ROADTOSUCCESS
Swing for the fences BY ROD McDONALD
WHEN THE FASTBALLS OF LIFE were thrown my way, I swung, and sometimes I hit and sometimes I missed. Just because I missed did not mean I quit swinging. The best hitters in baseball have batting averages of between 30 and 40 per cent (.300 to .400 in baseball parlance) which means, bare with my math lesson, that they missed 60 to 70 per cent of their times at bat. When a top hitter comes to the plate, there is frenzied anticipation from the crowd as they await the outcome of the duel between the pitcher and the hitter. In a metaphoric way, people are always interested in what we are going to do next, as well. We, of course, do not have millions watching our every swing on television, but we do have our audiences, who arrive at our garden centers, landscape yards and greenhouses, wanting to see what is new and exciting. They want more than the “same old, same old.” I have oft referenced the greenhouses and garden centres from the fifties to the eighties where things rarely changed. There they were, offering up packs of bedding plants, grown in mud. The plant varieties rarely changed. When asked, the owner/operator would respond, “Custom-
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ers want what they had last year, because it grew well for them.” Perhaps there was some degree of truth to that statement, at the time. Things have changed. Customers did purchase the “same old, same old” because they didn’t have a choice. Once things began to change and there were options, customers responded. They might have purchased familiar varieties, but they were also willing to try something new in a somewhat experimental fashion. All that was required was some leadership from us, the trade, to show what was possible. Those who provided leadership were rewarded: those that did not, suffered.
Over the years, I have had several members of our green trades complain of how their sales have slipped, and their businesses are not what they once were. One family ruled the greenhouse business, for several years, in my city and then their sales declined. Their decline continued until they disappeared. They blamed their demise on the fact that “customers are no longer loyal.” That was an actual quote from the family. In reality, their customers were no longer loyal to them, once they had greater options. The days of offering little customer service, along with a take
it or leave it attitude, doomed a business that once was the best hitter (again the baseball analogy) in our area. They had the goose that laid the golden egg and then the goose died from neglect.
Many years ago, I attended a seminar on greenhouse management. The speaker was a grower/manager of an extremely large and successful operation. He began his talk by saying “I am here today because I am more experienced than most of you. That is a nice way of saying that I have made many more mistakes than you have. Many more mistakes.” I love that opening. He acknowledged the true meaning of experience. Sometimes we do everything right and sometimes, even with our best intentions, things do not work out the way we planned. The adage of “we can plan the event, but we cannot plan the outcome’ resonates, again and again. Having said that, while we can never fully plan the outcome, we can simply align things so that we increase the chance for success. Every batter knows there are certain pitches they struggle to hit. Good hitters leave those pitches alone and wait for the ones they can hit. Mediocre hitters swing away, thinking that this time, things will be different. They
