Seven: Cactus & Tropicals

1983

Two new greenhouses

After negotiations were completed, the deeds and notes signed, and the greenhouse building permit waived, I was fired up and ready to go. It was 1983. I had eight years behind me selling plants—three in my Grass Menagerie shop, one year dormant as I resettled, and four years with my first greenhouse business, Cactus Growers of Utah. I still didn’t have a plan or a long-range vision of what my company would look like in the end, if there was an end. But I was starting to understand the meaning of entrepreneurship. I was in too deep to call the company an escape hatch or a hobby. And it was no longer just about plants or the products we sold. Cactus & Tropicals was forming its own psyche—a company ethos in an early stage of development, a growing staff spirit of collaboration and commitment, and a community presence.

Personally, I was feeling a stronger sense of stability and endurance and an increasing confidence that I could manage it—really make it into something meaningful. I was invested not only financially, but emotionally as well. I cared for it with a mother’s affection. I wanted it to grow strong and healthy. The future is a long way off, but I was beginning to pay attention to what might be around the next corner. I was aware I needed to sharpen my skills at “seeing the light” and taking advantage of opportunities when they beckoned; I needed to pay better attention to the timing of things. I say that, because looking back almost fifty years later, I wonder if that five-year gap between the down payment and the balloon payoff with the Ericksons wasn’t too long. It probably should have been three years.

I remember my dad’s business growing at a pony trot. He constantly needed more space for a new offset press or a fancy folding machine. His father, my Grandpa Miller, was a brick mason. He lived in Denver, but came to Salt Lake City every couple of years to add a room or tear down a wall at the Lorraine Press. It was chaotic; deliveries and cinderblocks dodging each other, the racket of the Heidelberg Press competing with the churn of the cement mixer. There were times when you couldn’t get in or out of the doors.

There was a similar rhythm in growing my business. Sometimes things were crashing down around us and the ground was pitted with post holes and glittering with metal pipe. That would be followed by a period of relative calm. Then I’d spend part of my evening driving by Cactus & Tropicals to make sure the gate was locked and the lights were out. To an outsider, the growth probably seemed haphazard, randomly adding a new greenhouse or demolishing a building. During the hectic moments, Dad would call.

“Lorraine, are you busy?”

“Yes, Dad,” I’d answer. “Really busy.”

He’d pause for a second and then ask, “Yeah, but are you making any money?”

Therein lies the rub.

Not my grandpa but my dear friend Stu, fellow soldier in the War Against Poverty who had helped me transform a boarded-up building into the Grass Menagerie, came out from Denver to help build the foliage greenhouses. We started in October, and the weather was beautiful—warm and dry. To begin, we had to dig forty-six post holes four feet deep. This time, we had a gas-powered auger and there was no need for charcoal briquets to thaw the ground like when the cactus house was built. We dug the post holes in two days instead of two weeks. Stu was a perfectionist with his string line and level, always on the bubble. As he cemented in a row of posts, he’d stand me in front of the first one and say, “How many posts do you see?”

“One,” I’d answer.

“Good,” he’d say. “That’s all you’re supposed to see.”

If the posts didn’t line up perfectly, every step that followed would be increasingly skewed, until the final pieces wouldn’t line up and wouldn’t connect.

Nothing can put a person to sleep faster than reading the erector set instructions of building a greenhouse. But there were a couple of construction decisions that impacted future growth, if it was to be. The first one had to do with the height of the greenhouse walls before the hoop starts to curve. The cactus house had four-foot side walls, too short to attach another greenhouse. In order to connect multiple hoops, an eight-foot sidewall is required. The curve of the roof doesn’t begin until the bows (curved parts) are attached to the eight-foot-high posts. That allows a person to walk from one greenhouse bay into another. With a four-foot side wall, a person would be forced to crawl.

Secondly, the Essential Secret of future greenhouse additions lies in one critical piece: the “Y” yoke, which slips over the top of each post. The bow slips over one side of the “Y” while the other side of the “Y” just sits there, poking out, awaiting its future use. Attaching them to the outside posts now insured that you could come back later—years later if necessary—and attach another greenhouse, slipping its bow on the other side of the “Y.” Remove the fiberglass wall and reattach it to the new outside wall. Voilà, the hoops would be joined and the space would be wide open. Thanks to lessons learned from building the cactus greenhouse, I had the foresight to build the new greenhouses with eight-foot walls and put “Y” yokes on the posts. (Just in case.) Now we had 3,200 square feet for foliage, and the cactus house was back to its original self of 1,600 square feet.

I had to change the company name again. Still mortified by the name I chose for my first shop (Grass Menagerie), I wanted to be clear about what we sold and didn’t want to stray too far from our current name, Cactus Growers of Utah. I dropped the words “Growers of Utah” and replaced them with the word “Tropicals.”

People called. “Hey, you changed your name. You’re selling fish, too, huh? Do you have guppies?”

Is this where the phrase “you can’t win for losing” applies?

The completion of the new greenhouses culminated in a most spectacular visit. Mr. Stuppy, owner of Stuppy Greenhouse Corporation in Kansas City, Kansas, his wife, and their tiny toy poodle were traveling across the country from Kansas to California, and they stopped by to see their greenhouses in Salt Lake City.