Moving forward after a late spring
With Memorial Day weekend behind us, summer has officially just begun, but if you talk to anyone in the green industry, they’ll tell you that spring only started for us a few weeks ago. All winter, we plan and strategize for spring, we consider the impact that economic, social, and political conditions will have on sales, and we try to predict what our circumstances will be at the very moment in time that we find ourselves in right now.
I think many of us have been contemplating this over the past few weeks: if we knew in February that we were about to enter into an uncommonly cold, wet spring that would delay sales and plant growth by several weeks and postpone spring cleanup and landscape projects, and that we wouldn’t sell through inventory nearly as quickly as we anticipated, how would we have modified our production plans to account for this, and what could we have done differently? This knowledge would have had its benefits, of course. We could have reconsidered our production numbers, adjusted our planting dates, delayed shipments of liners and supplies, and modified our sales projections. But there’s no doubt that it would also have held us back by shaking our confidence and preventing us from taking the aggressive approach that has not only defined our season so far, but has been central to our long-term strategic plan.
There is no such thing as a “typical” spring - if one ever existed, it certainly doesn’t anymore. When it comes to economic factors, we can at least look to past periods of recession and inflation for historical context that we can use to predict consumer behavior and do our best to adapt. But, as this spring has reminded us, Mother Nature will always be the prevailing wildcard in our industry, a powerful force that can either help or hinder us, but one that we can’t control. As we have seen, climate change is about more than just higher temperatures. It has meant increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, like early thaws followed by late frosts, erratic periods of intense heat followed by unseasonably cool temperatures, and extreme periods of rain or drought. In an industry like ours that is so closely tied to the weather in every way, I think our future will be defined by how well we are able to contend with and adapt to these extended periods of volatility that are becoming the norm, not the exception.
Despite the setbacks we’ve experienced so far this year, we’ve heard a common sentiment echoed throughout conversations with our industry partners: by and large, most of us believe that we still have a strong season ahead of us. The biggest uncertainty is whether we can still make up the sales that were lost in spring. Going forward, I think our primary concern shouldn’t be whether people will still want to buy plants, but how we can meet customers where they are when it comes to purchasing habits and consumer trends, and how we can adapt our industry and production methods to overcome the climate challenges we will inevitably continue to face on a larger scale. We should have confidence in our future because what we do is important; we grow plants and create landscapes that bring value to people’s lives and have a positive effect on the world around us, and this will only become more vital in the years to come. If given the choice last winter, I don’t think I would have wanted to know what this spring had in store for us. It may not be sound logic in a business sense, but the singular and somewhat naïve sense of optimism we have at the beginning of a new year is part of what compels us to move forward and make progress in the long run.
