Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Jessica DeGraff, and I'm the Director of Retail Accounts here at Proven Winners. And I, along with our Retail Solutions team, have the unique pleasure of working with independent garden centers like yours each and every day to help you leverage the marketing programs and tools that the brand offers, but more than that, to engage and connect with consumers and to drive them to your garden center as the source for our products. That's why I'm so excited to share with you something new for our Connect Plus program. Just one more tool in that toolbox that you're definitely going to want to have for 2025. It's something that we call Connect Space. John and Suni Kennedy of Boomerangel have worked for more than three years to develop this concept and program. In essence, it's an intranet hub that allows you to house all of the various tools that your garden center might need to be successful. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to John and let him walk you through Connect Space in more depth. And I'm so excited for you to see this and to take part in 2025.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Jessica, very much for that introduction and welcome to Connect Space. Connect Space, simply put, is everything that you as an independent garden center owner and a team of employees need all in one place. It is a beautiful workplace solution that utilizes an intranet platform. So this is only for your team. The only folks that have access to your intranet platform is your team. And this is customized specifically to your garden center. So it's everything that you need all in one place. Let's take a look and see what that everything is. On the homepage, you'll find it's important to reinforce your vision, your values, your mission on a daily basis. When employees come into the Connect Space platform to either check their schedule or in some instances punch in, they'll be able to see and be reminded each day about what's going on that's specific and germane to their business. You'll see that there's an update here for training if that's the case, a truck coming in if that's the case, when it looks at maybe a new employee as well. Our goal here at Connect Space is to ensure that your employees are informed, efficient, and engaged in every aspect of your busy independent garden center. There are quick links here to be able to drive you to areas of importance specific again to your garden center. Each of these are customized and different. Your leadership team, your team in relationship to supervisors, landscape division, or whatever the corporate structure you have within your independent garden center are all located there so that employees know who's who and where to find them. We also have a quick little virtual board to be able to inform people on daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Lastly, I lean a little towards this are the KPIs, the key performance indicators. One of the things that we're measuring each and every day is like a scoreboard so the employees can get in and log in and instantly know how they're doing on those areas of measurements that are important. Units per transaction, average transaction, mini games that are established, Google reviews, and whatnot. So we're going to bop along the top. DAISY is the next area. We're integrating automated and artificial intelligence. DAISY is our AI guide to help employees know everything they need to know without having to ask the owners everything. An employee can bop right in, ask DAISY the AI guide. What are our benefits? And immediately it comes right back in. So that informed and efficient piece is vital and DAISY is a good example of that. Human resources, all the people side, all the areas that the employees need to be having access to an employee directory. Who's who? What department? Oh, that's a new person. You can have a schedule that's there. Payroll, benefit launches, HR forms like time off request forms are a heavily leveraged area of ConnectSpace. New hire documents. And then lastly, in the HR side, onboarding videos. Welcome to your garden center. These are the things that we do here that are different than others. So take time when you get a chance to visit yourconnectspace.com to take a deeper dive and tour. We're just giving you the nickel tour pretty quick here. Training. To me, because of the importance of it, an informed, educated employee typically is a great asset to an organization and offers outstanding customer experience. So intuition does not come from an unprepared mind. We find that knowledge now is the new currency and we house all of the information that your employees need to have in order to be successful each and every day all underneath of the training area of ConnectSpace. Vendor training. Certainly, we want to highlight Proven Winners. When it comes to the Proven Winners brand, we have certainly the certification program. So your 2024 certified training video right there, resource guides towards the bottom. Here's the certification program. We also have Proven Winners University so that you can learn everything about the products and varieties that are currently available through the Proven Winners brand. There's a lot more training that's either customized for your independent garden center or offered by your vendors. Huge value right there inside of the training area. Operations naturally is more of the process side of the equation. People is HR. Process is operations. So supply requests, damage inventory, vendor buying, links to your company chats and playbooks all inside. Take a look at that. The departments. Which department? Again, customized to you. If you have a landscape division, great. If you have a grower division, great. If it's just the garden center division, great. Admin and each of them have their own microsites. Another challenge with the busy independent garden center is oftentimes marketing is marketing without informing the employees what's going on. So this affords every employee to never say again. Nobody told me because it's right there inside of ConnectSpace. All marketing efforts, all events, all videos, all radio ads and spots, a marketing calendar all inside of the marketing area of ConnectSpace. We find the community page is great as well. It celebrates the employee. Here's what's happening as a team. Here's a charity that we're involved in. And this shout out gives opportunities for employees to be able to give high fives to each other. So it's not just leadership, but the entire team that's informed, efficient and engaged in the aspect of running a busy garden center. And then lastly, a whole digital solutions and applications suite for you, all customized for your independent garden center. For your employees to be successful each and every day, to find themselves, to be informed, educated and trained up on everything that they need all in one place. And you can find this at yourconnectspace.com. This is part of your Connect Plus Elite membership choice. You have a couple of different choices and we're excited to offer ConnectSpace as one of those choices. Go visit the site, take a tour and we hope to have you on board.