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Papa Geno's
Owner:
Gene Gage
My first remembered encounter with Gene Gage
was probably 1996 because I had recently gone online and was
avidly searching around AOL trying to find herb folks. I found
an herb forum and there was Gene answering just about every
posted question with a rather devoted fan base on the list. A
few months later I received an email newsletter with information
about Papa Geno’s plant list. I emailed Gene and asked him if
his solicitation was successful. It was. This is the first
time I’d seen email newsletters and I was suitably impressed
and have remained being impressed with Gene and his business
acumen 11 years later.
Business Name:
Papa Geno’s Herb Farm –
www.papagenos.com
Prairie Home Perennials,
Tiny Trollgardens
(all dba’s under the ownership of Heartland Associates, Inc.)
Owner(s): Gene
Gage & Sharon Rose
Founded: 1985
Location: Martell, NE
Employees: Six full time permanent, as many as 20 p/t
during the spring
Annual Sales:
$500,000 - $1,000,000
Q: How did you start (or become owner) of the business?
Geez – I guess I got sick of what I was doing, rented greenhouse
space and tried to find out if there was enough herb business in
Lincoln, NE to make it possible. Sharon, who was a silent
partner from the beginning, joined me full time later. I think
about 1995.
Q: What made you
choose this type of business?
Herb growing was my hobby and there appeared to be a demand in
Lincoln.
Q: What is your
background?
Foundation and university executive. Owner of another (totally
different) business just before I started the herb business.
Q: What are your
biggest challenges as an herb business?
1. Extreme
seasonality. 75% of our revenue comes in 90 days each
spring
2. Difficulty of
finding employees who can live with the seasonality.
Q: What are the
biggest rewards of being an herb business?
The usual – doing what I love to do. Creating new stuff all the
time. Nice people to work with and nice customers
Q: What is your
philosophy of customer service?
It is, of course, our #1 priority and we try to make it as
“personal” as possible, even though 99% of our orders come via
the Internet. Both Sharon and I are available by phone or
e-mail, and we talk to customers every day.
Q: What makes you
stand out from your competitors?
I think an MBA would say “value received for dollar spent.” We
are not the cheapest source of live plants around, but we like
to think that ours are better in that they are grown cool and
with natural fertilizers (instead of in a 85 degree greenhouse
with tons of high nitrogen fertilizer). Even during our busiest
season, we can ship orders within the 3-day to 10-day range.
Q: What plans do you
have for your business?
Good question! I wish I knew. Neither my kids nor Sharon’s
kids are the least bit interested in the business, and none of
our current employees are in a position to buy it. Since we are
both 61, we definitely need to develop an “exit strategy” one of
these days. I suppose that I will try to sell it or merge it
with another business in due course. I would love to sell it to
some younger couple who have experience in a related business
and stay on as a part time consultant as long as they needed me,
but I haven’t found that couple in Nebraska.
Q: Is your family
supportive of your business?
My wife is a retired teacher and would prefer it if I didn’t
spend so much time working, but that kinda goes with the
territory of entrepreneurship. She is generally supportive
although she is aghast at the risks I take. Sharon’s life
partner is involved part time in the business and is generally
supportive, but he is as old as we are. Although some of
Sharon’s and my kids have worked in the business, all of them
are long gone and spread to the four winds, so their support or
non-support is a non-issue.
Q: What do you wish
you’d done differently with the business?
Not much, but perhaps I should have grown more slowly at a
couple of key junctures. Perhaps too, I should have gotten
involved in field grown stuff earlier, but I had no experience
with that market.
Q: What do you think
people starting out should know about getting into your type of
business?
- Definitely they
need to know business basics. Accounting, how to read a
financial statement, marketing essentials, stuff like that.
- That there is no
such thing as a 40-hour work week for a small businessman or
woman.
(I teach a one-semester
course on this topic at the university, so the list could go on
and on.)
Q: How has the
internet helped/hurt your business?
Without the Internet, I would not be in business. It has
been the key to our success, such as it is.
Q: How long has it
taken for your website to pay off?
This was one of the first businesses to have a website
dedicated to gardening products (1996) and my ongoing
investments have almost always paid off within months. However
– 2006 is an entirely different competitive situation than 1996
and I have no idea how long it would take for similar
investments to pay off now. In 1996, if one entered the words
“herb plants” in a search engine, one would get a half dozen
responses and Papa Geno’s would have been in the top 2 or 3. Try
the same thing now – I just did – and you will get upwards of
300,000 responses.
Q: What things have
you done to promote your website?
