Part 2

Let’s Recap from Part 1 :-

It does not take long to box up 1000 Fuchsia cuttings each week in January and February, these plants are worth £3,200 in sales with the bedding plants in May, you will always sell them and very many more. These could be advertised in the local press on a Friday and Saturday, the evening newspapers are also ideal. Try to stay open as late as possible dawn to dusk where permissible. Your plants are the best around, better than any of your local Garden Centres, because you have grown them and cosseted them from seed or unrooted cuttings, not like the Garden Centres who buy their plants ready grown, they only make 100% profit, your profit margin is as high as 1000%.
The whole idea is to make money and the only way to do that is to take it from customers, they will call at all hours so be ready to help them spend their Cash. They are ready and willing for you to do this. I have found, the fact is that people will buy anything, if it’s for sale and has a price tag on it, they will purchase it, this will never cease to amaze me. To take customers money you must be open, “am I getting my point across” Sale, Sale, Sale.
Here is a piece of very good and sound advice, this advice was imparted to me by a very wise and experienced grower, this man has a very large trade only Nursery. When I say large he has 20 acres totally covered with polythene and glass structures, he told me, “if you lose money do not give up, money can be acquired again, it’s the time that you lost, that is the main concern, gather your thoughts, talking to yourself is not out of the question, use your brain to find out what went wrong.”
Computer.
When you buy a computer, it is essential that you have a clean room for it’s operation, you should also purchase an accounting software package, and enough disc space to accommodate many thousands of names and address’s, maybe as many as ten thousand to start with, my personal cam base has ten thousand names recorded. You will also need to purchase a printer that can handle many printed invoice, dispatch notes and reminders. All these items are a must, if you wish to give your larger customers 30 to 60 day accounts, these accounts cannot be kept on scraps of paper. If you offer this facility you will improve your income overnight tenfold.
There might be the odd occasion when you have a customer that has not paid, or you will have to chase your money which is owed for plants supplied, these clients are very few and far between. The best way to deal with this is to write it off, if it is a small amount. If the invoice sum is a large amount you have the facility to use the small claims court. The other way to view this is, it is your own fault supplying a customer with so much material in the first place, keep a tight control on new customers until you have built up a good customer relations with them. For every customer that does not pay you will receive orders from two or three new clients. With new customers it is best to receive payment before despatch, especially if the order is over £250 or at least until you can trust payment will arrive within the 30 day account date, this may all seem very time consuming and it sometimes can be, but it is all brownie points, you are the grower trying to sell your well grown plants, the buyer can always go elsewhere. All this effort will be vastly rewarding in the end. £20,000 worth of sales will soon turn into £200,000 of sales, then £300,000, and so on, this is not all hype it really does work. As I have indicated before, you must be ready and stay focused.
Try to keep a diary of events, if not every day, at least weekly. For example; seed bought and sown, where seed came from, germination success ect.
The customers are always right, if they say the plants were rubbish they are, “you will always know better”. You will find that a well grown Fuchsia plant to one person is inferior to another, when you construct your advertisement for the garden press never ever state that all rooted cuttings are “well rooted”, this is because some plants root in 10 days and others root in 16 days, there will always be a few smaller plants in the batch that will be sent out. The best way to describe the cutting is to say that they are 18 days old, and have only been semi-hardened off, “do not be tempted to state this in your advertisement, only disclose this to customers on the telephone, if they ask”. A certain amount of care should be taken when they are unpacked upon arrival. All this information should be written on the culture sheet that will be send out with each order. If you do have a very awkward customer always replace the order, this does not mean that you have lost the battle, it means you have won a customer, and probably a few of their friends for next year.
Certain customers tend to come and go, I call these biannual buyers, they buy from your Nursery one year trying to keep the plants they purchase over winter, usually spending a fortune on heating bills, the plants which have been outside will pick up every disease around. The diseases are brought into their greenhouse and transmitted to all the other plants near by, most of these plants are probably clear of disease, and it cascades on.
It is advisable to bank cheques as soon as you receive them or no later than five days after plants have been despatched.
Do I keep stock plants ?
