Great Lake Gardens was a career sabbatical (and my midlife crisis) and a valuable lesson in business planning. The nursery raised rare and unusual plants from my years of collecting and sold them through a mail-order catalog and an e-commerce website. This was my first site selection project and I searched for two years to find the perfect site. This search included reviewing soil surveys, testing water quality and walking hundreds of acres of land while my real estate agent sat patiently in her car.
Once I found the perfect site, I developed a site plan, erected the first two of the dozen planned greenhouses, had utilities installed and did nearly all of the mechanical, plumbing and electrical installation myself (this is when I bought my first copy of the National Electric Code). I then set about growing and trying to sell plants. This including publishing my own print catalog, learning HTML and setting up several e-commerce platforms for the website and online store.
It turns out I’m a much better engineer than I am a plant salesman. By the end of the experience, when the money was running out, I finally sat down and wrote the business plan that I should have written before launching into the business venture. The local bank vice president said it was the best business plan he had ever seen.
Realizing that retail plant sales is not one of my strengths, I returned to engineering and transitioned Great Lake Gardens into an ornamental plant breeding business, which I then merged with my consulting activities into what eventually became Urna Vitae. All of these experiences have since lead to a number of related horticulture and plant biotechnology projects.
