OK, so now that we have shown you what a great place this is to live in we would like to take you on tour. A tour of the history and development of Tropical Blooms.
We want you to understand why it is so special and why it will continue to grow in value. Why we believe it is a great investment for the future.
The business and property are being offered for sale on a walk in, walk out basis to encourage the new owners to continue the business and to enjoy and prosper from this lifestyle as we have.
Firstly though, I can imagine you are thinking why. Why if its such a special place would we want to leave.
Sue and I have raised five children on this farm. There have been lots of ups and a few downs particularly in the early years, but thanks to this business we have been able to provide them with a lifestyle and standard of living second to none. We have enjoyed a number of holidays together overseas and also around Australia meeting many of our long term customers.
We have spent many school vacations away camping on Cape York. For 23 years we have enjoyed the rewards of our business and lifestyle. Now as the children leave home to pursue their own dreams we find that we to are ready to move on to some different adventures.
In short we a ready to cash in our chips and retire. We have ordered a new yacht and will enjoy some cruising, spend time with the grandchildren and Sue will pursue her passion of restoring old furniture and the old Queenslanders to put it in.
Tropical Blooms started as a marketing concept. In 1985 we were growing Roses on the Atherton Tablelands above Cairns. Logic dictated that to sell our product into southern Australia where the main market is we needed to grow something that could not be grown down there. In short we needed to take advantage of our tropical climate.
Two trips to Hawaii and many, many hours of research later we had settled on the new and as yet unproven exotic Heliconias and Gingers.
It took six months of negotiating with AQIS (Australian Quarantine) to get them to change the strict import rules which were preventing us from importing commercial quantities of plant stock into Australia.
There main objection was that Heliconias are related to Bananas and can host a serious virus called Moko disease. This disease was a major concern to the Banana industry.
With another trip to Hawaii we were able to get documentation stating that there was no Moko disease in Hawaii (the only Banana growing area apart from Australia that was moko free).
Eventually AQIS changed the regulations to allow the import of commercial sized shipments of Heliconia rhizomes from Hawaii, under strict provisions, into private quarantine facilities. This enabled us to import the numbers required to develop a commercial enterprise.
The import window was short lived though for within three years Hawaii reported an outbreak of Moko disease. Also around the same time a small Australian importer was found to have contaminated plants. AQIS reacted quickly and introduced very strict restrictions which have effectively stopped any large shipments of plant stock into Australia right up to the current time. For us though this was all good because we had been importing 2000 plants at a time for nearly three years and had our main cut flower stock established. New varieties were and are still coming through (with six months govt. quarantine) but only in very small quantities which take some years to multiply up to commercial numbers. Heliconia cut flowers are, as they always have been, totally banned from import. There is no probability of this changing.
While we were negotiating with Australian Quarantine to allow the import of plant stock we were also actively looking for a property that would meet all of the special requirements we needed. Things like natural wind breaks on all sides, a constant supply of high quality clean water, rich soil with good drainage, close proximity to the Cairns International airport and enough room for future expansion. These requirements would all be needed to develop a successful business. Needless to say it took a lot of searching to find a property that could meet all of these requirements.
Late ‘86 saw everything come together and Tropical Blooms Pty Ltd came into existence.
First up was a 48 metre long shed which also encompassed the second largest private quarantine facility in Queensland. We lived in a caravan next to the shed for two years while all of our efforts went into building up stock quantities for production.
By ‘89 we were growing around 30 varieties of Heliconias and Gingers and were the only full time professional growers in Australia. Other part time growers were starting to get into the tropical flowers as well, but by then we had more stock in the ground producing flowers than all the rest combined.
We had introduced a completely new range of exotic flowers to the florists and public of Australia and we had a three year head start over most of our potential competition.
Over the years Tropical Blooms has continued to be the leading grower supplying directly to florists all over Australia. Very rarely can a single company claim to have been the founder of a new industry. Tropical Blooms can make this claim. It is the oldest established professional tropical flower business in Australia and was instrumental in paving the way for commercial imports of these exotic plants.
Heliconias were unheard of except to a handful of collectors before we started marketing them to the floral industry.
Tropical Blooms has been featured on national TV a number of times including the ABC National News with footage of the farm during the airline strike, and on three different gardening / home improvement shows. There has been a full two page spread in the Womens Weekly magazine as well as numerous articles in industry related magazines.
Our flowers have been used in most of the five star hotels around the country at different times over the years. Flowers have been supplied for Bond parties. Packer weddings, Royalty visits, Olympic games, federal parliament and to two leaders of our country.
Flowers from Tropical Blooms consistently sell for more money than flowers from other growers or wholesalers.
Over the last 3 years we have been streamlining the business to make it more inviting to a new owner with no experience. By trimming less profitable and labour intensive areas we have reduced turnover but with the corresponding reductions in overheads. The end result has meant that we are generating the same generous net profit but with much less effort on our part. In fact we now spend on average a total of about 20 hours per week of our own labour with staff handling all of the day to day running.
We enjoy a large database of customers. Many of whom we have dealt with for 15 or more years. Tropical Blooms has immense goodwill, history and customer loyalty in the industry.
What value can you place on this type of history and goodwill? |