Picture This

Bissett Nursery, a three-generation family business in a mostly unautomated industry, learned how to use up-to-date technology to make itself indispensable to its customers

Jay Ratto was feeling desperate. the landscape contractor had been hit hard by the recession, and he'd watched his high-end residential sales dwindle as Long Island homeowners became more demanding and more tightfisted. It was the the spring of 1991, and two prospective customers were giving him a particularly hard time. He'd shown them other jobs he had done, recommended plants and shrubs at nurseries and in books, and walked them through blueprints drawn by his top-notch design staff. "But they were still really hesitant," recalls Ratto. "They were having a hard time envisioning everything." Ratto found himself spending time and money redrawing blueprints in what was starting to seem a futile attempt to woo those customers. "The hell with it," he finally said. "I'm tired of redrawing."

He'd reached the point where he was willing to try anything. Jim Vazzana, design consultant for Bissett Nursery Corp., in Holtsville, N.Y., had been "all over me like a cheap suit" to try his new computer-imaging service, says Ratto. "But I was stubborn." Vazzana had explained that he would take a picture of a prospect's house, scan it into his computer, and, selecting from his custom-built database of more than 4,000 images, produce a "rendering" of the property as it would look if professionally landscaped. Ratto, though still skeptical, decided to work with Vazzana to create computer-generated pictures that showed the two prospects' houses completely landscaped. As it turned out, the clients "were completely wowed," says Ratto. He won both jobs -- worth about $75,000 total -- and became a dedicated convert to imaging.

Over the past two years, Ratto has more than tripled his residential sales (from $150,000 to $600,000), has increased his average sale by at least 10%, and has eschewed blueprints in favor of imaging as a marketing tool. "I buy a lot more from Bissett now," says Ratto. "We do an image, and then we put together a plant list to work within the client's budget. We have a much better relationship than we had in the past." And for Bissett Nursery, that was the idea all along.

Jimmy Bissett, 30, estimates that the company's computer-imaging technology, in only two years, has generated about $7.5 million in additional sales for his customers, 75% of whom are small contractors like Ratto. About $3 million of that new business went back to Bissett Nursery, a $15-million to $20-million rewholesaler of nursery materials, hard goods, and lumber. Computer-imaging technology is a service that keeps customers loyal, and it has given Bissett a competitive edge in an unkind economy.

Only 10 years ago computers and other modern office technologies were as foreign to Jimmy, the company's vice-president, and his father, Jim Bissett Jr., as they were to just about everyone else in the nursery business. In fact, Jim, who still owns the company, was downright distrustful of the new equipment. He had seen others in his industry attempt to automate and "fail miserably." He and his grandfather had started out as roadside peddlers 30 years ago, and they'd grown the business into one of the largest horticultural rewholesalers on the East Coast by getting their hands dirty, not by punching keyboards.

But in the early 1980s things began to unravel. The Long Island construction frenzy had fueled tremendous growth. From 1984 to 1985 the Bissetts' sales grew from $6 million to $10 million, but Jim and Jimmy were still running the nursery as if it were a mom-and-pop operation. Invoices were still written by hand, bookkeeping often ran a full month behind day-to-day operations, receivables averaged 60 to 90 days, and inventory control was pretty much a joke. "Every morning Jimmy and I would ride through the nursery and make mental notes of the stock," recalls Jim. "We never even got out of the truck to count." But the worst was, "the line of customers was out the door," he says. "Sometimes they had to wait for their invoices for 25 minutes after their trucks were loaded." Since Bissett was one of the few nurseries that offered one-stop shopping for landscape contractors, "customers were forced to come here," says Jim. "But they might have chosen to go elsewhere if they could have. We just weren't serving them properly."

Jimmy -- who was then working in the yard, waiting on customers -- and Jim knew the construction boom wouldn't last forever, and the company was in danger of losing business when the building pace slowed down. The Bissetts realized they had to regain control. And Jimmy had a vision for the nursery. He wanted the company to grow, with a focus on vertical integration, but he didn't want to incur huge labor costs. "I knew what my goals were, and I wanted to find the quickest way to get there," he says. As it happened, the "quickest way" was through Bob Pospischil, Jimmy's brother-in-law, who was then a marine fighter pilot based in California. The former Top Gun flight instructor was comfortable with the intricacies of both technology and finance, and the intuitive, often impulsive nurserymen hoped Pospischil would be their rock. He agreed to sign on as chief financial officer in August 1985.

Pospischil spent his first two months at the company as a student, making his way through buying, sales, shipping, customer service, and accounting. "I wanted to see how everything was integrated," he says. "My goal was not to change the business but to use technology to meet the business's needs." His priority, he quickly discovered, was to streamline order entry and inventory control -- functions that had grown far beyond the company's current capabilities. "Bob and I had quite a few arguments," Jim recalls. "I knew we needed to computerize, but I just wasn't willing to accept that we could do it." With Pospischil's analysis, however, Jim finally had to admit that computerization looked like the only solution to his most pressing problems. The company had reached its productivity limit -- four order takers could write no more than 200 invoices a day. Period.