Roger’s Story, in his own words.

I somehow feel fortunate to have been born and raised in a very rural and simple world. My Dad returned from being a medic in the General Hospital Division of the US Army, stationed in England until after the Invasion and the conclusion of World War II. I was nearly three when he got home, built a four room cabin and began farming the forty acres he had purchased from my grandpa. We had no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no refrigeration and no automobile, but we did not feel poor. I attended a small three room school with forty kids and three teachers for first through sixth grade. Those who stayed in school past the eighth grade went to a consolidated high school in town (Columbia, Louisiana). Most folks in Caldwell Parish were pretty much in the same situation, so we just felt “normal.”

Along came brothers number one and number two (of four boys total) and a couple of years of poor crops or low cotton prices, so Dad hitched a ride to the big city (Houston) to find work. He got a minimum wage factory job, bought a used car, found a three room fourplex apartment in inner city Houston and moved us there after a few months. I was around ten, Bobby was five and Coy was a baby. As I recall, all that we had that was useful in the city fit in the trunk of our old Plymouth. I’ll always remember the culture shock of moving from a country farm that was several miles from the nearest neighbor and a three room school to a city of well over a million people and a three story brick elementary school that had many hundreds of students. Prior to this move, I had only been to “town” maybe ten times during those first ten years, and that was the town of Columbia, with a population of 2,000 people. (Columbia is still around 2,000.) I had started first grade at age five, so I was very young as a fifth grader in the Houston school system. Fortunately, I prospered in school, so they abandoned their inclination to put me back with kids my own age.

My mom was a stay at home housewife. She never worked, didn’t drive and did not handle any of the financial aspects of life. My Dad was a principled, quiet man with few words to say unless someone wronged him. He was a very hard worker, and I’m pretty sure he never missed a day during his twenty-five plus years at that same factory job he got after hitchhiking to Houston. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the early age of fifty-four. My youngest brother, Danny, was only twelve at that time. I was in my mid thirties and in my final years of a twenty-five year career with F. W. Woolworth.

I recall, as a junior in high school, seeing my Dad’s paycheck lying next to mine on the kitchen table. The gross wages were almost exactly the same, around $50. Looking back, I am continually amazed at the job he did providing for a family of six on the wage that he earned. We never felt stressed, deprived or poor. Unbeknownst to us, he accomplished this with extreme personal sacrifice and a non-wasteful approach to life, yet he never seemed stingy. His frugality came to light after his sudden death. My brothers and I decided to honor his frugality and bury him in his own clothes. After all, we concluded, that is what he would want, and he owned a couple of suits and always seemed neat, clean and dressed for the occasion. What we discovered was that his entire wardrobe was nothing but rags and threads that had been skillfully mended. There were no socks with toes, and both pairs of his shoes were reinforced with cardboard inserts because the soles were worn out. His underwear and T-shirts were threads.

During the high school years we had moved to the suburbs (Pasadena) and bought a two bedroom home, $6,000 or so, in a big new subdivision. It seemed like the entire city lived in the same size house. Many had two to four kids, and the father worked at a factory on or near the ship channel. This was a great atmosphere to grow up in. I don’t recall anyone ever locking their door, and I do not remember any incidents of crime during those fifth grade through high school years, which ended with graduation from Pasadena High School in 1961.

We (my parents and I) never had any discussion about college or schooling after high school at our house. No one in our extended family had ever attended college, to my knowledge. I remember thinking that the progression of life was that you transitioned from mowing lawns, shining shoes and such to a time clock job once you were sixteen, and that was what led to success and happiness. The very day I turned sixteen I started filling out applications. I had heard about a school program called DE (Distributive Education) in which you actually got school credit for working and could leave school at noon to go to your job. I knew that was my destiny, and I signed up as soon as I was eligible. I was hired at the first place I applied, a locally owned single location convenience store. My friend Robert Crosby was hired at Woolworth, which I had also applied for. When he heard I had gotten the Time Store job he said, “Man, that is the job I wanted.” Long story short, he convinced me to approach the DE instructor to try to reverse our employers. It worked out, and I soon reported to the local Woolworth strip center store as a stock clerk and janitor at 75 cents per hour.

I had saved up enough cash from mowing yards the previous summer to purchase a $200 1952 Chevy coupe. I had gotten a driver’s permit through Driver’s Ed, but I really did not know how to drive, and I definitely did not know how to drive a stick shift. After two clutches and one fender bender the first week, I was good to go with my new car. From that moment forward I had folding money to spend. I do not recall ever relying on my parents for clothing money, school money or anything outside of food at home after that first paycheck.

After starting the job at Woolworth in the fall of 1958, I do not recall thinking about working or doing anything else for many years. I knew nothing about retail and had never really thought about it as a job, a career or even as a business concept. That first day could have easily been my last day. Here’s what happened.

