Over 5 years ago, when we decided to purchase Natural Plus we had NO CLUE what we were doing or what we were getting ourselves in to.
And to be honest, we still don't. 😂
But does anyone, really??
Aren't we all doing the best we can, making mistakes along the way, but then learning from them and growing and choosing better next time?
When we bought the nursery, Dave’s dad Dave was running a landscaping crew and doing big commercial landscaping projects. We slowly inherited and took over operations of the crew and jobs in 2014 and 2015, however quickly realized it was more than we wanted to manage and more time consuming than we liked. We originally decided to purchase the business for the flexibility of working our jobs around our family. The demands of the landscaping crew, the appointments, the estimating, and the billing alone were more than Dave was able to handle himself, and keeping him busy all day and every evening, plus working the nursery on the weekends. He was falling more and more behind on everything because he was filling too many roles. We had to make a decision: get more help and grow the landscaping, or phase out that part of the business and focus on the retail nursery. We had a lot of deep discussions and spent hours projecting if a seasonal retail nursery could stand alone without the income from landscaping. We are excited to say that we {mostly} went for it, only doing a select few small landscaping projects that were still hanging on from previous years. We are continuing to trust in the process and take risks, choosing to pour in to the parts of this business that work for our family, and letting go of the parts that don’t. It’s been a long, slow process, and will probably never be complete. And it is oh so scary, not knowing if what we follow will continue to provide for our family and make our business profitable. We continue to have challenges, but choose to trust the process of it all, and know that we need to continue to make decisions for our business based on what we want for our family.
Business ownership has taught us so much in the last 5 years, but the thing we have gotten the most from it is THE PEOPLE. Our customers are the absolute best, and continue to SHOW UP and SUPPORT the little backyard nursery we have going here.
We appreciate all of you, and thanks for sticking with us as we grow and learn how to make this family business work for us.