If you decide to keep your own stock plants always have a supplier that you can rely on. There is nothing worse than having £30,000 worth of advanced orders and find that you do not have enough materiel to fulfil your orders, the likelihood of this happening is very remote, but on one or two occasions it did happen to me. The first time frost got into one of my stock tunnels when a heater failed, ‘my fault’. I did not have the heater maintained regularly enough, the second time disease was brought in on a batch of new Fuchsia varieties which I purchased from Portugal, the suspect variety was one called ‘Lena Dalton’. If you do get behind with your orders 95% of your customers will understand and wait a little longer to receive your superior grown plants. But the 5%, ‘fewer’ customers, you must have seen them on occasion, will complain and get themselves panicking with just about anything. Do not treat them as idiots these customers do have a role in life, ‘I know not what’, but they will keep you on your toe’s. If these customers are treated badly which they always think they are, the end result will be a letter written to your advertiser, issuing a complaint against your service. This can cause a problem and your advertisement may be pulled from your chosen publication. Your advertiser really does not have time for unsolved problems to be thrust upon them. Should customers keep bombarding your advertiser with letters of complaint, the publishers will get very angry and stop you from advertising for good. They do have their good name to think of and to lose advertising space with a good publication can, and most probably will cost you £100,000 worth of income per year. Just one other word on this in 1987 I was rooting 54,000 Fuchsia cuttings per week and it still was not enough to supply my customers. So let your watchword be, “you can never have enough”, be prepared.
Never be tempted to try and save sick or very week rooted cuttings, always throw them away. They are not to be mixed up with the small strong growing plants that you will keep for the sales with the bedding plants. Small and sick are just as described they will not make the grade, if you attempt to keep these cutting you will have to devote time and resources to them, and at the height of the growing season, they are just not worth it, they are best discarded, ‘forget them’.
Fuchsia cutting dipped in rooting hormone powder.
Most soft growing plants do not need ‘rooting hormone powder’ this is because the sap is delivering hormone at such a fast rate they will root anywhere along the stem and leaf axle. At certain times of the year such as spring and early summer the two uppermost leafs will ‘spring roots’ if potted these leaves very rarely make decent plants. If you decide to grow semi-hardwood cuttings such as Clematis, Azalea and quite a lot of the well-known Shrubs, powders can be used. Rhyzapon ‘A’ is the for these. I have over the years experimented with Rhyzapon ‘B’ tablets, these can be dissolved in 1 litre of water, and sprayed over the unrooted cuttings after inserting them into there rooting trays, or the unrooted cuttings can be dipped in the water mixture and left for a short time, this method I find is not very satisfactory, the time the cuttings are immersed under the water is very critical, and leaving them submerged for too long can inhibit rooting, this method really does defy the whole idea of using them for faster rooting.
The rate of use is one tablet per 1000 unrooted cuttings, per 1 litre of water. The results that I have recorded are as follows, over a five month Fuchsia rooting program, I managed to increase my yield by ‘25%’ which is a staggering 190,000 rooted cuttings, this equates to £28,500, the tablets will cost about £400.
Always use plastic re-usable trays. Strong plastic trays will hold approximately 200 cuttings. The trays must at all times be cleaned and sterilized after every rooted batch. If your propagators hold 20,000 cuttings at any one time, that will equate to 100 trays. There is a need to always have a surplus of 25 tray’s clean and ready for use, this will enable you to lift the trays which are just rooting without a delay occurring between batches. If there is a gap in the rooting program, the money that you lose from the propagators going cold and having to be re-heated is considerable.
There are a few methods how the trays can be sterilized, these are using heat and hot steam. This will distort the trays and life expediency is cut short, gas treatment is by far the best, but with only a small amount of trays to sterilize it’s not very cost effective, the one I use is the cheapest and simplest. All that is needed is a 40 gallon (150 litre) water tank with a lid if possible, the type used by plumbers as header tanks in central heating, a chemical called Formaline or Formaldehyde, the rates to use are approximately half of one litre to a tank full of water(150 litres). The trays can be submerged into the liquid held there for 10 seconds, lifted out and stacked on their edge to dry out. Do not stack them inserted in together, inserting will stop the drying out process and if the trays are not dried out properly the fumes will still be quite strong when you or your work force are ready to use them again. This type of sterilization is used to kill the spores of Pythium, Rhizoctpnia and Phytopthora. Any one of these diseases will play havoc in your propagation areas. When sterilizing your rooting trays or any equipment that you use for propagation, never attempt to use saved rain water for sterilizing, always use tap water. Rain water has many harmful elements in it, these elements can also slow up your rooting programme.
