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BUSINESS
Perennial Favorites founder moves into landscaping
Donna Rumbaugh trims a blue phitzer juniper on Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at Unlimited Future, Inc. in Huntington.
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HUNTINGTON -- It's Donna Rumbaugh's philosophy that a nice environment leads to a more productive life.
"If people have a beautiful home, they can have a more fulfilling personal life and then go out and do their jobs better," said Rumbaugh, owner of Perennial Favorites Greenhouse in West Huntington and a new business, Madison Avenue Landscaping.
"It's my way of fixing the world one yard at a time," she said.
Landscaping is a new direction for the self proclaimed "plant nerd," who founded Perennial Favorites Greenhouse 21 years ago, initially selling perennials from home in Ceredo. The business was temporarily relocated to South Point, Ohio, before she moved to her current location on Madison Avenue in 1995.
She started with perennials. That's what first sparked her interest in plants 30 years ago because her husband said he only wanted to dig once. But she now also sells annuals, small trees and blooming shrubbery.
To help her better fulfill her mission, Rumbaugh decided to move into landscaping in 2007.
People had asked her to do their landscaping for years, and she had done some consultations. But she didn't have the staff to do it all and didn't want to be "one of those landscapers who never showed up or called."
Now she's ramping up. She has three employees with her greenhouse business and three with her landscaping business, and she'd like to have eight with each.
To help her revamp her business plan and decide whether to meld landscaping into her existing business or separate them, Rumbaugh took a course with Unlimited Future Inc.
The Business Planning for Profit Class targets those who are just starting a business, or any established business owner who wants to expand or refine their business practices.
"We usually have people with an idea just conceived, and we try to take their business from conception to reality," said instructor Ursulette Huntley. But she individualizes instruction for each person in the class.
"The core is the same, but I try to work with the individuals in the class so they think, 'That really helped me,'" she said. "And when they graduate, we don't kick them out of the bird's nest. We're just a phone call away."
Rumbaugh said the class was very helpful and recommended business owners take a refresher course every now and then. Not only did she learn about a new computer program that can help her with computerized landscaping design, but she networked with other business owners with whom she can exchange ideas and resources.
The next series of classes begins on Monday, April 20. It's from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs for six weeks.
As a thank you to Unlimited Future -- and a way to showcase her services at their class graduation and trade show on Friday -- Rumbaugh landscaped the outside of their facility.
"I've been going in and out of there every week for my class and I thought it could use some cheering up," Rumbaugh said. "When people go in there, they're full of hopes and dreams. Right now, people need as much of a cheerful environment as they can find."
Although its exercising a completely different skill set than running a greenhouse business, Rumbaugh said she's having a great time with landscaping.
Figuring out what a person really likes is an art form, Rumbaugh said.
"I have to make it fit them and fit their land," she said. "It's very subjective. What one person loves is not what another person loves."
Rumbaugh likes to grow things organically, using as little pesticides as possible, and to work with various colors, and to consider what each plant will look like year-round.
"I like four-season color of some sort," Rumbaugh said. "I'm not just planting for right now. I'm planting for all four seasons."
The planting part is the easy part, Rumbaugh said. She definitely knows her perennials, annuals and blooming shrubs. Larger trees is new territory for her, though, which is "why I carry the Internet in my phone," she said. "It's a whole new course of study. It's fun. I like to learn about new plants because after a while, the old plants get boring."
She'll do irrigation, light yard-care assistance, and offers a service in which customers with their own design in mind can hire her workers for the manual labor. That's a great service for people who have always been excellent gardeners but can no longer do the physical part of the job, Rumbaugh said.
"We call that 'point and plant' or 'rent a guy,'" she said.
She really enjoys seeing where her plants end up. Before, she would sell a plant that she'd nurtured and grown, and never see what became of it.
"This way, I get to follow the whole process and actually plant," she said. "I've found out that I've been in the office too long. I crawl around and plant and have a ball."
