Why Hort Week's Leslie Kossoff is two years too late

Yesterday evening I read with amazement the advice that Leslie Kossoff - Prepare today for the upturn - was dishing out to horticulture based businesses with respect to the present economic situation and gathering gloom.

Where has Kossoff been for the last two years? This situation has not just crept up on garden managers it arrived two years ago and that is the time the advice on page 27 of this months Hort Week should have been dished out.

Forget about dealing with the upturn, some garden business managers haven't even begun to manage the downturn or plan for the real effects of a long and deep recession.

Of course it is going to get worse but isn't it a little bit rich for Kossoff to be patronising managers now - after the horse has bolted - we can all get it right in hindsight?

For any business to be in the greatest of shapes now it was necessary to prepare for this event well in advance. Yes there will be opportunities but there are more casualties to come and those heads of business who feel they are going to pick up some tasty morsels from the ashes of other unprepared outfits, may yet find it is them that are going to provide the food for the party, and it will be others who profit from their demise.

The greatest weakness that I have noticed in the last twenty four months is the failure to accept that a perfect storm had been brewing with the power to disable not just one part of the economy - housing for example - but others like the credit that fuels the housing and business development.

However, food inflation and increases in oil price have added thousands of pounds to company costs and at the other end, regardless of what the PR is saying at the front, profits are tumbling and company failures increasing.

The sad part about all of this is that some of us realised that the outlook was going to get rough when others were still raking in the cash and thinking the party would go on forever.

Horticulture Week are regular visitors to Landscape Juice but I guess there was either a policy to ignore what was being said or a reluctance to acknowledge that this maverick was talking straight.

I have emailed my thoughts to Kate Lowe at Hort Week and to Leslie Kossoff and solicited their comments.

For those of you who regularly follow Landscape Juice - here are my thoughts dating back to 2006 on what was happening twenty four months ago - All is not well in the garden and job losses as the downturn takes a hold.

Comments

[Helen Gazeley]

As an aside to this, I thought you might be interested in a quote from Andy Veares, Senior commercial manager, HSBC, who is quoted in the Business section of the Telegraph today. He's commenting on a case study of BTS Group, which is a company whose main business is clearance and maintenance services for Scottish Power et al (preventing trees touching power lines), and vegetation control for the Highways Agency.

He says: "BTS is fortunate in that the work it typically does is not dependent on the discretionary spend of the public. Landscape gardeners are probably feeling the economic downturn more and there might be a ready pool of talent for BTS to recruit."