Feeding a need

Ever eat at Art’s Station Deli? It was an old family shop tucked in a corner of northeast Philadelphia. Closed its doors for good just about 20 years ago now, but it filled up bellies in the neighborhood every day for a quarter of a century with the best ham and turkey and corned beef – with big, beautiful sandwiches, with whole meals wrapped up in paper. Art Gasper ran the place. His sons Art and Robert took over after he died. To hear folks tell it now, it was a good place to eat.

Only problem was, after a couple of years wrapping up those meals in paper, Robert Gasper had a hunch he wanted to do something else with the rest of his life. He had already worked for years in the airline industry. That was the first act of his professional life. Now here he was, smack in the middle of the second act, his days spent in the deli. All great lives unfold in three acts. Right?

Naturally, Gasper turned to the landscape industry to write his third act.

“I was looking for a career change,” Gasper says, “and that was my hobby.”

Setting up shop
Gasper Landscape uses vignettes to show customers examples of finished products. Gasper split the next four years between the back of the deli and in backyards across eastern Pennsylvania. In 1989, he left his brother in control of the deli and turned his attention to his landscape business, which today has evolved into Gasper Landscape.

The business specializes in bringing together its garden and landscape design departments to plan and install any project its customers or its team can imagine.

The efficiency of Gasper Landscape is in the fact that the two departments work together seamlessly – and have for years, even when they were located in separate buildings a mile from each other in Richboro, Pa., a suburb about 40 minutes north of Philadelphia. Since Gasper relocated the garden department to the same building as the landscape design department in 2005, the collaboration has been even more impressive.

When a customer walks in, depending on where their eyes turn and their attention leads, either a garden department specialist in the nursery or a landscape design specialist will talk with them first. If it’s clear they need something more, Gasper says, the specialists will walk with them to the other department. Along the way, the customer can take a look at what Gasper and his roughly 80 employees refer to as vignettes – finished products across the grounds that show how the integration of plants, hardscapes and other installations might look when finished.

“When we design a project, we often walk people through the nursery to show them what we intend to put in,” says John Schweizer, senior sales director. “As they walk through, some other plants might catch their eye and they might inquire about another type of tree or whether they can replace something we’ve designed for them or implement something else.

“Most clients don’t have a real knowledgeable background of all the plant varieties that are available, so walking them through not only shows them what the projects look like, but also shows them what else is available. Having the retail facility here is just a great benefit to show them all the options that are available to them.”

After that initial walk through the grounds and conversation about backyard ideas, the company will schedule an appointment for one of its sales designers to meet with the customer at their home. That’s when the sales designer gathers general information, shoots photos and starts to plan the first draft of what will wind up in that yard.

Then, the sales designer will work with an in-house designer to develop a plan and a schedule for the project, then they’ll talk again with the customer, this time back on the grounds. “And that’s really critical,” Gasper says. “We have a presentation room where we put our designs up on a large screen, we show them the plans and, if required, we’ll show them a 3D plan of the project. After the presentation, we can take them out to the nursery and show them all the landscape and planting material, and all the hardscape material.”

Customers can see the plans for their project on paper, on screen and in the flesh – or leaves – all in five minutes, all without walking more than a couple hundred yards.

“We don’t have to send our clients somewhere else anymore to look at the plants and the furniture,” says Mary Bowe, who has worked on the in-house design team since 1996. “The possibilities of what we can do have just grown exponentially. We used to be able to talk with clients about items – like a birdbath being a focal point in a garden – but we wouldn’t have any birdbaths we could show them. Now we can. We’re more efficient.”

Centralized growth
And no matter how many birdbaths – or anything else, for that matter – might pop up in a consultation and design, projects can be any size. Gasper Landscape handles projects as small as a day of planting and cost between $1,000 and $2,000. There are other projects that last every bit of a year and run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the crew on site every day, involved in every aspect of the installation.

“There are lots of companies that narrow themselves to one end of the spectrum,” Schweizer says. “We pride ourselves on being able to handle any kind of project our client might want.”

None of this was possible even five years ago, back before Gasper moved all departments to one location. Now, of course, just about anything is possible.

And it all makes sense, doesn’t it? The efficiency, the synergy, the relative ease for everybody involved. This might not be the exact image of what Gasper envisioned when he left the deli counter 21 years ago, but it fits – one department working seamlessly with another, just like salami or pastrami or tender slices of beef work seamlessly with a slice or two of cheese, some mustard and some horseradish between two slices of rye. The deli business seems to have so little in common with the landscape industry, but are they all that different?

Not to Robert Gasper.

“We did a good job,” Gasper says. He was talking about the deli. He might as well have been talking about his company. He has dozens of awards from the Pennsylvania Landscape and Nurserymen’s Association to prove it, the hundreds of quality recommendations, the hundreds of corresponding quality projects all around Philadelphia.

“We did do a very good job.”
 

The author is a freelance writer based in Cleveland.