From Seed To Shade

Growing vertical...

There is a tree farm that I had the pleasure to work with for several years.

Once upon a time a man had a landscaping company. He started by mowing yards by himself, which grew to several crews, which then grew to landscape maintenance. As he and his team did good work and earned the trust of his customers, he started getting requests to do bigger and bigger landscape projects, eventually getting into tree planting as well.

It turns out that trees are a whole different ballgame, but he was up for the challenge.

As he kept saying “yes” to more tree jobs, he grew frustrated with the lack of quality and service in the tree industry.

As he looked into it, he realized that his “tree farms” were really retail lots that were buying trees from actual farms that were growing them.

So what did he do? He started a tree retail company, naturally!

He saw an opportunity to shine in an industry where poor service was commonplace. And it worked.

At a certain point he found frustration though, where his tree farm suppliers were overpromising and under-delivering to the retail lots, which trickled down throughout the entire ecosystem all the way to the homeowner’s experience.

He knew that building a true ground-up tree farm was his destiny.

After finding the right land, he began planting trees for the future.

That’s when he found yet another broken piece to the system, which was the seed market.

The biggest retailers get first choice to the seeds, leaving little guys like him to sort through the leftovers.

Trees are a slow game, but over the decades he built the entire supply chain and now offers the highest quality seeds and the best trees.

Vertical integration led to market domination in their corner of the world.

This is from Trail 11 of Profit Hiker: 11 Trails to gain lasting elevation in your business. Find the book right here and the program over there.