Garden centers should be profitable every year: Q&A with Tim Quebedeaux

Maintaining steady business throughout the year as a garden center is a challenge every owner faces.

Tim Quebedeaux, service provider at The Garden Center Group and owner and proprietor of RetailKPI, says it’s possible to stay profitable through understanding the numbers behind your business. In this Q&A, Quebedeaux shares the metrics to understand to grow your garden center.

Editor’s note: Tim Quebedeaux will speak at the 2025 Garden Center Conference & Expo from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 6, in the session “Financial KPIs that Drive Retail Profitability.” During his talk, he’ll help garden centers benchmark their businesses and provide attendees with the opportunity to get advice on the biggest financial questions and challenges facing IGCs today. Visit gardencenterconference.com for more information and to register.  

Lauren Cohen: Tell me a bit about your career and what you do now.

Tim Quebedeaux: After 20 years of working in garden centers, I now work with The Garden Center Group as one of their service providers. I focus mainly on the financial operations part of it — I work one on one with garden center clients to look at their profitability.

I’ve been doing that for five years, (since) Steve Bailey, my mentor, retired. I’ve taken over for him and am having a blast helping garden centers make more money and be a firm, established part of their community — that’s big for me.

I like owners to be profitable, but I like garden centers to stick around for the next 100 years.

LC: Can you talk a bit about the subject of your conference session and why you selected that topic?

TQ: I’ll be talking about the Weekly Department Review, the annual Profit & Loss study, the trends and how things are working out for the year. I have about 100 to 110 garden centers I collect data from on a weekly basis.

So, are they up in sales? Down in sales? What categories are selling the most? What are not selling as much as last year? I have a pretty good insight into what’s happening in all these trends.

In addition to getting everyone on board with how the year’s going, I’ll also jump into the annual P&L study, which the group does with about 80 garden centers.

Basically, my whole session is really about, as an industry, where we are sitting for the year as far as our weekly sales.

LC: Do you have a target audience you’re hoping will come to your session? Who do you think would benefit the most from it?

TQ: I think any retail grower in the industry would benefit to know what’s going on. Garden centers should be able to not just be concerned with what’s in their immediate facility and actually look outward and see what other people are doing and how other people are doing.

You also get to commiserate with other owners. That just makes us feel better as people to know, "Hey, this isn’t an easy business to be into.” There’s a lot of outside factors that can affect our business that can get us down from time to time.

Hopefully, a lot of retailers come and join me and listen to what’s going on, for the good and the bad, and know they're on the right track, or maybe they need some help because they want to do better.

LC: Do you suggest that people coming to your session do anything to prepare? Should they look at any data before they come?

TQ: As you get through spring, you want to know where you are just in revenues, transaction counts, average sale — those are three big metrics that we look at every week. So, as a garden center owner coming to this, you want to know where you are business-wise in those respects. Study your P&L statement before arriving so that you have something to reference as I start talking. Just knowing where you are as a garden center heading into it would definitely be helpful.

LC: What key takeaways do you want attendees to leave with after they hear your session?

TQ: I want them to understand where we are as an industry. They should be able to track and measure things that are the key to their success and being profitable every year, not just when the weather hits just right or when there’s a bunch of people running through your doors.

I hope people, in hearing what I present, what I talk about, can understand the numbers side of the business … so they can enjoy the people side and be more profitable in their business.

LC: What are you looking forward to most about this conference?

TQ: Just connecting with people. This industry, whether you’re in a garden center or consulting with it, is all about people.

LC: What does the community that comes together at this conference mean to you?

TQ: One of my grandfathers was a farmer in central Louisiana; the other was a horticulture professor at Louisiana State University. I have the green industry in my blood. This industry is full of people pleasers. We like to make people happy — that’s why we sell plants.

And I just want to bring the number side to that group of people and hope that they can make this living a permanent thing — they’re not just going to work every day, they’re working toward something at the end of the day. Just being a part of that green community is something special to me.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for style, length and clarity.

Lauren Cohen is the editorial intern for the GIE Media Horticulture Group.