The use of chemicals.
Whether you agree with the use of chemicals or not, there will come a time when you will need to use them. With the temperatures rising through the winter months due to global warming year after year, the harmful fungus spores that carry the afore mentioned disease’s, also the near indestructible aphids are very hard to eradicate. The best preventative fungicides to use are; Aaterra to guard against Pythium, Aliette against Phytopthora spores, Basilex to kill Rhizoctonia spores, Rovral and Benlate mixed to control and combat Botrytis, and Plantvax to kill rust polips. The rust problem has really become a major disease over the last 20 years. It will destroy the saleability of Chrysanthemums and Fuchsia’s. If you maintain a regular program of spraying, you will be very successful in keeping rust at bay, maintain a regular fortnightly spraying agenda, alternating the program and using the above fungicides, this will clear most fungal diseases. It is advised that the same chemical is not used more than once in a six weeks period.
Recap: -
Most problems concerning diseases will not occur if the unrooted cuttings that are used, come from a major supplier. Their stock plants are inspected by the government agency concerned. The agency will issue the grower with a plant passport that will allow their company to export their cuttings abroad. In fact a lot of my own Fuchsia’s are growing in Egypt, Kuwait, Malta and the Arab Emirates, the Fuchsia’s I supplied were sent to mainly army and naval bases.
If your Nursery is growing very fast, the need for more land will become your top priority. This should take place after approximately 3 years. A plan will need to be put into action within a 12 to 18 month period.
So that this does not catch you out, a local map of farms should be sort out to help locate room for a larger Nursery. Most farmers are only too pleased to rent land on a long-term basis. Most farms have land that is un-used and totally useless for growing crops on, but would be useful for erecting a polytunnel, this land; you would not be expected to buy. If like me there is a parcel of land next door for sale that you can buy this would be much better in the long term.
Staying focused on the big picture is a must, always trying to improve the way that you are doing things. The more you focus the faster ideas will spring to mind. You must eat, drink and sleep your business, always see your projects accomplished, visualise them finished and working, earning you money and vast profits. If you have a mind breaking idea always write it down as soon as possible, never tell any other person your idea, always carry a pen and notepaper around with you. In fact, whenever I have the time to visit another Nursery I always carry my digital camera with me, to snap up any good worthwhile ideas that I might see, even if the idea does not work for the person who invented it, it could work for you. On one visit to Holland a few years ago, I was there buying root stocks for the following spring ‘grafting’, I noticed a hot box for the use of getting grafted trees to take quicker and better, I quickly snapped a few pictures of this hot box from all angle’s and when it was disassembled, I enquired about the box and was told that it did not work very well. When I returned to England I quickly developed the photos through the computer, over the next week or so I made a copy of the hot box, and could see the problem straightway and why it did not function very well. I made the few necessary adjustments to the water pump and thermostat and now it is working a treat. In fact this unit has increased my yield of bottom-grafted work from 300 every 3 weeks, to a staggering 2000 grafts every 3 weeks. My old heated grafting unit takes up 10 times more space than the new unit, and has increased the bottom-grafted work each year to 49,000 from 12,000 with the old unit.
Self built growing unit.
When starting your Nursery mail order business you will find that if your growing space is limited, it is possible to design and build your own timber built polythene tunnel. The design opposite is a universal size that I have developed over the years. It is designed so that one can add extra units to it as more space becomes available, the polythene structure is ideal for Fuchsia growing. Fuchsias do root very much quicker in an enclosed situation where the atmosphere is more close and humid; the cuttings will benefit from a change of air at ground level once a day to keep them strong and healthy.
When planning your packing and dispatch area.
Your packing area should always be clear of any unused rubbish such as old seed and plant tray’s. All unused cardboard boxes left over from the last despatch day should be cleared. Access should be made easy for fellow worker’s to have a unhindered journey to the despatch area, this means that all barrows and trolleys should be moved back to the holding area ready for the next plant collection day from the propagators, all this preparation helps the movement of plants around the nursery more easily. If the plants cannot get to the despatch area in time orders are lost, that means loss of income, which is loss of profit.
