Planting seeds for the future in a pandemic

BLUE Diamond Group operates garden centres in Jersey and Guernsey and dozens across the UK.

The company, which is headquartered in Guernsey and employs hundreds locally, has been at the coal face when it comes to dealing with the retailing fallout from the pandemic.

Picking up the story from March, Blue Diamond managing director Alan Roper says that he was ready as he could be. With information that lockdown restrictions were coming, he got his operation team together and put a plan in motion that focused on cost-saving management in the face of centres closing for an extended period. The plan also focused on developing a home delivery service, upgrading the company’s website, and critically using data to make the strategy as effective as possible. Furlough schemes and other government business support measures as well as working with landlords also helped the company chart its way through the crisis.

Planning for the worst

‘Originally the government suggested the lockdown would be for around three weeks but I decided we needed to plan for the worst. So, I decided that we needed to get a home delivery system up and running. It meant taking the website and turbocharging it. In the end lockdown turned out to be nearly three months.’ says Alan.

‘We implemented a call centre with our head office staff who now had no other work to do because of lockdown so customers could contact us. So necessary as demand was huge and the phones were in meltdown. They could also talk to someone on the phone at the garden centre and the person would just walk them through the plant area, tell them what they had and send them pictures.

‘They would be on the phone for 10 to 15 minutes talking and putting an order together. Then you would have pickers following behind and picking the products. With implementing a new business model, you need a new reporting system that benchmarks efficiency of the new processes. We have 37 stores, so with a new business you’re going to get some people doing it really well and some doing it poorly. Using the information provided we were able to get the orders picked per person per hour from just 10 per hour to nearly 20 per hour over the coming weeks and months.

‘Optimising the efficiency of the home delivery processes was paramount, we needed to balance our cash flow, cash was going out but with nothing coming in during lockdown, an efficient home delivery service was key and vital for survival. Daily meetings via Zoom with the senior team analysing the new data from the day before, and just relentlessly pushing, driving, innovating was the order of the day.

‘A day is now an hour’

‘It was hard for everybody in a situation like that. I used to say to people a day is now an hour. If we lose two hours we’ve lost two days. It we lose a day we lose a week and that’s what it felt like because you just needed to get the money in fast because we still had outgoings. For instance, 60% of our businesses have landlords to whom we pay rent. Obviously the rates scheme in the UK was a benefit. But we also had a duty and responsibility to our supply base and we needed to keep them afloat as we wanted to be able to get the products in once lockdown lifted. By trading we were keeping a lot of the plant nurseries going.’

Alan continues: ‘We’re just kept ratcheting the home delivery income up with expectations we might do a million pounds and then we did a million. Then we do two and then suddenly, by the time the lockdown ended, we’d done about 11 and a half million pounds, including VAT. The reason why I include VAT is because at the moment we don’t have to pay VAT till next year, and it's usable cash. We owe our employees, who willingly stayed working in the business during lockdown rather than furlough themselves, a huge debt of gratitude.

We will survive this but still risks ahead

‘I went from thinking is the company going to survive this to the company is going to survive this. It also built a good relationship with our customer base who were desperate to receive garden products. The weather was amazing, and has been ever since. Had we not closed this would have been probably the biggest year in gardening turnover in my 30-year history of trading in this industry. It would have been that strong because the weather has been with us all the way.

‘Our home delivery operation avoided a lot of wastage. We had millions of pounds worth of plants just sat there if we had taken the phone of the hook and furloughed all the staff as many of our competitors initially did, our plant wastage would have been financially very painful.’

Blue Diamond also responded to changing customer needs, including selling face masks which have been flying off the shelves.

Since centres were allowed to reopen, trade has been strong – due to people turning to their homes and gardens as sanctuaries and spending money on them.

The conversation turns to the future and the prospect of the virus surging again. As you might expect of a man focused on data driven results, Alan has been planning for the future throughout. Key to that is using the seeds planted during lockdown – the strengthened relationship with customers and utilising the home delivery service and website as required.

Having read widely around the subject, Alan says: ‘This virus will start to get its teeth back into society. In the autumn in the winter, but how are governments going to react? Are we going to look at it more rationally, sensibly, understand who this virus affects and implement more surgical controls? Or are we just going to take another large mallet and just shut everybody down again?’

Looking ahead, he notes that Christmas is after gardening the next biggest income driver. ‘There’s a risk there the more draconian Covid-19 measures towards Christmas could hurt us again. It’s why Blue Diamond is putting out its Christmas stall out earlier this year both in store and online in the Channel Islands and the UK. If we need to, we’ll do the whole home delivery again for Christmas,’ he adds.