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Les Stukenberg/The Daily Courier
Watters Garden Centers owners Ken and Lisa Lain and General Manager Brad DeKruyter take pride in Watters being named the Revolutionary 100 National Winner by Today’s Garden Center magazine.
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PRESCOTT - Ken Lain, owner with wife Lisa of Watters Garden Center, said he thinks attending the largest industry trade show in the country this past August helped Watters win a national award.
"Most folks cut staff, cut travel, and they did not show up at the trade shows," Lain said. "I used it as an affirmation for my employees that we are still in business. We use (attendance) as a training tool."
Lain said he attended the Independent Gardens Centers of America trade show in Chicago with four employees.
"Most people brought an owner or a manager, and we took our entire team," Lain said.
Lain said many of the judges for
the Revolutionary 100 Garden Center Awards attended the trade show as well, adding he believes his team impressed the judges.
Today's Garden Center magazine in Willoughby, Ohio, sponsors the awards, and named Watters the Revolutionary 100 National Winner.
The Revolutionary awards honor independent retail garden center owners for creating and implementing innovative and profitable business management practices into their operations, according to the magazine's website.
"The awards spotlight garden centers that stand out for their commitment to leadership and serve as positive role models that others will follow and benchmark their own operations against as a measure of success," the website states.
The magazine has about 20,000 subscribers, and the readership consists of independent garden centers, said group editor Richard Jones, who profiled Watters in the March issue.
"We have a survey, and people take the survey all across the country," Jones said. "This one is based on the quality of the retailers, how progressive they are, how revolutionary."
Jones said 350 readers responded.
"We grade all of them, and score all of the surveys," Jones continued. "The top 100 make our Revolutionary list. Ken (Lain) was the top scorer from every survey that we received."
Jones wrote in the March issue, "Lain and the rest of the Watters staff are in perpetual motion, always multitasking and always talking to someone - anyone - about retailing. The goal, he says, is simple: to learn something he doesn't know that can help him in his business."
Whether Watters promotes the garden, helps customers find the right plant or keeps an eye on the bottom line, Lain "does a lot of the same types of things others do," Jones wrote. "It's just that Watters does all of these things, and many others, very, very well."
Those traits helped Watters earn the Revolutionary 100 Southwest Regional Award for four consecutive years - and now the top national award, the article states.
Lain, who writes a weekly garden column for The Daily Courier, said, "Yes, I have a good team. It is not the biggest garden center that wins. In fact, we are one of the smaller ones."
Watters Garden Center, located on Iron Springs Road, has been in business 48 years and has 15 employees, Lain said. His father-in-law, Harold Watters, founded the business, and Lain joined it in 1992. His wife, Lisa, is the inventory control officer.
"In Prescott, you need to be the cutting edge in your industry, or you seem to go out of business because it is so competitive," Lain said.
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