5 Critical Errors Business Owners Make

I am a strong believer in looking to the past to guide your future. It is by learning from mistakes that we improve. And the mistakes don't just have to be our own. Classic tales of corporations gone wrong can be a powerful lesson to us all. So if you want to run your greenhouse operation in the ground follow these steps:

1. Keep doing the same thing you did years ago.

We live in a changing world. Consumers are bombarded every second with new products, new information on old products, new ways to shop, new ways to spend their money. Ignoring market trends is a sure way to be left behind. Floral growers and Nursery growers need to watch colour and plant trends, talk to interior designers as well as landscape designers, and don’t forget pot size trends either. Tomato growers, cucumber and pepper growers, need to watch trends for taste preference, size and color as well. Don't follow Kodak's lead, by ignoring the changed market place created by new digital photography technology, Kodak sealed it's fate.

2. Don’t take action to reverse negative Sales Growth

Hostess Brands Inc. revenues decreased every year for 9 straight years. That is at least 8 years of bad action. Sales is the top of every business’s food chain. Take care of your top numbers or nothing else matters. Sitting on the sidelines watching your sales drop is a recipe for disaster. If you don’t have the appetite for that, take up the call for action and find new products, or new customers. It is not enough to be aware of problems with your greenhouse sales, you have to take action and make it change.

3. Don’t Communicate with Your Employees

A sinking ship needs more than its captain in the hold with a bailing bucket. If sales and profits are down you need to communicate this with the team. If net profits turn to net losses a turnaround will almost surely require the full participation of your employees. It’s hard to reduce operating expenses in a greenhouse if your employees are careless with your soil, your fertilizer, your plants. It’s impossible to invoke organizational change if no one on the team is motivated, and motivation requires 2 way communication, which means listening to employees as well. Remember Kodak's insistence on staying focused on the film market was predicated by the executives ignoring the Kodak engineer who invented the digital camera in the first place.

4. Don’t continually work to reduce costs in the greenhouse

It is a common mistake for companies to “get fat” in good times. And when the tide turns and you have a lean year, it is more difficult to trim the excess weight. Where do you begin? In greenhouse manufacturing, greenhouse growing, and most agricultural businesses, lower prices is regularly a theme of complaint, turn that to a strategic advantage by training all your greenhouse workers to continually look for areas of improvement.

5.Don’t invest for Flexibility and your Growing Future

Remember the #1 mistake. I often hear greenhouse growers lament “I wish I had build wider greenhouses, taller greenhouses, not skimped on ventilation”. While the decision to build a greenhouse today is normally to satisfy short term production needs, don’t sacrifice long term flexibility. Budgets need to make sense, but consider: concrete flood floors offer more flexibility than benches, more ventilation is always better than less, taller under gutter height greenhouses give more growing room for ground crops and hanging baskets, a stronger greenhouse can carry more basket weight, and wider greenhouses give more options for spacing plants. The crop you grow today may not be the crop people will buy ten years from now. Investing in a greenhouse structure is a long term decision.

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