'Sherwoods Forests Interview'

Sherwoods Forests Interview

By Interviewer at 02/17/08 15:10

Name of your website? Sherwoods Forests Your name? Sherwood Botsford Your Location (city, etc) Near Warburg, Alberta, an hour southwest of Edmonton Alberta What are you about? Sherwood's Forests is dedicated to providing trees for rural landscapes. Farms and acreages can use larger trees to match their larger yards. We have trees that grow big. We have trees to slow the wind. We have trees that will survive on the prairie. Many trees sold locally are brought in from interior BC or even the coast. Poor things, they have never experienced an Alberta Winter. I've been told by professional landscape contractors that they expect a 50% mortality rate on non-local transplants. What inspired you to launch your own website? We wanted an inexpensive way to reach people directly. Small garden centers and acreage owners have a tough time finding local suppliers especially for species that are out of the ordinary. Finding them at reasonable prices is even harder. Our trees retail for half the price that you will pay at a garden center, and wholesale for even less than that. Why a web site for local business? Aren't websites for national or international businesses? My biggest business problem is letting the customer know I'm here. A web presence has the advantage that when people are looking they have a chance of finding you. In normal media such as newspapers and radio, almost all of the readers are skipping past your tiny ad to find the comics, or listeners who are impatiently waiting for the ad to end so the DJ will introduce the next song. The only other place that has people so ready to buy that they are actively seeking you out is the yellow pages. Becuase we can be found world wide, I feel an obligation to provide information that is useful far outside our general market area. It has worked better than I expected. I've gotten requests from one landscape centre in Montana who wanted a flatbed of 20 foot spruce. I had to pass the lead on to another local business that had trees that big in stock. I received another request from someone who wanted 100 4" European White Oaks shipped to China. I'm guessing for the Olympic Games. I tried to convince them that they wouldn't be likely to survive the trip at that size. (They weren't willing to fly them.) Eventually they found another supplier. This is my first attempt. This whole thing started when I was looking for a ponderosa pine to put in my yard. I asked at many garden centres. They either told me that it wouldn't grow here, or that it would get too big for a yard. I knew it would grow here. There are a dozen on the U of A campus in Edmonton. So I decided that if I couldn't find one, that other people must be having the same problem. I wanted a occupation to keep me active when I retired anyway, so I started a tree farm. How did you decide on a name for your website? We tried lots of names on our friends, relatives, anyone who would listen. Given my first name, Sherwood's Forests was a natural, and was regarded by most as a great name. Unfortunately apostrophes aren't allowed in domain names, so we had to modify it a bit. There is some confusion because a town called Sherwood Park is on the other side of Edmonton. We counteract this by stressing the relation to Edmonton where we can. Why did you start a tree farm? This whole thing started when I was looking for a ponderosa pine to put in my yard. I asked at many garden centres. They either told me that it wouldn't grow here, or that it would get too big for a yard. I knew it would grow here. There are a dozen on the U of A campus in Edmonton. So I decided that if I couldn't find one, that other people must be having the same problem. I wanted a occupation to keep me active when I retired anyway, so I started a tree farm. What are your eventual goals? For the farm? I'd like to get to the point of selling a few thousand trees per year. I don't want to get big. If I get big, then I'm spending all my time managing a business. The business is a necessary evil that gets in my way of growing the trees that I love. At it's biggest, I'd be willilng to hire a few students part time during the spring for the busy planting season, and perhaps a summer employee to help with the watering and mowing. For the website? Two fold: 1. Use this as a venue for selling our trees, not directly, but by raising interest in what we have. 2. Provide advice and information for people to use to grow and care for trees, and to help them to select which trees are right for their yard. The web site will be sold only when we sell the tree farm. It will be part and parcel of the good will and reputation that makes us who we are. Doubtless when that happens, the new owner will make changes in the site, but I'm optimistic that its primary goal will remain providing information about trees. How does your investment of time and money balance against your success? So far this is an expensive hobby. We've been growing trees for 5 years now. Two years ago we sold $1500 worth of trees. Last year we doubled that to $3000. However each year we have sunk 4-10 thousand dollars into the farm. So