Will power

In December 2022, Gardener’s Supply Co. suddenly lost its founder and visionary leader, Will Raap. And at the memorial service to celebrate his life, employees wore buttons featuring his smiling face and the words “This is Will” inscribed along the bottom.

The buttons, a keepsake commemorating Gardener’s 2009 transition to 100% employee ownership, were more than just a means to honor and thank Raap. Instead, they symbolized his most important legacy, that every employee there was a “Will,” too, and that they each continued to carry on his mission.

Raap was an amazing leader and had a particular knack for seeing his guiding principles — that people could be a force for good and could improve the world through gardening — in his employees, says CEO and President Cindy Turcot, who has been with the company since the very beginning and rose through the ranks thanks to Raap’s guidance and mentoring.

“We all carry Will’s soul inside of us, that we’re more than just a company trying to make money,” Turcot says of the Burlington, Vermont-based garden center, with outlets in Williston, Vermont, Lebanon and Greenland, New Hampshire, and Hadley, Massachusetts. “We’re the classic three legs of the stool — people, planet, profit. And we really believe you must have all of them, and they should be equal lengths. You can’t do what you want to do if you don’t have profit, but you want to ensure we have a culture of people who want to be here … and that we’re out in the community involved in volunteer programs and making an impact.”

And from his worldview, Raap forged a scrappy corporate culture that has not only endured for nearly 40 years but is arguably responsible for many of the successes it enjoys today and for sustaining Gardener’s viability into the future.

Core culture

Since its inception as a mail-order company in 1983 and its subsequent evolution under Raap’s leadership as a garden supply retail outlet, Gardener’s has always been a progressive and innovative company. Never shy to buck entrepreneurial norms, Gardener’s history is rich with examples of how Raap — whose management philosophy was often ahead of its time — was always eager to shake things up a bit and buck convention. Take, for example:

• From the beginning, a focus on making gardening accessible to everyone, including enabling products for the aging and physically challenged.
• Practicing “random acts of gardening” by delivering blooming containers to local nonprofits and nurturing company farms to grow food in support of local food banks and hunger-relief organizations.
• Maintaining an Earth-first mindset that included establishing composting operations, restoring hundreds of acres of the Intervale floodplain, and focusing on locally sourced farming and agriculture, including donating 8% of its profits to support community gardening efforts.
• Sounding the alarm for greater pollinator protection, choosing organic plant-protection practices instead of chemicals, and taking a stance against GMO foods years before this became socially in vogue.
• “These were all things that were important to Will — the ownership culture, organic gardening, doing right by the Earth,” says Pat Pearsall, Gardener’s retail operations director, who has been with the company for nearly two decades. “They were his guiding principles. So, therefore, those became our guiding principles, and we hired people who valued those things and continue to do so today.”

Another hallmark of Gardener’s culture is collaboration. “We collaborate across departments, across stores and across divisions,” Pearsall says. “Sometimes to our detriment because it gets so many people involved. But [collaboration] is kind of our calling card.”

The company’s employee stock ownership program (ESOP) is the glue that binds Gardener’s culture, and together they’re the components that make it stand out from competitors. Turcot remembers the recent hiring of a new director of distribution, a transplant from the manufacturing sector. During a Leadership Team meeting after he’d been with Gardener’s for a few months, the new director commented that in manufacturing, most employees dreaded the busy season, including its hectic schedule and frantic pace. However, he was shocked — culture-shocked, if you will — by what he’d observed from Gardener’s employees.

“When it got busy, everyone became cheerleaders,” she says. “In fact, people can’t wait for the busy season. They get excited — psyched — for it because they hate when things are slow.

“They know what it means for us to be busy,” Turcot adds. “And from an ESOP standpoint, every single person knows what they need to do to help us be successful. What [the director of distribution] observed validated [the culture] because it was somebody from the outside coming in and seeing this firsthand.”

Acquisition mode

From its modest origins as a catalog-based gardening supply operation, the company — known officially as America’s Gardening Resource Inc. — now operates five retail locations. Its long-term business strategy is to become a true omnichannel garden center. This customer-centric integrated approach provides a unified and consistent experience, whether clients shop at a physical store or online through the company’s website or an app.

Currently, Gardener’s two core sources for growth are online sales and acquisition. The most recent acquisition is the 2023 addition of the Greenland location, adding to an expanding footprint that reaches northern Massachusetts and southern Maine.

Gardener’s strategy is to not enter a market for the sake of being there and to grab market share. Instead, they’re looking for partners with solid principles, long-term customer relationships and a commitment to their home communities. So, in a way, Gardener’s seeks versions of themselves to acquire. A deal is often a year or two in the making to foster relationship building and to evaluate whether an acquisition is the right fit for both parties.