I reported to work for the 1 pm to 9 pm shift. The assistant manager, Mr. Cudd, took me around the store and gave me a one hour crash course on what my general duties would be. The nutshell was that I would work in the stock room until it came time for the janitorial duties, which included sweeping the sales floor, emptying all the trash and finally mopping the lunch counter area. But today there was a special task that needed to be done: clean up the bird pavilion and the bird cages in the pet department. There was a glassed in room in the middle of the sales floor that held the parakeet cages and other cages for the birds that Woolworth sold. They also sold hamsters, turtles, fish, small alligators, lizards and such. Eager to do a good job, I went to work, meticulously cleaning everything. The last thing was the cage with the Exotic Parakeets (which sold for $4.99 instead of $1.99 for the common parakeets). As I reached in to change their water, one of them latched onto my finger. As I jumped back, the door stayed open, and they immediately escaped and took flight toward the back entrance windows. I grabbed a net to chase them down, just in time to see all six of them hit the back storefront window in full flight. I rushed back there with my net, and there they were, flopping around on the floor with broken necks and squawking until they died. I even picked a couple of them up to see if I could fix their broken necks. I stood there in horror. One of the cashiers told me that the store manager, Mr. Urban, was a real hard-ass and known for his intolerance. I pretty much figured my retail career would end the same day it began.

Lucky for me, Assistant Manager Cudd was empathetic and said to me with a wink and a smile, “Well, it looks to me like some customer left the darn bird cage door open again. It’s happened before. Toss them out and get on with your chores.” The next day, I noticed that there were six Exotic Parakeets back in the $4.99 cage. He shared with me that the Exotic Parakeets were nothing more than ones selected from the cheaper shipments because their coloring was unique or more vivid. Later it became my job to select six or eight Exotics from the group each time we received a new box of twenty-four common parakeets from Hartz Mountain. This was my first of many lessons on how to increase your margins, or cover up shrinkage, by jacking prices on selected products. During that era, the more successful managers were often those who had the knack and skill to do that best. In some respects, this practice also became a major cause of the decline of many retail businesses, because many with less experience or instinct did this poorly, which resulted in the store being non-competitive or overpriced.

I was a very hard worker and almost never took a coffee or lunch break. Within a short time, Mr. Urban advised me that I was doing a good job and he wanted to “promote me” to a salaried employee and pay me $50 per week. As it turned out, I actually took a decrease in hourly rate, because I worked 1 to 9 on weekdays and 9 to 9 on Saturdays, and sometimes on Sunday for cleanup (stores were not allowed to open on Sundays because of the blue laws back in those days). I never looked back or worried about that. Mr. Urban liked me and kind of took me under his wing by teaching me a lot about the business. As time went on he exposed me to many aspects of the business, including ordering, counter layout, window trimming, customer service and ultimately supervising people. He was very old school and took seriously the responsibility of running a store “by the book.” His father was a buyer in the Executive Office in New York, which was quite a prestigious job. Everyone who worked at Woolworth above assistant manager came up through the ranks. Near the end of high school he unveiled to me the Woolworth training program. There was a clear path of upward opportunity for anyone who applied themselves and stuck with it. By then I was already doing many of the things that people on the training program did, which included carrying the store keys and opening or closing the store. The preference for training program candidates was to have some college and be at least twenty years old. He convinced me that because of his connections, he could get me on the program at seventeen or eighteen and forgo the college preference. Although I signed up for a couple of college courses after graduation, I also agreed to officially start the Woolworth training program. There were manuals and periodic testing, but most of the training was on the job. I soon became committed and “jumped into it with both feet.”

Not long after high school, I was transferred to a larger store in Beaumont, Texas as one of the two assistant managers. The manager of that store did not particularly like dealing with assistant managers. It was a good experience. The other assistant in the store was a couple of years ahead of me, plus there was another “manager in waiting” in the store who had already completed his training and was just waiting for a store to come available. Both these guys welcomed me in and taught me the ropes. The store manager, Mr. Sanders, spent most of his time doing maintenance chores around the store, and the assistant managers and clerks pretty much ran the store. I continued to work very hard and was there most hours the store was open. Many of the ladies on the floor had been there for years. I worked hard to help them, and they gladly accepted me and gave me their full support. I learned a lot from them and was mostly allowed to work on whatever I wanted.

After one year in that store I was moved to be the only assistant manager at the downtown Woolworth store in Port Arthur, Texas, under Mr. F. R. Joynt, a longtime manager who was only a couple of years from retirement. He had been there for many years, so he was well established as a respected city leader and businessman. There were several good things about that store. First, it was a downtown store, so we were not open at night. Second, every single clerk there had been there for twenty to forty years, and they all knew their job. To some degree the store was on automatic pilot. The third thing is that Mr. Joynt, as well as the ladies, really took me in and taught me a lot about the business. As a bonus, many of the ladies at the store had daughters my age, so they were always trying to fix me up with them. Also during that part of my life, I lived in a rooming house with four young chemical engineers. A couple of them became personal friends for many years.

