The Story Of Daleys Fruit Tree Nursery

Hi, I'm Greg Daly. I'm going to share the story of Daly's Nursery. Back in a long, long time ago, when I was a young fella, as we all were at one stage, 1989, I got my two brothers up here and we started the nursery. I was 23. My two younger brothers, they're identical twins, Rod Daly and Rick Daly. I convinced them to join my venture and they brought skills to the workplace of their builders. They've got completely different skills to me and we just work very well together. We have a really trustful relationship, but their skills of building polyhouses and you name it, everything. If you come to Daly's, you look around, Rod and Rick are responsible for that. That was probably the creation of Daly's Nursery, Rod, Rick and myself. Back in 1980, that was a time that was security of the world. There was a threat of nuclear war going on. There was a lot of people moving back to the north coast to get their blocks of land like they are a little bit in the last few years with the pandemic. There was an instant market there. There was people moving back to the land, lots of young families. People wanted fruit trees because the world was going to come to an end. And then the next stage was actually orchardists on the north coast growing avocados, macadamias, low-chilled peaches and then garden centres. There was a transition at a point there that the internet came into its own. So we said, no, we're going to go down the path of online marketing. And that probably kicked off in the early 2000s and that was a point that Corey Edmund, my nephew, decided to come into the business and he's looked after all our marketing and online growth ever since. In the early 2000s when I came on board, we really wanted to make it so that Daly's Nursery is the one place that you go to where you get all your information on fruit trees and you can share it, share your love of fruit trees with like-minded people who are also going down this journey. And whether or not that's with the ability to buy just one plant and get that at your door very quickly through our online nursery system or whether or not it's having a chat on a forum or a social media group. We really want to educate people at Daly's Nursery and have it that one place where people can get the information they need to really succeed at growing fruit trees. We can actually sort of look nearly all over Australia and nearly every suburb has probably got a fruit tree from Daly's. It's such a rewarding thing to do in your life to grow it and you've got all these connections with trees that have been sort of planted all over Australia. We'd probably do 100 to 200,000 trees a year. So over the last 40 years I'm sure there's well over a million trees spread around the countryside. Growing backyard fruit trees would have to be the greatest hobby that you can do. People have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years and having that connection and bringing your kids up in that connection to plants and to actually eating the fruit is just really exciting and makes you quite relaxed and mentally feel really good about yourself. One of the things I feel as though we've done really successfully is have this amazing culture of a work culture which we prize probably more than any other factor in our strength of our business is our community. I feel as though that culture has its own momentum with the staff that we have now and I feel quite confident that 10, 20 years time I'll look back and I'll be pretty proud of where Daly's has come and going.