Finally, with a tiny operation, Brown believed he could provide trees of a consistently high quality. With meticulous tending, they would have the kind of uniform branching and sturdy, finished appearance that the huge nurseries, growing and shipping millions of plants, are hard pressed to provide.
Given the advantages of quality, convenience, and service, Brown thought his financial expectations were reasonable. He estimated that the wholesale market for trees and shrubs was $2 million to $3 million in Montana. He figured he'd need only a small piece of the action to gross his target of $250,000. With a net profit of 10% to 15%, he would attain an income approximating what he'd make running a farm for someone else. And $35,000 or so goes a long way in a region where a house on five acres can be had for as little as $60,000.
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Among Brown's problems at the outset was deciding what to plant. How could he know what the market would want two or three years down the road? Tastes and fashions do change, even in landscaping. To minimize the risks, his first planting of 500 trees represented numerous varieties -- a conservative step. Then in 1984 he suffered his first major setback. He and Desi had tired of hauling five-gallon buckets of water several hundred yards from the nearby stream to irrigate the crop, so Brown installed an overhead irrigation system and watered and fertilized "like crazy" -- just as he had in Oregon, where he'd run a nursery of several hundred acres. What he didn't yet realize was that his rich, loamy soil retained water like a sponge. His trees grew too fast, and since they didn't stop their year's growth in time for winter, they suffered greatly from the cold.
The future looked dismal. Brown's overzealousness had killed off half of his trees. "My projections were that three years into it we'd start showing some money," he says. "But instead this was the deepest dang dark hole I'd ever seen, sucking up bucks as fast as we could throw them at it." In 1985, when Brown managed to sell 10 trees locally, Glacier Nursery grossed $195.
He hung on grimly with a megadose of sweat equity. He still couldn't afford much help, just a few high school kids on weekends. When he needed to open up additional acreage, he hired a local farmer with a tractor and a plow.
In addition to his 40-hour weeks swinging an ax at the Christmas-tree farm, he and Desi worked evenings and weekends in the nursery. He taught himself some electrical skills, bought some used telephone wire, and installed an electrified fence to keep out the deer. And when someone pointed out that his soil was ideal for shrubs, he planted those, too -- spirea, potentilla, dogwood, forsythia, cotoneaster, and others. They could be ready for market in two years, a shorter horizon than most of the trees offered.
"The hardest thing was the exhaustion, the endless hours, being here all the time," Desi says. "And the sun. And the dust. Before we moved the trailer here, you had no place to wash up or go to the bathroom. I was so beat I'd go to work on Monday to rest."
* * *
Brown couldn't afford to ease up. As he tilled more ground and cultivated more plants, he had to start thinking about sales. As a start-up, he couldn't provide the kind of selection the big growers offered, and he would have to persuade buyers with stable suppliers to take a chance on an unknown nursery.
Early on, Brown faced the issue of discounts. He had a pricing strategy in mind, of course. He intended to enter at 10% or so below market level, bring customers up to market price in two years, and finally exceed the going rate by 5% to 10% after he had won their loyalty and hooked them on his superior quality and service. Volume discounts ranging from 3% to 8% would keep him competitive, he thought, and a 2% discount for payment in full within 10 days would expedite cash flow. All plants would be backed by a generous guarantee.
But in dealing with a newcomer to the field, buyers wanted even better terms. "That was self-defeating," Brown explains. "I had to figure out how to make a living in a sparsely populated area and not cut my margins to absolutely nothing just to sell the product. That's when I realized I'd have to expand. So I began to move into Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon."
That was a huge commitment of time and energy, since Brown himself was doing all the selling, but customers responded well to that. The nursery field is an informal, close-knit one with lots of deals done on handshakes and friendships. A winning personality is a valuable asset, and Brown is "one of the people in the industry who's really enjoyable to work with," says Paul Lother, sales manager for J. Frank Schmidt & Son Co., which is both a competitor and supplier of Glacier Nursery's.
But first Brown had to get his foot in the door, and for that he employed a simple three-step, three-year strategy. In the first year, he wanted just to get acquainted with a potential customer. His goal in year two was to obtain a token order. By the third year, Brown says, he wanted to have a solid business relationship in place.
A case in point is Fort Collins Nursery Inc., a $1.75-million garden center in Colorado. Brown met its co-owner Gary Epstein at a trade show. He found him to be a nice guy but a hard sell. "He already had suppliers and no incentive to buy from me," Brown says. "But we sent him some free samples -- three species of bare-root shrubs, 10 of each -- about $100 worth of plants."
Brown stuck them in burlap sacks and shipped them UPS. He called later to see how Epstein liked them. They looked good, Epstein said -- they were quality plants. The following June, on a sales swing through Colorado, Brown stopped by Fort Collins Nursery to make sure the shrubs had filled out in the spring. "I was doing this with a half dozen people a year," Brown says. "Samples, phone calls, a follow-up visit." The next year Epstein ordered about 150 bare-root shrubs from Glacier Nursery. The year after that he wanted some 1,000 plants, $2,000 worth.
