A flourishing enterprise

Press, 25 July 1986, Page 12

A flourishing enterprise

Running a business from home ,

By

MAVIS AIREY

When a lot of Judith Cumming’s pot plants died she found it very difficult to find out why.

“Ask 10 people and you get 10 different answers,” she says. “There is a real gap in the market for advice-giving.” Spurred on by this experience, she started doing some research on the subject and soon found her friends bringing round their sick plants for her to rehabilitate. She was offered a job working with plants, “but the timing wasn’t right.” Then the family moved to Christchurch and, with her children well settled at school, Judith was looking for a job that was flexible, creative, and home-based. “I wanted to let the family in gradually,” she says, “not just jump into 40 hours a week.”

Remembering her pot plant experiences, she got together with a friend to start “Flourish,” which combines house-plant sales with advice, information, and after care. They started off with very little capital — about $3O each, Judith estimates — selling plants to friends and acquaintances at house-plant parties. Later, they branched out into a stall at the Arts Centre market.

This has become the business’s major outlet, providing a wide range of contacts and customers.

"It is an upheaval for the family every Saturday for six months of the year, but everyone does their bit and it is great fun,” Judith says. Paying the Arts Centre rent was a bit of a struggle the first years, she recalls, but they managed to remain in credit. By the second year it was less of a struggle, and by the third year “we just looked back and laughed at the struggle we had had.”

When her partner decided to go back to fulltime work Judith bought her out and continued the business alone. She misses the supportiveness of the partnership, but finds the business viable on her own.

She took the precaution of doing a small business course at the Polytech, and was careful to set the company up properly with an accountant and a lawyer. Otherwise she did no specialist training.

“I am not a fount of knowledge,” she admits, “but I do know where to go to'do research.”

Coming from a farming family, she feels she assimilated a lot and does not feel her lack of formal training is a handicap. She attends workshops and seminars whenever she can, and does not grow the plants she sells and services, preferring to use reliable nurseries.

After five years, the business is certainly living up to its name. Judith still does house-plant parties, often sis part of a voluntary organisation’s fundraising effort, but now she also supplies a wide range of containers and stands, using local potters that she admires, or fossicking around antique shops.

Several businesses retain her on a consultancy basis to call in-if anything goes wrong with their plants, and to do regular groomiing and repotting. She also supplies plants for television programmes and advertisements, and public and private functions.

She still gives a lot of advice, particularly to people planning conservatories. Three years ago she decided to build a conservatory herself.

“It is a marvellous buffer zone for the house. It gives insulation against tempeiature and noise, and ini the summer you can open it right up,” she enthuses. She also needed somewhere to put all her plants. Even so, she now

finds there is a great overflow of plants into the house and she admits that

putting a tunnel house in the garden will probably have to be the next move.

She has found building the conservatory useful in other ways too. She took out a mortgage, and services it from the business.

“It is a discipline. If you have got the knife-edge, that deadline, you go on and get cracking,” she says. “It gives you a focus.”

She enjoys the trading side of the business so much that one day she would like to open up commercial premises in the city, but she acknowledges that this would change the nature of the business. The overheads would be higher, and she would have to employ staff. In the meantime, she thinks there is quite a lot more she could do from home, perhaps making use of their half-acre St Martins garden. “It’s good to have the flexibility,” sfce reflects, “to be able to join in school trips, or be at home when lan is travelling.”

Her husband, a television producer, has been very supportive, but her children have not always found it easy accommodating her business, she admits.

“The children resented it a bit to begin with, but they are a lot more tolerant now” she says. “And there are very- positive overtones: they are a lot more self-contained; than they, would be otherwise.”