~ An essay reflecting on the past 3 years of Gabriella Plant’s growth ~

Backstory for context:

It has now been 3 full years since I first launched Gabriella Plants, which at the time was only a simple Etsy page, and I cannot begin to express my gratitude for how much our small family business has been able to grow in the past 3 years. We went from literally 0 customers to where we are today, shipping thousands of plants every week.

Despite now having 3 years of experience launching and growing Gabriella Plants, I’m still just 26 years old and I have a lot of learning left to do. This letter is a reflection and update on my personal experiences in the process, but specifically what’s happened so far this year.

A little about me first; My name is Shane Maloy and I’m 26 years old and I’m the owner and founder of Gabriella Plants, now the 3rd generation owner of the family business. I am happily married to my best friend and middle school sweetheart, Miriam, and we have a poodle named Teddy. I love people, plants & technology and I’m passionate about connecting those passions together.

I first took over the day to day operations of the full time at the start of 2017 from my Dad and for the first few years, I ran the wholesale only greenhouses in the exact same way that my Dad had. It wasn’t until August 28th, 2018 that I first began to experiment with an idea; selling the plants that our family greenhouse had grown for decades, like Pink Princess, Rio & other Philodendron, and instead of wholesale, to sell and ship the plants that we grow directly From Our Greenhouse to Your House®!

Fun fact; As of a few weeks ago, From Our Greenhouse to Your House® is now a registered trademark of Gabriella Plants! It’s official!

The initial beginning story as well as the first 2 years of Gabriella Plants were mind blowing as we experienced exponential growth and although I don’t want to recap allllll of those early lessons and accomplishments, you can read my transparent perspective at various other milestones via these previous open letters below:

Our Story So Far

2 Years Later

Now moving on to the events or experiences so far in 2021…

1 Location to 4 Locations
For some perspective, just exactly a year ago, I shared in a letter similar to this, that I was beginning to feel like the company could survive a single day or two without my involvement. That was completely life changing from the 2 years of constant 80+ hours every week without fail, as I had been doing that marathon of endless work for so long. Another thing I remarked on last year was my intention to pursue hiring talented individuals who have higher skill or knowledge levels than myself, so that our team can grow to a point beyond where I could lead them alone. In my last update letter towards the end of the 2020, I shared our plans of expansion to 2 locations, having a dedicated offsite shipping/offices location, so I’m going to pick up the story from the start of this year.

In January of 2021, we moved our Shipping Team, Customer Care, and Development teams to our first offsite location; Aloma. (Only named “Aloma” because it happens to be off a road named Aloma, original I know…) Before we got there, there was a ton of work that had to be done to get it ready for our company. I can’t say thank you enough to those on the team, including my father in law Chuck, who made that transformation possible. Curtis, our IT Director, also helped install more ethernet in that single large warehouse than the total distance to drive between Aloma and the greenhouses.

This new location gave us the ability to have proper office space for the teams that do digital roles to collaborate and work comfortably while it also doubled the amount of space we have for our Shipping Team. Lastly, we also pursued moving shipping offsite so that we could ship from a commercial address, giving us better timeliness and daily pickups from the Post Office and UPS, instead of us doing daily deliveries in rush hour at the end of every day. Personally, this space also gave me my first “real office”, although tbh, because I’m an introvert, I really only use it for the podcast recordings and other higher level meetings with vendors, partners or team members.

However, these were actually 2020 plans, that were put into motion in 2020, that essentially opened at the start of 2021.

We had 2 other expansion opportunities we were hoping to execute on before the end of the year; Opening a retail storefront nearby and building more greenhouses at my wife and I’s homestead just a few driveways around the corner from our original growing location. Our “Shop” has been a goal of Miriam and I’s since some of our very first public sales at the greenhouses and we had even gotten to the commitment line on a space the month before COVID lockdowns began last year, but were abandoned when the lock downs went into effect.

In late March, we found a spot that would put us a little out of the way of heavy foot traffic, but would keep the Shop less than 5 minutes from the greenhouses, just like our Shipping location. In fact, Shop is located essentially in the middle between the two, so it was a win-win. Chuck, our resident build-out expert, spent just 17 working days taking an empty shell and transforming it into a beautiful and operational shop. We went from getting keys to having our preview weekend sales in less than a month! Alexa, our Shop Manager, has single handedly launched and grown that Shop by herself, supported by the Inventory Team and the combined skills of all the handy folks at GP, needing only my input on marketing/digital items.

