Paying it forward

Jim and Kathy Deal’s story starts differently than most HILA winners. You see, Jim was getting tired of painting houses.

Jim had graduated from North Carolina State University with a degree in wildlife biology. He had started a house painting business to put himself through college, so he had some knowledge about how to run a business. But he was sure he didn’t want to be painting houses all his life.

One of his clients told him he needed to talk to Dow Pender.

L. Dow Pender Jr., the founder of Pender Nursery, was about 65 years old at the time and looking to get out of the business. Jim didn’t know anything about the nursery business, and he told Dow Pender that when he met with him. Still, Jim knew a good bit about hard work, and he decided to give it a shot. He started earning an hourly wage from Pender Nursery in 1980. At the time, it was a 2-acre landscape nursery that grew azaleas, liriope and camellia.

“After several years of [landscaping], I learned pretty quick that wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Jim says.

However, he became interested in the plant production side of the business. And Dow Pender was a wealth of knowledge when it came to growing plants, with plenty of connections to others in the industry.

“I kind of renewed his interest,” Jim says. “He was one of the most intelligent plantspeople of the day. We started bringing in plants from different areas and growing more varieties. Finally, we got the nursery going to the point that we could stop the landscaping, which was a great day for me. We could make it just on selling plants.”

Today, Pender Nursery grows about 600 varieties on 40 acres (10 of which are covered), supplying landscapers and garden centers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware with perennials, shrubs, groundcovers, trees and grasses.

Learning the trade

Jim had always been a hard worker, and his house painting business honed those skills. But Dow Pender’s mentorship helped Jim evolve from a businessman to a nurseryman.

“I knew how to turn a dollar, to pay the bills and keep people happy, but I learned everything about plants from him,” he says.

Propagation was one of the skills Jim learned from Dow Pender. When he started at the nursery, the two of them would propagate in beds of concrete sand. They’d cut little trenches to stick cuttings into, then once they rooted, pull them out and stick them into little cups or pots. Jim joined the International Plant Propagator’s Society (IPPS) to learn more and has been active in the organization for years. IPPS’ Eastern Region toured Pender Nursery in 2023.

In Jim’s early days with Pender Nursery, he was growing plants in metal food cans acquired from a local school. After seeing how two local Johnson County nurseries, Lee & Sons Nursery in Four Oaks and Carroll’s Plant Center in Benson, were growing in plastic containers, Jim decided to make the switch.

“One of the things that impressed me about the nursery business was how helpful all those Johnson County nurseries were back in the day,” Kathy says. “Helping to diversify our plants and just helping Jim with how to run a nursery business.”

“And giving me credit,” Jim interjects, “because I had no money, and they would actually extend me credit on plants I would buy. So of course, I paid them back and got a good reputation with them. That was a really big help for us.”

The help from Lee & Sons and Carroll’s, as well as Taylor’s Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina, was crucial to Jim’s development as a wholesale nursery manager.

“It taught me that it really wasn’t a competition. You didn’t feel like you were competing with the guy 10 miles down the road, because like Kathy said, they were willing to help us out.”

Improving processes

In 1983, Jim incorporated the business with Dow Pender and started running the business and handling the financials. In 1992, Jim and Kathy bought him out. Although Kathy did not become a full-time employee of Pender Nursery until 2004, she has been a true business partner for Jim for much longer.

For the first 15 years of the business, Kathy supported the family. She had a good job at a pharmaceutical company that provided the solid income that allowed the Deals to take a chance at becoming business owners.

“There were a lot of weeks I went without a paycheck, because we didn’t have money,” Jim says.

Kathy had a saying she was fond of using in those early days of their working life together.

“I would support him for the first half, then he could support me for the second half,” she says.

When the company she worked for was merged into a larger company, Kathy knew her facility would be hit with downsizing.

“I came home and said, ‘Is it time to start the second half?’ And Jim said, ‘I think we could do that.’ So, I took the package, and I haven’t looked back since.”

While Jim handled plant production, Kathy was able to find areas to use her skills.

“She tried potting plants a few times, but it just wasn’t her thing,” Jim says with a laugh.

Instead, Kathy improved the nursery as a business in many ways. She set up a safety program when the nursery had nothing of the sort. She wrote Pender Operating Procedures, or POP, that would allow Pender Nursery to develop more consistency with its processes and therefore its products.

POP helps to standardize the training of new employees. By sticking to the POP, every new hire is trained the same way every time. They will each use the POP to learn the same way to pot a plant. Kathy says it improved consistency immensely.

“The nursery was growing pretty quickly when I came in,” she says. “And springs are always fairly chaotic. So, figuring out the responsibility and interface between sales, production and shipping and having processes there so that everybody understood their role helped reduce the madness.”

