A daring disruptor

At 8 a.m. each day, Jennifer Moss’ phone alarm sounds and the words “strong, consistent, heart-forward” appear on the screen. These three words make up her personal and professional mission statement. It’s how she shows up, no matter the place or situation.

“Heart-forward means a few things,” she says. “I can be a caring person and really support your team and your people without being a pushover. It also means that I always want to leave people better than when I found them.”

Whether it’s an employee, a vendor, a supplier or a colleague, Jennifer is consistently upfront and transparent. She consistently withholds judgement. She consistently looks for new opportunities for her employees, for the business, for the industry and for herself. Consistency most definitely does not mean the same ‘ol-same ‘ol with Jennifer.

She can be strong each day thanks in part to lessons from her parents and her athletic background. Moss is a lifelong skier and competed in the Junior Olympics. She continues to use fitness to keep her body and mind strong with CrossFit and triathlon and Ragnar relay training.

“I’ve set a gigantic goal for myself. I’m going to be in the best shape of my life by the time I’m 40. I just turned 38 in March, so I’ve got time,” she says. “But part of that journey is getting really strong and getting my athlete body back. I’m strong, but I want to be this bad ass who handles it like a boss. So I told myself, ‘I’m doing it. There’s nothing standing in my way.’”

Jennifer handles proverbial business and personal mountains in much the same way, including a serious situation that helped her become CEO of the family business.

She remembers the day, the year and even the time that changed the trajectory of her career.

“I will never forget the day we lost our largest customer in 2017. It was Feb. 16 at 2 p.m. when he walked in,” she recalls. “We were doing 30% of our business with this one customer at the time. And they walked in and said, ‘We’re liquidating the business. I hope we told you soon enough.’ And my dad sat there and said, 'I’ve got 70% of the seed planted. No, you didn’t tell us soon enough.’ So I hit the ground running. We were in the middle of launching a wholesale houseplant program at the time, so I was already on the road trying to pitch that program,” she explains. “I had to pivot very quickly and start to identify a couple of chains that we could gain to make up for the loss. That’s the year I started to really earn my stripes and gain the respect of my coworkers and peers. At the end of the season, I was able to recapture 89% of the sales. It was tough. But that customer had done over a million dollars with us in 2016.”

Prior to that bomb getting dropped on the company, the family (Jennifer, her parents and her brother, Dewey) had a succession planning meeting with their ag lender. The family consensus was that Dewey would eventually be named CEO.

“I agreed with them at the time that my brother, who is younger than me, was a better choice to lead the company,” Jennifer says. “He was more level-headed, he was less emotional and he was more consistent. So that was the plan.”

Jennifer says she responded to things emotionally and would sometimes break into tears at a business meeting.

“I wasn’t projecting what I wanted to project. I wanted to come across calm, put together, direct and driven,” she says. “So I really worked on changing my responses and my reactions. I was seeing a life coach, Brendon Burchard, who wrote High Performance Habits. It changed my life.”

That’s part of the reason she’s now CEO.

“I outperformed the expectation, I launched myself and I earned my spot,” she says.

Last summer, the family decided to change the original plan.

“My parents felt that I was the good choice for the helm of the ship. My brother and I looked at it and he agreed. And we agreed that we could make this work and he became chief operations officer. My brother is an awesome partner. Where I'm weak, he's strong, and where he's weak, I'm strong. We're a good complement to each other.”

Her mom, Dana, says she’s proud of how Jennifer learns from her mistakes and turns negatives into positives. “Six or seven years ago, I would have said, ‘You didn’t learn anything form this situation,’ Dana says. “But now she does and it has a lot to do with her self-growth and self-development. She pursues personal development actively so she can be the best person she can be and help others be the best they can be.”

A meandering path

Originally, the Moss brother-and-sister team had no interest in joining the family business. They both went to college to pursue studies that had nothing to do with horticulture.

“Mom and dad never forced us to look at horticulture,” she says. “That’s why my brother and I have degrees in different areas. And dad said, ‘I want you to go out into the world and try something else. And if you want to come back to the greenhouse, then you can. But you have to want to come back. It wasn’t forced.”