The very best thing that happened during my year in Port Arthur (aside from becoming a Christian) was meeting Marilyn. There’s quite a story there, but in a nutshell, Mr. Joynt hired Marilyn after she completed high school to replace one of the longtime ladies on the floor who wanted to quit working. I couldn’t believe it when he called me over one day and said, “I want you to meet this new girl I hired to replace Mary.” It was this beautiful young girl named Marilyn. Mr. Joynt said, “And I want you to train her.” Boy, did I give her a lot of personal attention. Within weeks we started dating (which was against company rules), so we had to keep it a secret. After a couple of months, Mr. Joynt called me to his office and said, “I hate to do this, but I want you to let that new girl go, because Mary wants to come back.” I was horrified, but I had no choice but to follow orders. It was tough, we both cried, but it was the best thing. She quickly got a better job at another downtown store, and we no longer had to keep our dating a secret. Within a short time we were inseparable, doing something together several times per week. After a few months, we were engaged and had set a wedding date. I was only twenty, so my father had to come sign for me to get a marriage license.

During my engagement months, I was transferred to Galveston, Texas as assistant manager of a downtown store. This was less than a one hour drive plus a ferry ride from Beaumont. Dating was pretty much restricted to Saturday night and Sunday. The Galveston store had a young manager who was bright and capable but spent a lot of time out of the store hanging out with his buddies who managed other downtown stores like W. T. Grant, Penney’s and Kresge. This gave me a lot of time to “be the manager,” because he was absent.

The manager, Doyle Summrall, got moved into Woolco (a new discount division) in January. Marilyn and I got married on January 12th (a Sunday), and I had to open the store Monday morning at 8 am. Within weeks I was transferred to Woolco also. Woolco was the new discount division of F. W. Woolworth, and I was really excited for the opportunity. I turned the keys over to the new Galveston manager at 6 pm, and we headed straight for Corpus Christi, arriving about 5 am. This was only the seventh Woolco to open, and we were on the cutting edge of a new retail concept. This was before Kmart, Target or any of the others had ever opened a store. The only discount store we had in the South at that time was Gibson’s. Being on the ground floor of the creation of Woolco was very exciting and a great learning experience. The policies, procedures and methods of doing business were just being devised and were not that clear. Supervision was very limited and the buying rules were very loose, so in essence we were left to do much of what we wanted to do. Many of the earlier people moved into Woolco in the beginning were some of the new wave of younger mavericks who were anxious to do it their way. The Corpus Christi store kicked off as the second biggest volume store, and it remained that way after dozens of stores were opened. Expansion of the Woolco division was moving rapidly, and opportunities for advancement came quickly. There were three key management level positions within each store (Division Manager, Assistant General Manager and General Manager of the store). I became the youngest person to hold each of those jobs.

Just prior to becoming a store manager, I had developed a reputation among our vendors as an excellent promoter and manager. Out of the blue, I received a call from a guy who explained that he had just started a discount chain and would like to talk to me about managing one of his first stores (I think it was store number eight). He convinced me to drive up and talk to him, so I arranged to take a few days of vacation, and Marilyn and I started the day long drive. In the meantime, I called a former colleague who worked near one of his existing stores. He agreed to go take a look, so I would have a better idea what I was getting into before I talked to this guy. Halfway through the ten hour drive, I called my friend to hear what he had to say. The first words out of his mouth: “Roger, thank God you called. I visited two of his stores yesterday. You would be a fool to even consider working for that company. It is the worst retail store I have ever seen. There is zero chance they will be in business five years from now.” So I called the guy and politely told him that something had come up and I would not be able to honor our appointment. The guy was Sam Walton. Those initial store managers all became multimillionaires via Sam’s early stock options.

In the beginning, Woolco was managed by an executive office group in the Woolworth Building in New York. After managing a store in Houston, I was promoted to a newly created position titled Area Merchandising and Advertising Manager for the Houston area. This was our biggest market (store count wise), and my job essentially was to select and buy all the promotional goods that we were going to advertise. I did this with great success for a period of time, until eventually control of the stores was handed over to the regional offices that also had oversight over the Woolworth stores. My position was eliminated, but I was assigned a similar responsibility in Dallas, which they called Key City Manager. The Woolworth executives seizing control of the Woolco stores turned out to be the beginning of the end of Woolco, a painful process that would take another ten years to materialize. At that moment in time, Woolco was still “king of the mountain” in the world of discount stores. In my estimation, with the right leadership, Woolco could have become the Walmart or Target of today.