While each acquisition provides Gardener’s a strategic foothold in a new market, the real asset is the people gained in the deal. Again, it’s all about building and strengthening culture.

“Those employees are super important to our business,” Pearsall says. “We gain a lot of knowledge every time we acquire a garden center, and there are always super smart garden center people. We may think we’re sophisticated, but there are always things they do better than we do that we can then incorporate and bring to our other garden centers.”

For example, Gardener’s recently adopted marketing concepts and in-store signage best practices from its acquisitions and incorporated technology to better communicate with a broader array of customers. “Every facility is different, but we all do the same work,” Pearsall explains. “So somebody figured out how to do something really well at one facility because they were forced to because that facility was built a certain way. But we can look at that [process or procedure] and see a way to leverage that at all our locations.”

Gardener’s history is rich with people taking risks, following their guts and trying new ideas and concepts. A significant component of a successful acquisition is to convey that their thoughts, ideas, and suggestions — no matter how outside the box — are always welcome.

“The challenge I run into often is getting new teammates to understand that they’re part of something larger,” Pearsall says. “Hey, let’s share information. Maybe it works or doesn’t, but at least we tried. It’s just not something folks are used to, and you really must encourage it, which has always been a big part of our culture.”

Buying & selling

Another component of Gardener’s recent success has been gaining a better understanding of its inventory, especially as it expands into new markets. If Gardener’s wants to become a genuine omnichannel company, Pearsall says it must have excellent inventory control and visibility for its customers. To better achieve this, Gardener’s has invested in a new point-of-sale (POS) system and mobile inventory equipment that have afforded greater flexibility while simplifying processes across its various teams and locations.

“We’ve placed Wi-Fi canopies in all of our locations so that we can operate with our technology on the move, which is something I believe garden centers just need to do,” Pearsall says. “One of the things holding the industry back is the lack of technology from all of our partners and vendors that [prohibit] you from having your system updated in real-time.”

One of the most significant challenges for Gardener’s — and the industry — is to abandon old ways of doing business and innovate in ways that allow for greater flexibility and success. And like inventory control, Pearsall says creating and retaining a strong buying team has been critical, especially during its recent acquisitions, when it’s entering new markets and plans to integrate new product offerings.

Again, success is rooted in Gardener’s culture. And the buying team is led by Zoe Wainer, a veteran employee whom Pearsall says is simply a “rock star” of her profession. “I’ve never met anyone in our industry who has the horticulture knowledge, the operations and logistics knowledge, the merchandising knowledge, and sense of style that Zoe does,” he says. “She just pulls it all together.”

So, as Gardener’s enters new markets, all these components — culture, inventory control, buying proficiency — work together to increase the odds for a successful and seamless transition with both employees and the customer base.

“You’re going into a new market, and you’re going to sell different items than you do in other markets,” Pearsall says. “We’re really quite good at testing and figuring out — based on what we know from the prior owners and what our offer is — how we can change an offer and continue to tweak it so that it serves the customer while delivering our products [to them] and not immediately removing things that they may be brand loyal to but don’t necessarily align with our [eco-centric, earth-first] beliefs and principles.”

The future

Like many businesses, Gardener’s heads down its path challenged by economic conditions, wrestling with technology integration and getting its collective head around customer wants and needs while maintaining its core principles and managing through a variety of labor issues, such as hiring and retention, as well as the unique issue of long-term employee turnover. For example, after nearly 40 years with the company, Turcot will step down as CEO in late July. Gardener’s is in capable hands, though, and the reins will be passed on to Rebecca Gray, executive vice president of direct/merchandising & marketing, who has been with the company for the last five years and been prepped for succession.

But as it grows and expands, Gardener’s leadership realizes the company must never compromise or lose the unique culture its founder Will Raap nurtured and grew so many years ago. Turcot is reminded of a conversation with an executive from another garden center who talked about their struggles with growth and how they failed to acculturate new employees, whether through hires or acquisitions. As a result, the company’s culture slowly withered away.

“He said, in the end, if you lose your soul, then who are you?” Turcot says. “I was just really moved by this, that as we grow, how do we know we haven’t lost who we are.”

So, they created The Soul of AGR, a document outlining all of the characteristics essential to Gardener’s culture. It’s used only during orientations, which are done twice a year. But this allows new employees to be exposed to Gardener’s culture and report unbiasedly on whether the company is still adhering to its principles and is doing an adequate job acculturating those ideals.

“We have to always keep that in mind … how do we be the best we can be,” Turcot says. “We will change, but we will evolve. And we will figure out how to keep the soul of who we are wherever we are.”

Mike Zawacki is a Cleveland-based writer who has written about various aspects of the green industry for nearly two decades.