How a high-school coach became the "farmer" in the discount dell - Bill Meadows owns a discount nursery business

Nation's Business, July, 1991 by Henry Altman

When Bill Meadows considers people for a manager's slot in his Meadows Farms retail nursery business, one thing he wants to know is whether they live in homes they can barely afford. If they do, they have an edge over those of equal talent who live less pretentiously.

"A guy with a mortgage payment that's too big for him probably has a big ego," Meadows says, approvingly. Egos drive people to appear successful, he explains, making them likely to work extra-hard to reach pay levels needed to keep up appearances.

As the owner of a Chantilly, Va.-based business with annual sales around $18 million, Meadows himself lives pretentiously, in a 13,000-square-foot house. And he is the first to confess that he has no small ego.

But when he looks back, he recalls how he and his wife, Betty, "lived meagerly" in the early years--secondhand furniture and cars, third-floor walk-ups--even though they could have spent more freely. To this day Meadows, 55, believes in paying cash whenever possible for "things that wear out"--meaning everything but land.

So would he truly prefer a deep-in-hock manager? Meadows smiles; he was only talking probabilities.

In his own case, thrifty habits helped to build one of the country's largest privately owned nursery firms. It has 21 outlets, most in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Meadows entered the nursery business with little knowledge of horticulture. Natives of Crab Orchard, W.Va., he and Betty started out in 1959 working in the Fairfax County, Va., public schools, he as a physical-education teacher and football coach, she as a librarian.

Bored by the first long summer vacation, Meadows tried selling vegetables at the roadside the next summer. He and Betty bought produce from farmers and hired high-school students to sell it from step-vans.

They made $8,000 the first summer--about what their school salaries totaled then. By 1968, their combined school salaries were up to $62,000, thanks in part to master's degrees they both had earned, but their summer profit had reached $87,000 on volume of $200,000.

The Meadowses quit their school jobs and went into business full time that year. They added plants to their produce in the early '70s and soon were exclusively in the nursery business.

Meadows' key decision was to make Meadows Farms a discount operation. "I was told I would fail in the first year," he says. "There never had been a discount nursery. Everyone else charged for service. I gave terrible service--my salesclerks were high-school kids who might not know the difference between an azalea and a rhododendron--but I gave good quality at a good price."

Meadows Farms held costs down not only by hiring low-paid help and buying skillfully from growers but also by not guaranteeing plants as other nurseries did.

Today Meadows Farms gives guarantees at most of its locations, for competitive reasons. But it still relies on high-schoolers--as many as 300 are hired part time for the peak season of March to May, to supplement a like number of full-time, year-round employees. And volume purchasing from growers around the country still holds costs--and prices--down.

These days, Meadows leaves an increasing number of operational decisions to son Jay, 30, who is first among the company's four vice presidents.

Meadows often doesn't bother to drive to company headquarters, keeping in touch by phone (there are 26 phones in his house) and by fax.

He has a large, opulent home office, not far from a pool table and a jukebox full of rock records, but at company headquarters, his office is Spartan. A nameplate outside says, simply, "Farmer."

Meadows likes to be called "Farmer"--a sobriquet he adopted in his vegetable-selling days because "the corn tasted better to customers if they thought we'd grown it." He uses the nickname in ads, and he is chauffeured in a white limousine with license plates that read "Farmer 1."

The title is strictly fanciful, though. Meadows once tried growing azaleas himself, but the operation was a bust. His forte, he readily admits, is not farming but marketing.