Glacier FarmMedia – Nothing forces change like having your business literally flattened.
In 2015, a February storm brought snow to Falmouth, N.S. At Avon Valley Floral’s greenhouses, the snow froze into a thin layer of ice. Then came more ice and snow.
Greenhouse staff cranked up the aged boiler system, but it was too late to melt the ice off eight acres of greenhouses. Houses began to collapse. That broke the steam pipes, and soon there was no hope. Greenhouses started falling like dominos.
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They lost nearly six acres of houses.
Avon Valley had projected 2015 to be the first profitable year since a group of 10 employees bought out the venerable firm — a community institution and employer since the late 1930s.
“It took a few more years (to become profitable),” said Avon Valley president Joanna Gould-Thorpe.
Avon Valley Floral is in the black now, but it’s a very different business from the one crushed by a late-winter ice storm.
Fresh ideas
Founded in the late 1930s and incorporated in 1942, the aging business was bought out in 2012 by a group of employees who saw potential despite flagging sales.
“(They believed that) if they could get out from beneath this large corporate structure and start to operate it more entrepreneurially, more like a small business, they could actually achieve success with it,” says Gould-Thorpe.
Avon Valley and its two sister sites had been just a small cog in a conglomerate of companies, says vice-president of finance Suzanne Gould (no relation to Joanna Gould-Thorpe).
Most decisions had to be made by layers of management. Changes were made only after a package of information was pitched to the board of the larger organization. For example, Gould says that to change a graph in a labour report might have required signoffs from the board and president.
“They didn’t know how to quickly pivot,” Gould-Thorpe says. “The budgets were set sometimes a year in advance even though we’re a weather and seasonally related business.”
“It was killing the entrepreneurship,” she says.
When the employee group took over the business, they immediately began to make changes, though it took years to completely shed the layers of bureaucratic red tape.
Gould-Thorpe and Gould, now part owners of Avon Valley, joined the business in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Both brought experience in change management and fresh perspectives, which helped them cut the fat even further.
Today, division heads across the company have open and continuous communication because they need to know what’s happened and what it’s costing as soon as possible. Yes, they collect data into reports to inform budget decisions, but the leaders within the company are empowered to drive their departments.
“We still have oversight,” says Gould-Thorpe.
“Most people run stuff by us anyway. They just call us up and say, ‘what do you think?’
“But they have the autonomy and the power to make good choices on a daily basis, and that is what is helping build the business.”
This includes leaving space for workers’ special projects such as “Doris,” a three-year-old poinsettia that has been trimmed to resemble a ball of leaves atop a trunk, or “standard.”
“Honestly, what better thing to do than to allow people to have those moments of creativity?” Gould-Thorpe says.
“It just makes people feel that much more connected to the space.”
Unconventional lessons
Avon Valley’s crop year begins in February. By Valentine’s Day, they’re planting.
However,February 2015, after the “crash,” found them with a fraction of their former greenhouse space and no heating system.
While some products could be shifted to the business’s other sites in New Brunswick, those locations only had so much room.
“The pressure was still on to recover as much space here as possible,” Gould-Thorpe says.
They were able to get 2.3 acres into production. Other local greenhouses came to their aid, selling plants to them at a discount so Avon Valley could fill its contracts.
Recovering space post-crash forced the greenhouse to move from planting in raised beds to planting on the floor, which Gould says is something they should have done years earlier.
Members of the Canadian Farm Writers’ Federation who toured Avon Valley’s facility last October saw rows of poinsettias arranged in neat grids on the floors of some of the greenhouses. This allows for denser planting because it requires fewer aisles.
“Sometimes you learn things,” Gould-Thorpe says.
“(But) it’s not how you want to learn it.”
Crop density is something they’ve continued to push year after year. They ask if crops can tolerate less space or less time. Can they lay it out differently? For example, if they’d always had four lines of hanging baskets overhead, could they put six or seven? Will the crop below tolerate more shade? They alternated hanging baskets one higher and one lower, so more could fit in a line. They also rotated in a second, shorter crop after the spring-planted product shipped out.
“In five acres, we produce five times as much as what they did in eight acres back then, on a dollar per sq. foot basis,” Gould-Thorpe says.
“Honestly, it was the best thing to come out of what was truly a disaster.”
Difficult decisions
In spring 2017, Gould-Thorpe arrived at Avon Valley as a consultant on a six-week contract. The company was changing the software with which they sold their products.
Within a couple of weeks, Gould-Thorpe realized the business was floundering.
“They had been in survival mode since the (2015) crash,” she says.
“A lot of the really good managers — they’re still here now — they were so tired … they were literally just existing, hoping, trying to build things up.”
Gould-Thorpe saw she could be the person to say, “I’ve got this, this needs to change, and I have it, I’ll carry that for you for a little while.”
One major change was to drastically cut back on the number of products, or stock keeping units (SKUs), they offered.
“We were still trying to be everything to everybody,” Gould-Thorpe says.
They’d grow 100 pots of one colour for one customer and another 100 for another customer. Customers would introduce new varieties and discontinue others every year.
“They wanted fresh, new and exciting,” Gould-Thorpe says.
“You can’t build efficiency on that.”
For every change in the planting line for a new type of pot, or every time one pallet of one specialty item must be bought, it reduced efficiency.
Gould-Thorpe recalls sitting around a table with the company’s leadership and debating efficiencies for hours — stopping at one point for dinner “because we were about to tear each other’s heads off.”
“We knew we had to make a decision, and the decision had to be to keep our most efficient customers,” says Gould-Thorpe.
Avon Valley also negotiated with customers to adjust their orders and standardize inputs, for instance, to take a common size of basket, or to take the same type of product as another customer.
Quality and value for money were key criteria. They assessed whether plants would require specialized inputs or had lower chances of survival. They also considered the consumer’s success once they were planted.
They started with more than 130 SKUs. They ended up with fewer than 30.
“We’re good at what we do,” Gould-Thorpe says.
“We have a limited wheelhouse, but we’re really good in our wheelhouse.”
Silver linings
In hindsight, it’s possible to see silver linings within the panic and crumpled metal of “the crash.” However, the grief and trauma the staff felt was multifaceted, and the pain was felt for longer than some might have expected.
“Some people here felt directly responsible. They didn’t make a decision fast enough or the decision they made wasn’t the right one,” Gould-Thorpe says.
“They’re carrying grief and trauma about the whole thing … and it starts to inform future decisions.”
She says this highlights the need to get outside support. She and Gould were able to be the ones to say, “I know that today looks bad and feels bad, but it’s not. It’s OK. This is a step forward.”
They encouraged employees to look back at how far they’d come.
Gould-Thorpe says patience and gratitude for small wins were also key lessons.
“It’s micro-pivots all the time,” she says.
“When you can actually follow something through and have something work out the way you hoped it would, or perhaps slightly differently but still in a good way, to take that little win and just feel that gratitude and celebrate that with the team.
“I have learned to patiently wait for those moments and when they come, grab onto every single one of them, because people need them.”
