Website for landscapers, with the site visit as the first step
In the third week of April you have twenty-six people wanting a garden looked at and one van, and in the second week of November the phone does not ring for four days. The work is the same all the way through and the year refuses to be.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.
The shape of a landscaping year
Everyone in this trade knows these three. What is worth noticing is that all three are the same problem seen at different points of the calendar.
April arrives all in one week
The first proper weekend of sun does it. People go out into the garden, look at the lawn and the broken slabs and the fence panel that came down in February, and by Monday morning you have nineteen enquiries and no way to sort them.
Some of those are patios worth having and some are a person who wants a quote for a hedge and will not answer the phone again. From the emails alone you cannot tell which are which, so you drive to all of them.
Nobody can price a garden from a postcode
A hundred square metres of paving is a straightforward week if the van can get to the back, and it is something else entirely if everything has to come through the house on a barrow, or if the ground falls away by a metre and a half across the plot.
So the answer to what will this cost is always the same answer, and it is the one answer people do not want to hear: I would have to come and stand on it. The trick is getting them to book that visit instead of ringing somebody who will guess.
November, and it goes quiet
The construction work stops, the invoices from spring are paid, and there is a stretch of the year where the income is whatever maintenance you happen to have picked up by accident.
And maintenance is the thing nobody ever sells. It never gets mentioned on the last day of a patio job when the customer is delighted with you, which is the one moment in the whole year when it would sell itself.
Four things that make the spring survivable
The aim across all of them is to spend the April diary on the visits worth driving to, and to have something coming in when the ground freezes.
An enquiry that describes the plot before you see it
Roughly how big, what is there now, whether there is access for a machine or whether it all comes through the house, how steep it is, and a photo or three from the back door.
That is not you being difficult. It is the difference between a morning of six pointless drives and an afternoon of two visits that turn into work, and the person filling it in would rather answer five questions than wait a fortnight.
A quote with the ground work priced apart from the planting
Excavation, base, edging, the slabs themselves, the turf, the planting, the skip. Each one a line with its own cost, so when they ask whether it comes down any you can point at the line that comes down rather than knocking a lump off the total.
They approve it on its own page. A deposit at that point goes through your own Stripe account, which is what buys the materials.
The maintenance contract, on the page, all year
A seasonal maintenance agreement at a fixed price per season, listed as its own service alongside the construction work, with what is in it written out: the cuts, the beds, the hedges, the leaf clearance in November.
It is the only line on your list that pays in the months when nothing else does, and having it visible means somebody can ask for it without you having to raise the subject.
Last spring's patio is next spring's maintenance
Everyone who has enquired or had work done sits in the register with what they wanted and when it happened. The garden you built in May is on that list in the following February, which is when a maintenance agreement is an easy conversation.
Work that comes back to you is not luck. It is a list somebody kept.
How the service list can be built
You put your own names and figures on these. What is shown is which pricing type does the job for each kind of work, given that most of it cannot be priced from a desk.
Two categories keep it clear: work that changes the garden, and work that keeps it. The second one is the category that matters in December.
What landscapers ask us
The visit does. Give the site visit a fixed price that comes off the job if they go ahead, and mark the construction work as quoted. The visitor gets a definite number to act on and you get paid for the drive.
Then the form has to do the filtering. When every enquiry arrives with the size, the access, the slope and photographs, you can sort them into worth a visit and not worth a visit in twenty minutes on a Sunday evening.
Put it on the list as a service in its own right with a fixed seasonal price and what it covers written out, so it can be asked for. Then use the customer register in February to go back to everyone you built something for last year.
Yes. The quote goes to them as a page of its own with every cost line on it, and they approve it there. You see the approval and the date, and if a deposit is due it comes through your own Stripe account.
That can be imported, so whatever text and photographs are on it come across rather than being lost. The builder adds the parts that were never there, and you correct any of it by clicking the pencil icons on the page.
Between £49 and £199 a month plus VAT, depending on the plan. All of them run the site on your own domain with SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support in English. SMS is a prepaid add-on.
More trades
- Tree surgeonsPhotos and details in the form before the drive.
- Holiday letsDirect bookings with nobody taking a cut.
- Event and function venuesViewings booked against the room's own calendar.
- BuildersQuotes with cost lines, approved online.
- PlumbersThe emergency line, unburdened by prices and an FAQ.
- ElectriciansFixed prices for small jobs, quotes for the rest.
- All trades
Have the site ready before April
Tell it what kind of gardens you work on and which parts of the county you cover, or point at whatever page you have now. It comes back with a first version carrying your services, a bookable site visit and an enquiry form that asks about the access before you drive anywhere.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.