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Volume 1 Issue 3
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Internet Search Tips
If you are looking for more information on the Green Industry and the landscaping and gardening business ProGardenBiz has over 40 feature articles, columns, news, and tips in each issue. Previous articles and information can be found in the Archives.
For additional information you can use a good search site such as Google or All-the-Web. When doing a search use terms that define your interest.
Typical search terms for the Green Industry are:
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Use two or three words that best describe your search such as:
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ProGardenBiz is here to help answer your questions. We welcome your questions. Email us at: editor
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How Does Your Garden Grow?
Chapter One (Part Two) from Tom Ehrenfeld's book, The Startup Garden
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Article by Tom Ehrenfeld
The Startup Garden is an excellent resource for any business. Professional gardeners and landscape contractors will benefit from Tom Ehrenfeld's business tips on starting and running your own business. In previous issues we published the introduction, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" and Chapter One - Part One from The Startup Garden. The following is Chapter One - Part Two from that book. At the end of this article is a link to Tom Ehrenfeld's web site and to sources to purchase this book. Editor's Notes are added to the article to give a landscaping and gardening business perspective. - Editor
What is a business? What is a lawn care business?
Startup Garden Business Advice for Gardeners & Landscapers
Part Two
You learn to Recognize, Articulate—and—Capitalize on Your Passions and Strengths
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began
--Mary Oliver, The Journey
Let’s start by defining just what a business is and does. This includes lawn care and landscaping businesses.
There are several ways to think about a lawn care business. You could define a business as the various activities and processes that you conduct in order to produce a bottom-line profit. This definition is perfectly acceptable…for an accountant or a professor. Yet the point of this book is to help you see an equally valid definition of a business that tilts this equation. You should also consider a business to be all those financial considerations that enable you to produce something you care about. Is your business the first, or second, type of entity?
This, of course, is a trick question. You must think about your lawn care business as both.
At its very core, a business is an organized entity that provides goods or services to customers in exchange for money, or some other form of currency. Ideally, eventually, and finally, consistently, it does so for a profit. That’s because businesses add value, through sweat or smarts or processes, or scarcity, in ways that customers can’t or won’t do on their own.
The range of value-adding activities is vast. You might apply your sweat and muscles to provide a lawn care service, or turn a mass of construction materials and plants into a new landscape. You might use your thinking hat to ease
someone else’s technical confusion. You might have a knack for turning scraps of cloth into clothing or quilts. You could be a natural matchmaker between companies and executives seeking jobs. The possibilities are as unlimited as the number of stars in the sky.
Regardless of how you add value, the word exchange forms a critical part of this definition. Businesses always exist in relationship to a web of customers, employees, partners, vendors, and other community members. Businesses by definition exchange and relate to a wide skein of people and organizations. We’ll explore the notion of customers, and selling, and meeting needs throughout this book. But it is critical that you understand the importance of your lawn care business as an entity that conducts social intercourse with other people and organizations. At this very early stage in your business, even though you are determining what it is you have to sell, be sure to hone your listening skills. One identifiable trait of most superb entrepreneurs is their ability to read other people (See the sidebar “Who Wants to be a Lawn Care Entrepreneur?").
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Click on each book for more information
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As you begin to conceive of your own individual lawn care business, it’s important to think through how you will add value for your customers. Every business structure and type carries advantages and disadvantages.
Companies with low barriers to entry (meaning that they are very easy to start), for example, are often great starter companies for novice beginners.
Is a startup garden business or landscape maintenance business for you? - Editor
Endeavors like lawn care, cleaning houses, swapping collectibles, or consulting on something you know about all require few resources beyond what you have. This means you can get started easily and hopefully hustle your way to success. This inviting opening has definite drawbacks. First, anyone else can enter the field as easily as you did, giving you a run for the money. Second, you are probably relying more on your individual hustle than on the creation of something that is uniquely yours. While you can earn more simply by working more, your profits are ultimately related to, and limited by, your personal hours.
You can also pursue a venture that adds value at a much higher level than a simple lifestyle type of business. Yet this too has its pros and cons. There are pie-eyed entrepreneurs who have sought to build new satellite systems creating new communications networks. Great idea, and, should the venture work, it would be very, very hard to knock off by others. But of course one needs vast financial and organizational resources to make such a plan pay off.
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Who Wants to be a Lawn Care Entrepreneur?
Here is a set of questions that will test your entrepreneurial mettle. Don't worry about being graded on your responses. I don’t believe that this comes down to a pass-fail distinction. But these questions are designed to help you examine whether you will find the entrepreneurial life to be a good fit with your disposition.
- Can you afford the time, energy, and consuming distraction?
- Are you comfortable making decisions?
- Do you learn new skills quickly?
- Are you willing to admit, and compensate for, your weaknesses?
- Does selling come naturally to you?
- Have you ever started a business before?
- Can you live with rejection and loneliness?
- Do you have personal and emotional support for the enterprise?
- Do you mind giving orders?
- Are you willing to brave uncertainty?
- Do you believe, truly believe, in what you are about to do?
- Are you prepared for your life to change completely?
And, if you answered no to every question on this list, are you still willing to start? Today?
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A startup business, garden, lawn care, landscape or other, is rewarding, risky, satisfying, frightening and more all at the same time. To start your own landscape or lawn care business takes dedication and desire. This is only Part Two of the first chapter in Tom Ehrenfeld's "The Startup Garden". In our next issue we will continue with "What do you want from your business?"
 THE BOOK
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About the author:
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."”
– Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, p. 18.
Tom Ehrenfeld is a business journalist with more than a dozen years of experience in print and in radio. A former writer and editor at Harvard Business Review and Inc. Magazine, his work has appeared in publications ranging from Newsweek to the New York Times to Boston Magazine to Parenting Magazine. He is a frequent speaker and writer on small business topics, and a regular commentator on the nationally syndicated radio show Marketplace. He has a wife and two daughters, and lives in Cambridge, MA.
Tom Ehrenfeld
7 Howland St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 354-6013
http://www.startupgarden.com
tom@startupgarden.com
Recommended Reading:
Starting a Landscape or Gardening Business:
ProGardenBiz, a landscape and garden magazine for the Green Industry is your online resource for starting and operating a business as a landscape contractor or landscape and lawn maintenance gardener. Related fields covered by ProGardenBiz are irrigation installation and maintenance, sprinklers - repair and maintenance, waterscapes, water features, and ponds. You will also find information on plants, plant identification, trees and tree maintenance, and many other topics that span the Green Industry. Visit our new Community Web Portal for Forums, Chat, FAQ's, News, Articles and more.
If the answers you seek are not readily found, then drop us an email at: editor@progardenbiz. Your questions are welcome and will be answered by email and appear in our "Letters" or "Ask?" columns.
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