Gardening is the greatest business in the world.

The Inner Workings Of A General Gardening Business

When I stuck my first card in a newsagent’s window, I never imagined that my business would grow into what it is today – a full-scale gardening/landscaping business.

This is an all-year-round business where potential earnings are excellent and the satisfaction of running this operation is enormous.

There is nothing routine about this business. You’ll have to:

• continually think on your feet
• be capable of running a number of different projects at any one time
• manage and motivate a workforce, even if it’s only you
• work to budgets
• accurately produce written quotes and estimates
• become an all-round expert.

 

You’ll have to be comfortable with uncertainty, and able to motivate yourself when others would have given up and got a proper job.

But the rewards can be enormous. Nothing quite compares to the satisfaction that finishing a new garden brings, the sheer pleasure of seeing a new, beautiful garden occupying an area that prior to your arrival was overgrown, unsightly and unusable.

Surely there can be no better way to earn your living than making people happy?

Specific Jobs At Agreed Prices

This business concentrates on quoting for specific jobs, agreeing a price, carrying out the work and moving on. It’s a fun, fast-moving, hectic working schedule, which brings enormous rewards. To run this business successfully, you must be able to have lots of things on the go at any one time and not be flustered by it.

Some Services Offered By A General Gardening Business

Concentrate On Tasks That Require Repeat Visits

The key to success here is that initially you concentrate on services that offer a return visit at regular intervals. By doing this you rely less on the need to continually source new clients. Instead you concentrate on servicing a smaller number of clients with the advantage that you spend more time earning and less time trying to introduce new clients to your business.

The obvious service here is everything to do with lawns. During the growing season you want to be selling a regular lawn-cutting service and when that ends in autumn you can then offer your lawn-cutting clients a lawn-care programme which includes scarification, aeration, top dressings, spring feeds and so on. If your clients are particularly unhappy with the state of their lawns during the growing season, you can offer to re-turf it for them either in the autumn or preferably in spring. In our business we undertake new lawn preparations in the autumn and return in early spring to lay the new lawn.

We also concentrate on everything concerning hedges. Whether that is to plant a new hedge, or trim, re-shape or reduce an existing hedge, we offer to do it. The advantage with hedge work is, generally speaking, you will make three visits a year. One cut in spring, a further cut in early summer and the final cut and tidy in the autumn. Most homeowners don’t like cutting their own hedges, which makes hedge-cutting an ideal service to offer. To succeed, you must be able to undertake a good hedge cut as opposed to simply cutting it like a lawn.

Start Slowly

My own opinion is that anyone contemplating this type of operation should start slowly.

It’s best to establish your business by offering a quality service based on what you know now, ie your current expertise, and expand your range of services when your experience and capital allow.

Listed below are the services I offer as part of my business. This isn’t a definitive list as we’re introducing new services all the time.

• general garden maintenance
• overgrown gardens cleared
• new gardens created
• existing garden makeovers
• fencing erected and repaired
• areas redesigned and replanted
• tree stump removal
• hard features created
• water features created
• greenhouses erected and repaired
• herb gardens created
• turfing
• lawn care advice and consultancy
• coaching
• garden planning/design service.