The Garden Depot

Overview

The Garden Depot originated in 1985 based on a small family owned floral company in Ontario. As profit and sales increased, the company expanded to a large variety of floral, gardening lawn care product. In 1992, the company launched a lawn maintenance department. In 1998, the Depot ventured into landscaping business to offered complete landscaping package to customers. By 2007, the Depot was successfully operating three separate divisions. Unfortunately, the current state of the Depot has made the business to deteriorate. Due to the seasonal demand for garden business, the company hired part time employees to finish the order during the peak season. Therefore, 80 percent of the Depot's employees were students who would only work for the summer. At this situation, the company faced a challenge to recruit experienced and reliable employees to join. There is no human resource management system to develop the job descriptions in the company. Another issue is the inappropriate managerial positioning for the Dave Sampson in the company; Sampson is son-in-law of the president. Sampson had no previous management experience in landscaping environment, but he is the landscaping manager. This circumstance will increase the conflict among the employees.

Problems

The primary obstacle is the company facing the unqualified positioning employee in the management position. Sinclair is the landscaping manager who is the son-in-law of the owner. Sinclair has no prior experience in the landscaping environment, so he was not qualified for his responsible. His job is to organizing and deploying landscapers to job sites, dealing with customers, responding to customers concerns, invoicing completed landscaping jobs and traveling to clients' homes to quote jobs. Unfortunately, this entire job was out of his league. Due to his low knowledge of landscaping, Sinclair faced difficult communicate with customers, which led him to avoid calls from customers. Moreover, Sinclair was uncertain about which materials should be used for landscaping, so he started to avoid calls with customers.

The second problem is the company doesn't establish the Human Resource Management system, which leads the company doesn't have a formal hiring system and screening process. Because the business is mainly focused on the summer season, so the company hired 80 percent of students to work during the peak season. Since these inexperienced employees only join the company for a short period, they do not really perform their effort for the company as the full time employees. This unstable workforce causes the company lack of proficiency.

The third problem is the company doesn't establish a clear direction. Corporate culture is very important for every company. Since the company doesn't have a stable workforce, the company should r work on how to through