Former cooperative extension agent completed the purchase of Day’s Garden Center on Friday
In buying and running Day’s Garden Center, Andy Rideout hopes to honor the legacy that former owner George Day built in his 50-plus years running the business.
Rideout closed on the property Friday afternoon at about 3:30 p.m. On Monday morning, he was in the building, sizing up the amount of work to be done before his hoped-for grand re-opening sometime in April. (He hasn’t yet set a date.)
Although faced with 50-years of books and papers and other assorted accumulations—and the reorganization needed to make a place your own—Rideout brimmed with excitement about the possibilities.
“I’m going to strive to (give) the level of service George provided here,” he said.
He also recalled some of what he learned from Day in a relationship that started when Rideout started doing small landscape jobs while still in high school in the late 1980s.
“He helped me a lot,” Rideout said. “He guided me big-time for about three to four years.”
Rideout said that Day helped him later when he got into golf course management with a project at Breckenridge Country Club in Morganfield.
Rideout later moved away for a while, but when he moved back to the area and took on the 4-H extension horticulture agent position in Henderson, Rideout began to stop in at Day’s again, almost every week, to chat—much of the talk revolving around Day’s knowledge of plants, pests and diseases. As the horticulture agent, the visits “fit right in with the job,” he said.
Rideout said Day, now retired, was a big reader, keeping up with trends researchers were seeing. He’d also developed a vast array of contacts—breeders, researchers and university professors—in the field that he called for discussions.
“He was pretty well known,” Rideout said. “He was well-connected.”
That, according to Rideout, was one of the keys of success for Day’s business: He just knew so much about it.
“I can’t say that I’m going to match his skill set, but I’m going to do the best I can,” Rideout said.
Rideout’s no slouch. In the 16 years of working as the horticulture agent for the cooperative extension service, he fielded myriad phone calls, read reports and offered unbiased advice on what a person should do.
Now, he plans on doing much the same—except the advice will be biased toward him as a business owner, offering “the same advice but also try to sell plants,” he said.
Rideout said that he’s not sure that the setup he envisions will be much different from what Day had in place, though there will be some changes. For one, he’s working with his brother, Ty, at Abba Promotions to add some new signage. (He plans, however, to keep the simple, yet well-known “Day’s Garden Center” on the gabled section at the front of the building.)
Additionally, Rideout said he wants to make the nursery area an “experience” that people will want to walk through and enjoy even if they don’t come to buy anything.
“We want you to enjoy being here,” he said.
His wife, Laura, will also sell her fresh cut Feldman Farms flowers that she grows at the couple’s county home.
Holdovers from Day’s business will be the wood floor on the indoor sales floor and buckets of seed that customers scoop into the little paper bags—unlike big box stores’ prepackaged seed, he said, adding he’ll aim for unique and higher-quality seed.
Like Day, Rideout will focus on retail sales of high-quality plants, pest management and a gift shop. He also thinks there’s money in selling wholesale to other businesses and doing some landscape maintenance at homes. He’s also toying with the idea of doing landscape installs in the future.
To do all this, Rideout expects to hire six or seven employees, not including he and his wife, who is a teacher and won’t work full-time till the summer.
A few days into ownership on Monday, Rideout was compiling the massive list of what needs to get done before opening in April. For one, the heavy rainfall let him know he’s got a leak to fix in one of the roofs. Then there’s the cleanup and the repairs here and there. He’ll also need to establish relationships with vendors, buy plants, get them shipped and set out before opening.
Rideout declined to say for how much he bought the building, land and business. He said it will be public record soon enough. He said the business will need to gross $400,000 starting out, at least, to be profitable.
He said three months’ time seems like enough to get prepared, but it’s going to be a race. He’s not complaining, though, about the 80-hour work weeks staring him in the face, nor of the $250,000-plus to get all the work done and the plants ordered.
A veteran owner of several businesses, Rideout said he’s in his element, setting up a business plan and seeing it through. He resigned from the extension service weeks ago when he decided to take on this challenge, a resignation that had nothing to do with money. In fact, he’s sure he won’t be getting rich by running a nursery.
“It’s more about quality of life and doing what I want to do,” Rideout said.
