Limitations of a gardening round

Is a gardening round really for you?

As a business I no longer offer the services as a gardening round. There were a number of reasons why I had to close my round. The deciding factor for me was that my gardening round was incapable of supporting me through those long winter months.

While many businesses such as hotels, guesthouses, seaside arcades and so on close for the winter, their earnings are likely to be far higher than those of a self-employed gardener. My own personal financial circumstances meant that I couldn’t afford to close for three months of the year, much as I was tempted to.

You may well find that many of your clients want you to work for them throughout the winter months. Indeed, there are lots of jobs to be getting on with in the garden during this period.

During the winter short days mean shorter earning periods

The main draw-back is the short days. This means that the average hours you can work in the garden are about six. That’s if it’s not too wet or snowing or everywhere is under a few feet or inches of water.

If you’ve enough regular clients to see you through these bleak months, remember that your working hours will be severely reduced, and with it, your earnings.

By adjusting your cash flow forecasts to cover seasonal downturns, you can ensure that even though your income is reduced, you are financially prepared for it.

Offer domestic maintenance contracts

An alternative to the traditional gardening round is to offer the homeowner a domestic maintenance contract. The advantage of this is that you do away with hourly work and instead offer a service whereby a set amount of work is carried out at a pre-agreed frequency. Your client benefits by having their garden looked after at a pre-agreed price. You win by having a portion of your diary full every month and knowing in advance how much your business will earn. What you’re doing here is essentially replicating the successful formula used by domestic cleaning contracts. Here’s how it works.

Create three levels of garden care service

The first level of service – The Premier Service – is where you tend the client’s gardens on no less than four visits a month. Weather permitting and failing unforeseen circumstances, these visits will generally happen on the same day each week.

During each visit you undertake the following work:

• cut the grass
• weed the borders
• sweep and clear pathways of any debris
• dead head any roses, flowers, etc.

Depending on the size of your client’s garden this work could take you anything from a few hours to a full day. If extra work is required then you simply bill this at a pre-agreed hourly rate.

The Standard Service is the next level of service. This is where you carry out the above work on each visit, but rather than attend weekly you attend twice a month. Again your visit could take you anything from an hour to a day. However, be careful when offering this service that your client’s garden can realistically be maintained twice monthly. If not, or you have any doubts, you should be selling them your Premier Service.

The Garden Help Plan is the final service level to offer. As the name implies, it’s your basic level of service where you visit your clients once a month and offer the above service list. The idea of this level is to sell to those clients who need regular help in the garden but either their garden or their budget isn’t large enough to merit more frequent visits.

A word of warning – when offering this service, you need to impress upon your client that you’re not undertaking to service their garden as you would with the other two services, but offering a ‘helping hand in their garden’. My experience has been that the people who initially opt for this service are attracted by its relatively low price compared with the other services we offer, but once they’ve signed up, expect or even demand the same results as you’d normally expect when undertaking weekly visits. So make sure you impress upon prospective clients that this really is a ‘helping hand’ service and not a monthly garden clearance or complete tidy-up service.

Even the smallest garden can, when left unchecked, become a huge task if only attended to once a month. So the pre-requirement for this service is that your client is willing to undertake regular gardening work themselves while you attend once a month to give their garden more of a polish than a clearing.

For your business to get the best out of offering any of the above services, you should:

• 1.Only offer a service over a pre-agreed minimum period of at least six months.
• 2.Offer an attractive rate to your client while still earning enough profit for your business to make it worthwhile.
• 3.Target your service at time-poor, cash-rich clients.

Pre-agreed period

What you need to avoid is the client who only wants this type of service for a month or two during the summer. There’s no commercial advantage to you in these short-term agreements. Where a client asks you to undertake a couple of months’ regular work you should do so but charge them your normal hourly rate. If they want to take advantage of improved rates and guaranteed service then they’re going to have to accept that the minimum period is six months. Usually this would be from say April right through to September and at the end of September you should be looking to put them on your winter maintenance programme.

Don’t worry initially if they only want you from April to September. That’s fine. It’s a good start and come the autumn you can then sell them leaf clearance, lawn-care programmes, gutter clearance, fence and shed repairs – all the things that need to be done during the summer months, but there’s never time.

The rate you charge for this service must be attractive. Remember you’re not offering an hourly service, you’re offering a weekly/fortnightly or once-a-month all-in service. On some visits you could finish in an hour while others may take far longer. So when you’re working out a monthly rate don’t get too hung up on how much you charge per hour. What you’re offering is a service where you invoice each client at the end of the month, so think in terms of a monthly as opposed to an hourly amount.

