Start a business before you retire especially if it’s a plant nursery.

Start a business before you retire because plant nurseries take time to get up to a good level of production. We started 5 years before we planned to retire. Though we haven’t actually retired yet we, will be more than ready. The idea of starting a plant nursery was something we loved and found that we also loved the work. At times it was a little much to balance demanding jobs and working many hours in the nursery. We made it work with some planning and extra effort. For example we could take a shipment of 500 to 600 plants and get them potted in a weekend. To do this we took a day off, had all our materials ready to go, and even hired help on bigger planting weekends. Starting early, before retiring has many advantages, here are some.

The financial benefits of starting a business before you retire.

• Cover start up costs out of your current working cash flow or salary.
• Yes, you can write off some start up expenses against your current salary income.
• You should have nice profits even before you stop working. You can then stash more away in savings just before retiring which is good.
• With a reliable extra retirement income established you can potentially postpone your Social Security payments. This is good for many people and will boost your income when you are older and possibly unable to work.
• Many financial advisors say to diversify your investments, the growing plants in your backyard nursery can be considered an another retirement investment. And a good one at that, plant appreciate even while your sleeping but will rarely keep you up at night.
• Likewise you can postpone all or some withdrawals from your retirement nest egg. This will preserve your nest egg and even give it potentially several more years to grow. Remember your nest egg may need to last until you are 100! or even older!

Plant nurseries take time, practical reasons to start a business before you retire.

• Gives you time to learn the business and your market. It can take 2-3 years to really understand what plants sell well and what you should grow. If you are buying bare root liners it will take 1-3 years before these grow out. You might even find that they don’t sell all that well. Nothing beats experience so start early.
• You need to be planting for 1-3 years before you really build up a nice stock of plants that sell. We plan for this by planting different size plants, using smaller and larger containers and planning for maximum growing times.
• Building up a good variety of plants and offering more than one size will make your nursery more desirable to customers. This does take some time.
• You don’t want to feel the pressure to sell plants too soon. Early in the starting of a nursery you may be putting out a lot of money. You might want to start selling. We have a lot of Blue, Norway and White spruces planted. Most of the work is getting them potted up. Then water, fertilize and shape them for 2-3 years. Then sell them for around $30 to 35.00. After just a year or 18 months we could probably sell them for $20 to 25.00 each but would miss out on $10.00 per plant with almost no additional work. It’s better to wait!

If you plan to do a lot of propagation you really need to start your business early. Many propagated plants take at least 6 to 12 months longer to get to a sell ready condition. This is especially true in the woodier plants. Rooting them and growing them out to a good size can take 2-5 years. Growing out a bare root liner takes almost a year less as it was probably rooted 6-12 months before you received it.

Starting your nursery business 2-3 years before you retire is pretty good.

You won’t get every advantage described above but you will get a good stock of plants started. If you can start just part time on weekends, 5 years before will be even better.

Starting with a fall planting of 300 spruce trees to test our planting ability, how we wanted to plant and to learn how well the plants would survive. Yes, we made some minor mistakes but overall it was a very good test. So, then we then ordered and potted up 1,000 plants that next spring. Some more minor mistakes but still an overall success.

By the next fall, just a year from starting we potted up over 2,300 plants for a total of 3,300 plants potted in the first 12 months, while still working. In addition we were propagating plants, over 200 new plants the first year. From there we are buying, potting up plants and propagating about 2,000 plants each spring and fall. In addition the goal is to root at least 200 to 500 new plants per year. Ok, this is ambitious but it doesn’t take all that much time to pot plants up. We hope to maintain a planting schedule of 4-5,000 plants per year.

If you are bootstrapping, you absolutely must start your plant nursery business long before you plan to retire.

Can you bootstrap when starting a backyard plant nursery business? Bootstrapping is the process of starting a business with very little investment. Yes you can! This would require more work and time to grow out smaller plants but can be very successfully done. To keep your initial investment low you could do the following.

• Learn and practice to take plant cuttings and root them. Or with some plants divide them. Some plants root very easily and if you have access to a larger plant you could really get dozens if not hundreds of new plants started.
• Go around and find used pots at house sales and from landscapers in your area. Find people willing to give you pots for free or for $0.05 to 0.10 each.
• Find a low cost source of humus, sand, and or fir bark to make your own inexpensive potting soil mix.
• Grow out some plants, sell them, repeat and repeat.
• Hold back some plants so you always have plants to take cuttings from or divide.
• Give yourself several years to really get going, you can do it!

We got a big jump by starting our business before retiring.

Having the business up and running will make our transition into retirement much easier. We won’t feel pressured to take our Social Security early and won’t need to touch our savings. Our business is becoming established, we have learned a lot and the revenue appears fairly stable. As more of our plants are ready for sale and we can offer some larger plants the revenues will also increase. By the time we reach retirement age (67 for us) we may be able to really slow down planting new plants and focus on selling what we already have growing. A good start could give us the ability to just sell plants for 2 to 5 years because we started our business before we retired!

See more of our Backyard Nursery articles and videos.

Backyard Nursery Resources
Starting a Plant Nursery
Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery
How to make Money with Plants
Plant Propagation