Richard Alan & Associates Pivots to New Ventures & New Team

Change is difficult — even when you know change is coming and can prepare for it. Much harder to navigate are those times when change arrives unannounced. For Richard Alan, principal of Richard Alan & Associates (RAA), major disruption came in summer 2024, when six of his reps abruptly left. Several months later, he lost one of his core lines.

Fortunately, not only was Alan able to quickly rebuild his agency with some key additions, but he also adjusted his agency’s focus to include a growing category where RAA had already started to make inroads: the Green Channel.  Without sacrificing attention to his core decorative residential lighting lines, Alan has aligned his agency with Joel Podolsky, principal of Florida Landscape Lighting (FLL), an independent rep agency focused on the Green Channel in Florida, Mexico, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean.

Fluent in Spanish, Podolsky has 10 years of lighting experience — including a role as regional sales manager/Landscape Lighting for Kichler before taking the helm at FLL.  Together, Alan and Podolsky’s respective agencies are working together in a “complementary alignment” to serve the Green Channel – calling on distributors of irrigation and landscape-related materials, such as artificial turf, pergolas, outdoor living spaces and appliances, drainage, fire pits, and water features.

In addition to attending the Dallas Market, Podolsky has traveled in the past to Light + Building in Germany and Euroluce in Milan in order to gain an understanding of emerging lighting innovation and fashion from a global perspective.

“Our goal is to elevate the landscape lighting category,” Alan and Podolsky say about their combined business initiative. To that end, FLL was recently selected as the representative for Dauer Manufacturing’s LED landscape lighting line as well as its newly developed commercial lighting and architectural lighting divisions, while RAA represents Kuzco and its premium Auroralight landscape line. New to the line card is Alteck Lighting, a brand new manufacturer focused on outdoor lighting.

“What Joel is doing in the Green Channel will eventually go across our whole footprint at RAA and become more uniform,” Alan says.

Since FLL has an established presence in the territory, it will continue to operate under that name.  “We are keeping the name Florida Landscape Sales because it already has relevance in the market and underscores what we do right out of the gate,” Podolsky explains. Both agencies will also serve the showroom channel as well as others, such as hospitality.

“We want to expand into the Green Channel and, at the same time, we are also pursuing Hospitality very hard,” Alan says, adding, “These are two exciting new ventures for us. Overall, RAA is better off than we were before; we are pursuing different channels and different avenues with different people and different vendors. This past year has taught me that vendors come and go, but what matters is the people in your orbit. This is a newly revitalized Richard Alan & Associates. I think of it as an upgrade. We weren’t aggressively seeking change, but we’re just making the most of the changes that occurred, and the net-net result is positive.”