Within another year of the move to Dallas, I became the District Manager of the South Louisiana store group, which contained our largest volume stores (by a large amount). The next responsibility was Regional Director of Store Planning, Opening and Development. This position entailed some supervision over 120 stores, but more specifically, to staff, train, set up and open new stores in the region. This job was a great training ground on many fronts. Among other things, I was 100 percent in charge of planning and executing the grand opening sale of the stores in my region. As I recall, thirteen of my fifteen openings ranked in the top twenty for opening week volume for the entire chain (over 400 stores).

In the midst of that job, the board of directors decided to close and liquidate all the Woolco stores. This was a period of time in the early 1980s when inflation was runaway, interest rates were 12 to 16 percent and the economy was in the tank. In fact, I had a new store being set up when the closing decision was announced, so the decision was made to go ahead with the grand opening sale in October, then start the going out of business sale in November. Learning about the closing was a huge shock at first, and it felt like my world was coming to an end. Many of us first heard the news on the radio. Word had gotten out before headquarters could call everyone to tell them about it. The Morning Advocate called me before I had heard, and I told them that it was not true, that it must be a rumor that was a misunderstanding, that the company would be closing a selected group of underperforming stores. They printed my quote, but in the same issue was the headline story: WOOLCO TO CLOSE ALL STORES. The 25,000 employee layoff would be the biggest in US history. This was on a Friday. We called it our BLACK FRIDAY.

We were told to be at a meeting in Dallas on Sunday morning. The phone lines were kept hot Friday night and Saturday as we speculated as to the reason, our course of action and who the bad guy might be. Our likely suspect was Bruce Albright, the former president of Target, whom Woolworth had hired to “turn Woolco around.” As a form of protest, I called six of my District Manager friends and instigated the idea of us all renting black Lincoln Continentals to drive from the airport to the meeting. They all complied, and we parked them in a row out front of the regional office as if to simulate a funeral procession lining up. The top brass was not amused, but there was little they could do, because a mutiny attitude was apparent. As it turned out, the “big dogs” were not acting like big shots any longer. In fact, they outlined a better than expected severance package, along with a significant bonus opportunity based on the recovery achieved in the closing sale.

Each of us was given a group of stores to close and schooled on the closing process. A professional store closing company was hired to train us, but we would be in charge instead of their people. The business of closing a store was in fact an exact science, based on their history of closing thousands of retail stores. As I recall, the severance offer included one month’s pay for each year employed, at your top salary, plus a little more (for me that was twenty-five months), plus some vested stock options, and finally a bonus offer to earn $20,000 if your store group achieved at least 62 percent of the total retail value of inventory. (We worked on a retail inventory accounting system, since there was no POS system.) I think that meant the company would recover about 90 percent of the cost value of the inventory. As it turned out, my stores achieved the largest recovery in the company (over 65 percent), and my bonus was over $30,000. That ended up being the seed money for starting Louisiana Nursery.

The Woolco stores closed at the end of December, but I was kept on payroll for another sixty days to assist with the final inspection of all stores in the district. The managers would not receive their bonus until I arrived, inspected their store and signed off. I was used to help inspect stores throughout the region, because a few of the guys had “jumped ship” early. As you can imagine, there was a lot of unrest, bad feelings and revenge going on. A few people, including myself, were offered several opportunities to stay with the parent company in some capacity. I had three such offers: one in California, one in St. Louis and a pretty lucrative one to accept a job in Store Development at Woolworth headquarters in New York. I was tempted, but my family really wanted to stay in Baton Rouge. Also, I had suddenly developed this burning desire to go into some kind of business for myself.

During the closing process (October through December) I had actively pursued other retail jobs and was sitting on several offers, some of which I had verbally accepted. Those included Walmart, Howard Brothers, TG&Y, Michaels and Hobby Lobby. All were good offers, but I really could not get excited about going to work for anyone. There was just some major reluctance to put my fate back in the hands of someone else. I had explored several local business concepts. The first one was buying an existing Mr. Transmission franchise; the other was opening a Ben Franklin Arts and Crafts store (I actually went to their show and talked to some shopping center developers). Both of these would have required way more capital than I had. The SBA was a viable option, but the application process was massive, and interest rates were above 12 percent at the time.

One morning in December, I was stopped at the light on Flannery at Florida Boulevard (across from the restaurant). A guy was selling firewood, and it suddenly came to me: “This would be a great place for a nursery.” Within a few days I had reached an agreement to rent the property from the owners (an out of town Baptist children’s home), beginning in mid January. I even bought the small portable building from the firewood guy and took over his electrical and telephone lines. The idea was to ready the location as a vacant lot plant nursery by late February. I also enticed one of the other DMs (a former manager of mine) to find a location in Ascension, and we’d open two seasonal garden centers. He agreed, and we started to work on the sites immediately after Christmas of 1982.

