After 40 plus years in the landscape industry, the spring always brings a heightened sense of excitement and anxiety. We are heading into our third full year with a focus towards fine garden maintenance. Although we’ve always offered fine garden maintenance services, the service acted as a filler between our landscape design and installation projects. These days, fine garden maintenance is a service we’ve grown over the last 3 garden seasons. The service now accounts for approximately 80% of our annual sales. Why the refocus? Good question! I often say that the landscape design and landscape installation side of this industry is not sustainable. We proved successful at it for over 2 decades but it wasn’t easy. Quite frankly, it was unbelievably hard. Yes, there were always plenty of leads. Leads were never the issue. The trouble was filtering through the 80-150 leads that came in each year to find the handful of landscape projects that were right for us. The jobs that interested me, where people had the means to pay us, people who valued what we did and had the patience to wait. It still amazes me the people that call in the spring and expect us to complete something in a couple of weeks. We always maintain a very healthy backlog.
I was always looking for the next person to spend $10,000 to $100,000 or more. I had to meet people, often after business hours and weekends. Once I found a good fit, then I’d send them a design proposal and wait for a deposit check. This is when the real pressure began. When will the design be done? When will we have an installation estimate? When will you start? Once we started, I thought people would be happy but the when will you start immediately turned to when will you finish. There was always more to do. For 2 decades, it was not uncommon for me to work 7 days a week and still be in front of a computer at 11 pm on a Sunday night. I’ve never had a great work, life balance. During Covid, where I worked approx. 15 straight months without a real day off, I decided it was time for a change. I thought that change should be to shut my business down and go work at Home Depot or Costco at the end of the season. That was the plan for about two months in 2021. Then one day, I received a call from a classmate from college. He said, why don’t you figure out what your best days are and sell more of those. It was like the blinders were removed. It only took a couple of minutes to realize that my easiest days were fine gardening days. For one, the service is recurring income, Special landscape projects With our regular clients, seem to happen on my time, not someone else’s.
This new phase of my career has been a good move. It’s definitely not as sexy or fast paced as the landscape installation side of the business but fine garden maintenance doesn’t involve me every minute of every day. After 40 years of self employment, it was time to buy back my time. Do I miss landscape design and installation work, I do. I definitely do. There was a real passion there but it was time to recreate myself in a less hectic, less stressful, less demanding way of life.