Even including such jobs as weeding isn’t difficult when you’re the one who is responsible for the entire garden maintenance, as weeding is one of the jobs that you can either do yourself during your visit or, as I prefer, employ help to do it for you. The advantage to taking on weeding under such circumstances is that you’re the one responsible for keeping them under control. So if you chip away at them during each visit they’re unlikely to get too far out of control. The same applies to dead-heading, for example, roses. On some visits will there will be lots of work in this area and on others none. Overall you’ll find it all balances out. But the most important thing is you make a profit from this service. To do so you need to put together accurate forecasts for everything from fuel for your lawnmower to disposal of green waste. Then offer your client a monthly fee which incorporates everything.

If you’re going to go down this route my advice is that you offer either one of the above plans and when somebody says they’ll cut their own lawn, so how much would it be then, walk way. Otherwise you’re likely to end up with the weeding jobs and nothing else. And trust me, nobody likes to pay for weeding!

Target your services at the right customers

While there are many potential customers out there who will love the idea of your coming to look after their garden on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, there are few who are actually willing to pay what you’re going to have to charge to make it worthwhile.

That’s why when offering this sort of service, you must target the right customers. By this I mean those prospective customers who can instantly see the benefit of what you’re offering. Remember you’re not selling a new gardening concept here. This sort of service has been offered for years by gardening companies all over the country, which means the concept is an established successful business model.

In my experience the customers who will buy this service at the right price are, generally speaking, young high-flying professionals who are what’s known as ‘time-poor and cash-rich’.

What these customers want is for someone honest and reliable to visit their property and keep it looking as they would keep it, if they had the time. The last thing they want to do when they arrive home after a day’s work is to spend their free time pushing a lawnmower up and down or weeding an overgrown border. But neither do they want to have their garden look untidy or uncared for and that’s where your service comes in.

Usually this section of the market tends to go for either the larger garden maintenance companies or uses one of the franchise gardeners. That’s not to say that as a solo-operator you can’t compete. You can, but this is an area where image and professionalism are everything. Not only does this market demand their garden maintenance company is knowledgeable, honest and reliable, it also wants them to look professional. Before you even begin to knock on the door of these people, make sure:

• Your stationery is professional. This includes letterhead, business cards and flyers. The relatively small charges made by professional printers for creating your stationery will pay enormous dividends when tackling this market.
• You look the part when you turn up to meet your prospective client. Even though I own my gardening business and employ others, I still wear our uniform because it creates the right impression. Turning up on the doorstep of any prospective client wearing shorts and a T-shirt is bad at the best of times, but do it when targeting this market and you may as well stay at home. They’re not going to hire anyone that looks unprofessional.
• Everything about your company needs a branded feel to it. The reason franchise gardening businesses do so well isn’t, I would argue, that their gardening is any better than yours, it’s because they work hard at creating the right image.

The more professional your company appears, the more quality business you will get. By quality I mean those customers who appreciate that to get a good job done they’re going to have to pay that little bit more.

I’ve had a number of my clients tell me that, in the past when they’ve asked gardening companies to come and quote for work, they’ve been so put off by what they see walking up their driveway that they’ve pretended to be out. Unfortunately all too often this is a common experience. Such is the poor image that many of these businesses portray, that rather than attract clients they actually send them into hiding!

So don’t be put off by tackling the upper-end gardening market. There’s nothing to stop you from winning the business provided you create and maintain a professional identity. My advice would be to get yourself a nice gardening uniform with your business name embroidered on it. The advantage of this is that you instantly appear a larger business than you actually are.

Summary

• 1.A gardening round can provide a good income, provided it’s set up and run correctly.
• 2.Here’s a low cost start-up opportunity that’s easy and fun to operate.
• 3.Reliability is often more important to your clients than being the best gardener in the world. You’d don’t have to be a wizard at every aspect of gardening in order to start here, but you must be willing to learn new things and listen to what your clients tell you.
• 4.Make sure you set prices to allow enough return to make the commitment worthwhile.

Ten ways of ensuring that your gardening round is a success

• 1.Get your pricing right from day one and make sure that you include an element of profit in your calculations.
• 2.Buy the best tools that you can.
• 3.Keep them well maintained and always in serviceable condition.
• 4.Have adequate insurance in place from day one.
• 5.Keep your round as geographically tight as possible, thus reducing travelling time between appointments.
• 6.You’ll need to do all-round gardening if you are to enjoy this business and make a complete success of it. Therefore read as many gardening books as you can and never stop learning.
• 7.Plan to take your holidays outside of the main gardening season.
• 8.Decide now what you are going to do for the winter months. If you’re planning to stay open, work out some financial forecasts and make sure that you can cover your survival income during this time.
• 9.Continually monitor the costs of providing your service and make sure that your pricing takes into consideration any significant changes.
• 10.Always do what you say, and if you’re unable to for whatever reason, make sure that you keep your client informed and updated.