Forward focused

Prides Corner Farms was started in the late 1970s by Peter Sellew. He left a corporate job in New York City to start a greenhouse tomato operation. Peter bought the original 50-acre property in Lebanon, Connecticut, from an old dairy farmer.

“My father was an incredible entrepreneur,” says Mark Sellew, president of PCF. “After he left the corporate world in New York City, for 25 years he was starting businesses left and right. … He was a tough old coot, not your wonderful nurturing type; you had to prove to him that you had what it takes.”

After several years, Peter’s new business was losing money, so his son, Mark, decided to join him after graduating from Cornell University in 1978. He joined his father at the nursery when he was 24 years old.

Mark was planning to pursue a master’s degree in plant breeding, but after helping his father for a few months, he fell in love with growing plants and decided to stay at the nursery full-time.

“[My father] was in a world of trouble,” Mark says. “Things were not going that well, and he really needed my help. He loved the idea of farming and growing things, but there was a lot of heartache early [on]. I felt, as the son, I had to stay there and help him out.”

Together, Peter and Mark worked diligently to get the business back on track. Then in 1980, they decided to pivot from a greenhouse tomato operation to an ornamental plant operation — specifically growing rhododendrons and azaleas.

Mark’s father was never happy with the status quo, and he always challenged Mark to do better and think bigger.

“I’m grateful for what we’ve created, but it’s important to be forward focused — what are you doing tomorrow to be better and to be more relevant?” Mark says. “I think that focus of mine came a lot from him.”

Mark bought PCF from his father in 1984. The business was small, and Mark quickly realized he couldn’t only grow rhododendrons and azaleas to be successful. He started growing a variety of different plants.

Mark earned a bachelor’s degree in plant science, and as someone who loved everything about plant biology, he was focused on the product. He loved to figure out how to grow the tough stuff.

In the late 1980s, Mark began to spend his Saturdays on the road visiting customers. By visiting a customer or a prospective customer, he quickly realized they bought several plants from a lot of other growers, and most of those plants were better than the ones he was growing.

“[That] motivated me greatly, and [it’s what] drove a lot of improvement and motivation to be better at Prides Corner,” Mark says. “It was instrumental for me to get out of the nursery and see the marketplace in real terms. To this day, on busy weekends in April and May, I enjoy visiting customers.”

Today, PCF specializes in growing a diverse selection of plants and provides efficient logistics that deliver its products to customers exactly when they need them. The nursery grows everything from small basil plants to 15-gallon maple trees and everything in between.

The nursery has more than 2,000 active customers, with the largest making up only 2% of the nursery’s sales. Its customer base consists of IGCs, landscapers and landscape distributors.

“My dad is definitely a visionary,” says Jack Sellew, senior manager overseeing inventory and the distribution yards. “He built this company because he’s not afraid to take on risks and try new things, and he inspires the people around him. That’s what’s led him to a lot of his success.”

An envisioned and enlightened future

Mark is passionate about the industry, and his mission in business is to always look to the future. He loves to travel and visit other operations in the United States and abroad. He’s traveled to the Netherlands and Germany to get new ideas for PCF and to stay informed on what’s happening abroad within the industry.

He recently partnered with the Blackmore Company to begin using its Ellepot Trays to grow plants without plastic pots.

“The future is coming, and you can’t really look back,” Mark says. “So, I feel very forward-focused in my thinking, and I love to look at ways to be more relevant.”

Mark attended the SN show in Europe, and he visited the largest nursery in Germany. The nursery prints its tags for each customer on demand and includes the customer’s business on the tag. PCF is working to incorporate a similar tagging system into its operation.

PCF’s mission is to produce the healthiest, best-quality plants with the lowest environmental impact while being a partner with its customers. The company is achieving this mission by using renewable energy, recycling plastic materials used in production, recycling containers, incorporating an integrated pest management system and using rice hulls, biological controls, water conservation and controlled release fertilizer.

