Navigating a new era

It’s been nearly 45 years since three Raker family members, tired of battling urban sprawl, pulled their truck vegetable farm out of the Detroit Metro area. The trio of two brothers and a nephew moved C. Raker & Sons to Litchfield, Michigan. It’s a place that Susie Raker, now vice president of Raker-Roberta’s Young Plants, describes as “the middle of nowhere” then and now.

The 1978 move was a smart one. The area offered affordable, productive land within striking distance of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Indianapolis, and a new start. The simple beginnings launched C. Raker & Sons on a path to become one of the nation’s leading young plant producers — and put the middle of nowhere on the horticulture industry’s map.

When the company was acquired in December 2017 by Eric Wallien, owner of longtime Raker customer Roberta’s Unique Gardens, Raker-Roberta’s Young Plants was born. Susie Raker stepped up to pilot the business as a new era began.

Building a foundation on young plants

In C. Raker & Sons’ early years, the focus on young plants was self-serving. They needed vegetable liners for their field-grown farm market crops. Hoophouses added to the Litchfield property solidified their jump on the fresh produce season.

One day, a seed salesman asked if they could do the same with petunias. Seed-grown annuals were added to production — positioning the company for the bedding plant boom to come.

As the company grew, young ornamentals gained importance. “The margins, profitability and future potential of the young plants far outweighed anything else that was being produced,” Susie Raker says. Field-grown crops were dropped in the mid-1990s. Vegetative crops were added in 2004.

As the young plant market exploded, so did Raker & Sons’ sales. From 1985 until 2005, revenues doubled every five years. But the marketplace was destined to change. By the early 2000s, other growers figured out what the Rakers knew. Oversupply hit the young plant market. Margins went from worry-free to shrinking, forcing the company to reevaluate. “We were really focused on right-sizing operations with cost efficiencies and refocusing on revenue streams that had the appropriate profitability,” Raker says.

Faced with competition, a changing marketplace and a shoestring budget, the business struggled to adapt. Some thin years followed. Then a candid conversation with a loyal customer turned things around.

Pulling together through transition

Wallien recalls his surprise in 2017 when Susie Raker, then Raker’s director of sales and marketing, told him about their financial pressures. “I was pretty shocked. I think everybody was because Raker & Sons had a great reputation in the business for top-quality stuff. It was eye-opening that it could happen,” he shares.

He dug deeper into Raker financials and saw high-pressure banks and “outrageous interest rates” at work. “Talking with Susie, she had some great ideas on how to improve the whole business overall,” he recalls. With his banks and accountant on board, Wallien purchased the company and put Raker in charge.

“It was a natural progression of where I was going as a professional in my career,” she says. “It just happened to work out pretty good.”

“The biggest thing I learned was there are a million different ways to run a company and none of them are wrong,” Raker adds. “Probably the biggest hurdle was learning the way that Eric ran his company from an economic standpoint and those expectations.”

Her first move was to meet with her upper management team. “We had been so hyper-focused on sales prior to that, just because we had a revenue problem. With the transaction of the company, it allowed us to refocus,” Raker says. “My goal was to focus on profitability more than sales.”

The team, which has an average age around 42, backed her goals. “I’m very fortunate because my upper management team is the best in the business,” Raker says. Wallien agrees: “She has a very young team. They’re hard workers, they’re intelligent, they’re all hungry and they do a great job.”

His hands-off ownership style fits Raker well. “I trust her, so I’m a springboard. I love her to bounce things off me. I’ll tell her if I recommend it, but I let her make the call,” he says. “Do it right, do it the best, and we’ll be fine. That’s kind of how I look at it.”

Refocusing on core strengths

Newly invigorated, Raker-Roberta’s Young Plants (R2, for short) refocused. “Young plants provide 70% to 75% of R2’s revenue, so it’s still so very, very important to us,” Raker says. They focused on what they do best: growing and shipping plants.

Direct-to-consumer sales, a personal passion of Raker’s, moved into the limelight. “I knew that the internet was the future 20, 25 years ago. I looked at how my generation was purchasing and doing things. It’s the convenience of being able to order online and have it shipped directly to your door,” she recalls.

As a young plant provider, R2 had extensive experience in contract producing and shipping plants in boxes for their core customer base, including Roberta’s Unique Gardens. “We can ship just about anything. We like to pride ourselves on that,” Raker says.

With Raker free to follow her instincts, R2 leveraged that expertise to grow D2C sales for themselves and their customers. The division is now second in line to plugs and liners.

Diversification has been key to company health. Revenue streams include contract-grown finished products for wholesale customers, a national fundraiser program, hemp liners and a retail outlet launched when COVID shutdowns left Raker with 50,000 hanging baskets to move. Despite the rural location, the community came out. “It was amazing,” she says. “Except now I can never not have retail.”

Raker-Roberta’s Trial Gardens are an integral part of the company’s identity dating back to early Raker & Sons. The 10-acre gardens host between 2,000 and 4,000 visitors annually — from customers and plant brokers to garden clubs and educational groups.

“Our trial gardens were originally inspired by the need to test genetics to ensure that we were offering the best products to our customers,” Raker says. “It also is a great sales tool for our team to be able to talk very specifically about products because we see them, feel them, grow them for ourselves in our environment.”

Moving forward together

Though Raker’s keen on innovation, she’s not easily moved. When opportunities cross her desk — regardless of how they tempt her inner entrepreneur — she goes through a checklist of how they fit with what R2 does well.

“As a management team, we know these questions that are important tick boxes for us. And if a program doesn’t match that, we don’t pursue it,” she says.

The seasons since COVID hit have held both challenges and successes. Raker credits industry growth and market expansion with enabling the company to return to investing in employees and infrastructure. Ongoing supply chain challenges require creative, forward thinking to meet needs from new equipment or repairs to soil and plastics.

But labor is a bright spot. “We finally took the bite and incorporated the H-2A program,” she says. “Although H-2A obviously presents some challenges, it’s solved our problems of consistent labor to get the best results and the most efficiencies per labor dollar spent.”

Wallien says that every year since the acquisition has been profitable: “I think it’s going to continue to grow. Her young plants and plug business is going to get better and better. The quality they’re putting out is even better than it used to be.” Raker adds that R2’s claim rate has dropped to less than 1% of total sales.

Looking to a new era for the industry and the company, she’s optimistic — especially about millennials who are moving horticulture forward. “They breathed new life into our industry, and they’re going to continue to do so because they’ve gotten a taste of it,” she says. “The trends of the last three years bode well for our industry. We just need to keep it rolling!”

Jolene Hansen is a freelance writer specializing in the horticulture and specialty ag industries. Reach her at jolene@jolenehansen.com.