Do more with less

It’s late October and the baseball season is winding down. I just watched my scrappy Cleveland Guardians get eliminated by the New York Yankees. I’ve seen this movie before. But there are 30 major league baseball teams. Any time your hometown team makes the playoffs, you shouldn’t complain.

The Guardians were a lot of fun to watch this year. They were a group of likable players who overperformed expectations. At the beginning of the season, no reasonable expert would have predicted them to be one of the final four teams playing October baseball.

Of course, because major league baseball has no salary cap, it’s easy to play “Which of these things is not like the other?” The final four teams and their respective payroll ranks were the New York Mets (no. 1), Los Angeles Dodgers (no. 2), New York Yankees (no. 3) and Cleveland (no. 23). When three teams all have payrolls above $300 million and the fourth is a tad above $100 million, you’ve got a sizable disparity on your hands. It feels a little like David vs. Goliath, and in Cleveland’s case, David ran out of rocks.

As fans, we hate it. We want the billionaires who own the team to spend more money, especially when adding one or two more good players could have been exactly what the team needed to get to that next level. But as a business, you’ve got to respect it. Competing with the big spenders, winning just as many games as them while spending one-third as much? That’s impressive.

Nurseries are always trying to find ways to do more with less. Whether that’s through making strategic improvements to processes, small adjustments that can add up to cost savings or working on the margins to tighten up your balance sheet. If you’re reading this magazine, you probably have more in common with the Cleveland Guardians than the New York Yankees. Most growers don’t have a Scrooge McDuck vault of money to throw at their problems. They have to be clever.

This month, we’ve got a few articles that can help you find that edge. Our cover story, starting on pg. 16, provides an economic outlook for 2025, courtesy of the industry’s top economist, Charlie Hall. Read up before you pull the trigger on any big business decisions. On page 20, see if the gains in distribution uniformity from pressure compensating spray stakes would make that investment pay off for your operation. In this month’s Marketing Confidential column, learn how Jim Berry built the Hollywood Hibiscus name into a brand that gets recognized at garden centers all over. If you’re looking for more ways to improve, our Ask the Experts special section starts on pg. 35.

Our thoughts are with all the nurseries that were impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton this fall. We recapped the damage and provided resources for those who are able to help. Find that on pg. 33.

So who are you rooting for in this year’s World Series, Goliath or Goliath? I just hope both teams lose.