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In Episode 8 of Winners Circle, host Pavle Majerle welcomes Andrew Barry, Managing Director of Griffin Greenhouse Supplies, and Bob Hawkes, Director of Information Technology, to explore how one of the nation’s largest horticultural distributors planted seeds of AI innovation and grew a culture of digital transformation. Griffin is a 75-year-old, family-owned company with 16 distribution centers nationwide, serving the market from commercial greenhouse growers to independent garden centers. Their story shows how tradition and technology can thrive side by side.
Why Transformation Became Essential
With scale comes complexity—tenured employees are retiring and taking decades of know-how with them. Manual workflows are slowing fulfillment and creating bottlenecks. At the same time, customer expectations across the horticulture industry are rising faster than ever, demanding more speed, accuracy, and flexibility than legacy processes can deliver.
To stay competitive, Griffin needed modern systems that could preserve institutional expertise before it was lost, automate routine work for greater speed and accuracy, and empower a new generation of employees to thrive in a digital environment. Any changes had to also honor the company’s long tradition of serving customers responsibly and reliably.
Turning Manual Work into Predictive Insight
For Griffin, choosing NexusTek as their managed service provider and consultant meant working with a partner who understood both the realities of horticultural operations and the technology required to modernize them. Partnering with NexusTek, Griffin launched an AI strategy starting in purchasing. Buyers once spent 80 hours analyzing orders for a single vendor; now AI replicates those same decisions in minutes with near-perfect accuracy. This freed employees to focus on higher-value activities such as preventing lost sales and nurturing customer relationships.
Results That Scale—and Blossom
The benefits of Griffin’s AI and automation journey go well beyond time savings. By streamlining purchasing and warehouse operations, the company has sharpened forecasting, strengthened service, and cultivated a competitive edge in a sector where many companies are still relying on outdated processes and legacy systems.
The improvements translate into measurable gains, including:
• Hours of manual work reduced to minutes
• Higher accuracy in forecasting and order management
• Stronger customer service across independent garden centers and commercial growers
• A competitive edge in an industry where many still rely on outdated processes
• Employees freed from repetitive tasks to focus on higher-value, revenue-driving work
Honoring Tradition While Driving Innovation
Now in its third generation of family ownership, Griffin blends 75 years of integrity, hard work, and customer focus with bold innovation. The leaders emphasize that the company’s principles remain unchanged, and leadership has given the next generation the freedom to push boundaries—expanding into innovative product lines, exploring new technologies, and constantly asking how to make it easier to do business with Griffin. But full automation is still a long way off. Technology is costly, adoption takes time, and growers pride themselves on hands-on expertise that can’t be fully replaced.
Their advice for peers in traditional industries is straightforward: start small, choose partners who understand both your business and your culture, and focus on tools employees can adopt successfully. As Andrew puts it, the goal isn’t to replace people, but to make them “superhuman” by removing repetitive tasks and letting them focus on work that grows the business.
How NexusTek Helps
NexusTek empowers businesses across industries to modernize with confidence—no green thumb required. From AI strategy to IT infrastructure and managed services, NexusTek ensures digital transformation delivers measurable results that help businesses grow.
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