Mark and his partner Steve Castorani, president of North Creek Nurseries, co-founded and grow the American Beauties Native Plants brand, a national brand of native plants and non-hybridized native selections that support native pollinators and wildlife.

“That brand is doing amazingly well,” Mark says. “Native plants are having their moment. We’ve added a lot of new licenses, and it’s our most rapidly growing brand.”

Mark is also a part of SynRG, an organization of growers, plant breeders and IGCs. The group includes five wholesale nurseries: Overdevest Nurseries, Prides Corner Farms, Saunders Brothers, Sheridan Nurseries and Willoway Nurseries.

“SynRG was formed with the sense, as Mark put it, to accomplish more together than we could alone,” says Ed Overdevest, owner of Overdevest Nurseries. “Though competitors, we try to find better ways of serving our customers and better ways of bringing new and relevant plants to market.”

The group developed the “Handpicked For You” certification program and recently developed the WorryFree brand of unique problem-solving plants to provide consumers with plants that are non-invasive, good for the landscape and easy to take care of.

Great people and an efficient operation

Mark is passionate about both the business and the people. He’s very appreciative of the team at PCF, and he takes time to visit the shipping area, propagation area, growing area and the satellite locations to talk with employees and keep a pulse on everything that happens.

“Sometimes he doesn’t get to the office until the afternoon because he’s visiting different areas of the nursery, and I think if it were up to him, it might even be longer,” says Mark’s wife, Lisa Sellew, with a laugh.

Mark explains that one of the key elements that has allowed PCF to expand and continue to improve along the way is its great people. The company values being an employer of choice and empowering its employees by giving them a sense of purpose.

Mark reorganized the business to create a sense of ownership in the field. PCF has more than 700 acres of production, but the nursery is divided into separate “crop groups,” or unique geographies around certain plant species. PCF has more than 25 team leaders who oversee all quality control, growing, fertilizing, scouting, pruning and spacing of the crop groups. The only thing they don’t oversee is spraying; there is a sperate team that handles plant health.

“The crop groups have been a game changer for us,” Mark says. “We used to have big pulling crews and big pruning crews, but it was very hard to manage. Now, we have these great teams of between 10 and 20 in their respective crop groups, and we’ve retained those team leaders. They’ve been here many years and are the core of our middle management team.”

Dividing the nursery into crop groups with team leaders has allowed the nursery to expand the complexity of plants while maintaining attention to detail. Now, PCF grows more than 3,000 varieties of plants, including perennials, shrubs, ornamental grasses, groundcovers, trees, annuals, edibles, ferns and more.

“I fell in love with plants and became a plant geek at Cornell,” Mark says with a laugh. “I think that’s really driven me. Only a plant geek would have 3,000 varieties and grow 500 of this and 1,000 of that.”

Working with supply chain management company FlowVision also helped the nursery have the capability to grow 3,000 varieties.

“You can grow the plants,” Marks says. “You can sell the plants, but can you ship the plant when the customer wants it? … We worked with FlowVision to absolutely blow up what we used to do on conveyor belts to a Lean Flow model.”

The team leaders of the crop groups pull plants out of their respective areas for 20 trucks, so they go to one plant and pull for 20 trucks. They pull much quicker and spend less time pulling, so they can focus their energy and time on growing. The plants are then brought into the nursery’s shipping pad, which staff calls the supermarket.

“It really is like a huge supermarket with aisles, and people start shopping and filling up carts within the supermarket that are directly for a customer,” Mark says. “So, all our plants go on carts now, and FlowVision got us to that place. We started [this model] about seven to eight years ago. With the labor situations with our customers, if we shipped the [number] of plants we do right now loose, we would have never been able to grow the business.”

Adversity strikes

PCF has endured several challenges over the years. In 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted an immigration I-9 audit, and the business lost about 200 workers.

“That was so hard,” Mark says. “I really commend my management team who stayed with us because we were not a pretty place to work at for a year or two. It was ugly. It was a battle.”

The experience resulted in the company pivoting hard to the H-2A program. Of its 730 employees, 330 are H-2A.