far about 1/3 of our customers have found out about us through our website. How are you financing your growth? My wife and I decided at the beginning that we wouldn't borrow money for this venture. In the worst case, we can walk away and not owe anyone anything. This has meant a lot of decision before investing in machinery. We now have a 50 hp utility tractor that can haul, dig, and mow, a smaller garden tractor with a rototiller for preparing soil, and a riding lawnmower to handle the 5 acres of grass between pot pens. Specialized equipment that needs to be run for weeks every year has no place: It means that I'd have to hire someone to run it. So I do a lot of work with a shovel, with a grain scoop. A person is the ultimate general purpose tool. I've got 4000 seedlings coming in this spring. It will take me 20 seconds each to plant them. About two weeks at a few hours per day. I could buy a 15,000 dollar machine, and with two or three people I could do it all in a day. That machine would have it's own engine, and would make a racket and require maintenance. I'll tkae the time, and be able to stare at the sky watching the hawks hunting field mice while my hands do their work. If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand? You're not hearing what I'm saying about size. the primary goal of the web site is to provide information about trees and about our operation. At this point I have no intention of selling advertising. The only exception to that is that I may put up a page with contact information about my suppliers, and if they wish, my customers. What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with? Writing web pages isn't easy. Writing web pages that present in a consistent manner on different browsers is harder. I'm still learning. My latest trick is a package called TTree, which allows me to create page fragments, such as a menu bar, then assemble the page automatically from the fragments. This will mean that when I change a menu, I only have to change it in the fragment, and not in every page on the site. On the farm side, water is a problem: getting it to the trees in sufficient quantity. This spring I'm faced with upgrading our water system with a larger pump, and replacing a thousand feet of 1.5" water line with 2" water line. What has been your biggest challenge? Learning how to take care of trees in containers. Because the roots are confined to a smaller volume, they can dry out very fast. In hot weather they need to be watered every two days. With 10,000 trees that's a lot of sprinkler moving. What method has been most successful for promoting your website? How are you continueing? Getting indexed by Google. Getting listed on the Alberta Roundup governement agriculture information site. I've just recognized the importance of getting into local directories. There is lots of information on the net. Finding stuff that is local to your own region is a lot harder. Not all things ship well. So far there is no overall recognized search engine for local results, so I'm spending my winter working on the web site, and trying to get us into all the local directories that I can. How has running your website differed from your expectations? It's a lot harder. Just trying to add stuff to it to make it interesting and new is much more work that I expected. There are always otehr things to do. How long do you expect it to take for the farm to pay? It's been 5 years. We've started making sales. I expect taht 2009 will see us make a bit over expenses, and that 2011 will see us making more than minimum wage for our efforts. What do you think of having this format for submitting stuff? I think it's great. I suspect that with my primary discussion about the farm rather than about the web site, it probably won't get used. But it's a good enough idea that I've cut and pasted all my questions and comments so that I can put it on my own site. What is your website address? Sherwoods Forests News Digest Blog Tags: • web interview • rural landscapes • trees • - Permalink Previous (Newer) Post Next (Older) Post Comments Thinking about making a comment on this blog post? Great! But please remember that this space is for just that, comments about this blog post. It is not a place to post random thoughts about other stuff. We found that most of the "comments" posted here are not comments at all and should have really been posted in our forum. So: If you have something to say that's not exactly a comment on this blog post, please post it on the Home Improvement Blog Forum If you are just planning to spam... go away as all the comments are premoderated Have something to actually say about this blog post, please submit your comment here: Leave a comment: We welcome your comments on this post in the Home Improvement Blog. That means a comment on this post, not something about some other topic. Name: (required) Email: (required, not published) Comment: Note: Your comment will be immediately submitted and you will have no opportunity to review to edit it. It is recommend that you register on Home Improvement Blog and login so you can include full html (ie: links). We don't have a chapta because we think we're smarter than the spambots.