'Lagniappe' is a word that Mark Twain said was "worth traveling to New Orleans to get". In Life on the Mississippi, he tells us more about it:

We picked up one excellent word — a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — "lagniappe." They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish — so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a "baker's dozen." It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop — or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know — he finishes the operation by saying — "Give me something for lagniappe." The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans — and you say, "What, again? — no, I've had enough;" the other party says, "But just this one time more — this is for lagniappe." When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his "I beg pardon — no harm intended," into the briefer form of "Oh, that's for lagniappe."

So, these pages and these little side bars are our lagniappe for you. Enjoy!

Social Responsibility

We feel that sustainability doesn’t end with ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’. Being a good corporate & community citizen is a sustainable practice as well.

We endeavor to hire people who are like-minded in terms of sustainability. As our reputation grows, this becomes easier. As we grow, so does our culture of sustainability, making it easier for new employees to assimilate into the culture.
We offer paid summer internships for students majoring in horticulture or other environmentally focused disciplines.

Compensation

We look at compensation as a major subsystem of our business. Have you ever heard a company say things like “our employees are our greatest asset”? Well, like all valuable assets, employees need to be cared for, cultivated, and sustained. Our team is literally the engine that creates value for the company. So we take care to ensure the ‘engine’ is maintained properly. How do we do it?

Seasons

First, as mentioned before, we have the decision as to how we operate in a seasonal cycle. One option would be to hire many low-cost workers, perhaps migrant or immigrant labor, for the summer growing season, and then lay them off during the times of low cash flow through the winter. That’s what many, if not most nurseries do. And while there may be some very real benefits to this approach, there are also some very real disadvantages. We would have to hire and train a new team of people each season. We would have a certain number of new people, unknown to us, each year. The workers would not be invested in our company and other people here; nor would they feel familiar with our company culture. In fact, it’s doubtful we’d have much of a ‘company culture’.

So instead, we’ve built a team of people who grew up around here and are part of our community. We endeavor to keep everyone employed year-round – although some of our folks prefer to cut back their hours in the slower winter season, and that’s okay with us too. It takes some work to do this – thinking ahead to winter projects, how to propagate our plants, and knowing which ones do better in which seasons. And we have to balance our inventories against our year-round production capacity as well as our highly seasonal delivery schedule. With these plans in place,we keep our team on all year round, and they stay busy too. More about the benefits of that later on.

Pay?

Ed & John had worked as management consultants before starting the green roof plant business. We often worked with and experienced good, great, bad, and terrible compensation systems. Things like commission systems to encouraged discount sales, with no profit. Or systems that encouraged employees to diminish the real value of a company’s products & services to the customers. We wanted to build the opposite of those systems. We had also learned of many valuable approaches. Over time we’ve refined our system into one that works well for us, and which is informed by our intrinsic moral value set.

We believe in paying a living wage. That means no one here is expected to stay here at a base wage they cannot thrive on. Even entry level positions pay a base wage that’s not based on the state or federal minimum-wage requirements; but, rather, on a level we know people can live respectfully on. And we want everyone to be invested in our performance as a company. So a significant part of wages are reserved for a year-end bonus, which is determined based the company’s performance for the year. For example, in 2010 people earned an average of 29% in the form of a year-end bonus, above their base salary.

Benefits

Since we tend to migrate people into year-round positions as quickly as possible, we offer benefits to all permanent employees, whether full-time or part-time. We wanted to have the best health care protection we could. So the company pays 75% of the premium for all our employees. And we offer what we think is a better health-care insurance program than most businesses do:

A Note on Health Care Insurance:

Most companies have gone to a new system called ‘High-Deductible HSA’. HSA means Health Care Savings Account. In this system, the employees have a very high deductible level on their health care expenses, usually more than $1,200. However, each employee gets a Healthcare Savings Account where they set money aside, tax-free, to pay these high deductibles. For equivalent coverage levels, HD-HSA’s have lower overall premiums, and often the company will add the amount of the deductible to the employees salary and still come out with a lower premium. But HSAs are really not a good idea. They are a means for the insurance carriers to externalize a great deal of their costs. They add a significant burden to the employer and the employees. In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average cost of premiums + deductibles in high-deductible policies exceeds the average cost of premiums + deductibles in traditional plans.You can see more reasons that HSAs are a bad idea here. Finally, the cost of HSA’s (the ‘premium’) is growing at a faster rate than the cost for a more traditional policy. So they might seem to cost less now, but they won’t cost less for long.

So we have a premium Health Care Policy with reasonable out-of-pocket costs and low deductibles.

We also have a 401(k) and Roth 401(k) retirement program. Employees can contribute through payroll deduction, and every year the company contributes 3% of employee’s compensation to their account. Our investment options are socially and environmentally screened. And our plan is run through SocialK, which is a certified B-Corp.

Laniappe

Our employees enjoy many other smaller benefits. Each employee gets a small stipend to purchase their own safety & comfort supplies. Personal days and sick time. We send people to conferences and educational programs that are pertinent to their work.

We have purchased two company cars for the use of employees who were in need. These cars will belong to the company for 5 years, after which they will become the property of the employee. We hope to do more things like this to promote a long-term view among our staff.

Community

John and Ed both participate in community and business organizations that promote good and green business practices. We support university research, and kids who need plants for a science fair project. We encourage employees to give to the community and to participate as well.

Culture

Finally, we feel it’s important that people who work together with us feel like they’re a part of something bigger, and part of something real. We eat lunch together, have company outings to Orioles games, and usually have a summer field day – where we take a green roof tour or visit botanical gardens. We usually all know it when someone has a sick kid at home, or an ailing parent. It’s not an invasion of privacy, it’s more like a family who all cares. We don’t know how to put a value on that, but it IS real.

Meet our people here.

Green Roof Plants