At the same time Shop was under construction in April, our team began to create our plan to expand how many greenhouses we have by installing new greenhouses in MY backyard. When my Grandpa sold the greenhouses and property of our original location to my Dad, they bought a piece of land and built a home just around the corner, literally. I cannot begin to describe how happy I was to have the opportunity to purchase this home and property, after my Grandma passed away last year. Certainly, a large portion of the decision to purchase this piece of property was that it had 2 acres of land already zoned for commercial agriculture ready for an expansion and it would be so close by to the original growing location (0.2 miles) that we could easily share farm equipment like the tractor and share supplies like soil, without the need for another location manager or operational challenges like transportation of supplies. It also warms my heart to know that my children one day will also grow up in a greenhouse, just like I did.

These new greenhouses, nicknamed “Brooks”, were also configured to be a completely different style greenhouse than the ones at our primary location. The Brooks Greenhouses feature an active cooling system, which allows the greenhouse to stay at temperatures lower than outside even in the heat of summer, and maintains a minimum humidity of 80%. This additional space for plants combined with the new environment allows us to explore a wider range of plants we can grow year round.

Not only did we want to build more greenhouses to grow more plants, having the greenhouses in my backyard also means that I am able to do what I love in whatever time I do have, including nights and weekends with ease. I still look forward every day to the moments I get to do my part to propagate a next batch of plants for our customers in the greenhouses.

Although we had planned to accomplish both of these milestones this year, I didn’t anticipate them happening at the same time, not to mention the same month, same week and practically speaking, both projects finished on the same DAY! I am incredibly blessed and forever humbled and grateful.

Weight of Ownership
At the same time we were starting our year shipping at our new location, I successfully completed the official process of buying the family business from my Dad, along with multi-year lease of the original greenhouses. The weight shifted with the stroke of the pen and it felt heavier in a way I can’t really explain. Although I had led the teams to goals and objectives over the past 2 years, I felt a renewed and higher expectation to provide for the team financially and to help grow them in character and in their skills in their roles.

Primarily, as I’m sure is the case for any business owner, finances were now my full responsibility and stewarding the growth we experienced in ways that benefited the team as a whole became my top priority. This also meant that I had a lot of work to do that in my head, didn’t really accomplish our mission, because paperwork isn’t as direct a task as propagating a tray of plants I know our customers will want and need.

To this day, the weight of a team of 26+ people relying on me is a lot. Quite often I still feel fairly unqualified or unprepared. Why am I in this position? Am I qualified for something THIS big? Don’t mess it up… (I tell myself.). The answer is probably not, but I believe that God has a bigger purpose that I can see and it’s not really mine in the first place.

One skill I’ve had to develop this year in order to care for the team the best I can has been learning to ask the right questions. Given our team’s diverse ideas and experience, I fully realize that THEY hold the keys to make GP better for our team and for our customers. I feel that my role in the past few months has been to be intentional about framing the big mission and right objectives and creating clarity by asking the right questions… and most lastly but importantly; celebrate the team hitting their goals.

More Talent
We started the year with a LOT more talent on our roster than ever before, having Brett Weiss join our team with years of industry experience and the desire to be our Head Botanist working on managing what we grow, breeding new plants and expanding our offerings to our customers. Brett also has an impressive amount of botanical education and knowledge, alongside a heart to share that with others. Although I have years of experience working in our greenhouses, I know that I have very little true knowledge of plants or plant science, so learning from Brett has been a treasure.

We also welcomed Zach Herrbach, who serves as our Media/Marketing director and has been rapidly advancing the way we tell the story of Gabriella Plants to our customers. Lastly, we brought on Chuck, my father in law, full time to our team as a Senior Project Manager, in both physical and digital senses, as he oversees our build out projects for new physical spaces and also manages the ongoing work within our app/tech development team having a lengthy career in just that, but having been laid off due to COVID.

Each one of these team additions served a critical piece to our mission of Always Growing More, but they were also some of the missing pieces I felt I needed to pull off the most insane customer experience and mission we have at GP of sharing Every Plant’s Story with our customers.

Not only did we have a few additions to the team, several other team members have transitioned to a more permanent role, or new sets of responsibilities. I do everything I can to also find ways to have people grow as we grow together as a company.

