The business was a seasonal one. Year-round crews tend the plants, but the operation lives and dies by a compressed peak: a roughly 10-week window from April 1 to mid-June that accounts for 53% of annual sales. During those weeks, workers receive picklists specifying plant types and quantities and then coordinate logistics from potting through shipping and truck dispatch, all to move some 14 million plants a year out to national retail chains and specialty distributors. The company was profitable, but it was carrying real cost pressure into that peak.

The deeper problem was that none of the staffing or performance ran on information. Hiring had never involved scientific workforce planning. Management added workers at the onset of the season without ever determining the actual headcount a given volume required, and once they were on, there were no productivity measurements anywhere in the operation, so the organization simply could not assess how it was performing. Forecasts and historical data existed, but the information had never been integrated into a usable management operating system that first-level farm supervisors could act on.

Compounding all of it was a leadership gap at the production level. Supervisors had been promoted up from the worker ranks without formal training in management fundamentals, so they could not set crew expectations, establish finish-time targets, or track hours worked, and there was no systematic process for ramping the workforce up and back down as a season built and wound down. Leadership did not need a one-time labor cut. It needed a system: measures, expected rates, and trained supervisors capable of defining and improving the work itself.

POWERS started in the fields, on the potting lines, and in the propagation areas, conferring directly with the people doing the work to establish crew sizes and to surface the lost-time patterns and core performance issues that the absence of measurement had kept hidden. From that ground-level view, the team consulted with growers and supervisors to establish task-completion rates per hour, drawing on field observation and experience so that every job carried a defined, expected pace it could be scheduled and judged against.

In parallel, the engagement gave the operation a forward-looking system to plan against. POWERS built a process that examined one-to-three-week projections and analyzed previous-year patterns to identify seasonal trends, then turned that into ramp-up plans tied to projected loading volumes and helped supervisors determine the right timing to reduce the workforce as each season wound down. For the first time, the forecasts and history the company already had were doing real work in staffing decisions. A land-acquisition analysis ran alongside this, confirming that an identified property could support the required volumes to justify a lease or purchase.

The throughline was the supervisors. POWERS trained them to quantify work definitions, establish expected rates, calculate crew-completion timelines, and schedule daily workloads to fit more work inside operating hours, and reinforced it with hands-on application and behavioral coaching rather than classroom theory. As measures, rates, and trained leadership took hold together, the operation began to run on information instead of instinct, and the culture shifted with it: staff now proactively surface problems and share successes rather than waiting to be asked.