The Greenhouse Odyssey: Fifteen-Cactus Just Sing Among the Foliage
By Lorraine Miller
The leaf cuttings of my business were scattered. Two were taking root. One was faltering.
With the opening of the Garden Wall gift shop, the addition of some parking and the busy foliage houses, the cactus house, my first born and first love, had unintentionally become isolated and untended. I’ve got to save it. The problem is that the cactus house has only a four-foot high sidewall, while the foliage house walls are eight feet high. It is impossible to connect them. When we built the foliage houses seven years earlier, I had a glimmering that someday this might be a problem, so we installed the critical “Y” yoke connector at the top of each foliage house post. This would allow the bow, or curved pipe, of the new greenhouse to slip on to the other side of the “Y.” When construction of the new greenhouse was complete, all we needed to do was remove the fiberglass wall in the foliage house. Voila! We’ve got four hoops, all open to one another.
Hoop houses, as this type of greenhouse is called, are not expensive buildings to erect. The real cost comes from the cooling system, exhaust and oscillating fans, louvers, hanging heaters, temperature control systems, water lines, concrete sidewalks, the electrical and the plumbing. Still, I’d just signed up for an SBA loan to create the gift shop and to demolish Phranques Gallery. I’ve got to find another way to pay for new greenhouses.
The best way for Cactus & Tropicals to do that was through our interior plant maintenance program. It provided us with an initial sale and then a monthly service fee. As our account numbers grew, the monthly service fees grew exponentially. Plant maintenance gave us the opportunity for additional income as well. Sales of poinsettias at Christmas, lilies at Easter, monthly flowering plants for reception desks, Secretary’s Day gifts and corporate gifts all make plant maintenance a good business.
With Kathy Harbin at my side, we hit the pavement running. We were giving bids and getting contracts with city libraries, hospitals, malls, numerous office and government buildings, the airport, restaurants galore, banks, hotels, museums and homes. As our accounts increased, we hired new technicians to do the plant maintenance. Kathy trained and managed them.
As plant maintenance contracts grew, so did the enormity of account management. This was a time when computers with big, honkin’ hard drives were becoming the way of the world. We were stragglers, not quite there yet. We kept all account information on 4”x6” index cards, alphabetized in a recipe box. Invoices were handwritten in carbon triplicate. One copy went in the mail, one was saved in case a second mailing was necessary and one went into a hanging file folder. When the check came, the copy was removed from the file folder, stamped, paid and placed in the customer’s file. Our growth gave us the need for a new telephone system that would allow for telephones in different locations, extension numbers, all with ‘hold’ and ‘transfer’ buttons and intercom abilities. Perhaps computers weren’t that far behind.
Maybe we were working in the dark ages, but we were successful, despite the recipe box and carbon paper.
Pursuing plant maintenance was exactly the right way to generate revenue to solve the ‘isolated greenhouse’ problem. I confess that making sales calls was not what I wanted to do. It’s not what got me into business. My inspiration came from dirt under my fingernails (maybe a smudge on my cheek), knowing and growing houseplants and wearing Levis for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand how one thing led to another. But life and business are like that. Sometimes we have to take a sidestep, kind of a rejig, and do a few things we don’t love in order to support the whole thing. I’ve learned to know those unloved tasks as necessary steps, something to get done and move on. Forge ahead.
Ultimately, I was creating what I loved, always trying to make it better. The work would never be done. The process is progress. I realized I was developing another love, the love of growing something besides plants, the love of growing a business.
It took another year and a half to save the cash to finance the new greenhouses. I ordered all the Stuppy greenhouse parts. Then, at the end of the summer, my friend Stu, who built the foliage greenhouses, came back from Denver to lead my three nephews and as many employees in the construction.
Before construction could start, the cactus house had to be emptied and taken down. We built new metal benches and placed them against the south wall of the foliage house. It took us several days to pack all the cactus in flats and carry them to their new digs. When the backhoe came to demolish the cactus house, I stood on the back porch of the little house and watched the driver raise the arm of the backhoe and swing it at the bows and purlins. My heart crashed. I ran for the car and drove up Millcreek Canyon, where I sat on a picnic bench and bawled my eyes out. I stayed until sunset, long enough for business to close and the backhoe to leave. This was indeed a dark day, a day of mourning. But this is what business requires. One has to admit when ideas that seem so good, so innovative, and so wanted and needed aren’t working. Stick with those ideas at your own peril. It is better to be nimble, to see the failure, and to make change.
At the end of October 1991, the framing was in place and we pulled the plastic roofs onto the new houses. Just in the nick of time. It snowed that night. In the morning, we removed the fiberglass wall, separating the existing foliage greenhouse from the new and spread our wings. We had another 3,200 sq. feet of greenhouse to fill.
We made a little chorus of cactus around the trunk of a braided Ficus and snapped a photo with the byline, ‘Cactus just sing among the Foliage.” We were writing a new song.