Horticultural Trades Association

The HTA supports around 1,500 garden retailers, growers, manufacturers and landscapers across the UK with everything from training and e-learning to conferences and market research insights.

As a not for profit organisation, teaming up with the right type of Health & Safety and HR & Employment Law partner was key for them; and that’s where we came in.

Working in partnership

We’ve been helping the HTA for a number of years with our Preferred Partnership Programme. Tim Bell, their Commercial Manager, said: “We’ve been really pleased to work with Citation.

“Our members come in all shapes and sizes, so we’re really pleased with the flexibility of the way in which they work.

“There are some fairly small independents and some really large garden centre groups, so it’s important to us that any partner of ours understands the diversity of the HTA membership and has solutions that will best meet that, and that’s certainly what’s been delivered.”

Understanding all the way

Here at Citation, we always take the time to get to know our clients on an individual level – something the HTA are all too familiar with.

Tim spoke: “The relationship we have with Citation is very easy to manage. The team’s extremely friendly and professional, and have taken the time to understand our industry, understand our members and provide us with a suite of tools not only for us to use as clients, but for our members to use too.”

Making the everyday more manageable

When it comes to online compliance management, our online platform, Atlas, is the bee’s knees. Anne Clark, HR Director at the HTA, said: “It’s very easy to use and user-friendly.

“What I like about Atlas is the reports we can run from it. As a small organisation with 50 employees, we can’t afford to have a lot of HR software in place so it provides us with a place that we can store information, without having to use a number of spreadsheets.

“It allows us to keep our data in one, safe area. Without it, I think we’d be all over the place with our information.”

Our pride and joy

We know our service is only as good as our staff, and our staff are our pride and joy. Anne added: “All of the consultants I’ve dealt with have been friendly and helpful.

“They always provide us with all the knowledge we need in a timely manner, to ensure we can support our employees or deal with the problems that we may have.”

Complete confidence

“We’re really proud of the relationship we have with Citation because, not only do they understand our businesses, they understand the way that the HTA works and we’re therefore extremely comfortable to talk about Citation as a partnered business,” Tim said.

Adding: “We know the way that Citation will talk to our members is very professional, very well organised, very well structured and will give a really good reflection of the HTA brand, as well as the Citation brand.”