Kathy also worked with a production supervisor to develop a life cycle so the nursery could have fresh plants when they were needed. For instance, Pender has three seasons for Encore Azaleas: early spring, late spring and fall. There are POP guidelines that explain to employees how to have those shrubs ready for each time period in the quantities that are needed. Knowing when to take cuttings and when to move a plant up optimized the nursery’s space as the workers rotated crops through.

And she facilitated the nursery’s “Discover Diversity” branding and program for its perennials, with the management team.

Kathy gives a lot of the credit for Pender Nursery’s success to their neighbors in the Johnson County Nursery Marketing Association. She and Jim learned a lot from the association’s nursery tours, and she was amazed at how freely its members shared information, like how they pot plants, manage inventory and set up irrigation.

“It’s a big sharing community,” she says. “We even ship orders together sometimes if they’ve got a small order they need to get to the location we’re going or vice versa. It’s pretty special to have guys like that.”

HILA Class of 2018 member John Hoffman is a friend from the early days, before he even founded Hoffman Nursery. He used to show up in his old flatbed truck and buy azalea and liriope from Jim for his own landscaping business.

“John and [his wife] Jill are the greatest people you’ll ever meet,” Jim says.

For his part, John is very happy for the Deals’ success.

“I’ve known Jim and Kathy since the early 1980s and have watched their nursery blossom into what it is today,” John says. “This award is well deserved. Congratulations to you both.”

Responding to challenges

When the recession hit, business got tough at Pender Nursery.

“The business changed so much,” Kathy says. “Plants were easy to sell, and all of a sudden, it all stopped. We had to make a lot of changes: cutting back on the numbers of plants, cutting back on hiring new people. Everywhere went through a real struggle to survive.”

That was when Jim and Kathy found Ariel Montañez. Like them, Ariel had come to horticulture through an uncommon path. After eight years in the Marine Corps, he earned a business degree and got started at Monrovia’s North Carolina facility as a human resource assistant. He worked his way through roles in shipping, logistics, purchasing and maintenance before Monrovia closed its North Carolina facility. Then he interviewed for a similar shipping role at Pender Nursery.

Although he was hired as shipping manager in 2013, Jim and Kathy saw something in him that made them believe he could be the next general manager.

When they told Ariel that, he asked if they realized he only had seven years in the industry.

“I am not a horticulturist,” Ariel says. “I’m a former Marine with a business degree. My understanding of the production process was very limited, but in spite of that, they gave me the opportunity that has been the opportunity of my lifetime.”

In Ariel, they saw a hard worker with the ability to lead. Although he didn’t have production experience, neither did Jim when he started.

Ariel is grateful for the support he’s received from Jim and Kathy that has allowed him to be successful. Whenever he has a question or a concern, they’re there for him, ready to provide advice if he needs it. They have also been patient with his mistakes, understanding that he would probably make some and helping him work through them.

“Jim really has been not just my boss and the owner, but he’s been a friend,” Ariel says. “He taught me how to hunt. Being a Marine, I knew how to shoot a rifle. But I never learned how to go hunting. That’s a skill that I would not have learned had it not been for Jim. It was more than just work. He took an interest in me as a person.

“Kathy has been there to help me think things through whenever there’s been an issue, whether it’s a personnel or a process issue,” he continues. “She’s very analytical, very technical. I could sit down with her and say, ‘Hey Kathy, I’ve got this problem,’ and she’s always been there to discuss it. I’ve enjoyed having that level of relationship with her.”

Training the next generation

Jim and Kathy have been open to change throughout their career. Being new to the nursery industry has its advantages, and chief among them is the freedom from traditional dogma.

“The fact that we got into it accidentally and we didn’t know anything about nurseries to start with had a lot to do with our process, how we treat the employees and give them opportunities to make decisions and come up with suggestions,” Jim says.

Jim and Kathy attribute a lot of their success to that willingness to allow input and ideas.

For them, it’s about giving people opportunities and putting them in a position to succeed. They’ve tried to create a culture in which it’s normal to move people around until they find the job that is the best fit for their skills.

The culture at Pender Nursery starts with the employees. When hiring, Jim says to look for people who demonstrate the characteristics you want in your business.

“It’s not all about the plant,” Jim says.

While he hopes Pender Nursery employees have a passion for plants, it’s not a requirement. When hiring, personality and the ability to get along with others are more important.

“You can teach plants, but you can’t teach character, compassion and teamwork,” Kathy says.

Everyone from salespeople to the support staff to the people pulling plant orders needs to be focused on customer service.