Every Plant Has A Story
One of the things I’ve been most proud of this year has been our launch of our Story Stakes. Over a year ago, I had a vision of being able to use technology to share everything we know about a plant’s history directly to a customer. Since we grow nearly everything we sell, we can share a lot of information with our customers and we will create the most unique customer experience for our customers in the process.

Our Story Stake technology was all developed internally and is the only system that tracks individual plants with the purposes of sharing those individual stories with our customers. Right now, the technology uses a QR code printed on specific nursery stakes that have individual IDs and once scanned, our current Story Portal webpage shares the date that plant was first planted, name of the grower, soil mix, fertilizer and other notes, but in the future we have BIG plans that I can’t wait to share on how customers will be able to CONTINUE to track their plant’s story from home! That’s coming soon, but the technology has taken months to develop.

The backbone of our Every Plant Story technology has been our internal use GP App, which lets our teams organize what plants are needed at which locations, what plants are growing on what benches, what plants are ready or on a list to be uploaded to the website in an Inventory Update. It also generates the individual serial numbers for each story. Our teams at GP have been so hard at work, we’ve already planted/started over 80,000 stories since March of this year alone.

• Then (3 years ago) vs. Now
• We grew from 1 location to 4 locations, including two growing locations, our offices & our retail storefront.
• Staff members 3 grew to 26.
• Unique species/cultivars we offer our customers grew from 14 to over 700 now.
• Weekly shipping capacity has expanded from 60 plants by myself to over 2,000 – 3,000 plants each week during the peak shipping months.
• We built our own proprietary Story Stakes technology, so that we can track every plant that we grow and share their stories with our customers.
• We have planted over 80,000 individual new plants (and their stories) since we began printing the unique individualized stakes in March.
• Lastly… 89% of the plants we have sold this year so far, WE GREW OURSELVES.
• Developing Trust & Leadership
• One thing that I knew was likely and also feared daily was growing divide between the locations or disagreements among the growing team. More people bring more ideas and more hands to help with work, but also bring more perspectives that need to be heard and appreciated. It took very intentional conversations to enable all teams to be able to empathize and to remind the team that we’re on one mission together.

When tensions were high, there were nights that I would get off the phone with my COO and just hang my head not knowing how to make that particular situation any better and in some cases, I had to learn that it was okay that I couldn’t do anything about it. Even if I knew the answer wasn’t something I could provide, I still spent dozens of hours listening to audiobooks on leadership, trying desperately to expand my own skills in being able to handle conflict.

Some lessons just had to be accepted and applied next time. I expect myself to be able to catch every single person’s fall and I had to accept that was an unattainable goal, regardless of how noble it may be. I say this with confidence now, but this is still a daily struggle of feeling the pressure to be more than I feel I am.

I have been radically transparent with both our team and our customers from the very start of Gabriella Plants and I believe it’s one of the most unique things about our company. I don’t have all the answers and that’s okay. I have learned that it’s okay to say that I don’t know or to redirect a question to the person on the team that is most likely to have the answer.

I’m a hardcore introvert, despite what you may believe, so one skill I’ve learned this year is how to be intentional in investing time with people 1 on 1 in order to see where they’re at, how they want to grow and to help give them guidance to hit their own goals. It’s one of my favorite things I do every 3 months now. I also learned to condense most of my in person meetings into 2 or 3 days of the week, allowing me to have a better balance of human interaction that’s meaningful and impactful & focused time alone to work on larger projects or just get some therapy in by propagating some plants.

Even before having the Aloma offices, I found myself most often working from home, rather than the greenhouses, simply because it was the only place that had the screen privacy to handle sensitive tasks and was a much quieter place to take calls. However, I found that even after we had our offices, my tendency was still to work from home most often.

Working from home allowed for me to accomplish some of the best changes we’ve made for our customers this year so far, but it also came with the daily anxiety about what may be happening at a location I’m not able to be present at. Even the days I was present at a particular location, I realized I couldn’t possibly be at all locations all the time.

I had to learn to TRUST the team and the LEADERS that I had put in place.

Hands Off / Team Solutions
Part of trusting the team meant wrestling with developing a hands off approach, as it’s what would demonstrate my confidence in trust in the team’s capabilities.
THAT has been the hardest part of this year. To come from the first 2 years of the business, where nearly every question came to me throughout the day like an endless spring, to now seeing the team take on entire new goals of their own while still accomplishing our primary mission has been incredibly rewarding to witness and celebrate. It’s truly HUGE.

