The offering was immense. There were hundreds of illustrated gardening and home landscaping articles written by Northscaping staff and guests writers. There was a dynamic discussion forum where gardeners could come and ask questions and share their experiences. There were a number of database-driven tools for gardeners, including a Landscape Plant Search which let users search through thousands of landscape plants, an Interactive Climatic Map with local data pertinent to gardeners, and a comprehensive Online Landscaping Guide for the do-it-yourselfers.

The business model was simple - build a community of gardeners and home landscapers, and then sell access to this community to relevant advertisers. It should have been a match made in heaven. However, by 2007 it had become clear to the team that they weren't going to make any meaningful profit on such a business model given the degree of competition and the general failure of the "print advertising" model on the Internet. It was crunch time.

The team sat down and had a heart-to-heart. They examined their assets and looked at what was working and what wasn't. One thing had become apparent over the three years of operation; the Landscape Plant Finder tool was consistently getting more than 10 times the usage of any other tool or page on the site. Plants were being searched for by the thousands every day. Each day, hundreds of gardeners from across North America would ask where they could buy these plants, or if Northscaping sold plants. Gardeners were in love with this tool, but Northscaping couldn't close the loop because it didn't actually stock and sell plants.

Realizing this opportunity, the team consulted with the two largest garden centers in the city of Winnipeg. The question was simple - how do we connect the obvious power of this front-end plant search tool with the plant stock of the local garden centers? Northscaping has the database, the photographs, and the search engine, and the garden centers have the physical plants. Add a little dash of inspiration, and the NetPS Plant Finder tool was born!

In 2007, these two garden centers became the first of a long list of clients using the NetPS Plant Finder tool. In the following years, the search technology would be refined and perfected, over 100,000 plant photographs would be taken at botanic gardens and arboreta across the continent, and the plant database would be expanded by thousands of plants every single year. Nurseries and garden centers were consulted, and new features were added according to their direction. Meanwhile the popularity of this tool among gardeners and home landscapers would grow to fanatical proportions.

In 2014, the Northscaping team decided to focus solely on the NetPS Plant Finder tool, completing a total shift of the business model that had begun seven years earlier. The Northscaping.com resource and community website was closed for good in 2014, after a decade of operation. The NetPS Plant Finder tool is now on the websites of hundreds of nurseries and garden centers across the United States and Canada, with more being added every day. It was the first dedicated Plant Finder tool for nurseries and garden centers, and it is unquestionably the best.