Opportunity knocks

Harrell’s surprised many recently when they jumped into the LCO market … predictably, with both feet. Building on its foundation of turf and ornamental products in Indiana and Florida, Harrell’s added coverage of the southeastern U.S. in its expansion of the turf and landscape division.

The company placed territory managers in six states: Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and parts of the Gulf Coast, and appointed a dedicated technical adviser for that division.

We caught up with Jack Harrell for his first major interview to talk about the company’s growth, his management philosophy and how he’s become the king of Facebook among turf distributors.

Give me the “elevator version” of your company today. We’re a family company that sells directly to the golf course, ornamental/nursery and landscape markets. We manufacture our own fertilizer and represent major pesticide manufacturers. If you draw a line from Texas north to Canada, we cover everything to the right of that in some fashion in those three main markets. The vast majority of that is covered by our reps and our trucks. We have two fertilizer plants – one in Lakeland, Fla., and one Sylacauga, Ala. We also formulate Polyon.

That was a damned good elevator speech! Now tell us the 30-second version of your history. We were a Florida-based small golf distributor and we also covered Sea Island, Biloxi and a few other places. We first started doing business with the Pursells in the mid 1980s, working with Jim, David and Tim Orton. We worked with them in ’90-’91 to bring Polyon to the golf market. We got into the nursery/ornamentals business with Polyon in the mid ’90s. In 2000 we made the decision to, in our vernacular, go north. We broke ground on the Sylacauga (plant) site. At the end of 2001, we bought Willbrough. We ended up owning three plants for a while. When Simplot decided to retrench and move back west, we saw that as a big opportunity. Obviously we’ve done a couple of other acquisitions since then and expanded territories a little, too.

How big is the company now? We don’t normally give out dollars and cents figures. We have about 275 employees now and we produce 60,000 tons of fertilizer annually. That’s not huge in some markets, but it is in our world.

You seemed to come out of the recession stronger, which is remarkable considering how hard it hit both the golf and ornamentals market. We dipped about 15 percent in 08-09 against a market drop of 40-50 percent. Our people really are our greatest asset. As a whole we have the best team in our industry. They worked together. At the beginning of the year, I laughingly told them that in 2009 I had one goal: to be in business at the end of the next year. Everyone really got into it and it was actually kind of fun. Guys pulled together and it was a great team effort.

We’d spent 10 years buying companies and growing and working like crazy and it took that same effort to ‘save our way to prosperity’ in one year. We laid a few people off, but it also came down to blocking and tackling. We reduced inventories dramatically and stopped doing things we didn’t need to do. The sky wasn’t falling and we had great relationships between our guys and the end users. We actually did come out of it stronger because of the intense effort.

Why did you decide that now was the right time to move into the landscape side? I don’t know that we’ve ever done a bunch of marketing analysis and made decisions based on how the market was doing. We had played with it in the past but decided to get serious about it, particularly since our bread-and-butter (golf) isn’t likely to grow anytime soon. That’s when I sat down with Matt and we decided to do it. It’s another opportunistic move, not some big master plan.

This is a marathon – not a sprint. It was all about getting the right people and looking at this as a long-term play. In 10 to 15 years from now it ought to be at the same level as the rest of our business. Polyon, long term, will be good in that market, too. The days of multiple applications are coming to an end.

And candidly, we didn’t see anybody else that was being all that successful. Lesco was king of the hill in that market but still losing money thanks to their infrastructure. That’s not a shot at them … I didn’t know how to attack it (the LCO market) either. They had all those service centers and that didn’t seem to help, so I got to watch and learn from them. We figure that we have infrastructure, too – warehouses, trucks, etc. – but we just need to go do it the Harrell’s way.

What are the LCOs saying so far? The early results are that customers like it and we have a team of quality people with good relationships. At the end of the day, if we don’t make our customer successful we’ve screwed up. In that market, it’s about their ability to keep customers. All three sectors have different dynamics. Golf courses need to look good, ornamental growers need to get the most for their crops and, in lawn care, it’s all about retention – eliminating churn.

You’ve launched your own products in a couple of key segments like wetting agents. How do you balance an opportunistic approach to that “own brand” philosophy with supplier relationships? We have great relationships with Bayer, Syngenta, Dow, PBI/Gordon, BASF and a bunch of others. In that world, we are 95 percent branded. I don’t see us changing that. That’s not on our horizon.

We are a branded company. We had the opportunity to do our own branding in a segment that was pretty splintered, so we don’t look at it that same way.

We’re probably the only company in the east – when you look at Harrell’s, JDL, Agrium Direct and Helena – we’re pretty much the only company that leads with brands. That’s one of the big things that has grown our business in spite of everything.

Okay, you’re all about opportunism … how about the opportunity to go national? I don’t know. Last year was our 70th anniversary in business and I’m the third generation of my family running it. So I gave a talk at our national meeting in December about what we’d do in the next 70 years. Going west – or going national – was one of the things on that list. That said, there’s absolutely no timetable to do it. It would be like everything else we’ve done: opportunistic. There’s nothing specific driving that, but most of the golf courses are in our current territory. I’m not saying that if somebody called me today and there was an opportunity in California, I wouldn’t listen. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were there in 10 years but we have to do it our way.

What’s the secret to the growth? We’re still family-owned and pretty nimble. We can jump on opportunities pretty quickly. The second thing is that if you don’t grow, you plateau. I’m always looking for ways to grow our company, but do it on the top line, the bottom line … the whole nine yards. But we don’t want to get too far afield of what we do best. Boring is beautiful.

Our philosophy is, ‘Be nimble and find ways to grow the business.’ That’s what drove the decision to get into the landscape and lawncare business more heavily. We’d always treated it as an appendage to golf, but as we were looking at ways to grow, it seemed logical. Matt Shook and Greg Nichols were managing our business in a north and south geographic territory set up. So, we quit being geography-specific and got market-specific.

So now, Greg has golf and Matt has a full-fledged turf and landscape business. Matt is very well thought of inside and outside our company. It speaks volumes about how important this is to us that we put Matt in charge of it.

How does it feel to be the king of social media in turf distribution? (Laughs) I am truly inept at all things technological, but I have a great team. Alex Barcia has been our IT lead for years. Back in about 2003, I told him I just don’t understand all this tech stuff. I just want to make sure we’re the most tech-savvy company in the industry. His new title is chief innovations officer and I give him pretty free rein … including to make me look like I know what I’m doing on Facebook.

The author is publisher and editorial director of Golf Course Industry.