 Todd Davis |
Let’s face it, mistakes occur in this business. Screw ups happen.
Each transaction has thousands of moving parts, and we’re dealing with living, perishable products. Transportation is always an issue, and there’s often zero margin for error.
But you can’t live in fear of failure. If you’re afraid of overextending yourself, you’ll never reach your full potential.
I’m living testimony that you can be both a screw up and a success in the nursery business. If you’re adept at fixing problems as they arise, your customers will appreciate you even more.
The following is true. If you’ve made a mistake bigger than this, I want to hear about it. But I also made a customer for life.
Big job, big whoops
Ted is the owner of a midsized design/build firm. I’d been working with him for a little over a year, and he had a big residential job coming up. I mean really big.
He called me needing hundreds of 7-gallon variegated pittosporums – a full 53-foot trailer. But I sourced them at a great price and they were great quality. It was perfect.
He was going to make money, I was going to make money and the homeowner was going to be ecstatic with these big, beautiful shrubs.
It was a direct shipment from the growing operation to the job site. I was eager to call Ted when the truck arrived.
 “Hey Ted, how do those variegated pitts look?”
“Great,” he said. “Too bad they’re not variegated privets like I need.”
My heart sunk into my shoes. How could that have happened?
We’d talked about this job for weeks. Could he have said, “privets” all those times and I just heard, “pittosporums?” Or did he say “pitts” when he meant “privets?”
At that point it didn’t matter. I had to take action and do it fast. I told him to send the truck my way and we’d unload it at the nursery. Then I asked for 30 minutes to see if I could fix the situation.
I got lucky. I found the privets he needed and had them delivered the next morning. They were also big and full and were even cheaper than the pitts. His crew had plenty of work to do, so there wasn’t even any lost labor hours.
We sold through that truckload of pittosporums in maybe two weeks tops, and all was right again with the world.
Ted saw a guy make the biggest blunder of his career, yet fix it in 24 hours. He was impressed, and I became his primary supplier of green goods. A year later he was one of my top customers.
And a good friend. We’ve had a few laughs about those pittosporums. I turned lemons into lemonade – a 53-foot trailer full of freaking lemonade.
Todd Davis
tdavis@gie.net
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