Courses: The Business of Horticulture and Selling Plants

Interested in transitioning from plant passion to practice and profession?

Interested in transitioning from plant passion to practice and profession? Starting your own plant-based business, improving a green industry business you’ve already started, or are currently employed in the horticulture industry and want professional development and advancement opportunities?

Exciting news! I’ve just signed on the dotted line to create and teach two horticulture business courses through UCLAx. Both courses can be taken either in sequence or individually, depending on your needs. Each course will be 6-weeks, online and asynchronous (to be more flexible with your schedules) and with weekly live Zoom office hours with me as a group or scheduled one-on-one as needed. This week I’m starting to build the first course so please chime in if there are specifics you’d love to cover!

Course 1 (Fall ’24) “The Business of Horticulture” will introduce the green industry and its inner workings and the basics of starting and running business operations as they relate to the horticulture industry. We’ll cover some basics of financials, bidding and contracts, customer relations, sales, staffing, and marketing in the context of the horticulture industry. We’ll also work on an initial business plan project if you’re starting a new business.

Course 2 (Winter ’25): “The Business of Selling Plants” will focus on the basics of buying and selling plants (as a grower and reseller) and we will be covering legalities, how to manage live inventory, learn savvy buying and inventory skills, plant pricing, sales, and marketing.

These are of course just quick descriptions of each, and if you know me or have taken one of my courses, you know you’re going to get a lot of information and guidance.

Both courses will be interdisciplinary, meaning they are for those who aspire to work in or own their own business in the fields of garden design, garden center/plant shop retail, horticulturist, landscape maintenance, landscape architecture, plant growing, plant stylists, plantrepreneurs, arborists, and all allied trade. We can tailor conversations around everyone's individual disciplinary needs.

The courses are open enrollment: you don’t have to be a UCLA student, anyone, from anywhere, can enroll. You can take the courses for credit, pass/not pass, or not-recorded as simply continuing education. If you are a UCLA student, or are pursuing the Horticulture Certificate or Landscape Architecture Certificate in the UCLAx Horticulture program each 6-week course will be worth 2-credits. You can also hit your employer up for continuing education benefits!

Course 1 starts September 24, 2024 and ends Nov. 5th; registration opens July 29th.

More details to come, as well as course links, as I get further into development, and we get the course descriptions and syllabus up online. I’ll post links once we get to that point, but please feel to contact me with questions.