The Power Up ⎯ SN.01/EP.04
Turn Your Seasonal Business Into Year-Round Success Like Barton Springs Nursery
Barton Springs Nursery generates an insane amount of business, but only in a couple of months out of the year. As a local garden center, they are a seasonal business with a full-time staff year-round. For Amy and Greg’s first two years as owners, they have used the off-season to improve systems, the grounds, and their infrastructure.
Now, Amy and Greg are setting new goals to diversify the business in creative ways to reinforce their income and future. Amy shares, “Our business is very seasonal and so in order to have it be less of a seasonal business, we’re trying to offer more and more services and events. We’ve had a lot of interest in it being a wedding venue or for corporate events. So we’ve been exploring that and testing the waters and now we’re ready.”
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About The Business
Business name: Barton Springs Nursery
Purchased the business: 2021
Owners: Amy Hovis and Greg Thomas
Location: Austin, TX
Website: https://bartonspringsnursery.com
Sales diversification strategy: Nursery, gift shop, event services, installation services, food truck, e-commerce (launching soon)
About Our Guests
For many years, Amy owned an architecture design and build studio, EDEN, on the Barton Springs Nursery property which was founded in 1986. Every day she would walk through the neglected nursery property and see its potential as a giant creative endeavor to redesign the spaces. In 2021, Amy and her recent husband Greg, purchased the business and started revamping the business from the inside out from the grounds needing repair to automating systems.
As they’ve transitioned from running a business to a growing one, they began opening “mini businesses” and services to create new demand year-round. In fact, the first wedding hosted at Barton Springs Nursery was, in fact for Amy and Greg.
To discover how Amy and Greg are opening mini businesses to stay profitable all year long, listen to the whole episode on The Power Up.
Full Transcript
Sean (Thrive): Hello everyone, it’s Sean from Thrive with another episode of The Power Up, where I meet with successful small business owners and operators to learn about their business strategy so you can take their insights and level up your own business. Once your business is ready to expand, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Our guests have some creative solutions for how they’ve tackled tricky problems and turned them into growth opportunities. Now, let’s dive into today’s episode.
Our guests today are Amy and Greg, owners of Barton Springs Nursery. Barton Springs was founded in Austin, Texas, in 1986. For many years, Amy’s architecture design and build studio was located on the nursery’s property. Every day, she would walk through the neglected property and see its potential as a giant creative endeavor until one day in 2021, Amy and her husband Greg took over ownership.
Amy and Greg spent two years rebuilding the business from scratch and redesigning spaces to educate and inspire people to create living sanctuaries. Barton’s Nursery now features a Genus Bar where a professional horticulturalist can answer your questions, an on-site potting station, a lending library, and a gift shop. Recently, their focus has been diversifying their business for year-round growth and success by exploring ideas from event services to large-scale pottery installations and even a skincare line.
Alright Amy and Greg, you ready to get started?
Amy (Barton Springs Nursery): Yes.
Greg (Barton Springs Nursery): Yeah, absolutely, thanks for joining us.
Sean: First question right off the bat: talk to me about the Genus Bar. I’ve seen your guys’ website, everyone knows or has at least heard of the Genius Bar, but what is the Genus Bar? Tell us a little bit about that.
Amy: Yeah, sure. It’s a place where, if you have any really difficult questions about your plants or gardening in general, you can always go to the Genus Bar and have an expert meet with you. We have microscopes to help determine the source of the problem. So it’s a place not only to learn but to educate yourselves about plants. Everyone on our staff is very knowledgeable, but you can always head there and get immediate help.
We also do what we call “plant of the day” every morning. One of our staff members, Dave, who’s been here for 20 years and is just known in the community as a center for all kinds of information, educates our staff. With the plant of the day, he highlights one plant or product, and we feature that at the Genus Bar for customers to view as well. We’re working on recording it and starting an archive of that. It’s been such a success and a great way to learn. It’s really brought a lot of education together.
Sean: That’s great. I would probably be someone who would be at the Genus Bar 24/7 with problems with my plants, so yeah, glad that you have that.