Once I began to dream about the possibility of starting or owning a business, the concept of working for someone else became increasingly distasteful. It seemed strange, because prior to that I had never really considered it as a viable option. I guess I was caught up in that dominant mentality of the era: get out of school, get a job, work hard and stay with it till you retire or die. Nowadays people change jobs, or businesses eliminate personnel, at the drop of a hat for all kinds of reasons.

The thought of opening a nursery was born one day, finding and securing a location was completed within two more days, a name was conceived that same week, and we were open for business within sixty days. The name Louisiana Nursery Outlet actually came from noticing a name and logo in the Morning Advocate for a business known as Louisiana Liquor and combining that with a nursery I had seen called Plant Outlet. Also that week, I was telling one of my colleagues, a Woolco District Manager named Herb Orth, about the idea, and after a lot of enthusiastic conversation we agreed to seek a second location in Ascension. He did so, and we opened both stores for the spring of 1983 (a little over sixty days after that initial conversation). Herb had worked for me as a Woolco store manager for a few years, until I got him promoted to DM in 1981. We had become friends and did a bit of carousing together when both of us were out of town. No partnership agreement or terms were drawn up. We just agreed to be equal partners and shook on it. I have since learned that having a good lawyer and getting all relationships in writing is the best route.

As I recall, we each put up part of our closing bonuses and got a short term second mortgage loan on our homes of around $20,000. I’m thinking we had about $50,000 in total capital to build two facilities, get supplies and equipment and buy inventory. Because of our vendor connections with Woolco, we were able to get some plant loads on thirty day credit. The initial stores were essentially a 10 by 12 portable building and a makeshift shade cloth and gravel parking lot located on a corner vacant lot. The plant blocks were wooden pallets, and the bedding plant tables and display units were created with cinder blocks, pallets and landscape timbers. All the hard goods (chemicals, fertilizer and lawn and garden supplies) fit into the garage size portable building. The cash register was on a covered front porch.

We opened on a Saturday at the end of February 1983 with a half page hard sell ad (which I had to pay for in advance). The staff included myself, Mitch, Marilyn, Lucy Doty, Les Rivet, two or three high schoolers and several volunteer friends who just showed up to help. Customers came in droves, and we sold over half our total inventory in those first two days. There were many incidents and stories that I could tell about those beginning months. One in particular comes to mind. The gravel parking lot was full with maybe forty or fifty customers when we opened that Saturday morning. The first lady made a beeline for me with the question, “Do you have Coral Bells azaleas?” I turned to look at a huge bed of maybe 2,000 mixed azaleas (not in bloom and none labeled), and through my head flashed the thought, “Holy crap, I remember now, there are more than one variety.” I was the most knowledgeable plant person on staff, and I knew little or nothing. I scampered that next week to restock the nursery and hire a couple of people with plant knowledge.

The customers continued to roll in that first spring, and our sales volume exceeded my expectations. In that era, we were buying most one gallon plants for $1 per gallon, and our sales price was $2.65, or ten for $25. Down the street at Imahara’s, that same plant was $4.99 or more. Back then over 80 percent of the people paid cash, and we had shoe boxes full even after the bills and taxes were paid. I was always aggressive on buying but very frugal on expense. I had long been a proponent of the Sam Walton philosophy: “make frugal cool,” and MWWA (Manage While Walking Around). What was intended to be a short term seasonal business was quickly becoming a long term passion. I was beginning to love being a business owner.

A lot of lessons were yet to be learned. One was the dramatic seasonality of the business and how to manage that long negative cash flow period between the end of spring and the Christmas tree selling season. From the very first Christmas, I was committed to being a significant Christmas tree retailer. To me this was a fast paced business that I DID KNOW something about. That still today is probably the thing we do best, and it is definitely our most profitable venture. Our Christmas tree story is a book in itself.

Herb and I disbanded our partnership after the first spring, because he wanted to open a hardware store. The second spring, I doubled the sales we had achieved in two stores in my one location at Florida and Flannery. I did not fully realize that the winter of 1983 and 1984 was one of the coldest in modern history, and that created a huge demand for plant material in the spring of 1984. The wholesale growing nurseries in Forest Hill had devastating plant losses, so I had to scamper to find inventory. We ended up buying several loads out of California, which turned out to be a brilliant move.

After the first spring in 1983, I was recruited by and accepted a job with a small off price clothing retailer out of San Antonio named Solo Serve Corporation. Their agenda was to expand into Louisiana by opening several stores throughout South Louisiana and Alabama. I always disliked clothing retailing but signed on because the pay was very good. Also, finding new locations, setting up new stores and conducting grand opening sales was right down my alley. Many of the locations were in the same strip center, or even the same building, where my stores had been located, and the entire management team came from people who had previously worked for me in Woolco. Even past that, many of the key employees within the stores were people who had worked in some of my stores. We had great success in the beginning. So much so that the company was having a tough time keeping up with supplying my stores with sufficient inventory. Logistics was also a problem, because the plan was that all the inventory would be replenished from the San Antonio distribution center. I was kind of my own boss, since the headquarters and all the “brass” lived in San Antonio. I was pretty flexible, but I mostly worked the Solo gig on weekdays and the nursery on Saturday and Sunday. I did a lot of the nursery work by phone from the Solo stores. I also had a Baton Rouge store (Bon Marché), so I would schedule myself there when I needed to be in Baton Rouge. They did not know about the nursery business (no ask, no tell), but I gave them their money’s worth during the one to two years I worked for them.

