Meeting New Customers…

When I first set up in business as a Landscape Architect I was incredibly proud, I felt like I’d ‘made it’.

I had the desk, the drawing board, the drafting pens, a phone number and a business name, I even had a little brass plaque outside my door. The clients that I worked for had been introduced by friends and family and I had plenty of work to get me started.

But as the projects were completed I noticed a large hole in my workload rapidly approaching.

What do you do?

You cannot just pick up a phone and dial the first number that comes to mind.

You can begin to narrow down who might want the services of a landscape architect – but then what do you say when you call?

Who do you ask for …?

These were the issues that kept me awake at night during my early days as ‘self employed’.

Gradually, I began to build my list of contacts and gradually worked out that architects were a great source of work and the bigger commercial architects often had several projects on the go at any one time – all that needed a landscape design for submission – this kept me busy for years.

Thanks Dave Evans from Leach Rhodes and Walker.

As my practice expanded, I began a wider challenge of increasing my workload by attending networking events and socialising with planners, developers, landowners …often going out twice weekly for drinks and food and lots of wining and dining the people that made decisions.

Thanks Phil Rothwell from Peel Developments.

You begin to get your name around and you begin to get repeat work, and gradually the business begins to grow and you take on new people to help you with the workload.

Now you have more people working for you, you need more work and larger projects to keep everyone busy. So you do more networking and you think, maybe I need some sort of marketing strategy to increase the number of people who know about your services.

So you begin to produce a website and marketing brochures which all cost money so you need more work to pay for the new web development and the printing costs.

You begin to think, how do I drive more people to my website? … So you look into search engine optimisation, which costs money, so you need more work to fund the magical people that drive you up the search rankings.

Then you realise that all of your competitors are doing the same thing, so you need to be better, you need to be different, you need a new website and a better search engine magician …which all costs you even more money.

Then you walk past a pet shop and see a hamster on a wheel and you think …hmmmmmm?

Mike C Hamster