Now, the nursery has a high-quality labor force that’s made the company a better employer for its middle-level supervisors, with motivated laborers that arrive just when the nursery gets busy and leave when it slows down in November.

Another challenge was boxwood blight. The nursery had to throw away $1 million worth of boxwood in 2012. Despite the challenge, PCF found a way to move forward. NewGen boxwood sales are very strong as one of the nursery’s top sellers; the sales are close to $1 million a year.

Learn to lead

Mark’s mission in life is to be a great husband, a great father and a great boss at PCF. He believes that bosses aren’t born, they’re created; anyone is capable of learning how to be a good boss and leader. He explains that being a boss is about giving people the motivation and inspiration to move forward and work together as a team.

“If there are issues or decisions to be made, he gets people together to build a consensus and motivates people to work together in ways which they might not have otherwise thought of,” Lisa says. “So, I think that’s really a strength of his.”

Lisa is the vice president of PCF and manages everything behind the scenes at the business, particularly the finances and the H-2A aspect of HR, including the application process and complying with regulations.

Mark and Lisa met while attending Cornell University. She was a teaching assistant in one of the classes he took his senior year. They have been married for 40 years, and they enjoy going on adventurous vacations, such as visiting Switzerland or the White Mountains in New Hampshire to hike. Mark also enjoys mountain biking, and he has mountain biked throughout North America and Europe.

“She has been my partner forever, and she’s amazing,” Mark says.

Mark and Lisa have three sons — Paul, Ben and Jack — and family is very important to them. They often have barbecues with their family and travel to Boston, Massachusetts, to visit their oldest son, Paul. Their three grandchildren usually end up taking over at family gatherings.

Just as Mark decided to join his father in the family business, Jack and Ben are following in their father’s footsteps as well.

Jack is the senior manager overseeing inventory and the distribution yards. He started his career at PCF in 2009, working during his summer breaks throughout high school.

“[My father] has been an incredible mentor for me, and he’s someone I look up to not only as a business operator, but as a father and a husband.” Jack says. “Now that I’m involved in the business and see how demanding it is, I look back and realize how he really made an effort to make time for us, his kids. He coached every youth sports team I played on, and I appreciate how he made time for us.”

Ben works in sales at PCF, and he started at the nursery working on the loading docks during his summer breaks, too. Ben admires his father’s sense of urgency, his ability to de-escalate situations and the fact that he’ll do whatever it takes for everyone to win — his employees, other nurseries in the industry and his customers.

“He’s a great leader here,” Ben says. “He always has a contagious smile that makes everyone feel like they’re part of the Prides’ family. … He’s one of my biggest role models, and he’s taught me how to work hard and how to be a good person.”

Relentless change

Mark has been with PCF for 45 years. His passion for growing plants and dedication to never giving up in the face of adversity has brought the business to where it stands today.

“Mark brings energy and passion to everything he does,” Overdevest says. “He approaches business like the mountain biker he is: immersing himself in nature, loving the adventure, embracing the inherent risk and turning it all into a great ride.”

If there has been one constant at PCF, it has been relentless change. The company has grown into a large business that employs 730 people. Within the state of Connecticut, PCF has five locations: the Main Farm, Lebanon Yard, Cromwell Yard, Ledyard Growing Operations and Suffield Growing Operations.

“Prides came from humble beginnings, and he’s just stuck with it for over 40 years — slowly building to the nursery, adding new plants, programs, managers and team leaders,” Ben says. “I remember when I was a kid, Prides was not even close to what it is today, and I think my dad deserves a lot of credit for that.”

Mark is always open to new opportunities, and that’s one thing that sets PCF apart from other nurseries. His leadership has allowed the business to continue to grow and be on the forefront of new trends and new ideas within the industry. He has the ability to look down the road and take risks to move the company forward.

“It’s been a remarkable journey,” Mark says. “I’m very proud of where we are today with our size and the culture we’ve created here. It’s a great time to be in our industry.”