Because of the pair’s early decision not to be part of the family business, their parents formed an employee stock option program. The business is currently 35% employee owned.

When Jennifer graduated from high school, she wanted to work for the FBI.

“I wanted to chase serial killers like they do on the Criminal Minds television show. I was really into that because I competed in speech in high school, and one of my topics was DNA profiling and criminal profiling,” she says.

When Jennifer enrolled at the University of Idaho, she took a criminal justice class and was disappointed to learn of corruption in the industry.

“I was raised with integrity as a core value and I could not imagine myself going into such a corrupt industry,” she says.

Instead, Jennifer changed her focus and received two bachelor’s degrees — one in communications studies with a psychology background and another in public relations with a specialization in large event planning and organization.

“My dream job was to plan the Winter X Games,” she adds. But she ended up getting a job selling life insurance and being a dog walker. And when people weren’t buying life insurance in the middle of a recession, she got a job at a hotel.

“I was in Portland where I didn’t have a network, but I tried it for a year. Then I called mom and dad and said, ‘Hey, I need to move home. How do you feel about a dog?’”

Jennifer and Solomon the husky returned to Idaho and Jennifer worked at a restaurant where she had a job during high school.

“They quickly promoted me to a manager and a trainer, and I worked there for a year to get my feet back under me,” she recalls.

Next, she joined the staff of a new high-end restaurant where she was hired as catering manager and was quickly promoted to assistant manager.

“Candidly, that was the worst job I’ve ever had. However, it taught me a lot,” she says. “Those hard jobs are actually really good for you. They build character and you learn what you can do and what you’re not willing to tolerate. It was at that job where I was put in a couple of situations that I could not stomach. Going back to that core value of integrity, I put in my two-weeks’ notice. That’s when I went to my parents and said, ‘Let’s give it a go at the greenhouse.’”

She was hired as a retail assistant manager then moved to the marketing department.

“The hardest part about coming from restaurant and hospitality management into the greenhouse is, in a restaurant, dinner's on the table and if the customer's upset, you have to solve it right then. And when I saw an issue at the greenhouse, I’d say, ‘We need to change this.’ Since I came on in January and our fiscal year is September through August, I’d hear, ‘No, we don't need to talk about that for eight or 10 months.’

“I'm like, excuse me, what? But I didn't understand the seasonality, that kind of process. That the minute hand has to go all the way around the clock. You can't make a decision at 7 that affects 2. And so I just had to learn to slow down. That was probably the hardest transition."

Since coming to the family business in 2011, Jennifer has worked on the retail side, handled marketing tasks, worked in wholesale production and plant sales, and became director of sales and marketing.

Strengths and superpowers

As she navigated her way through the different departments of the family business and learned how to better channel her emotions, Jennifer honed her self-awareness, which she calls a “superpower.”

“I went through a period where I was just the boss’ daughter for a long time, yet my brother didn’t have that stigma of being just the boss’ son. And it pissed me off. That’s when I became more aware of what and how I was projecting things,” she explains.

She began to recognize and sharpen her strengths, which was the catalyst to her successfully turning around that million-dollar customer loss.

“And my competitive athlete background taught me to ask, ‘What is your win?’ So I started finding those small wins, even in the hard days,” she says.

She also learned a tremendous amount from her parents, mostly by example. She also inherited their workaholic tendencies.

“Our parents taught us about hard work and consistency. They showed up. They were driven, even in the hard years, the really good years and the completely average years,” she says. “They showed me that you dive in during the spring, you kick ass, then you get to enjoy your summers and winters. And take the time, get offsite, use your vacation days. I’m still not very good at that part.”

“My mom showed me how to generate trust with people and to have faith in your decisions. My father taught me how to lead a team and how to hold people accountable. With my mom's softer approach combined with my father's drive for results, I developed a hidden talent I didn't realize I had until the last year, which is building teams and creating loyalty in my employees,” she says.

Jennifer doesn’t run from conflict; she runs at it.

