Every successful gardening business, whether design, landscape or maintenance, will have started at the beginning, first off, tentative part-time, then full-time, struggling to make a living twelve months a year when the work dried up but the weather didn’t, then a steady stream of work and money coming in as the routine settled down.
Every day was a learning day, what to do and what not to do. Which tools to buy and which to hire. Which clients to attract, which to avoid. It does take time to process and establish yourself in your market place. I want to concentrate on those who specialise in, and enjoy working on domestic private gardens. Landscapers develop their own impetus, building up a business using labour and renting premises and land as their success grows. Designers either rent office space or turn over a bedroom at home and start to find work through word of mouth or by joining an Association.
Gardeners, almost by definition, are successful in different types of ways in my experience. What makes a successful Gardener? Someone who build up a steady round of customers, working five or six days a week if they wish, in some beautiful gardens, learning more and more about their chosen work, and developing close relationships with their clients in a way that Landscapers and Designers cannot do. The Maintenance Gardener almost becomes part of the family, which is great – unless and until you want to expand and grow your business.
The time comes when your income is dictated by the number of hours in a working week. You have a finite number of clients, with a finite income and no time or opportunity to increase your money, no matter how popular and successful you are! Moreover, because you are good at what you do, and friends and neighbours of your clients see what you can do, they too wish to become your customers. More and more, the pressure grows for you to either clone yourself, or figure out a way to increase your workforce.
This is the time to step back and examine your success. Take a full and frank look at what you are, and why you are where you are at. Take stock of your situation in a dispassionate way, almost as an outsider. Consider yourself and your work situation in a highly critical manner.
Why are you so popular? Is it because of your positive attitude? Your personality and friendly manner? Is it because you are reliable, never letting people down, always on time? Or is it because you are too affordable, operating with low rates that have scarcely risen since you started out. Be very honest with yourself. If you have not raised your charges for a few years in any significant way, have you dropped behind your competitors, pricewise? Or is your success really down to your skills and talents?
Having taken stock, should you decide that your charges are really too low, and you feel able to earn more per hour or visit, how can you increase your rates? Across the board with every customer informed that your prices will be increasing and risk losing some or all of your clients? Or piecemeal, one at a time to gauge their reaction, losing some but not others, so that you now have time to take on new customers at new higher rates.
This financial retrospective is useful if your sole purpose is to gain greater income, and want to feel more valued as a skilled artisan. However, if you feel that the time really has come to begin to build a Business out of your maintenance round, with a longer term view, it is vital that you produce a Business Plan, based over a three to five year period, clearly setting out your goals and targets, together with realistic time scales.
Matters to consider will include, but not be limited to, transport together with an overview of costs involved in running and maintaining your vehicles, storage and yard space if deemed essential, higher insurance premiums, tools and equipment, and vitally, the number of clients you will need to service the costs. Therefore, you must establish your projected costs for each year, taking into consideration that if you are successful, you will have to pass through the VAT threshold and take on board any implications for client shedding due to the additional costs of the tax.
When you consider that your future plans will be moving you away from the comfortable and regular workplace you are currently working in, with friendly regular customers who treat you as family, you will be obliged as a matter of necessity to act and think like a professional in a business-like manner. Every hour of every working day will need to be accounted for, and any lost time made up for within the working year. There are several articles within The Landscape Library that cover such topics, including and especially, The Landscapers Survival Manual (Books and Publications Section) so I will not dwell on those here.
The most important factor to decide is HOW you propose to expand your business. Simply charging more for your time will increase your income, but will not expand and develop your potential to build a Garden Maintenance Company. The most essential ingredient to your plan is skilled labour.
This is where you need to go back to the analysis of your current success. Are you popular because you are inexpensive? Put your rates up. Because of your personality? When developing your expanded business model, you need to maintain your personal presence within the company. How? Because of your skills set? Replicate them by training others to match your skills, even at basic levels.
Everyone has their own back story, which will materially affect any advice offered in this article. However, everyone wishing to develop and blossom into become a business will have to follow a pathway similar to the steps set out in this paper.
Set your goals. Within twelve months I will be at this stage. Within two years, at this stage and so on. Any shortfall in your programme will affect the time scale of your projection, and any financial implications will have to be recognised. If you have budgeted for a certain level of income to cover the costs of your plan, you must face that reality and make adjustments elsewhere at that time, otherwise you may lose control of your future plans.
