As we hit the fourth quarter of 2018, now’s the time to recap your business’ annual performance, make year-end projections and set goals for the next fiscal year. But where do you start, and how do you best get an accurate picture of your performance? Let’s make a list you can follow for financial clarity.

The first task, and most obvious one, is to pull out your budget, sales reports and financial statements for the year. Wait — you don’t have a budget? Well, most people hate making budgets. There is this gray space between our ears that sometimes likes to get in the way of making the mental commitments required to set a budget. So, you’re probably not alone. Many owners and managers avoid setting budgets, fearing they can’t make realistic targets or adhere to setting numbers. If you’re a budget-avoider, rest assured that you don’t need to strictly adhere to a budget. Budgets are more often a moving target. It is good to create a budget with goals and sales targets, but it’s also important to cut yourself some slack when it comes to following it to the letter and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. Use your budget as a guide, not a rule book.

Now, gather your sales reports and financial statements. You do have sales reports, right?! Ok, if you don’t then go ahead and add that POS or accounting software upgrade to your 2019 to-do list immediately! Let’s crunch the numbers to assess your real net profit numbers against your budget targets. Are you hitting sales targets? How are your expenses? Then, based on your current financials, cash flow and season, let’s do a year-end forecast to ballpark where you expect to net end of year. Are you happy with this number?

The next step might be a little surprising for some of you, but ultimately, it’s why you’re in business: customer satisfaction. Part of evaluating your performance as a company is to gauge how you did, or didn’t, deliver on customer expectations. Do you send out a customer survey or solicit feedback from regular customers? Touch base with your sales managers to collect feedback from regular customers, and review customer service patterns that don’t align with your company goals and values.

Next, look at new customer acquisition rates. How many new customers did you attract and hire over the past year? Did they fit your target customer profile and what is their average sale? Balance this against your customer loss rate. Did you lose any long-term customers? Categorize whether these losses were good or bad for the business. Not every customer is an ideal customer.

Now it’s time to evaluate employee performance. How is the team doing overall, and how are individual employees performing? If you haven’t conducted performance reviews yet, now is a good time to get them scheduled before the end-of-year holidays. Your employee goals and your company’s goals need to be compatible. If you don’t conduct performance reviews and talk openly with your staff about their goals and ideas, it can put a serious dent in your profits.

You might avoid performance reviews because you don’t want to create the expectation of a pay increase in conjunction with the review. While I understand the concern, this approach will almost always fail you. You can split up performance reviews and compensation reviews and hold them at separate times of the year. One way or another, you need to give your staff feedback, listen to their ideas, and keep up with proper compensation and market value for each job role.

No business is an island. Like it or not, you operate in a fluid marketplace that can change quickly. That change will impact your budget, goals and projections. I know it’s challenging to spend the time to do market analysis — and it’s easy to operate in the microcosm of your own business — but keeping up with market trends is a must. In terms of product offerings and marketing, are you doing what you need to do to stay relevant and differentiate your brand? This is the time to look for underserved niches in the marketplace you could move into to increase profits — or achieve other business goals.

Looking for simple ways to turn this and next year’s business goals into reality? I’m going to make things easy for you: Just write it down! No, seriously. Simply writing down a goal and attaching a timeline to it makes a huge impact on accountability — both consciously and unconsciously. Once a target is in black and white, your brain logs it as a must-do. If you spend any time online on social media, you’ve no doubt seen ads or promoted posts for a bevy of organizational products and daily planners. Clearly there is an art to how to write things down, and every owner and manager will find different yet equally effective methods.

If you haven’t yet set aside time for your annual business review and employee reviews, get out that new planner and schedule the time for yourself and your staff. Your goals will thank you.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, business and marketing strategy, product development and branding, and content creation for green industry companies. lesliehalleck.com

Some growers have trouble finding young people to work for them. However, these educators are doing what they can to garner an interest and horticulture in children and young adults, while teaching them skills that would translate to the industry and other job markets.

Troy Badeaux is the ag science teacher and FFA adviser at East Ridge High School in Clermont, Florida. For the third year, he is teaching classes and advising activities that are focused on the production of ornamentals in a 30-by-50-foot greenhouse and a 30-by-50-foot shade house, produce in a 25,000-square-foot outdoor garden area and shrubs in a 6,000-square-foot outdoor area. Below, Badeaux answers some questions about how he teaches and motivates his students.