“I tackle hard things. And if it’s really hard, I just dig my feet in a little bit deeper so that I’m completely anchored. I’m not afraid to do hard things at all,” she says. “I have no problem with change. I disarm the emotional fear of it and other hard things, and I just keep moving. I think that's probably a lot of people's hardest moments – when they get stalled with indecision and fear. I read an incredible book earlier this year called The Gap and the Gain. And being an engineer's daughter, everything's a math equation. I just have to figure out the right variables to solve for X. And I approach all of life like that.”

Jennifer doesn’t fear failing, either.

“I’ve learned that failing forward is the best way to approach it. Failure doesn’t disarm me, it doesn’t scare me. I tell my employees that if you don’t fail forward, the universe will continue to bring you that lesson and it will get harder and harder every time. So when something bad happens, don’t ask, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Ask, ‘Why is this happening for me?’”

During situations where certain things can’t be controlled, Jennifer has learned she can control herself, her actions and her attitude.

“If something really hard comes in front of me, I ask myself, ‘Will this matter in a year? In five years? In 10 years? And if the answer is no to any of those questions, then I need to make sure I’m not giving it too much energy in that moment,” she explains.

Jennifer has also learned the power of the word no.

“That has been a really hard lesson, though,” she says. “I had FOMO — fear of missing out. I wanted to be in all places and all things. But that’s not the case anymore. I know where I stand as a human. I know what I want to show up for, and I know how much currency I have in the tank to be able to accomplish things.”

It all goes back to her superpower of self-awareness.

“When I was managing the restaurant, I had to make very big decisions on the fly. And I didn't have a super strong mentor in that space, per se. I didn't have a bad one, they were a little bit more passive. And because of that, I was abrasive in my management, and I would anger easily. And that trickled into the greenhouse for a little while. I started to pay a lot more attention to how I was showing up to conversations. What was my body language, was my tone of voice right or how did I leave people feeling? And I have really worked on that over the last four or five years and fine-tuned it.”

It's also crucial to listen to others and let them point out shortcomings.

“The person who runs the wholesale office has been with us for 20 years. When I took over as a director of sales and marketing in September of 2018, she told me her biggest fear was that I was going to have a bad day and fire everybody. It really helped me say, okay, hold on, this isn't a bad comment. This is a lesson. There's an opportunity for growth here. And so I dove in and I really took a different approach.

“I worked on walking away and taking a couple of hours to come back with a clear head. My brother is very good at this. I really started to practice that. And that huge miss became a huge win. And it's very unusual for me to get angry now. I can still hold people accountable, and we can walk away from a situation after a positive conversation where we all feel that we succeeded in being heard and solved the situation.”

Jennifer had a similar experience with a retail manager.

“They said, ‘You always bring me step five and you make me figure out one through four. If you could please include me so that I can be a part of all five steps.’ They were absolutely right. I was giving them directives without the right tools. I've really listened to those moments because if I'm managing one person like that, am I managing all people like that?”

Disruptions and new directions

Jennifer is a self-described disruptor.

“I do not like the status quo. I am a person who holds space for everyone and I don’t make judgments,” she says.

Challenging the status quo took center stage after they lost their big customer in 2017.

“Our offerings as a supplier were very traditional. When we lost King’s Discount Store, it was an opportunity in disguise. We started to change our basket combinations and move away from that flat footprint into more container gardening with more perceived value on the baskets,” she explains. “We had a mono-crop approach to our smaller 10-inch baskets, and at that time we were growing about 35,000 of them a season. They consisted of just one petunia color and we made the shift into adding two colors. But we had to do it slowly because a lot of our customers have worked with us for three generations of my family. And they expect the same thing from Moss all the time. So we split the crop in half and kept half a mono color and grew the other half with two colors. And then we started messing with the combinations even more. Now we have a lot more diversity in our mixes and we evolved faster.

“I think it was in 2018 at Cultivate where I challenged all of our brokers and suppliers saying, ‘I want to be two years ahead of the market. I want to try everything I can in Idaho before you release it.’ I want to be on point as soon as that new variety hits the market.”

