you then have an opportunity to educate them in how to care for their plants, sell them some garden care products and of course show them, by giving the a free replacement that you are lovely warm people to deal with. You can guarantee that they will be back, spend more at their next visit and of course tell their friends about how wonderful you are.

If you are a friend of mine on Face Book (by the way I have 335 of them!) you will now that I have been with some clients in the USA. Why? To look at retailing ‘best practices’. We have sure learnt a lot, been inspired and above all motivated to improve retailing standards. But why the USA? I firmly believe that in the UK we lead the way in garden retailing, but having been to the US six times (and spent 6 months working there in 1994 – 1995) I really believe that general US retailers set the standards. So, in search of inspiration we visited Wholefoods Market and Trader Joe’s in Boston, Jordan’s Furniture store in Reading, LL Bean in Maine, Wilson’s Farm Shop in Lexington, Party Warehouse in Springfield and Bass Pro in Foxboro. Oh, and we did visit a few garden centres and Arnold’s Arboretum – home to Hamamellis Arnolds Promise. Here is a quick summary of the trip …

Best Visual Merchandising – Briggs Garden Centre, Attleboro – the only garden centre I have seen in the US that is based on a UK style garden centre. Strong visual impact the minute you enter the store. Gary Briggs, the owner, said women love the store but men can’t understand it!

Best ‘One Liner’ was delivered by Mark Nanjorini, general manager at Jordan’s Furniture store – he said that his visual merchandisers have to “find the emotion in the product.”

Best “WOW” factor – Bass Pro in Foxboro – the store oozes retail theatre. Some of the highlights – stuffed animals, huge fish tank with bass swimming around, and a massive yacht in the centre of the store.

Best farm shop – Wilson’s Farm Shop at Lexington – superb produce, displayed in a tempting fashion with a strong use of colour. Also a fabulous welcome from Heather Aveson and her team.

Proudest business owner – a hard one here. Every business owner and member of staff we visited were all incredibly proud and enthusiastic to work in their respective businesses. Maybe we need to be a bit more upfront about or history, achievements and pedigree?

So, we had a fantastic trip, with loads of ideas and thoughts gained that are applicable to the UK garden centre scene.

Well Christine Walkden and Adam Pasco have certainly stirred up the debate on the HW forum about the inspiration on offer at a UK garden centre. All I have to say about the matter is that I think we lead the world in garden retailing – this is not just my view but the view of well respected nurserymen in the USA. Speak to any US nurserymen who has been to this country and they will enthuse about how good we are at retailing plants. But I am also speaking from experience – I have travelled widely in the US, New Zealand and Europe and still believe that we lead the world with the quality of our garden centres.

However, I do believe that we can learn from other countries about general retailing standards and customer service, that’s why I am taking some clients to Boston, Massachusetts on Saturday for a week to look at retailing standards. We are of to see some of the best retailers in the country, Bass Pro, LL Bean, Jordan’s Furniture, andTrader Joe’s to name just a few. Should be inspiring!

That well known and respected propagator at Notcutts, Ivan Dickens, once proudly presented me with a new plant, expecting me to rave about it. My instant reaction, much to Ivan’s amusement was to suggest that the particular plant in question would look good in a yellow pot! I may not be the worlds most fanatical plantsmen but today I was reminded (and am grateful) that our sector is full of very keen plants people – this became very apparent when I took a bunch of HTA members to Green Island Gardens in Ardleigh and Beth Chatto gardens in Elmstead Market. On the way home, I started thinking about who are the best plants people in the UK today. So, here’s my favourite five plants people (but in no particular order – that’s because I want to avoid offending anyone!) ….

1. Roy Lancaster – has to be in every one’s top ten
2. Beth Chatto – great work on dry gardening – but then you have to embrace dry loving plants when you live in the driest county in the UK
3. Dan Heims – Mr Heuchera – he is also a friend of mine on Facebook
4. Rod Richards – I worked for him once – a very enthusiastic plantsman
5. Tom H D – famous for his World Garden – the guy is overflowing with enthusiasm