Magazine advertising
Card deck advertising
Pay per click
Search engine optimization
Direct mail
But mostly I try to maximize the potential of the
50,000 customers who are on my email list and the 90,000 on my
snail mail list. And I do that by taking care of my existing
customers rather than spending all my resources trying to find
new customers.
A couple of years ago I heard a speaker at a
Mailorder Gardening Association meeting compare a larger garden
marketing company to a guy who spends all his time and money at
the bars chatting up attractive women, while he was spending no
time or money on his beautiful and loyal wife at home. That
definitely resonated with me, and I now use my weekly email
newsletters to “reward” my existing customers with deep
discounts, freebies and advance notice of sales. In other words,
I am trying to spend a much larger proportion of my promotional
resources on my long time customers than on the bimbos in the
bars.
Gene had more to say on what’s happening
with his business, to give others an option that may be a
possibility for them. One thing I’ve found with most successful
business people is that though they’re not going to give you all
their success secrets (in spite of some pretty bold folks asking
them) is that they are willing to share ideas you can adapt to
your own business.
I have focused on the
"retail" parts of the business, considering this audience, but a
big part of my business comes from drop shipping live plants for
other "national" businesses. Obviously, this is not an option
for many of you, but it perhaps deserves a mention as an example
of what a small businessperson can do to increase their
revenues. This is a far cry from what I was doing at the
beginning, when I had a small retail herbs-only retail
greenhouse business. At that time, I was supplementing my
retail plant business income by working my ass off cutting fresh
herbs at 5:30 every morning for delivery to local restaurants
and grocery stores. I was doing a stall at the weekly local
farmer's market and working every relevant herb festival and
garden gathering within a hundred miles. I was designing and
installing (a few) herb gardens every year. I did open houses at
Mother's Day and before Christmas. I made herbed vinegars and
oils, I did herb-related crafty stuff. And so on - lots of
individual little efforts and experiments trying to make ends
meet and figure out what works and doesn't work. All those
individual efforts took a lot of time and effort and didn't
produce a lot of revenue, but I was definitely figuring out that
traditional face-to-face retail in Nebraska wasn't going to cut
it.
It wasn't until I finally got up enough courage to
make pitches to the "big boys and girls" that our fortunes began
to change. Our first "national" drop ship contract was with
Shepherd's Garden Seeds (then owned by White Flower Farm), which
led the next year to contracts with Better Homes and Garden and
Gardener's Supply Company, which in turn led directly to a
contract with Garden.com, and so on and on. (See client list.)
I think we have shipped for nearly every major garden marketing
business in America in the past 8 years. Some are regular, every
year clients, some are now-and-then, every two or three year
clients.
We had experimented with TV shopping channels along
the way - with mixed results - and it is only now (2006) that we
have developed a solid relationship with one of the "Big Three"
TV shopping channels. During the spring of 2007, there will be
10 one-hour programs devoted to our products, and the revenue
produced will be significant. If it works well in 2007, the
business will probably double in 2008. If it doesn't, we may or
may not do anything in 2008. That's business. If you don't try
something, you'll never know if it will work. (Big lesson for
your newbie members.) If you had asked me in 1990 or 1993 or
1995 if I had plans to be on national TV, or in Better Homes and
Gardens, or featured in the catalogs of Gardener's Supply, I
would have thought you were nutso. Let alone be earning
hundreds of thousands of dollars from something called "the
Internet." Hmmm - now that I think about it, I probably wasn't
even aware of the Internet until 1994 or 95.
And finally, I think that - unless the entrepreneur is
really lucky first time around - one must continue to come up
with new products or improved versions of the original product(s).
Even Rolls-Royce is continually making improvements in their
cars as technology advances and customer preferences change.
When we started, it was herbs only, then we added scented
geraniums, then heirloom veggies, then herb-related crafty
stuff, then potted perennials, then bare-root perennials, then
some holiday-oriented products. Our first year in the mail order
business (1995) we shipped product for 17 only weeks in the
entire year. For the past 2-3 years, we have shipped product
every week of the year except for the last two weeks of August,
and a week around Christmas/New Year's. Makes a difference in
one's revenue stream, I assure you.
My next
venture (to be trotted out in 2007) is something called Tiny
Trollgardens. It will target folks with very little gardening
space in and around America's major cities. Every plant will be
dwarf or miniature, and will either be "container gardens" or
"small space gardens" with detailed garden plans. I even have
trees and shrubs that grow no larger than 12" to 24" and lots of
perennials that grow no larger than 6". I call them Troll
Gardens because they are at about the same scale as those small
hand carved wooden trolls. (Even old farts can have fun in
their greenhouses now and then!)
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