The Wright Gardner was recently featured by Automile on its Blog for our use of its fleet management product to improve our safety practices. See below…
The Wright Gardner provides plant services that make indoor environments more vibrant, healthy, and productive, and is based out of San Francisco, CA. As a private, locally owned business, they deliver top notch personalized service to every client, and guarantee their work so their clients can focus on what they do best.
We had the opportunity to speak to Christian Figueroa, CFO at The Wright Gardner.
Christian, tell us a little bit about your company and your role.
The Wright Gardner is an interior plantscaping business, and we’ve been in this industry for 30 years now. We take care of plants in professional settings like offices, hotels, restaurants, legal offices, photo studios, and the likes, and our services are based primarily out of the Bay Area. We have 20 employees, and 10 of them form our mobile workforce.
As a plantscaping business, we focus on doing excellent plant services, and people pay for excellent looking plants. Anybody can have plants in their office that don’t look good, but we pride ourselves in making plants thrive. If plants start looking bad, we replace them immediately. We sell, lease, maintain, source containers, and do everything clients need for their plants.
I’ve been at Wright Gardner for 20 years, and when I first started, it was really about getting into a field that got me excited. As a company, we really wanted to be doing something that we enjoyed, and were proud of. We like keeping our clients happy and running a profitable business.
What do you guarantee? How does that work?
Most providers will say they guarantee their work, but often that is simply a marketing statement and they will hide when it comes time to actually redeem the guarantee.
What insurance do you carry?
All service providers entering your corporate environment should be independently insured with policies for workers comp, general liability, auto (if they are driving onto your premises), and umbrella liability. Industry standard insurance for horticultural work is at least $2M aggregate general liability and $1M in workers compensation. Upon your request, they should be to quickly produce a certificate of insurance sent from their provider showing a current policy that is in effect.
Can I see purchase and lease/rental pricing?
Some service providers will only offer one option for purchasing or leasing. Those that don’t offer leasing might be struggling with cash flow, and you may not want a provider that can’t manage their own finances. Providers that only offer leases might be hiding huge margins. Getting both leasing and purchase prices will provide you with some good insight.