Sometimes it can be as simple as offering a customer a bottle of cold water on a hot day.
It’s sometimes the simple things that help run a retail business like keeping the trash picked up, J.D. Boone recently explained outside his business, Dothan Nurseries.
Boone said it’s important to help make the customer’s visit to Dothan Nurseries a memorable experience. As part of J.D. Boone’s retail philosophy, he runs his business with a certain motto of sorts, “Perfect Plants. Perfect Place. Every Day.”
“It’s not just walkways and displays. It’s about making every single customer special. It’s about making it an experience as opposed to a place to just buy stuff,” Boone said. “We have people who come by once a week and just walk. It’s their release, they just want to walk and look at the plants.”
But Boone also said he’s learned a lot from his family, including his father, Bobby, who has been in the nursery business nearly 40 years. Bobby Boone owns and runs Buds N’ Blossoms Nursery and Landscaping, located on U.S. 431 in north Dothan, with his wife Rhoda.
Sacrifice
J.D. Boone said owning Dothan Nurseries has helped him understand the sacrifice it took for his parents to run their own business as he grew up.
“It’s helped me understand it’s one thing to work at a business, but it’s another to own and run a business,” J.D. Boone said. “I understand now what a big sacrifice it is. I’ve got two little boys, and it makes it even more clear.”
But J.D. Boone said that’s not the only thing he’s learned over the years from his father.
“He’s helped me learn not to get all worked up about employee issues,” J.D. Boone said. “He’s been running his own business for 40 years and I’ve been running mine for almost 10 years. It’s nice to have someone to go to for advice not even nursery related, but just business related.”
J.D. Boone said he’s learned how to run a business, including how to be smarter about buying inventory to sell in the business.
“I encourage him to shop,” Bobby Boone said. “If you can buy right, you can sell right.”
But his father said the feeling is mutual.
“I’m 62 years old, and I’ve reached that point where I feel like I’m learning more from him than he’s learning from me,” Bobby Boone said. “He’s just a wealth of new ideas. We do a better job of retailing because of him.”
In the Beginning
Bobby Boone’s wife’s father started the business on U.S. 431 North in 1972. In the early days of the nursery the total annual sales for Buds N’ Blossoms Nursery and Landscaping came to around $60,000.
Boone worked at the Farley Nuclear Plant, but when his wife became pregnant with J.D. he started working at Buds N’ Blossoms. In 1974, Bobby and his wife took over the nursery.
“It wasn’t a big place, it was actually pretty small,” Bobby Boone said. “We hit it about the time people started landscaping more. We’ve just gradually grown it.”
Bobby Boone said he and his wife purchased the land on Montgomery Highway that formerly housed Wayside Gardens and the Bama Drive-In Theater before that. Bobby and Rhoda Boone changed the name to Dothan Nurseries.
A phone call one day left Bobby and his wife “overjoyed” to find out their son planned to move back home to Dothan with intentions to work with them at the family business.
J.D. Boone grew up in Dothan, and moved away to attend college in South Carolina where earned a degree in finance. He came back to Dothan and worked with his father in landscaping for about a year.
“I like plants, but I love retail,” J.D. Boone said.
Bobby Boone said there are many advantages to the family running similar businesses owned by different people and different locations. He said Buds N’ Blossoms generally has an 80 percent focus on landscaping and 20 percent focus on retail plant sales.
“We can exchange information, and you surely don’t mind sending customers to your son,” Bobby Boone said. “I can’t call my competitors and ask them what to do, but it’s nice to have a son I can call on for advice.”
Bobby Boone said running a similar business with his son has also helped them both expand their customer base.
“It works good being separate businesses. We get all the benefit, and none of the junk or bad stuff,” J.D. Boone said. “The bottom line is we’d both make a lot more mistakes were it not for each other.”
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