Do you guys do any sort of, like, elementary school field trips or anything like that? Do you have students coming in or anything along those lines?
Amy: We do, from time to time, and we’re going to be doing more of that. Part of what we want to do is really educate youngsters about what we’re doing. We have them go through the greenhouses and then pot up a little plant for themselves to take home. Really catching people when they’re young and excited about nature is a big part of what we are doing.
We’re lucky the grounds are so beautiful, and we have a large space with beautiful oak trees. People like to wander throughout; it feels like a botanical garden. You can see plants in maturity, see how they’re blooming, and that kind of stuff. It’s a fun place to come see the birds, the bees, butterflies, and just immerse yourself in what feels like nature. That has been the best education we’ve offered so far, but we do want to offer more organized events and things like that for children.
Sean: Very cool. I know you and I were chatting a bit before the recording started, but you guys just got married this last Saturday, so congrats on that! The audience won’t know this, but you got married actually on your property. I know in the bio you said you were looking at using your property for events. How did that come up? Did you get customer interest in that? Did you just see a spot and think it would be great for events? What happened?
Amy: Both. We’re trying to diversify because our business is very seasonal. We make most of our money selling plants during the spring. To have it be less seasonal, we’re trying to offer more services and different events. We’ve had a lot of interest in it being a wedding venue or for corporate events, so we’ve been exploring that and testing the waters, and now we’re ready to offer that service.
We started small by cleaning up an area that was previously used to store dirt. It was like a barn, an old horse stable barn with a beautiful oak tree out front, but it was muddy and not usable space. We cleaned it up, built a small stage, hung string lights, and cleaned the barn out of cobwebs and dirt. It took a long time and many tries, but we finally got down to the walls and painted them white. The space developed from there.
We hosted small lectures, authors would come in. We did about six of those a year during COVID, and it was outside, which was nice. We started hosting evenings with friends there. One night, we did a giant long table with the staff for an event. We did a big event last year for Christmas with about 70 people at this table. It was so much fun; we had a food truck, and I thought, “This is doable.” We started growing the idea from there, and that was about a year ago. It all came together.
Sean: That’s awesome. In retrospect, because diversification is definitely key, how can you keep things going year-round? Even during your hot season, can you still stack this additional layer on top of it? If someone is interested in getting started and thinks they have a space for events, are there any things you did or didn’t see when you first got into this? Like city zoning regulations, permits, anything you would advise someone looking at this?
Greg: Yeah, for us, we haven’t had to get any special permits in terms of zoning because it was already zoned as commercial space. That was set for us. But in terms of infrastructure, these additional services we’re offering for diversification are like mini businesses. It’s taking all the things we’ve done with the nursery as a whole, creating systems, methodologies for hiring and training people, and creating mini businesses for these other services.
For example, with the wedding venue or events, it’s creating infrastructure: who’s going to do the cleaning, how to do setup, who’s going to manage the project, how many staff are needed to service it correctly, and how to set up and tear down. It’s like taking what you’ve done for the big business and scaling it down for these mini services. That’s how we see long-term success, not just isolated to selling plants but offering design services year-round.
This way, we can bring in income during months when we can’t sell plants because it’s freezing or too hot. We’re looking at all these ideas to maximize the audience we’ve created and make money year-round. Amy and I love brainstorming about that stuff.
Amy: Greg will say, “What about an ice skating rink?” or “What can we do with this giant parking lot we’re not using during the off-season?” So we try to come up with seasonal projects and long-term ideas to make money year-round.
Sean: Is Greg the one with all the crazy wild ideas, and you, with your architecture background, figure out how to implement them?
Greg: It’s quite the opposite. I come from a startup and kitchen/restaurant background. I’ve worked in lots of different industries and acquired a big toolset to accomplish projects. She’s the one with the crazy ideas, and I’m like, “Okay, let’s try, let’s figure it out, get the team,” and all that.
One thing we’re doing that’s working well is when we invest in the company, we don’t own the land; we have a 10-year lease, hoping to stay forever, but we operate based on that. Everything we do has to be smart. We don’t want to build things we can’t take with us if we leave. So when expanding, it’s really about adding services that don’t cost much. We struggle to find office space for all these people doing these things, so we get creative and make spaces. It’s become like a co-working environment where people can jump on different things.