Greenhouse Management: Are your classes electives?

Troy Badeaux: It is an elective, but in some cases, it also counts as a science credit ... You get kids that get in there, and they don’t like it. You get kids in there that do like it. What we have in our school — and now it’s our whole district — is something called flex time scheduling. [It’s] basically a 45-minute period where the kids ... go where they need to go. I get anywhere from 20 to 60 kids who say, ‘Let me do this,’ and some of them are my students, and some of them aren’t. But what I’m finding is some of the ones that aren’t my students — they like what they do, they like the course and they end up taking my class the following year.

GM: Could you describe the work that they’re doing with the plants? Are they sticking cuttings and transplanting?

TB: I explain to them the definition of work protocol, if you will, and how different plants have different protocols — there are different things you’re going to do to propagate different plants. Sometimes different plants have the same protocol. You’ll do the same for a pentas that you will for a coleus. Then the Mexican Heather is like a little bit different, but you’ll do the same protocol for the Mexican Heather that you would the Mexican oregano. Sometimes with a Sansevieria or mother-in-law’s tongue, there’s a certain protocol for that. Some plants need a little woodier cutting than others. Let them stick a variety of that and see how that takes or doesn’t take.

GM: Have you had students go on and pursue this as a major, or find anything right out of high school, that would fit within the horticulture/agriculture/landscaping career path?

TB: I had a couple kids last year who were trying to go that way as a career path, so I at least tried to give them the experience. I’ve got one kid right now that’s got a part-time job in that specific area, so he’s able to take what he learns in class and bring it to the job site, and vice versa. Stuff that he does on the job site, he’s able to bring to the classroom ... I can say, ‘Look, this is what we’re doing.’ And then he helps pick up the pace. ... I just let the kids know, and I tell them, ‘What we’re trying to do is build a culture — build something that will always be a part of you, that you’ll always carry. You’ll always be a part of it, and it will always be a part of you.’ And those kids, man, once they started developing a little more self-motivation — not just the fact that they’re learning horticultural skills. They’re learning soft skills. They’re learning to take the initiative.

After 19 years in her role, Dottie Lankard, supervisor at Bluestreak Greenhouse at Neodesha Middle-High School in Neodesha, Kansas, has expanded her program to include four classes for 7th through 12th-graders. These include a greenhouse class that grows poinsettias, hanging baskets and other crops in a 30-by-60-foot greenhouse; an interiorscapes class that is focused on patio plants; a shop class that includes woodworking tasks; and an administrative class that selects plants, creates a master planting schedule and pays all the bills. Below, Lankard answers some questions about how she has made her program a success.

Greenhouse Management: Is the greenhouse class during both the spring and the fall semesters?

Dottie Lankard: Mostly, we just call it shop class in the fall because the classes look different in the fall semester than they do in the spring semester. ... I say it’s greenhouse students in the spring. And one of the things I do with those kids — once they get done planting seeds, plugs, cuttings, whatever we’re doing ... I teach the kids how to count change and how to run the cash register, and then start giving them those soft skills — how to wait on a customer, how to say, ‘hello,’ how to greet a customer. We spend probably anywhere from four to six weeks of that springtime when we’re done planting, when we’re waiting for everything to grow — that’s when they start learning how to run the registers so that when we’re open, [they’re ready]. The open days are really exciting. I’ve had as many as 60 to 75 people come into that little 30-by-60 greenhouse on opening day.

GM: Do you sell everything that is grown in the greenhouse?

DL: We sure do. I take the interior plants [that sit the entire school year in the commons area] home and baby them over the summertime. ... Everything in the greenhouse sells because I don’t want to have to water it over the summertime. We start fresh every year. Another thing we do is, when we’re done selling — and we only have like a two-week span where we sell to the public — we sit down and take a look at what sold well, what went first, what did we have to sell at half price. Since we went retail [10 years ago], we have been budget-free. We’re self-sustaining. The district doesn’t give me money to run this program.

GM: Is there anything else you’d like to add about this experience?