Then I heard that Walter Imahara was moving toward leasing his garden centers to his employees, and that he really did not like retail. At that point he had three locations, and I made arrangements to lease the Florida Boulevard location and purchase his existing inventory. That step was pretty much my “no turning back” decision to be a full time career nurseryman. My family was already all in, but now we were all in plus committed in every way. I severed my full time relationship with Solo Serve amicably. Bob Grimm, the president of Solo Serve, tried to entice me to move to San Antonio and “help him run the company,” but we instead worked out a consulting arrangement, and I moved on.

At that point I devoted myself to creating a sustainable year round nursery business, with the intention of providing a long term livelihood for my family. In the two years operating the vacant lot nursery, I had learned enough to realize how little I knew about all aspects of owning and operating a private retail business, especially a specialty business like a full line nursery. I had confidence, but the fear of failure was likely my biggest motivating factor. To complicate matters, my kids were approaching college age, we had little money saved, and our borrowing capacity was very limited. My mindset was FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION, so I set my sights on learning all that I needed to know and doing whatever it took to create a top notch, respected business. During those early years I worked every minute of every day. I unloaded trucks, I waited on customers, I ran the cash register and I walked every aisle a hundred times per day.

On the surface it appeared we were having great success, but the cash flow problem would loom large for several years. We experienced huge double digit sales growth for all of the first ten or fifteen years we were in business. The lack of cash or a credit line to get us through the unprofitable months almost did us in. We were broke but too dumb or stubborn to know it. Banks are not willing to loan money without solid collateral, and inventory is very low on their collateral list. I did discover that growers and other lawn and garden vendors were very willing, even eager, to sell us plenty of product on credit, and oftentimes with extended terms. This proved to be the vehicle that allowed us to keep moving forward. I do not recall any vendor ever refusing to sell me on credit. We took vendor relationships seriously and made a point of paying them on time when we could and remaining loyal to them unless they failed to perform. When we could not pay on time, we were very forthcoming with a plan of what we could do, and we always tried to live up to that commitment. At times I would knowingly overbuy just for the purpose of selling at a low margin to create cash flow. I do not recommend this as the best business strategy, but we made it work for us until the cash flow slowly improved.

For the first few years after taking over the Imahara facilities, we continued the initial business model of being a discount plant nursery but continued to add more hard goods lines. The business name was Louisiana Nursery Outlet. Our objective was to attain a 44 percent final margin, keep payroll under 20 percent (18 percent was the target) and total expense under 40 percent (38 percent was the target). The other goal was to be a one stop source for all types of gardening products. A side note: I am still surprised at how many customers still refer to us as Louisiana Nursery Outlet, since we haven’t used that name in nearly thirty years.

My initial thought was to get rid of gifts, Christmas and similar products. As I visited other successful garden centers, interacted with other owners and vendors and saw what others were doing, I began to sense that niches such as gifts and Christmas offered potential. We continued our aggressive discount type item and price promoting, but we were also adding more products that lent themselves to upscale selling. First, I put together a completely new business strategy and concept for Christmas. My theory was that we WOULD be the Baton Rouge source for live cut Christmas trees, so having a complete one stop Christmas store would be the natural complement to that. This worked pretty well, so we began to expand gifts and decor.

I had long felt that any store needed signature departments or product lines that lured customers by “owning that category.” This takes a while, because you have to earn that credibility by repeatedly doing it well. The goal is to be the “go to place” in the market for a particular product line. A few examples might be: Louisiana Nursery is the place to go for a live cut Christmas tree, pots and containers, hanging baskets, Christmas ornaments and decorations, blooming tropicals, indoor foliage plants, coco lined baskets, pine straw, citrus and fruit trees. In the past some could have been Beanie Babies, orchids and bromeliads, home decor, Department 56 village products and so forth.

One thing that became increasingly clear was that we needed to change our image. I attended a seminar in which the presenter said that if you want to be successful in many of these categories, you cannot be a middle of the road type business. He further said, “The only thing left in the middle of the road is dead armadillos.” That stuck with me, because I knew it described us. We seemed stuck in the middle. One step we had taken in 1986 was joining the hardware co-op Servistar. A fellow garden center owner in Jackson, Mississippi (Steve Ziski of Lakeland) had convinced me that they were the best of the best for lawn and garden products. We made that move, and this gave us sources for many product lines. I was like a kid in a candy store.

