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The more time a person spends on the floor of a retail store observing customers and employees, the more obvious it becomes that success or failure depends on what a company actually does, not management's good intentions.

As a result, there have always been a few hits, a few misses and lots of room for improvement. Here's a mix of tips and suggestions taken from street-level experiences working with garden centers in the Group. And as usual, some of the best ideas come from the people with all the right answers: staff members who works with customers on a daily basis.

Tip: "People come to buy, so don't disappoint them." From Billy at Van Wilgen's Garden Center in North Branford, Conn.

It doesn't make sense to discourage customers from buying plants before the frost date. In spite of garden centers posting signs with some magical date about when it's "safe" to plant in spring, people buy what they want when they want it, either from you or somebody else. If people on your staff have that much weather insight, they should be talking to the folks at the Weather Channel. They can't get weather predictions correct a few days ahead, let alone several weeks.

Posting a sign with a frost date followed by an explanation at the end is pretty omnipotent. A sign and a small handout that states: "In case of frost ..." is all the information needed and more than customers want to hear. It might freeze, but then again it might not. Your responsibility is to inform, not scare people. Besides, most people will buy the stuff anyway with or without a warning.

Tip: Three easy steps to increase your perennial sales, from Naomi at Berns Garden Center in Middletown, Ohio.

1. Reduce the number of suppliers. The plan was to have just three main suppliers. After careful research and discussion with potential suitors, the bulk of the orders was given to two key vendors, who were made to realize the important roles they would play with no margin for error.

2. Constantly shift inventory mix according to customer interest, not availability. As soon as it was obvious that Echinacea was more important to shoppers than coreopsis, bench space, marketing and inventory levels were adjusted to a lot more of one and a lot less of the other. There's a lot more money to be made by stocking heavily what customers want to buy instead of what department heads and growers want to sell.

3. Make them ask for the little stuff. Perennials might come in two or three sizes (please no more than three), but customers at Berns have to search for the small stuff, even early in the year. When someone asks for a particular variety, the staff members takes them to the largest ones. Unless the shopper asks for a smaller size, why bring it up? And guess which size plants are front and center and which ones are in the back of the department?

Tip: Don't assume your average customers can't afford expensive, custom pots, from me.

During a visit to a really nice garden center operating in a market with great opportunity to sell higher-end products than what was currently being carried, I asked the custom container garden designer why all the special-order pots were much nicer and a lot more expensive than the ones she had made for cash-and-carry sales. "Those people have a lot more money to spend than our regular customers," was her reply.

The logic escaped me but she made up a few really nice, high-end ones just to shut me up. The next day two $650 matching urns sold to a walk-in customer along with an additional $500 worth of large-size annuals.

I remembered that the employee was only going to make one urn until I reminded her that people like to purchase matching ones for a front porch. "But what if they don't sell?" had been her response.

It would be easy to lay a starving-artist syndrome on the employee, but it's more about how the company failed to live up to marketplace opportunities. There's an operational culture that's created for each company, whether by accident or intent. That belief system flows through every action that's taken. Don't expect employees to act in any other manner than what the company culture espouses or allows.

Push for excellence

So how good do you have to be? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, better than good, much better. The article claimed that some of the country's top food purveyors like P.F. Chang's and Panera Bread Co. said sales were off compared to earlier projections. At the same time, Pottery Barn sales were down while handbag maker Coach said earnings jumped 33 percent due to shoppers paying full price at their main stores instead of discounted prices at outlet sites. And across the mall, Nordstrom was on a 3-year run of steadily increasing sales.

When most people already have too much stuff and aren't interested in buying more stuff just to have more stuff, telling them your stuff is cheaper than it was before surely won't get them to change their minds. At least not the type of customers who build successful specialty stores.

If you're going to be a so-called specialty store then you better be really special. Face it, Panera is just a better Subway and Pottery Barn is a stand-alone Target department. But no one ends up at Nordstrom after first checking Penney's or buys a Mac after checking Dell. If you're truly special, people know it.

And if everything was as it should be, what could be more "special" than a really nice garden center? It's us and the box stores. There's no room for an average option, just what should be really good (us) and what we know to be really bad (them).

A specialty store isn't defined by the products it sells but by the people coming in to shop. Its success comes from focusing on the needs and wants of a special group of customers. A garden center's focus should be on addressing real-life values of the people we want as customers. Not the typical product/ price value that shines attention toward our stuff, but connecting to the personal values held by our customers. Our challenge is to say it better, show it better, do it better. There really isn't any other position left to take.

Is there really a difference?

In spite of what editors, consumer panels, speakers and countless magazine articles written by people who want us to believe they can read the minds and intent of entire generations, this person wasn't that much different than the other few hundred shoppers that day. In fact, she looked, shopped, talked, purchased and responded to what was being offered like a typical garden center customer. Yep, I found one -- a real, live so-called Gen X shopper at one of our Group centers.

Her first question was, "Is it alright if I bring my dog with me?" Sure, as long as I get to ask a bunch of questions, follow you around and see if you're really as different and elusive as everyone seems to want to make you. Guess what? She's not.

Her name was Rebecca. She owns a condo in the same town where she went to college, is the manager of an American Eagle store, drives a jeep, hates the war, loves her dog, wishes she could grow roses, knows the difference between annuals and perennials and spends time and money visiting garden centers, as long as her dog is welcome, too. Pretty weird, right? Didn't seem so strange to me. In fact, other than the dog, she fit in well with all the other shoppers who were out enjoying the great weather and preparing for a weekend in the garden.

Here's the point: all the recent dialog about generational differences is just tabloid attention by talking heads and a desperate grab by insecure retailers. Rebecca didn't require this garden center to connect with her in a special Gen X way. She just wanted a friendly place with a pleasant shopping environment where she could take her dog. A radio ad helped get her there, although all she could remember was the name of the company and the statement about decorating the backyard. The only negative shopping experience she had was having this weird guy ask her a bunch of silly questions. Create a story worth telling, then live up to the claims. Really nice places attract really nice people of every generation.

In the movie "A League of Their Own," Tom Hanks delivers a line that is easily transferable to any business. "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."

Operating a garden center isn't easy. But maybe that's the best way to create the type of companies that really matter.

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© 2006 Branch-Smith Publishing