Hosta business

Andrew:

Over the last few days you have been making some comments about your 
hosta business and engaging in an interesting discussion.  I have to 
commend you for your desire to build up a business, but I wonder if 
you understand the pitfalls of what you are doing.  Sure, it's nice to 
have a healthy business, but you seem to want to grow the business 
QUICKLY and make it big; I assume you are looking at a business within 
a short time grossing at least a quarter million dollars a year in 
sales.  I hope, good Democrat liberal you are, that you undrstand that 
the harder you work to build your business, the more the government 
steals from you as taxes - maybe you will finally learn what 
progressive means!

The way I see it, there are mainly places for two types of business in 
the nursery industry - either a small scale, mostly one person 
operation with limited capitalization or a large operation doing 
millions of dollars of business, many employes and high 
capitalization.

Once you highly capitalize your business, then you basically become an 
employee of the bank that lends you the money to operate the business. 
You need constant income to pay for employes.  You don't build up this 
kind of operation within a few years without a LOT of money being 
spent, and then you still have to compete with all the existing 
businesses.

You say you want to grow 500-600 different hostas.  Why?  Waldenwest, 
just down the road from me, has quite a large number of hostas in 
their catalog and some of them are in quite good supply, but some of 
the hostas just don't sell.  Just because you have a large collection 
doesn't mean that you will be selling them, but they will still be 
taking up space and effort to grow them.  If you really want to 
develop the business you are really looking at the wholesale and 
landscape market.  With careful selection I suspect you could make as 
much money growing maybe 50 hostas at most as you can growing 600 
hostas.  Hosta people might be impressed with a list of 600 hostas, 
but the average backyard gardener will probably end up getting 
frustrated reading the same description for different plants.

Joe Halinar

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