We also had opened another “vacant lot” type operation at the corner of Coursey and Airline in 1986, leased two Sears garden centers in 1987, started a growing operation in 1987 and taken over the other Imahara location on Perkins Road in 1988. We were well on our way to being the dominant garden center in Baton Rouge. This was before Depot and Lowe’s were here, but there were more than a dozen independent garden centers in operation at the beginning of that time: Anderson’s, Al’s, Naylor Bros., Clegg’s with three stores, Hart’s, Butch’s, Capital Garden Center, The Plantsman, The Hanging Basket Nursery, Harb’s Oasis, Garden District Nursery, Plant World and a couple of other mom and pops. Our sales and customer base continued to grow, and many of them were falling by the wayside. The Advocate newspaper supplied me with market data that indicated we had a larger percentage of the lawn and garden customers than all of them combined. We also had become a Top 100 US garden center, according to Nursery Retailer magazine. We were doing well, but the lack of a bank credit line was taking its toll. After an extremely rainy spring in 1987 (68 inches in April and May), we were getting desperate. With the help of Mack Bayles and Mike Anderson, we were able to wade through the mountain of paperwork needed to attain an SBA loan for $300,000. This put us on sound footing financially, and we were able to move forward in a substantial way.

Another major objective of mine was to solidify and stabilize our year round personnel. Retail companies in general were accustomed to high turnover. We were no different, so I came up with a plan geared toward improving that. The basic concept was to determine how many full time year round employees were required and could be afforded within our business model. After considerable research, I arrived at one employee per $300,000 in volume. The next challenge was to come up with a wage and benefit package that was affordable and competitive. The goal included my hope of providing a competitive hourly rate, health insurance, a retirement savings plan that the company could match, liberal vacation days plus other paid time off, one weekend day off (which was unheard of in our industry), an employee discount, guaranteed full time work year round, and a year end bonus based on individual performance and company profits. In exchange, we asked for their loyalty, reliability and the other attributes that most employers want from their employees. The hope was for happy employees who stayed with us and gave their best effort most of the time. I called them Gold Badge employees (the intention was that these employees would wear gold colored badges with black letters). The concept worked better than I ever expected, as evidenced by the longevity of many of the key employees.

One big help in accomplishing much of this was the fact that Lucy Doty had returned to work and was very proficient as my administrative assistant. Lucy was a friend prior to the nursery beginning (part of a circle of friends that we had). She was college educated but had not worked in some time. Her husband, Larry, was general manager of Placid Refinery, and she had spent many years as a stay at home mom. Lucy enjoyed the challenge and was willing to take on many roles in her years with Louisiana Nursery. I think the nursery job gave her a chance to develop and enhance her many skills, and I think it gave her a degree of fulfillment. She was one of a handful of people who contributed tremendously to getting our company off the ground. I will be forever thankful to her for all that she contributed.

One day I received a call from Paul Pence, the incoming president of Servistar. He told me I was one of six garden center owners being invited to serve on an advisory council to explore the possibility of Servistar forming a lawn and garden center co-op to operate under the umbrella of Servistar. I jumped at the chance and went to a three day meeting at Servistar headquarters in Butler, Pennsylvania. After several “think tank” meetings with most of the Servistar executives and buyers, the decision was made to create a completely independent division that would be the catalyst for creating a nationwide chain of garden centers. All would be independently owned but would function under a common umbrella, much like the Servistar hardware stores. It would have its own general manager, sales staff, store development personnel and so on, as well as its own trade shows. Their vision was to sign up hundreds of existing garden centers, plus entice entrepreneurs to start new ones.

The next step was to recruit a general manager. They hired Dave Meder, who had headed up the lawn and garden department at Montgomery Ward. Dave utilized the advisory council in many ways over the next year as the entire program was put together. He was very good at soliciting input, allowing debate, then arriving at a consensus. The first task was to come up with a name, mission statement, marketing strategy and the other amenities that the consumer would expect from the “perfect garden center.” Servistar gave him considerable resources and autonomy to get the task done. They used Salami and Associates, a well known New York PR company, to choose name choices, logos, marketing statements and other items (a couple of their clients were Eastman Kodak and IBM). They picked our brains, visited stores, and we held several meetings to hash over various issues. The six advisory council owners were a very diversified but astute group who were very opinionated and vocal. We had a lot of contentious meetings, but we meshed well together, and Dave did a good job of reeling us in to reach a unified decision about many things. This challenge was right down my alley because of my chain store experience in store planning and development, plus setting up and opening new stores. This also allowed me to be a big help to Dave, and he relied on that. He has retired, but we are close friends today. Overall this was a great learning experience, but I also had a lot of input and influence in most every decision we made.

