Grown in Montana

Profile of a bootstrapped start-up nursery.

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Brad Brown wanted his tree nursery to be a tight little operation in which he and his wife did most of the work. Seven long years later he's still bootstrapping

Brad Brown scouted Montana for the perfect business location. He knew he'd found it when he came upon the Flathead Valley. With the northern Rockies towering above the valley, every view there could grace a Sierra Club calendar, but Brown was struck less by the grandeur of the scenery than by the quality of the soil. It was dark, loamy, glacier-tilled stuff, three feet deep -- ideal, he understood at once, for growing trees. And Brown knows trees like Bo knows football.

Some kids want to grow up to be actors or astronauts. Brown knew his calling from the time he had a summer job picking seeds from trees. In the Chicago suburbs where he grew up, he spent his summers as a teenager working in a nursery. At the University of Illinois he earned a degree in ornamental horticulture. Then, yearning for the West's wide open spaces, he made his way first to Oregon and then to Montana.

"Every job I've had was training for this one," he says. "Each one has taught me something else -- technical skills, people skills, business skills, cost accounting. It was all leading up to the day when I'd have my own company." In 1983, at age 29, Brown felt his biological business clock ticking like a time bomb and decided to take the plunge. "I wanted to start while Desi [his wife] and I were young enough," he says. "I didn't want to fail at age 50 and then try to get back into the job market."

So, while still employed at a nursery in the tiny Montana town of Plains, Brown scraped together his $15,000 life savings, got a $50,000 loan from a friend in Chicago, and purchased 20 acres of fertile farmland in the Flathead Valley, near the town of Kalispell. He called his new business Glacier Nursery, and at first, because money was tight, he tended it only in his spare time. On weekends he drove the 100 miles from Plains, got down on his hands and knees, and planted the first 500 small trees he'd purchased from a former employer.

Farming is about as basic as business gets, and Brown had expectations to match. He envisioned a tight little operation in which he and Desi did the grunt work and hired some help in the spring and fall. He didn't want to get big, just to make a living. "It was your basic income-replacement idea," he recalls. "I knew how hard I was working for others and making $30,000. I'd certainly work that hard on my own little farm."

Now, seven years later, Glacier Nursery is still losing money. Desi's outside income supports the household. The Browns and their two children still live in a mobile home on the nursery property. Their vehicles are two battered 1977 models. "I thought we'd be a lot further ahead by now," Brad admits. "There are quicker ways to make money, but few as rewarding. I think we're finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel, though, and it's not an oncoming train."

A tree farm is a tough business to start. The tree crop takes two to five years to mature -- the older the better, since larger trees command higher prices from the garden centers and landscape contractors that purchase them. With nothing to sell for several years, a nursery owner needs the wherewithal to wait it out. Brown, however, had spent what money he had on land and plants. And he couldn't very well ask for a bank loan when he had no means of repayment.

Brown's location, despite its superb soil, didn't make matters any easier. The most successful wholesale growers in the West operate from the milder climes of Oregon and California. Even the big growers in Iowa don't experience the kind of weather that northwest Montana gets. Winter temperatures sometimes hit 35 degrees below zero, which can quickly kill some varieties of the hardy specimen trees that Brown was aiming to grow: maples, crab apples, mountain ashes, lindens, birches, and others.

But he did have a plan. In 1984 he left Plains and took a position as foreman of a Christmas-tree farm in the Flathead Valley. (It wouldn't be until 1988 that he would quit that job and turn to Glacier Nursery full-time.) He reckoned he could save enough cash from his tree-farm salary to buy and plant more "liners" -- small trees -- and then maintain them in his spare time. In short, he intended to make up with sweat equity what he lacked in capital.

And he saw his Kalispell location more as an advantage than a liability, a place to carve his niche. Montana is a huge state, but home to just 805,000 people, spread far and wide, with the only clusters in such small cities as Bozeman, Billings, Butte, and Missoula, and in the Flathead Valley. Brown estimated that about 40 garden centers account for 90% of the retail plant sales in the state. But with the retailers scattered over such a vast area, large wholesalers based outside the region have trouble giving them the just-in-time delivery they require.

A regional supplier like Glacier Nursery, Brown reasoned, could handle the kind of timely, economical deliveries of smaller quantities of plants that more distant growers simply could not match. To exploit that advantage, he intended to market his products throughout the entire growing season -- March to November. The big outfits tended to sharply curtail their shipments to the sparsely populated western states after the spring surge.

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