In finding the balance of giving direction while demonstrating trust, I thought endlessly on how to grow the team. I kept trying to find new ways to express my vision to transition our company from running off of my plans and strategies alone and into a culture where the team was fully aware of the overall goals, challenges and opportunities, and their mission was to create the solutions that meet those goals and that work well for the team. Every person has a natural desire to want to be empowered and if I can help create an environment that allows people to bring those ideas to the table every week to make our company better, that is just pure joy.

I found that the more I was able to successfully communicate what was in front of us and ask the team for their thoughts, that they had much better ideas on how to overcome that hurdle than I could ever come up with. Some of this included redirecting people’s questions to me right back at them; “What would YOU do given the situation?” and I found that 90% of the team, they already had some ideas on how to make it better.

The more the year has gone on, the more I’ve realized that the team is fully responsible for our daily operations and that has had a weird impact on me personally. My self worth has always been in what I’ve “done” each day. For the entire start of the company, my worth has been in what work I did every day, with the regular 14 hour days begin the norm.

As I realized that the team did better without me in some senses, it really began to make me question what exactly I was worth, if I was worthy of being the leader of the organization as a whole given the disconnection, or if I had done enough that day or night. In fact, a little piece of this is still why I propagate so late into the nights several nights a week. That’s some real talk right there.

One thing I’ve found encouraging though, is that apparently I’m not alone, as far as the emotional waves of owning a business that has grown at a pace I can’t truly comprehend. Letting go is still something I’m working on.

The best thing I’ve found while wrestling with letting go has been investing whole heartedly into 1 on 1 Quarterly Checkins with every Team Member. These meetings have given me windows into perspectives, motivations and victories of the team and have been a great means of reassurance that everyone is on the right track and on the same team.

Investment in Team (financially)
Investing in the team is demonstrated not just in enabling the team to make decisions, but also taking care of the team financially. The agriculture industry historically is an incredibly low paying job, but what we have is certainly something beyond the scope of the traditional industry in most senses. In order to retain the talent that we have, I have made it my highest priority to continue to provide career advancements and raises for every member of our team. As of a few months ago, our minimum wage is now officially $15/hr for everyone that has completed their first 90 days, but the average wage of the team is even higher than that.

Not only have we issued consistent raises throughout the year, we’ve also provide benefits to our team, including PSL, PTO, Plant Perks & additional benefit packages like dental, vision or life insurance.

I truly believe in our team with all my heart. I am not in a league of my own as the business owner, I am part of the team and we share our victories together and I will do everything in my power to take care of the team that takes care of our customers.

I will, without a doubt, continue to explore ways to better care for our team as they continue to grow in their careers with the company.

The Future…
Of course, who am I to know what the future holds, but I know one thing; Good is ahead. Our team just keeps getting stronger, growing better, advancing their skills and learning together.

There are some things I really look forward to sharing with our customers later this year. A few examples of things coming up:

Continued develop of our internal GP App, which tracks Every Plant’s Story via their unique serial Story Stake and track that particular plant’s status through the process of getting them to our customers safely.
Launch of our Gabriella Growers Club, a membership that has first access to all the new technologies launching this fall. Members will also have exclusive access to small early “test batches” of plants that we have limited numbers of.
Provide richer data available in each Story Stake to better connect the conditions the plant was raised in with our customers, to give them a better understanding of how to have ongoing success with each plant.
Updates to our limit policies on certain plants on the website, as many will be reduced or eliminated.
Continued development of in-person and online classes or workshops to help share our knowledge of plants with our customers.
Later in the year, sneak previews of all the NEW plants we’re growing for next year, as we continue to find ways to share what data we have as we plant batches with our customers and we pursue our intentions of continuing to expand our breeding and production programs.
Personally, for the rest of the year, I’m focused on trying to lean into taking appropriate rest. That will always be a struggle in my life, but I feel the investment and sacrifices I’ve made thus far have created an opportunity to rest for a season. However, that will never stop me from physically growing more plants, especially with the greenhouses now in my backyard.

I cannot ever in my life express how thankful I am for a team that has stuck by me, believed in my vision and helped make it way better than I ever could myself. Not only have I had a fantastic team, I have been blessed with an incredible wife who has supported every bit of my ups and my bad days. And lastly, GP would be absolutely nothing without the patience and support from our customers. If you’re reading this letter in it’s entirety, I have no words to express how thankful I truly am. I don’t think those words exist.

Until next time,

Your friendly and thankful grower,

Shane