What rewholesalers wish you knew

Landscapers who are understanding, informed and flexible will have a better relationship with rewholesalers.Whether you already have a stellar relationship with your rewholesaler or not, there’s always room for improvement and it would behoove more landscape contractors to strengthen that working partnership. The key to making the relationship work? “Give and take,” says Ben Woods, project manager, Site Structures Landscape in Maine. Woods says Site Structures has a good relationship with the several nurseries they work with, and that success has a lot to do with flexibility – on both ends.

“Certain challenges come up and you have to accept that,” Woods says. “We run into situations where orders do change last minute. I may need to call the nursery after an order has already been loaded to tell them materials have been cut or added. They are understanding, and we try to be too. If a plant gets damaged during transport, we try to be patient and they always do their best to replace the item quickly. With that sort of give and take you develop a stronger relationship. It’s about understanding that, in the end, we’re all striving for the same thing – a happy client.”

Here are some things rewholesalers wish their customers knew.
 

Understand availability.
When it comes to crop availability, rewholesalers say they wish landscapers could see things from their side of the spectrum when something isn’t available. “Even the very best growers, who really have it down pat, know it’s difficult to keep a seamless inventory at all times,” says Steve Taber, owner and operator of Southwest Wholesale Nursery in Carrollton, Texas. “As a rewholesaler, we’ll take one basic crop and may need six to 10 vendors just to keep a seamless inventory at the best possible quality.”

Taber says he wishes landscapers better understood what goes into product availability. “Growers sometimes do everything they can and spend years on a crop only to have a catastrophe knock it down,” he says. “Our product doesn’t run off a manufacturing wheel and it’s not like you’re ordering bricks or televisions. Our product has required a grower to start working on it as long as eight years ago and sometimes landscapers just walk in and say ‘Where is it?’ We’d love for them to have a better understanding of crop cycles and availability.”
 

Be more flexible.
In understanding that certain plants might not always be available, rewholesalers wish their clients would also be a little more flexible. “If you’re looking to do a job and maybe one or two of the plants may not be exactly what you specified, try to be a little flexible,” says Jan Jansen, co-owner of EP Jansen Nursery, in Florida, N.Y. “If you can’t be a little bit flexible, you’re going to waste time running around,” Jansen says. “Almost 99 percent of the time we can fulfill your request, so be a little flexible if we have to change something slightly.”

Taber says, “There are designers who can design a plan with terms like ‘small to medium shrubs’ or ‘large flowering trees.’ A general description leaves them open to walk into our nursery and cherry-pick what looks good. But somebody who says ‘tassel fern, three gallon’ is really pigeon-holing themselves in a corner if they can’t come up with that exact product. You don’t always know what the possibilities are until you come in to the nursery. You’re actually doing your client a better service by leaving it a little open and getting them what’s the best-looking at that time.”
 

Let us educate you.
With that flexibility in mind, Jansen says he wishes more landscapers would let him introduce them to some new things. “A lot of times they get stuck in a rut and keep using the same plants,” he says. “We’d like it if landscapers would keep an open mind and let us show them some of the beautiful options they might not know about.”

Nurseries are the real experts in plant material and it could only help to use that to your benefit. “We’d like to invite landscapers to spend some time walking around the nursery,” says Jansen. “We can explain what some of the newer options are, and educate them on what’s out there.”
 

Don’t cry wolf.
Greg Ammon, president of Ammon Wholesale Nursery in Kentucky, says it can be frustrating when a client calls with an “emergency,” and says they need supplies immediately only to wait weeks to actually come in. “They’ll tell us they absolutely have to have it right away, so we drop everything to make sure we get it ready for them,” says Ammon. “Maybe we have to dig it up. Then they’ll wait two weeks before they even come pick it up.”

Ammon says they’re happy to help customers with the occasional “emergency” and that they understand last-minute orders do come up. But don’t take advantage of the situation as it can be frustrating and potentially hurt the rewholesaler/landscaper partnership.
 

Look at the big picture.
Jansen says one of his pet peeves is when a landscaper installs trees that are ultimately going to be too large for the property. “Everybody is hot on these Heritage River Birches right now, but they get very large,” he says. He wants landscapers to think a few years into the future.

Rick Christensen, landscape division manager for Teufel Nursery in Portland, Ore., agrees. “We have all seen designs that call for plants to be installed much too close for their ultimate growth size,” he says.

“Not only is this a waste of money, but if not corrected by removing some of the plants later on, there will be an unhealthy situation for the plants. Your wholesale production nursery is your best source of information on the ultimate growth size of plants.”

Check your specifications.
“Another classic issue we see is when plant material is either not correctly specified or the installation landscape contractor is not aware of specifications that impact whether plants may or may not be accepted on a project,” Christensen says.

“The best example is trees installed along a pedestrian corridor. They need to be branching at a four to six feet height or they will be rejected during inspection. Unfortunately, if this information is not shared with the nursery, it is possible for wrong trees to be provided, resulting in extra handling, shipping, and perhaps installation costs.”

The author is a frequent contributor to Lawn & Landscape.