From IT Strategy to Peony Grower, An Unexpected Journey

Some of you have noticed I’ve updated my profile to include our family flower business in my profile.  Yes I am still running my consulting company and working with a select group of clients who are seeking to  transform how they deliver change within their organisation but this update is reflective of a new balance in my personal life.

This change has been 2 or 3 years in the making as the flowers have become increasingly important.  We (my wife Jo and I) have grown flowers for about 10 years now and about 3 years ago we reevaluated whether we should continue to do so.  At that stage we had about 6,000 peony tubers and analysis suggested that this was too many to be an interesting hobby and too few to be a viable business.  At best what we had done was buy ourselves a job as flower growers.  There is nothing wrong with being a flower grower but to be viable at this scale you needed to do all the work yourself and I wasn’t looking to buy myself a job and nor did I enjoy the prospect of picking 10’s of thousands of flowers at 70 which was the logical outcome if we didn’t change.

We choose to change, specifically we choose to scale our flower business.  Originally we were looking for a first step on 5-10, 000 additional tubers then our plan to grow met opportunity.

A retiring couple was looking to sell their peony tubers, they were in their 70’s, doing all the work themselves and decided to call time (an interesting look into our potential future).  We bought their tubers, as is where is, lifted them and transplanted them at our Nelson property.  The result, we ended up planting nearly 37,000 new tubers rather than the anticipated 5-10,000.  Four  things became abundantly clear:

And there is a 5th thing, to me, being a peony grower seemed incomplete and risky as it meant we were growing and selling a commodity product.  I’m not an expert in economics but I do remember 1st year economics teaching me that commodity businesses make little money as excess returns were competed away.  I didn’t like this idea so we have made a small change, we are not peony growers we are in the peony business.  The difference?  For us the difference is that peony growers, grow peonies and sell flowers however if you are in the peony bossiness then you are constantly looking for ways to add value to the peonies.  There are many ways you could do this and we want to explore them all.  For now we are focusing on innovative sales models (innovative for peonies) and creating skin care products that capitalise on some of the unique medicinal properties of the peony plant and flowers.

Who knows what the future will hold but I have decided I want to capture and share the journey in a blog.  Part of my motivation to do this is selfish because blogging helps to clarify my thoughts and facilitates learning and growth but I also hope that the journey will be interesting and useful for others.  If you think it might be, consider following the blog posts at peonies.nz/