DL: It’s been great. I get some kids who have no idea they even like plants. They just thought it would be easier than the other alternative they had for class choices. Some students — not all — but sometimes I will get a student come through my program for six years. That’s where I see the most improvement. And that’s awesome. Not many teachers get to watch a student grow and change and mature like that.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Leora Radetsky’s background is in lighting research with a non-horticulture (or even horticulture-adjacent) focus; she has been at the Lighting Research Center (LRC) (lrc.rpi.edu) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for more than a decade. Dr. Jaimin Patel, meanwhile, is a plant pathologist by trade, having received a degree from North Dakota State University in plant pathology; he started at LRC two years ago. At first glance, Radetsky and Patel would not seem to be two people who would embark on a long-term research project together.

But that is just what they are doing. When Patel joined LRC to bolster the center’s horticultural research capabilities, the goal was for him to embark on projects not being done at other universities or other research centers. And for that last two years, that’s what he and Radetsky have been doing. As a pair, they are exploring how light affects the health of the plants, including physiology.

“We really found that few are working on this area, so there’s a lot of opportunity, and we really think that our mix of physicists, vision scientists, engineers and researchers can really be creative, and test and potentially find solutions,” Patel says.

Research goals

The aim of the research is simple: to see if light can be used as an alternative or adjunct to chemical treatments used to treat pest and disease issues.

“There is some really good research in the literature but in some cases it’s hard for growers to know how to implement it,” Patel says. “We are looking into specialty crops, and considering economics for growers, as a real tactical approach to apply treatment. We want it to be effective to control plant pests and not do damage.”

In the past two years, Radetsky and Patel have only worked on a small number of crops — specifically specialty crops such as cucumbers, herbs and squash. In cucumber and squash, Radetsky and Patel’s research has shown that the ultraviolet light at the right intensity can be effective in treating powdery mildew. But they have also found that light that is too intense can do damage.

“If you overdose the plant, you kill the plants or you damage them. It kills productivity and you don’t get the yields that you want,” Patel says. “If you under dose, or if you don’t give the right spectrum of UV, then it’s not effective either.”

Patel says the key to what they’ve learned so far is understanding how light affects the plant and the pathogen. For example, DNA in the powdery mildew-causing pathogens is damaged by certain UV doses. During the day, both UV and visible light are present in sunlight and the pathogen DNA can repair itself. Applying UV at night prevents the repair mechanisms and allows the optimum dose to be determined.

“In the case of powdery mildew we’re affecting the DNA, whereas [with] other crops that we’re looking at, we are not sure of the mechanisms. We’re finding that visible light has an effect,” Patel says. “In these cases, one outcome measure that we’re looking at is reducing the spores. But we’re just getting started, and there’s a lot more to look at. But what we think is important is that you have a dose response curve, essentially — so how much you need to give, what spectrum, at what time and for how long — and we are looking at the economics of that.”

How the Lighting Research Center works

The LRC, according to Radetsky, works differently than some other research programs. Instead of a land-grant university allotting money each year to different research projects, researchers at the LRC must, for the most part, secure their own funding and set up their own experiments in different facilities. This is in part because of the wide range of topics — many of which are consumer-facing and/or not related to horticulture — the LRC explores.

“As long as I’ve been here at the Lighting Research Center, that has been our model,” Radetsky says. “We primarily operate on this sort of soft-money grant writing. In many ways we are like a business where we have to be efficient and productive in all phases. This keeps us working on real problems and societal benefits.” She adds that the pair also receives financial support from some forward-looking lighting companies such as OSRAM and Cree who have a vested interest in the research yielding positive results about light’s impact on plant health.

According to Radetsky and Patel, they have received a fair amount of help that has helped their research remain ongoing in the past few years. They have access to some greenhouses near their Troy, New York lab for their research and have an indoor growing space at a nearby RPI location. They add that David Gadoury, a senior research associate at the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has been an invaluable resource as their partner in this research.

“It’s really thanks to him that we embarked on this research,” Radetsky says. “And he’s been working in this area for a long time. Thanks to him, we really got started in this and really started to understand the opportunities.”

They’ve also partnered with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research and the University of Florida on the research.

“We also get to understand the problem, and not just at the regional level but also at the national and international level,” Patel says. “We’re hearing from different stakeholders to really understand what is going on in agriculture.”

