BlogSmall growers
Your first wholesale buyer
The first landscaper or garden centre that buys from you changes the shape of the business. Orders get bigger and come back, and a season can be planned around them. Trade buyers also buy differently from people at a market stall. They are buying a supplier as much as a plant, and what keeps them is mostly what happens around the plants.
What a trade buyer is buying
A landscaper bids a job on plants that have to be there, in the size quoted, on the day the crew arrives. A garden centre fills a bench before a weekend it has advertised. Both are trusting you with a promise they have already made to someone else. When Greenhouse Grower asked a garden centre buyer about growers in 2015, the answer was that "the issue that causes the biggest problems for us with our growers is communication", and the growers worth keeping were the ones who "show up on time, call with changes and anticipate our quality needs."
Expect to have to give a buyer a reason to switch. A sample nursery business plan from Penn State Extension notes that most landscapers and nurseries are already satisfied with their current suppliers, and it builds its case on being close by, which helps contractors when they bid, on consistent quality and on delivery to the job site. A small grower rarely wins a trade account on price. You win it on being near, being reliable and growing something the bigger supplier does not.
Before you say yes
Have three things ready before the first order. The first is an availability list with sizes, counts and ready dates, kept current, because the buyer will plan from it. The second is a price list for trade buyers, separate from your retail prices. The third is your terms, meaning when payment is due, any minimum order, delivery charges and what happens when something is short. As one example, North Creek Nurseries, a wholesale grower, asks new accounts to apply for terms, sets a minimum on the first order and bills at 30 days. Yours can be simpler, but they should be written down before the first invoice rather than argued about after it.
For a new account, Digger, the Oregon Association of Nurseries' magazine, advises a formal credit application with references, and notes that it is fine to give better terms to long-standing customers than to new ones. If the buyer is reselling the plants, ask for their resale certificate as well, which our post on the paperwork that comes first explains.
Keeping the account
Confirm every order in writing, the same day if you can. If something is short, ring before the truck leaves and offer a substitute or a size up, because the same buyer in that 2015 article put the alternative bluntly: "I can't sell credit." Deliver what the order says, when it says, and send an invoice that matches what arrived. None of this needs to be elaborate. It needs to happen every time.
In Sprout a trade buyer asks to join through your shop link, and nobody can order until you approve them. Each approved buyer orders at their own price level and sees only the plants that are ready now, so the availability list cannot go stale. Confirming an order emails the buyer, posting it emails the invoice with a due date from their payment terms, and a reminder can go out before payment is due. A grower taking on a first trade account gets a supplier's paperwork without a sales office, and a nursery with dozens of accounts gets every buyer handled the same way.