What a year!
We are in the last throes of our first full year in business. It has been an unbelievable year. We are truly grateful for all of our clients, friends, suppliers and especially our families.
I promised myself, you (I hope), my business partner and others I would write frequently and on topics current to the times. I did not do that.
This season brought us some very interesting jobs and the opportunity to meet some very interesting people! The entire season has reinforced an idea in my head that has been rattling around for a long time. People are hiring Verdant Landscape and Design Inc. not because of what we do but because of who we are.
The snow and frost came mighty hard a week or so ago. We were in the middle of a rather large (for us) job in Mississauga. We are very hopeful the weather will improve somewhat and let us get that job completed. One thing working with my Uncle Ralph taught me is the weather is what the weather is. We cannot fight it, we can only work with it. So we are switching gears for a little while.
We need to make our business larger. That is not a statement based in greed but rather necessity. We need to hire 3 people next year. In order to be able to hire passionate people to join our vision we need revenue to pay them. Once we have people on our team we will be able to focus on what we do best. Morgan cannot design while he is laying stone or cutting grass.
The next little while will be us focussing on building our winter business (tropical plant installations and maintenance), planning for the 2020 season and of course budgeting and those wonderfully stimulating business practices that must be undertaken.
Part of the planning we need to do for the 2020 season in planning and executing our marketing. Thinking back on 2019 I see one of the biggest obstacles I had to overcome was the mindset of our clients. I am not saying our clients don’t know about horticulture BUT they are subject to the advertising they see in papers, magazines and on TV. I am also not saying the messages in those ads are not horticulturally correct BUT I AM SAYING the messages are blurred.
For example, the Stanley Cup playoff race starts in the winter and builds up through late winter and early spring ending in late spring. Throughout the playoffs we see ads for lawn fertilizer. In our area turf fertilizer should not be applied until about mid to late May. We see ads telling us to buy fertilizer in the winter. I have neighbours that fertilize their lawns in the winter. Not because they are duped but because they don’t have all of the information. By the way when the ads start there are places in Canada and the US where it IS time to fertilize turf.
That long winded diatribe really is just to illustrate what we are thinking we ought to do. We are going to develop a series of information pieces we gave give our clients and prospects so they can educate themselves. We will be preparing a number of these to cover a series of topics; lawn maintenance, irrigation, design principals, pruning basics, rose pruning, and more and more.
I will be making the “guts” of that information available on this blog. I may not be seasonally correct in the release of the information but it will be here!
If by chance you want information on any particular topics, please let me know! We’d love to help you out.
As always, if you have any questions please contact us.
