Building a name in the community and in the industry has helped fuel three decades of success for Jason Marotta’s Possum Run greenhouse operation.

Justin Marotta, founder of the Possum Run Greenhouse, a 100,000-square-foot growing and retail space in Bellville, Ohio, grew up in a greenhouse family. In fact, after World War II, his grandfather’s operation northeast of Cleveland supported three families—his granddad’s, his dad’s and his uncle’s.

“I was the first one in my family to go to college, and I had no intention of working in the greenhouse industry,” Marotta asserts. After graduating with a degree in business administration from Ashland (Ohio) College in 1972, Marotta went to work as a personnel director for a large retailer. “But subconsciously, I found myself being drawn back into a business I could control myself,” he says. “So, in 1974, I returned to the only industry I knew. I bought a dilapidated building with a small greenhouse in Bellville, and Possum Run was born.”

While Possum Run has survived and thrived for some 32 years, it may not have had a run at all had it not been for Marotta’s faith in his own abilities. Unlike many other businesses, the rate of survival in a greenhouse enterprise is typically somewhere around 20%.

“Statistics are meaningless,” he opines. “In 1974, I wasn’t thinking about statistics. I was 24, I was somewhat naive and I was bulletproof. I believed I could do it. When you grow up in this industry, there’s a rate of success within the family niche that allows you to be confident—not cocky, but confident. Working with Mother Nature provides you with that mechanism. I had a professor in college who said I’d determine my own worth. She was right. I was the only one who controlled my destiny then and that of others now.”

Marotta attributes his long-term success to the brand Possum Run has built in the community. He notes that the company always seeks the latest and greatest in the marketplace for its customers, and that he and his wife, Lynn, who introduced the retail side of the business, grew the company based on consumer demand.

“Lynn was the one who decided in the mid-1980s that as long as we were heating this big facility year-round, we might as well add garden supplies and a gift shop,” he says. “And she was right—the retail side of the business during the past few years has caught up to the wholesale side in terms of sales. We’re looking for a third niche now, but we’re not sure what it will be.”

But it was more than just offering retail and gift products that helped bolster the Possum Run name locally. Lynn began the first of the customer outreach tactics that consistently built return traffic to the greenhouse and gift shop and cemented the growth of the retail business. The newsletter she started in the early 1990s, which offers gardening tips, special offers and Possum Run news, now has a subscription rate of more than 5,000.

A few years ago, Eric, the eldest of the couple’s three sons, who joined the business after working for four years in the telecommunications business, added the Possum Tails
e-newsletter, which now has some 350 subscribers. Add to that a series of free instructional seminars Possum Run regularly offers, and the tours the Mansfield & Richland County Convention & Visitors Bureau brings to the greenhouse, and, as Marotta says, “we get pretty good local traffic through the facilities.”

You’ll likely never hear Marotta say it himself, but another reason Possum Run has been a strong community leader is his own work in the industry. He is on the Vice President’s Advisory Council, the chief advisory body for the dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University; and he has served as president of the Ohio Florists Association, the largest grower body in the U.S., as well as on the Ohio Plant Agriculture Task Force. But perhaps the work Marotta is most proud of is what he did to help open the Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center at Ohio State in August 1999.

“We have the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado, which preserves all the food and fiber sources from around the world,” he explains. “It’s a genetic library of corn, tomatoes, potatoes—you name it. If a disaster wiped out our food supply, the center provides the means to regrow it. We didn’t have that type of genetic base for the floral industry, so, working with an ad hoc committee under the auspices of the USDA, we worked with the Society of American Florists and the American Nursery and Landscape Association to get a Congressional writ, eventually establishing our Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center.”

Marotta adds that the work he’s done for the local and national bodies that represent his industry, and for the government on behalf of florists, has been his “graduate degree.”