In this episode, host Bill Calkins is joined by Tom Van Wingerden from Van Wingerden Greenhouses in Blaine, Washington, to discuss a business angle that isn’t new but like many things these days, rapidly-evolving tools and technology are increasingly available to take it to the next level.

Tom is Sales Director at Van Wingerden Greenhouses in Blaine, Washington one of the 100 largest greenhouses in North America and a gold supplier for Ball Seed. He has a degree in business management, is a proud father of four and was a blueberry farmer in the past. Tom is an outside-the-box thinker who’s always looking for ways to do bigger things with fewer resources. That comes across loud and clear in this podcast.

The topic is fundraisers—which can be a love-hate topic for many and although some greenhouses businesses have found success with fundraisers over the years, many have not and thus given up the opportunity to create a profit center working with local organizations who are hungry for plants and ways to leverage plant sales to fund projects.

Of course, greenhouses need to make money from these efforts because they require plenty of work but what Tom’s team has developed has more than tripled the company’s fundraiser sales while requiring fewer people to manage the segment.

This isn’t just an episode about how Tom and the Van Wingerden team have grown sales. They actually developed a software system called PlantBuy.com that’s now available for other greenhouses who want to streamline the fundraiser process. It’s a system developed specifically for the commercial horticulture industry that could (in the future) result in a network of greenhouses across the country fulfilling orders from organizations who want to raise money through plant sales.

In the episode, Tom and Bill discuss the overall opportunity for fundraiser business, what is required by greenhouses and the organizations they partner with, how plantbuy.com simplifies marketing, ordering and fulfillment, as well as best practices Van Wingerden Greenhouses has picked up over the past 20+ years supplying fundraisers of all shapes and sizes. If you also have a garden center operation (like they do), the marketing potential alone might be worth the effort!

Resources:

Learn more about PlantBuy: www.plantbuy.com

Book a demo: https://www.plantbuy.com/schedule-a-demo/

A Million Dollar Idea ft. Tom Van Wingerden