What Actually Makes a Strong Garden Centre General Manager?
It’s something I speak about a lot when recruiting senior people into the garden centre industry.
There’s rarely a perfect CV.
Some people are brilliant retailers. Some are strong people managers. Some know horticulture inside out. Others are incredibly commercially driven.
Recently, I put a poll out on LinkedIn asking:
When hiring a Garden Centre Manager, what matters most?
The results were:
People Leadership: 66%
Garden Retail Experience: 18%
Commercial Ability: 11%
Horticultural Knowledge: 5%
People leadership won by a long way, and I can understand why.
A garden centre is a complex business. Depending on the size of the site, a GM could be overseeing plants, seasonal, furniture, gifting, food hall, hospitality, customer service and everything behind the scenes.
No one person can be the expert in every area.
The strongest General Managers build a good team around them. They set clear expectations, give managers ownership and know how to get different departments working towards the same goal.
But I also think commercial ability is sometimes misunderstood.
For me, being commercially strong goes well beyond simply growing sales.
It means understanding margin, stock, labour, seasonality and profitability.
Knowing what to buy, how much to buy and when to stop buying.
Knowing that a successful Christmas or furniture season is decided months in advance.
Knowing how to react when the weather turns against you.
And understanding that turnover alone doesn’t tell you whether the business is performing well.
A strong GM should understand gross margin, wage costs, stockholding, wastage and EBITDA, but more importantly, they should understand the decisions they can make day-to-day to influence those numbers.
That is where people leadership and commercial ability come together.
The best GMs don’t keep all of that knowledge to themselves. They develop commercially aware managers who understand their budgets, margins, stock levels and the impact their decisions have on the wider business.
Because if the GM is the only person thinking commercially, the business will always be limited.
Garden retail experience definitely helps. It is a unique industry, with weather dependency, seasonality, live products and often both retail and hospitality under one roof.
But experience alone doesn’t automatically make someone a strong GM.