Usually, in this industry, people hire seasonally and let staff go in the slow time. When we took over, we decided to keep everyone year-round and use them to accomplish projects to diversify and not be so seasonal. It’s planning and taking it slow, figuring out where to invest. We call it finding the low-hanging fruit, what little things can we clean up to make it look good? Start in one corner and work your way through.
We’ve never had a cash influx or taken out a big loan. We do it piecemeal ourselves. We’ll come up with an idea and execute it little by little. We do one level of execution, then “next level it” when we get more cash. We test things out, and once viable, put more money into it.
Because we’re methodical and testing the market, we launch things we know will be successful based on numbers. With Thrive, that works well for us because we’re constantly looking at numbers, making decisions not just on intuition but also data.
Sean: That’s great. I have one more question about your structure thinking long-term. How do you think about liabilities with things like an ice rink or food truck? Are you creating many businesses, setting up different LLCs, or keeping it all under one umbrella?
Amy: Great question. It’s a little of both. For example, the food truck is a separate LLC. Everything we’re doing in marketing, branding, and creating these many businesses can be launched as separate LLCs. Right now, we’re under one umbrella, but we’re smart about it so we can peel one off, rebrand, or sell it if we want.
We’re planning for the future because we don’t know how long we’ll be on the property. We want to make sure all this hard work with many businesses can be launched individually. For tax purposes, they mostly remain under one LLC as an umbrella. We started with one business, now a couple, and plan to have an umbrella LLC with sub-LLCs underneath. That way, you can sell, move, or grow a business individually.
We have huge brand equity because this business has been here for 36 years and is part of the community. We want to keep the Barton Springs Nursery name, but don’t want to be stuck to just the nursery with global climate change and everything else happening.
Sean: That makes a lot of sense. It’s smart to keep your options open and structure it so you can pivot or expand without being tied down.
Now, I want to ask about your skincare line. That seems like a really interesting diversification. How did that come about, and how does it connect with the nursery?
Amy: Yeah, that’s been a really fun project. We’ve always been interested in plants, not just as decoration but as part of a lifestyle and how they can improve your wellbeing. We started looking into how plants can be used in skincare, and it just made sense to create a line that uses botanicals from the nursery.
We partnered with a local formulator and created products that are plant-based, sustainable, and reflect the ethos of Barton Springs Nursery. It’s a small line right now, but it’s growing. It’s another way to bring people in year-round, especially during the winter when plant sales slow down.
Sean: That’s really cool. It’s kind of like extending the brand into lifestyle and wellness. Do you sell those products on-site and online?
Greg: Exactly. We sell them both in the nursery gift shop and on our website. We’ve been getting great feedback, and it’s a nice complement to the nursery. It also helps us reach a different audience who might not be into gardening but are interested in natural skincare.
Sean: Awesome. It sounds like you’re really building a community around the nursery and these related services. Speaking of community, how do you engage with your customers and keep them coming back?
Amy: We do a lot of events, workshops, and classes. People love learning about plants and gardening, so we offer hands-on experiences. We also have a membership program that gives discounts and early access to events. Social media is a big part of how we connect, too. We share tips, highlight plants, and showcase what’s happening at the nursery.
Sean: That’s great. Before we wrap up, what advice would you give to other small business owners looking to diversify and grow?
Greg: Start small and test your ideas. Don’t try to do everything at once. Use your existing resources and staff creatively. And always keep your customers in mind, what do they want, and how can you serve them better? Diversification is about adding value, not just adding complexity.
Amy: Also, be patient. Growth takes time, especially when you’re building something new. Keep your vision clear, but be flexible. And don’t be afraid to ask for help or collaborate with others.
Sean: Fantastic advice. Amy, Greg, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights. It’s inspiring to see how you’ve transformed Barton Springs Nursery into such a vibrant and diverse business.
Amy: Thank you for having us!
Greg: Thanks, Sean. It’s been a pleasure.
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