I recently read that this will be a tremendous year for gardening as folks are homebound and looking for activities that will get them outside. There is even talk about folks having Victory Gardens this year.
A routine at our home for 25 years has been buying flowering baskets for display on our home’s wrap around porch. It is a rite of spring for us.
This year presented a unique challenge in that we have for these many years been buying these plants from a local nursery in Meadowview, VA (can’t beat that name for the location of a nursery). The nursery is not far from our former home in Emory, VA. We now live in Wise, VA, yet each year for the past 8 years, we have traveled an hour to the nursery to browse their flowers and make our purchases.
With the challenge this year of social distancing, how could we handle this?
My wife hit upon the idea of calling the nursery, sharing what we needed, and letting the nursery pick out the baskets for us.
Doing this, we would put our confidence in the Nursery to select the flowers. More on that in a moment.
In today’s world and circumstances, we are being called more than ever to put confidence in others. We are ordering groceries online. It is one thing to order a can of soup and a box of crackers, but how about vegetables or meat? Our trust is that the grocers would pick or select what we would.
Over 132 years, consumers and businesses have trusted us to help and do what is best for them. The Payroll loans are recent evidence of our customers putting their trust in us to help them – and their trust in us has been rewarded.
Now back to the nursery.
Why would my wife put trust in the Nursery to pick flowers as well as she would? Because over 25 years, they have clearly demonstrated the quality of their product and their high level of service.
As Bankers (or any business), we all have the opportunity every day to demonstrate the value of what we do – to allow folks to develop trust in our organizations. Trust is a precious thing!
So last Sunday we traveled to the Nursery. They loaded the flowers, and we returned home to hang some of the most beautiful and healthy plants we had ever purchased.
Perhaps through this crisis, we have re-learned the value of Trust in others, and for businesses- the opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of working with people you know.
– Leton
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“Letters From Leton” is a blog series comprised of the weekly updates that Leton Harding – President, Chairman, and CEO of Powell Valley National Bank, shares with the Bank’s team members. These newsletters are full of uplifting anecdotes and intriguing insights that are applicable beyond the Bank, so we want to share them with you.