The area where the postal collection van arrives, should be cleared of trolleys because if the postman can not park as close as possible he might just complain and not take your enterprise very seriously the next time he calls. The postman should be able to reverse to the collection area without hindrance, and for ease of loading your parcels. The postal van is one of the main events of the day, and all parcels should be ready at the time that you have arranged for collection. A good time I have always found is 4.30 pm. At this time of the day most of the postal collection vans are out on the road collecting from the post offices and post boxes. Your main days for collection will be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but at the height of the season a collection on Thursday can be arranged. This can cause a problem with delivery and the plants may get caught in the weekend post and not arrive at there destination until the following Tuesday.
If the plants despatched are especially tender or very damp when packed, they could suffer stress and have some die back, which does your reputation no good at all. If possible try to have all orders ready and finished by Wednesday, no later, this will also help with propagation, and one is not tied up with despatch all week therefore, other jobs at hand can be concentrated on, around your very fast growing Nursery complex. If on your despatch days some orders are not quite ready for the collection, it is always possible that someone can take the parcels to the postal depot. The problem with doing this, is it also eats into you very valuable time and when you arrive there are always delivery vans in the way, making life difficult, having nowhere to park. Usually there is a parking area half a mile away from the depot. The long haul of carrying the heavy parcels yourself to the collection area has to be accomplished.
On average you should be looking at approximately 200 parcels per day of various sizes. The parcels should be fitted into the postal bags as neatly as possible to conserve space in your despatch area. Aim to do only as much mail order that is possible per day, taking into allowance time and staff that are available. Deal with the larger orders first i.e. any orders of 5000, then 1000’s and so on, until you get down to the 10’s, these small orders I have found, customers really do not need their plants until the weekend, so they can be despatched with the Wednesday collection. Always have your labels printed and ready for the days orders. This will help with the flow of the Nursery, if you have to stop work and start writing labels this will severely restrict the rhythm of the days output, cutting productivity, which in the long run cuts profit. When productivity is cut by as little as 10% this has a knock on effect throughout the day 10% of 200 parcels is 20 parcels, if these 20 parcels are lost through bad management they will have to be completed the following day, if the same problem happens again the next day, by the end of the week you are looking at up to 100 customers on the phone asking where their plants have got to. You just do not need the hassle. There are far more things to do at the weekend than answering angry customers “you could be printing next weeks labels”. Labels can be printed by various means. The easiest method is to print them on a computer, this is by far the most efficient way, but you do need to have special software to achieve this, or you can buy the labels already printed. There are various companies that will do this job for you, but they will expect a large order to make the print run worthwhile, namely 1000 labels of each variety. This may seem quite a lot, but when you are at the height of the season they will soon be used up. There are also the printed picture labels. I have found that these are very good for the smaller orders such as the 10’s, 20’s and 40’s, this will save you a lot of time producing them yourself. The hidden bonus is your customers will love being able to view the colour of their plants before they flower. They will also in turn tell their friends and neighbours about your wonderful cuttings. There is one slight drawback with this method and that is the expense, each label will cost approximately 05p, so 10 colour labels will cost an extra 50p, this will have to be build into the price per unit, or you will have to shoulder the expense yourself. I have found that this little extra expense is totally vindicated when your Nursery receives very high praise and lots of extra orders. There is one slight problem with the picture label theory, and it is this, you are telling and showing your customer what their plant will look like when in flower, so it is always advisable to make absolutely sure, the plant in the parcel is the one on the picture label, you can compensate for any incorrect labelling by having a disclaimer clause written in your business terms which are printed at the back of your catalogue, price list and culture sheet.
If there is a dispatch problem, and your customers start to telephone your Nursery demanding an update on when the plants will be delivered, there are a few well rehearsed problem solvers these are; - the plants were not rooted enough at the time your order was ready for despatch, so we are keeping them on the propagators for a few more days, the cuttings will benefit a great deal from this, or the light levels were low this week, so the cuttings did not root as quickly as usual, this excuse will not work all the time, especially if the time of year is April when light levels are always high, but it will work in February.
So the main point is to be always prepared. Make necessary arrangement that all the kit that is needed is easily located by your staff, i.e. box’s, sticky tape, staples, printed labels, enough postal bags, post bags can be obtained from the local sorting office.
Part one Click Here

Part three Click Here


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