The success of Hello Hello does not lie in it’s plant stock, equipment or property. It lies in our cause, the team of people and the culture, product, customer relationships and the franchise in the minds of the people of Victoria, that this team has created.

  Over the last ten years Hello Hello has grown from being a small corner nursery to one of the busiest and best known nurseries in Melbourne.
  "hello hello dot com dot au", "Chris & Maries” & “Hello Hello " are all household names. Hello hello dot com dot au is the number one horticultural web site in Australia, voted the 9th home improvement web site in the Herald-Sun, July 2001. If you go anywhere in Melbourne & yell " Hello Hello" people start talking about running around in the nude or Chris’ legs or dot com dot au.

 What is the secret of Chris & Marie’s success?   In 1997 Chris & Marie were invited by Gold FM to attend a seminar in Hong Kong entitled ‘Thinking outside the square’. At this stage we had a backlog of unsold stock and we were a struggling corner nursery going nowhere, we had a large inventory of stock & a giant overdraft. At the seminar we learned three things that completely changed our lives.

1. Concentrate your firepower. Like a lot of small businesses we spent our money on a little bit of radio, a bit of newspaper, some on magazines and some on television. Larry & Jason said take your entire budget and spend it all on one medium that you can dominate and have presence on.
2. The more unbelievable the offer the more it has to be grounded in reality. Like lots of retailers we would say "It’s Easter and we are selling silver birches for half price, 6ft silver birch $5". Instead we learned that it’s better to say, "We’ve grown a large field of silver birches and because we’ve grown them we can afford to sell them for half the city prices, 6ft silver birch $5".
3. Create a franchise in the minds of people. Larry & Jason told a story about a Cadillac dealer from Chicago who used the one slogan on every piece of advertising for 30 years and became so well known and successful he was able to sell his dealership for 10’s of millions of dollars.

  Taking these three simple ideas we created the "hello hello" advertising campaign. We concentrated our entire advertising budget in either radio or television at any one time, we grounded every offer in reality and we kept a consistent theme in every ad, turning our nursery into the busiest & best known plant retail outlet in Melbourne.

  Since that time Chris and Marie have attended further seminars & had further coaching with Larry & Jason. Lots of people ask us how we did what we did, now the secret to our success is available to all in a book entitled:

by co-authors Laurence Haughton and Jason Jennings.
  The principles discussed in the book are simple and easy to understand. We have worked together as a team to achieve "being fast" and have held cause community meetings where we discuss our ideas and plans with relevance to our cause which is - Providing The Experience Of Adventure, Beauty and Abundance. Our staff have also completed a course run by Chris on how to become really successful in your job & how to create your own job.
  By using Larry & Jasons principles from the book you can take the smallest business and watch it grow to number one in its field or area. Our business has grown dramatically over the past four years and we will continue to do so for the next four years.
  Readers who wish to read more about the new book “It’s Not What You Say… It’s What You Do".

Thanks Larry & Jason
From Chris & Marie & staff

About the authors

Laurence Haughton
  Laurence Haughton, Co-author of The New York Times best-selling book, "it's not the BIG that eat the SMALL.... it's the FAST that eat the SLOW," was born in Buffalo, NY and a few years later, moved to the West Coast with his aerospace engineer father, mother and five brother and sisters.
  Haughton's interest in the media (especially radio) started at an early age. In high school, Haughton co-founded and helped run a non commercial radio station. Directly after high school, with the intention of studying silicon wafers, running tests on the ovens, and replenishing chemicals and gasses—surprisingly, no one was injured. Even with the dangling carrots of stock options and offers of tuition aid from Intel, Haughton decided that his attraction to advertising, music and entertainment were too powerful to ignore and decided to major in communications at San Francisco State University.
  Nearing graduation, he was told that in order to get a good job at a commercial station he needed to begin in a very small market. Haughton, not one for convention, landed a job as "call screener" at KGO in the major-market of San Francisco. Once there Haughton was selected by the top afternoon host to be his full time guest booker, show producer, and writer. Initially he aspired to be a radio host, but soon realized in order to attain that goal it would take too long to work through all the bureaucracy. The importance of speed and streamlining were two ideas he understood, even from the beginning.
  In 1977, Haughton joined broadcast consultant, Jason Jenning. Haughton was brought into the company to write and produce training tapes. On his first day he was also put in charge of telephone sales. From the get-go, Haughton proved himself more than competent and was soon promoted; his first consulting project was a radio station in Fort Meyers, Florida. By the end of the second year, Haughton’s quick mind and intense energy had propelled the Jennings organization into the "must get" category for businesses across the U.S.
  Haughton and Jennings initially concentrated on media clients, but soon the two realized they could expand and apply their knowledge to high tech companies, retailers, distributors and manufacturers, Haughton personally took charge of these new unique challenges and hit the streets with their clients’ trainees to demonstrate the training under real-life situations.
  Haughton’s accomplishments catapulted him into the limelight and generated a demand for speaking engagements, making 50-100 speeches a year discussing topics such as "Seeing around corners," "Maintaining momentum long after the mood has passed," and "Taking heavy action."
  Haughton and Jennings figured out that speed is such an integral component of the success of a business that they wrote a book dedicated to this issue. The unusual title of the book, and the concepts contained therein, came directly from an as Haughton wrote many years earlier and was instrumental in attracting the attention of Harper Collins Business who agreed to publish the best-selling book.
  The book reveals tactics to speed up business by removing the speed bumps that can slow a company down, and what can be done to sustain the momentum. Entrepreneurs and managers who have to make it happen have responded by buying the book; in the book’s first 60 days it made national bestseller lists including "The Wall Street Journal," "USA Today," "The New York Times," and "Business Week."

Laurence Haughton lives in Northern, California with his family.