Another important part of Pender Nursery’s culture is promotion from within. Most of the nursery’s management staff started off at a lower-level position in production, propagation or shipping.

“One thing I can always say about Jim and Kathy is they’re willing to give people an opportunity to grow and advance into other positions,” Ariel says. “We’ve had people that have started here as what we call a field tech, which is somebody that just helps customers and pulls orders. And they’ve worked their way all the way up to management from there.”

Jim says that working their way up through the company makes them appreciate every job and gives them a more well-rounded approach to leadership.

“It’s pretty rewarding to see these young people grow in the company,” Jim says.

Pender Nursery’s employees have been loyal, with nearly 15 that have been with the company for more than 20 years. The nursery has about 35 full-time employees and has used six H-2A seasonal workers for the last three years.

They also established the L. Dow Pender scholarship at North Carolina State University to help horticulture students get their education and get involved in the industry. They even offer the scholarship recipients a part-time job at the nursery, and they’ve had a few takers.

Jim says many young workers get their start at Pender Nursery. Some have stayed in the state and started their own landscape businesses. Some have moved out of state and gone on to bigger careers at arboretums and botanical gardens. Some of them are at other nurseries around the state and around the country.

“It makes us real proud to put people out into the industry from getting their start here,” Jim says.

Encore performance

One of the keys to Pender Nursery’s success was being an early partner of the Encore Azalea brand. In 1997, Jim was offered the opportunity to become the first licensed grower of the famous brand on the East Coast.

Jim developed a good relationship with Flowerwood Nursery in Loxley, Alabama. The Flowerwood folks knew that Pender Nursery had a reputation for growing a lot of the old-fashioned azaleas, which led to the possibility of propagating the Encores. Jim had his doubts, but he decided it was a worthwhile business opportunity.

“When we got our first 100 Encores in, I said, ‘There’s no way I can sell a 1- gallon for $4.50 when the regular azaleas were selling for $1.50,’” he says. “But after a year, we started advertising it, and it started catching on. And now that’s one thing that we are known for, more than anything, is our quality and varieties of the Encores that we do.”

Jim’s very proud of how the nursery stuck with it. It’s developed into a large part of the business — between 15-20% — and is a huge reason Pender Nursery is profitable and successful. Since the Encore experiment worked so well, Pender Nursery has added other brands to its growing portfolio, including the Southern Living and Bloomin’ Easy plant collections, First Editions, Proven Winners and Star Roses and Plants.

To get those azaleas looking their best, Pender Nursery has a strict regimen to follow. Jim says it starts with a pine bark potting mix, then the right type and amount of fertilizer. He works closely with his fertilizer companies to ensure his plants are receiving the proper amounts of nutrients. The next step is pruning. Pender Nursery has a production manager who Jim says is a “pruning freak” who keeps everything uniform. Besides pruning and spacing, the nursery also schedules carefully so it has flowering azaleas available at multiple times of year in the numbers they need and without crowding out its other crops.

What the future holds

Jim says the key to improving the industry and getting more young people interested in horticulture as a career is to raise prices. If nurseries can sell plants for more money, they’ll be able to pay higher salaries.

“I think we’re losing a lot of people to tech jobs because there’s no way we can compete with the kind of salaries they can make in other professions,” he says. “I just wish we could get more for our product so we could give more to our people.”

Other than labor, the biggest challenge the nursery is facing is input costs. The cost of the raw materials that go into growing and potting plants has increased dramatically.

“I don’t remember it going up as much in the first 30 years as it has in the last 10 years,” Jim says. “It’s just crazy, and it’s forced a lot of nurseries, us included, to cut down on employees. At one time, we had 80 employees here, but this has forced us to cut down and do more with less, develop more efficient processes.”

Jim and Kathy love to travel. They’ve been to Alaska several times and enjoy taking their camping trailer out during the three slow weeks of summer when they can get away. Jim loves hunting and fishing, and Kathy enjoys fishing and fly fishing. Since Ariel has taken on more of the day-to-day responsibilities, they’ve been able to get away more often. They have a couple of dogs and a cat at home that tie them down.

“I don’t know that I see myself ever completely retiring,” Jim says. “Ariel’s here managing the things he does; I’ve already eased out of things a bunch. I still really enjoy seeing these younger kids come in and grow with the business.”

Matt McClellan is editor of Nursery Management magazine. Contact him at mmcclellan@gie.net.

Meet the other members of the HILA Class of 2024:

• Mark Sellew, Prides Corner Farms
• Elias Mejia, Costa Farms
• Christa Orum-Keller, Midwest Groundcovers
• Ieda Del Bianco, Van Belle Nursery
• David van Wingerden, Express Seed