It’s that relevancy that keeps customers coming back to Moss Greenhouses.

“Moss has always grown our annuals for special projects that we have going here in Ontario [Oregon]. Even though Jennifer has many, many balls that she keeps in the air, she never fails to be available — never,” says Susan Kurth, owner of Andrews Seed Co. “She has worked tirelessly on behalf of all of us in the nursery business to keep things relevant and up with the trends. In my experience, she grows some of the best products with the most selection of any grower that I have dealt with.”

Jennifer took a big leap when she disrupted the focus of the company. “I was named CEO in September of 2022 and we’ve made some big shifts. We have gone from focusing on top-quality plants to becoming an employee-centric company. My best asset is people and I want to treat that asset the best way possible,” she says.

She’s creating a “safe space” for employees where there’s “no fear and no anger.”

“When my staff comes to me with an issue, I solve, I don’t blame or finger point. And if they start to blame or finger point, I de-charge them immediately. I say, ‘None of that matters right now. The problem is here, let’s fix it.’ And then when everything settles, I come back and ask how we can prevent this in the future. I learned a valuable lesson from my tattoo artist. There are two things in life: there are tasks and there are relationships.”

Jennifer attended leadership training, and one of speakers was Brian Canlis who owns Canlis Restaurants, a highly successful company in Seattle. He shared how he has a two-hour meeting every week with six people and how everyone at that table during those two hours is equal.

“I knew this was something we could do. Because employee engagement is the hardest thing as an owner, without question, for them to buy into your mission, your values and how you do business. We created what is called the Moss Captain's Table. And every person at that table for one hour, once a week, are all equals. And the captain is not always me. It rotates for every meeting, and it has created more teamwork and more buy-in than I've ever seen from my team.

Now, there's another side of it. Some people say, ‘Why didn't I get invited to the table?’ I can't make everybody happy, but if we're not dealing with any confidential issues, and somebody can't make it, they can designate a person to stand in for them. That way we kind of demystify what happens at that table. And that's been tremendously helpful in building trust in new ownership and in our processes. For instance, it could be the loading guy in the basketball shorts with sleeves ripped off his t-shirt and tattoos up to his neck saying, ‘Man, I just listened to this incredible leadership podcast’ and he goes into how we could adopt that process or that philosophy. I’m always wowed. It’s brought the bar up and on a consistent basis. And it wasn’t me lifting the bar, it was our employees. And that is incredible.”

Jennifer says no matter how long you’ve been a leader or whatever your background may be, “don’t be afraid to be a disruptor and ask the hard questions.”

“Don’t be afraid to put the guy with 30 years of experience on the bench and let him consult a group of younger folks to lead a project and challenge the status quo,” she advises. “If you are going to get people interested in this industry, it can’t continue to look how it’s always looked. It’s okay if everybody’s skin color is different at a table. It’s okay if half of the people in the board room are covered in tattoos. It’s okay if someone came from the cannabis industry and is now growing lettuce in a vertical farm. We’ve got to be able to cross over into the next stage of this industry’s evolution.”

Jennifer is very intentional about diversifying the industry after an unfortunate incident at a trade show.

“I went into a supplier’s booth and stood there, ignored, for about 20 minutes, despite having 12 workers in the booth,” she explains. “It was right when the show floor opened, and they weren’t busy. I now call it the khakis and polo club because that’s what every one of those guys were wearing. It’s the traditional footprint of so many in our industry, but I don’t participate. I’m tattooed. I’m young. I’m female. So was like, ‘Okay, here’s a bias.’ So now I'm very sensitive to the gender gap in our industry.”

To combat that gender gap (or any other type of gap), Jennifer sticks to her three-word mission: She stays strong, consistent and heart-forward.

“That's something I value in a leader — somebody who has heart. They have their heart in it, and they care while still being consistent, strong and business-oriented. That's hugely valuable to me in every single way. And that's how I want to show up at that table and every other table that has an opportunity for growth, anywhere, in any industry, in any room.” 