In this series of articles I am going to review some of the fundamental principles you will need to build your own landscape or garden design business from the ground up. Whether you are thinking about becoming a landscape designer or just learning about the green-industry, this six part series should help you on your journey to success.
If you already own your business and are just not finding success, these lessons can also help you streamline your company and gain a more competitive edge to win jobs.
It can be very difficult to start your own business in the green industry, especially when first starting. It may seem like all you might need is some basic design skills, the ability to buy materials, and a few clients to start your firm, but you will quickly realize that it is much more complex.
When I try to mentor new business owners I often use analogies to help illustrate my point and it is usually fairly helpful as a tool to understanding how we will approach a problem. So for this introductory post, I want to use a rather cliché but relevant architectural analogy.
Building Your Business Foundation
When you look at a house for the first time, it is easy to get distracted by the fancy elements and beautiful features that try to catch your attention – the decorative moldings, expensive furniture, or the state of the art technology. But the first thing that was built for that house was a strong and sturdy foundation.
None of the other elements in the home would be as beautiful or useful to the homeowner if it didn’t have a stable foundation at its core. The same is true for planning a design business. If you were to take a look behind the scenes at any of the successful landscape design businesses in your region, you would see a strong understanding of the fundamentals of business planning based on years of research and experience. Without those elements, the design company would not last.
So in this scenario, your actual business is the house and we need to start by laying a proper foundation. That is the purpose of the Business Planning series, working our way up level by level to build a stable and successful landscape or garden design company. So you have the best success to move forward in your pursuits to earn a stable income.
An Overview Of The Series
In the first article, we will discuss the mission of the company and the organizational structure it takes. This is important because it helps individuals best clarify what their interests are and how that passion can drive their business in the future.
In the second lesson we are going to cover industry and customer analysis. Industry analysis is critical on both a macro and micro scale to the health of a company. Without understanding the market fluctuations that can influence your profitability you may not know how to deal with downtrends and weather financial storms. It is also important to know your potential clients – who they are and how to market to them. We will review tactics to differentiate yourself from competitors and what are the best avenues to get your information to consumers.
The third post is all about your competition. We will be spending a good deal of time reviewing how to identify competitors in your field, and how to make actionable goals around the information you discover.
In the fourth lesson we will cover startup costs, licensing, and registering your business. It is often a surprise to people when they first start out to understand exactly what it will cost to start a business. Some have wild ideas of purchasing a office location on a busy street to bring in clients, while others want to go out an buy brand new installation equipment without knowing how to pay for it. We will cover the do’s and don’t of starting up and how to best calculate your needs for getting the company off the ground.
During the fifth lesson, with the business plan almost finalized, we will focus on marketing. How do you get your company’s brand in front of your consumers and how to actually make the sale. You’d be surprised at how often businesses fail to properly market themselves and then believe that there is just no interest in that area for landscape work. In this lesson we will try and review all the traps and pitfalls of marketing so that you have a good stable plan for getting the word out about your company.
Finally, in the concluding lesson, we will wrap up the material we covered and I will go over next steps and how you can use free resources such as this to keep building your company and winning jobs.
Hopefully at the end of this series you will have a strong and stable foundation on which to build your business and move forward with success in the landscape design industry. As you use these lessons, be sure to comment and share with others who are interested in this great and rewarding field.
So without further ado, click here to start Part 1: Developing Your Company Mission & Legal Structure.