After a while, the name Home and Garden Showplace was born. In addition to Salami, we met with several other consultant groups, like Retail Planning Associates in Cleveland, to put together a prototype layout for the ideal garden center. Immediately afterward, a prototype store was developed, and many new stores were built to that concept. I immediately signed our two former Imahara stores up. We changed our name and our signing and set out to change our image to be an upscale, full service, full line garden center. We hitched our wagon to the Showplace concept and never looked back. In the years that followed, we participated in most all of the Showplace marketing and advertising initiatives, which helped to continue building our customer base and reputation. The next step was to build our own prototype store. The earlier prototype stores required that the Servistar development team build a turnkey store, which was pretty expensive. I convinced Dave I could do it, and he allowed me. I complied with or improvised ideas to match most of the concepts, but I was able to duplicate the store for about 30 percent less cost than the others. It took longer than expected, but the new store opened in 1995.

Many new people emerged to be significant contributors to the development of our company. One of those was Ken Gilbert, one of the Imahara employees that we inherited. Ken was knowledgeable about plants, but young and unsure of himself, and he was very willing and eager to learn. Early on, we had leased the garden centers at the Baton Rouge and Lafayette Sears stores. Ken’s first management role was to manage that operation in 1987 and 1988. He did an admirable job, and the Sears management loved him because of his excellent customer service skills. After a little over a year, I made a decision that the Sears garden centers and our growing operation were a distraction that was negatively affecting my focus, not to mention how it was stretching our cash requirements. I closed all of them down, severed my relationship with Wallace Heck and tried to reel things in a bit. I appointed Ken the manager of the Florida Boulevard store and later tabbed him to manage the new Coursey store. Ken has worn many hats, including buyer and other corporate responsibilities. He has always been loyal, dedicated, reliable and willing. Much of the same could be said for Susan Altares and Les Rivet, who have also been with us since the beginning. All have worn many hats and taken on various responsibilities as we developed the company.

A “diamond in the rough” who emerged from a seasonal hire was Shane Michelli. Shane was first hired as a Christmas tree lot employee, I think in the fall of 1992. He first impressed us with his carpentry skills, but it soon became apparent that those skills were just the tip of the iceberg. He seemed to distinguish himself in most everything we had him do. I was always trying to identify individuals who might fit in as a more permanent part of our team. Shane proved to be one of those possibilities. Oftentimes we would hang on to willing prospects until an opportunity presented itself, or we simply created an opportunity to test that person’s willingness. Somehow we were able to hang on to Shane by giving him projects and challenges. He always seemed to exceed my expectations. Ultimately I put Shane at the new store location during the construction process. He helped monitor and facilitate many of the infrastructure elements we were trying to achieve, including fixture installation and more. Ultimately I put Ken there as the store manager and Shane as the nursery manager. They did a really good job of setting the store up as we readied for a September opening. Shane progressed to helping us further develop the outside nursery program as our corporate nursery supervisor.

From the very beginning, Mitch took a great interest in the business. He was just starting LSU at the beginning, but he always worked a full schedule at the nursery. Much of this was on his own initiative. I seldom ever told him when he HAD to work. Covering all his contributions to the business is yet another whole book in itself. He is probably one of the most knowledgeable plant people in all of Louisiana. Suffice it to say, very few, if any, second generation businesses have a person more qualified than Mitch to step up and take over.

There are many employees who contributed to our development. Some were individuals like Shane who made their mark but ultimately moved on, because we simply were not able to offer them opportunity that matched their enormous potential. The same could be said for Lucy Doty, Rebecca Bates, Reeves Fleury, Stephanie Michelli, Virgil Harris, Mary Beth Boyd, Jeremy Harris and several other individuals who used us as a stepping stone as we were using them. I was always supportive when it was apparent that these individuals were moving on to bigger and better opportunities.

One of the most rewarding parts of being an independent business owner in this industry is the camaraderie that has developed with other owners and many of our vendors. I have long been a “student of retailing” and have spent most of my life visiting retail stores of all kinds just to see their concepts and their ideas and try to understand what makes them tick. Since I’ve been in this business, I’ve literally visited hundreds of garden centers throughout the country just for ideas and to learn more about different concepts. I’ve always been appreciative of how willing most of them are to share their thoughts and ideas. I have become pretty adept at copying, retreading or utilizing in some way the good ideas and concepts that I’ve seen. I’m also very willing to share with others in our industry. This is likely the greatest benefit of being a member of several associations, buying groups and organizations. Some of those include serving as Chairman of the Board of the Louisiana Retailers Association, on the Owners Advisory Board for Servistar and then Home and Garden Showplace, on the Board of Directors of Garden Centers of America, as a member of the True Value Presidents Club (selected from their top 5 percent of volume purchasers), as a member of the Garden Center Group, and others.

Much of this is just flowing from my memory, so my apologies for the inconsistencies, repetition, dead end streets and other ramblings.