The Bourne family at Perrywood Garden Centre want to make the GCA’s A-list. Alan and Karin Bourne and their son Simon - middle child of three – are the management team at Perrywood. “In reality, Simon pretty much runs the whole business. He’s good at most things,” Alan tells Mike Wyatt in this months Garden Trade News.
At the age of 32, Simon Bourne finds himself running his Mum and Dad’s garden centre. If you’d told him when he left university that this would one day happen, it would probably have scared him. “I had it all worked out,” he tells me.
“I definitely did not want to join the family business. I did not want to run a garden centre, I was certain I did not want to work in retail.” He choose a career in mechanical engineering and, like many an aspiring twenty-something, hoped it might lead to a role in the world of motor racing. “But I never got anywhere near it.” Instead, he landed a job with Trinity House, re-engineering lighthouses.
It took seven years there for his own personal light to come on, illuminating the path to the family business – Perrywood Garden Centre and Nurseries near Tiptree in Essex.
So what happened on the road to Damascus? “I used to go on lots of courses and conferences and instead of thinking about how I could apply this new-found knowledge to my job, I found myself working out how it could benefit the family business. I began to realise that, although I had told myself I didn’t want to be in it, I actually did.”
He found himself at odds with the public service culture at Trinity House, “where there is no profit motive – you are given a budget and told to spend it”. Importantly, he realised that the successful family business presented a ready-made opportunity to be his own boss, or at least have more control over his destiny, whatever that might turn out be. “I understood that once you sell your business, you can never get it back, so that was a draw,” he said.
His parents, Alan and Karin, had spent 25 years building up a former fruit and vegetable smallholding into a thriving garden centre. “They had been thinking about an exit strategy but they didn’t want to sell up and I just couldn’t imagine that happening.” Nervously, he approached Alan and Karin. “Mum was concerned that I was doing it because I felt I had to, not because I really wanted to.” Once he assured them that this was destiny, not duty, he was welcomed with open arms. “We had always thought about it,” Alan tells me. “We hoped it would end up this way but we didn’t want to force it.” Perrywood’s roots go back another generation.
When the supermarkets began to squeeze the fresh produce market, the nursery founded by Alan’s parents began to struggle. Alan left his job with Colchester parks department to join the business and quickly persuaded them to erect a greenhouse for the production of garden plants. Plant sales soon began to outstrip potatoes and strawberries.
In 1983, with Mary and Les ready to bow out, Alan and Karin swopped houses. “Our house and the smallholding had roughly the same value so we took on the nursery and they moved into our place,” Alan said. Turnover that year was £75,000.
Thirty years later, after two major building projects and a programme of continuous investment (all self-financed), Perrywood has a turnover of more than £5 million. Alan thinks it can climb further. “We don’t talk about expansion. We think of it as improvement. If we go on getting better, the growth will follow naturally.”
Perrywood was 63rd in the Garden Centre Association’s standards audit last year. This year, Simon says, they’ve aimed for the Top 50 and next year will push hard to reach the Top 25 – in effect, the A-list.
The GCA’s standards are famously stringent so this is a tough ask for any centre, but you would be ill-advised to bet against Perrywood getting there when the results are revealed next January.
Simon is garden centre manager and Alan says he gets full reign to manage it. “He’s good at most things he turns his hand to. He’s good with the customers, he’s good with the products, he does all the sundries, furniture and barbecues buying and I don’t ever have to question it. We’re now more likely to go Simon if we want to find out about health and safety or pay rates or IT. The day to day management is taken care of and it’s made a big difference to Karin and I. We don’t have to do so much preparation before we go away somewhere.”
Simon says his arrival in the business allowed his father more time and energy to do what he loves and does best - growing plants. The Perrywood nursery grows around 40% of all the plants they sell. “Dad is a plantsman and a very good one,” he says. “He knows what people want.”
Simon’s older sister Hannah, currently on maternity leave from her marketing and communications business, looks after the centre’s publicity and advertising. His wife runs the centre’s on-line operation. His younger brother Tristan works in the renewable energies industry. Simon has young children, so there will be a long wait before we discover whether Perrywood will remain as a family concern.
This series is sponsored by Quinton Edwards, specialist property consultants to the garden centre and horticultural industry www.quintonedwards.co.uk email: sales@quintons.co.uk
Read all of the August issue of Garden Trade News here.