The next steps

Radetsky and Patel both say that their next step is to begin raising awareness for their work and, ideally, to garner more funding for it. When that happens, their plan is to expand their work beyond the produce crops they are currently working with and expand to other specialty crops and ornamentals. They have not yet determined what the first group of ornamentals would be, as it may depend on requirements tied to the funding.

Sometimes they focus their research on one specific pest or disease issue, perhaps even in one specific to a region of the country. For example, a New York State Farm Viability grant was awarded to them to use UV to treat powdery mildew and downy mildew in summer squash.

“We want to make these solutions practical for growers,” Patel says.

“Our team has been funded to look at the impact of light on some economically important specialty crops,” Radetsky says. “Hopefully, as we show results and as we’re able to do more work in this area, we’ll be able to look at other problems in the food chain that we’re very interested in.”

At Cultivate’18, Dr. Stephanie Burnett was part of a panel offering growers tips on how to best optimize propagation and how lighting can play a role in that effort. Burnett, an assistant professor of horticulture at the University of Maine, spoke on the panel with Dr. Marc W. van Iersel, a professor specializing in crop physiology and nutrition at the University of Georgia’s Department of Horticulture.

Below, in a follow-up interview with Greenhouse Management, Burnett discusses her presentation, what lighting levels are best for different periods of propagation and more.

Greenhouse Management: What are some of the broad factors contributing to propagation success?

Stephanie Burnett: Lighting can be a big factor, and I think for a lot of herbaceous plants that people work with, the general trend is that people have found that if you have a high daily light integral (DLI), you generally have better rooting. And that’s true both for cuttings and stock plants. You want to have a high DLI when you’re growing your stock plants and you want to have a higher DLI when you’re rooting the cuttings. There are other factors as well that can be important. Substrate moisture is something that some growers don’t really manage very well. If you have too high of a substrate moisture, it can actually reduce your rooting [success], and if it’s too low it can be detrimental as well. It can be challenging to find that nice medium point for a lot of folks. It can also be challenging to manage temperature.

GM: What are some best practices growers can implement in propagation, and how does lighting impact them?

SB: Keeping a clean environment can be very helpful. And just trying to find the right balance between all of the different factors that are there when the roots take hold, they’re starting to grow and everything is kind of moving along. Also, are there signs that a grower could see that that lighting is making some kind of difference, other than physical characteristics? Are there other characteristics that stand out in terms of, ‘Okay, this is something that actually is making a difference?’ I think it’s tricky to tell, too. Growers could always do some side-by-side tests on their own, and not in their greenhouse, to get a better idea of if supplemental lighting is making a difference.

GM: Are there specific lighting levels growers should be trying to stay within when trying to achieve successful propagation?

SB: At [van Iersel’s and my] talk, we recommended different levels, kind of depending on the stage that the cutting is in. Very early on, it doesn’t really need as much light and it needs to [be] in the range of three to eight moles per meter square per day. Then, when the roots are starting to form and differentiate and starting to photosynthesize a little bit more, it needs in the neighborhood of five to 10 moles per meter square per day. Once the roots are starting to grow and it’s beginning to photosynthesize a lot more, it needs between 10 to 15 moles per meter square per day. Then when you’re starting to harden it off and tone it, you can back off on the light a little bit more and give it about 10 moles per meter square per day.

GM: Are there different kinds of lights that are most effective in propagation?

SB: If you’re using LEDs, they would be a lot cooler and you would have a lot more control over your temperature because you could just manage it with temperature controls in your greenhouse. But if you’re using HPS lights, then they would provide a lot more heat and you would have to keep that in mind as you’re growing. You’re controlling your temperature, too, because they provide heat as well. LEDs are actually a great thing to consider using in the propagation environment because [cuttings are] such [a] high-value [input] and it really justifies [purchasing] the expensive LEDs.

I think you can have success with HPS or LEDs. I think the big difference would be the temperature. If growers still have older HPS lights, they can definitely use them. They just need to keep in mind the temperature. And then with LEDs, they kind of need to keep in mind the wavelengths they might want to attain.

Dr. Roberto Lopez [from Michigan State University] gave a talk [at Cultivate’18] about substrate temperature and the propagation environment. I think that we are just starting to realize that substrate temperature impacts rooting. but there hasn’t been a lot of research yet about how to manage that and what the right range is for greenhouses.