Businessman Leaves Green Thumbprints All Over Buildings
Jul. 8–If a rising tide lifts all boats, Bruce Rumph has been riding the green wave generated by the commercial construction boom in Central Florida.
“It’s the perfect place to start a business,” said Rumph, the owner of the Plant Manager Inc. in Lakeland, which designs, supplies and maintains interior foliage for 175 area businesses. “We think we’ll continue to grow along the I-4 corridor, with all the demand for new offices.”
The company has grown at a brisk annual rate of 18 percent during the past five years, Rumph said, and he expects to double his business within the next five years.
Frustrated by the inability to get timely delivery of quality plants from other plant nurseries, Rumph began expanding his own nursery operations five years ago, he said. The company now has 65,000 square feet of greenhouse space, up from 10,000 square feet originally.
The nursery, which has more than 100 foliage varieties, has grown so large that Plant Manager wholesales to local landscapers and retail garden centers, Rumph said. It receives plant material from all over the globe, including China, Thailand and Central America.
But the core business remains serving commercial customers, he added. His clients include Fortune 500 companies, such as Kinko’s and the Holiday Inn, plus small business and local governments, such as the city of Lakeland.
When a company wants to put the finishing touch on a new building or brighten up an existing facility, Plant Manager wants to get the call.
“This is the finishing touch, the live touch that warms up the office,” Rumph said. “Most plants are going to soften the interior and make an office more friendly.”
On that first sales call, Rumph likes to walk through the office with the owners or managers to discuss the kind of atmosphere they want to create, he said.
Since most clients don’t know much about indoor foliage, he gets a lot of leeway on design recommendations, Rumph said. His designs take into consideration available space, natural lighting and traffic patterns.
Lighting is important because indoor plants vary greatly in the amount needed to stay healthy, he said. Some plants are too soft to tolerate a lot of human contact in high-traffic areas, so more durable palm and ficus trees get placed there.
Most commercial customers also agree to a maintenance contract, Rumph said. It provides that one of four Plant Manager employees will handle watering, trimming, pest control and other caretaking duties monthly.
And if a plant begins to wilt, the company will replace it at no additional charge.
“When people pay me for a service, it’s got to look good. It’s got to look almost floral-shop quality,” Rumph said.
Plant Manager is part of a rapidly growing horticulture industry in Florida, which provides the country with 65 percent of all foliage plants, said Ben Bolusky, the executive vice president for the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association in Orlando.
According to a University of Florida study, the industry had $9.9 billion in 2000 sales, up 33 percent since 1997, and provided 188,000 jobs, up 13 percent over the same period, he said. Those are the most recent figures available.
The growth has continued over the past five years, Bolusky said. Strong commercial and residential construction markets and overall growth in the state and national economies has spurred the industry’s performance.
The U.S. horticulture industry is also performing well, according to a UF-University of Tennessee study. It measured the industry’s 2002 output at $147.8 billion and total employment at more than 1.9 million jobs.
Rumph, 54, started his company in 1992 after working in another family company that provided and serviced industrial uniforms. He left that company, Mid-State Uniform Rentals, after it was sold to a large British corporation in 1989.
“This business structure is exactly the same as what I did (at Mid-State). It provides contract services,” Rumph said. “Only the growing part is different.”
But the growing part wasn’t alien to him either, said Marie Rumph, his wife and business partner.
“He’s got growing in his blood,” Marie Rumph said. “His mother had a green thumb, and he does too.”
Plant Manager started out with three people — Bruce and Marie Rumph and Connie Carrasquillo, his sister — on County Line Road in Lakeland. Carrasquillo, who handled designing, left the business after a year when she married.
The company now employs nine people, including the Rumphs, and hopes to double its work force in the next five years. It services customers from Brooksville south to Venice and as far west as Orlando.
Bruce Rumph said he hopes to pass the business to his son, Christopher, 21, a business major at Florida State University, who started working at the company this summer.
The Lakeland Area Chamber of Commerce recently awarded the Plant Manager its Small Business Award for June.
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