Meadowbrooke’s 2015 Staycation!

Last year, I wrote a blog on our exciting company trip to Key West. Well, this year some of the most asked questions are “where did you go on your trip? what did you do? and why didn’t we hear anything about it?”. For those that are new to our company, each year we shut down the company for one week sometime in February, March or April to go plan the next step of Meadowbrooke Gourds.

Everyone goes along with family members (usually some place warm) to dream and think about where we would like to grow our company. Last year when we went on our trip, we decided we needed to focus on hiring and training new people and improve our production system. Our production areas were cluttered and too small to accommodate increases in people and gourds. These extra costs caused us to miss our profit goal necessary to take our yearly vacation. As much as we all would have liked to spend a part of the cold winter with our toes in the sand somewhere, we needed to make some big changes at home.

So with that decision made, we have spent most of this year improving things behind the scenes. Many of you that were out during our Spring Fest, should have noticed one of our first big changes in regards to the second floor back in our production area. This not only provided a really neat place to do our Create your Owns during our special events but also provided much needed storage on the second floor.

The next step was to get all of our unclean raw gourds coming in out of the fields this spring under cover. We had currently outgrown our old storage areas so we knocked down two of our former gourd cribs and built one humongous building back behind the store that can now handle our overflow. Gourds will begin to breakdown in the sun so this was becoming very necessary for us to take care of. For now, it is also storing our shipping boxes until we have our next building built.

The last thing we will be doing this year is constructing a new shipping building where currently our cleaned raw gourds are located. This existing building will be demolished and a new one connected to the dock beside the store will be going up.

Now I know all you of you that come up for raw cleaned gourds are starting to panic. Please do not worry because our raw gourd area will be moving inside next to the store where shipping is currently residing. We are also going to expand our gourd supply parts area and make everything very convenient and a little bit more climate controlled. We will keep you updated as we start moving things around.

So although I don’t have any exciting fishing trips, beautiful sunsets, great places to eat to rave about this year. I am super excited about all the changes going on right here on the farm during our “staycation”.