Be prepared to change your image from being a sole gardener to being the principal and owner of a Garden Maintenance Company. You can still be yourself, working along similar lines, selling your skills to your clients, but in a professional manner. Your customers must see you in a different light. If they care about you, they will be delighted to see you prosper, and wish you well! They should think that they were blessed with your presence for however many years you worked for them. Consider how Alan Titchmarsh’s old clients must feel when they remember when he used to work for them!
By thinking and working in a professional manner, perhaps even wearing livery and colour coded tools and equipment, you will now be in position to advertise for skilled labour. Seek out and engage, even on a part time basis, another pair of hands to work alongside you. Your choice of individual will suit you as a person, and I will not comment on age or sex, as long as you feel comfortable working alongside that individual.
I suggest too, that you conduct a trial period, paying that person on a casual basis, subject to any restrictions and deductions that your accountant advises you on. You should introduce that person to your customers in such a way that they are comfortable with. Some will not be happy to see a new face in the garden, hence it is advisable to begin working with your choice of labour only on new client’s property, where they will know no different. Your hourly rate needs to reflect the additional cost, or better still, work only on price-work, so they are not aware of the costs. The rate you charge for your new labour must be realistic, certainly no less than two and half times the amount you are paying for their time. If you are paying them £12.00 then your charge out rate should be £30.00 per hour for their time.
Even if your costs are lower on the casual rates, they will certainly be higher once you start to pay Employers costs. Your accountant will advise you on this matter. What you cannot do is to increase your charges for those same clients after you have started working with your labourer.
There will be a temptation to avoid becoming an employer but using part-time and casual labour to help with your customers, paying on an ad hoc basis. I really cannot recommend that route for many reasons. Put simply, you will be introducing a Third Party into your relationship with your customers, someone who will be accepted as they have been endorsed and approved by yourself by virtue of your bringing them to site. Unless you are fortunate, you will suddenly find that you have been replaced by your new colleague at a cheaper rate! I have seen this happen so many times! Loyalty means nothing when compared with cheaper rates.
Another scenario to avoid -in my opinion – is that of taking on a partner to help manage your clients, only this time by sharing them with someone who is introduced as your equal. Again, this is fairly common, and may seem like the ideal solution to coping with too many clients. Simply keep taking on more work, and if things work out well, both you and your partner both profit. Between the pair of you, larger projects can be tackled, and new horizons open up.
Even if you take a share of the money coming in from the partnership, the potential for conflicts and problems must far outweigh the benefits of keeping more customers happy. How do you choose a partner? Their name will have to be added to your headed paper and business documents. How do you know they do not have a history of bad debts? The sheer amount of potential trouble could never make taking on a partner an attractive option as far as I am concerned, although I know of several very successful companies who operate as partnerships.
In order to expand your business, the only solution is to start employing staff. This is not an easy route, but there can be no other way!
HOWEVER!
There is another way to greatly increase your income!
By being very selective in your choice of customers, choosing those with the best potential from your existing client base, being quite ruthless, lose at least one of them by giving notice of your intention to shed them as customers. This may be explained in a number of ways, which will depend on the client and location (or proximity to another of your customers. You do not want to shed one only to discover they have mentioned your leaving to another, when you may lose them both!) but in essence, you must get rid of your least-best customer.
By taking on a new client at a higher rate, you immediately increase your income, and embolden you to raise your prices with your other customers, some of whom you may lose, but soon pick up others. Think of this tactic as being similar to the one you will have to face one day when you reach the VAT threshold! Even if your rates are already higher than some of your competitors, always remember that there is a sound reason why you are so popular.
Become a specialist in certain aspects of garden maintenance. Topiary, greenhouse work and propagation, vegetables, fish ponds, shrub or climber pruning for example, and consider reducing other aspects of gardening that are hard work, but that may be done by others who will not be able to handle the projects you can. For this reason alone, you can justify your increased rates on a Supply and Demand basis, which is a very good reason for moving on to enable you to use your skills to better advantage, leaving the more mundane jobs to others.
Consider joining a Specialist Group. The Association of Professional Landscapers have the APL Professional Gardeners Group, which is the ONLY Gardeners organisation that carries out a full vetting of members before being accepted into membership which has many benefits. This exclusivity enables the members to command higher rates, working in some very prestigious gardens alongside many of Britain’s leading Garden Designers and Landscapers.
To repeat – the only way to expand your business is to take on labour. But you can find other ways to expand your income by careful selection and planning!
(See also Improving Efficiency and Increasing Income under the Contractors Section in The Landscape Library)