Dear all,
I am a garden designer and constructor in Cape Verde. Things are a bit different here.
Salaries for manpower are about 10 euros/day. This in contrast with me having an hourly that is far beyond that.
So of course I cannot go and spend days on end in people's garden charging my hours, though all of them are foreigners. I do my best to stay away as much as possible but often my presence is necessary to speed up the work and lead everything towards a good end result. Nobody here has gardening experience. I always start from an estimate with a clear section on hours and if it is a work of a day or a few days I even make clear that my presence is needed.
But for example on a larger project, if I have to do soil moving, I have to call a guy with a small truck (Toyota Dyna; 2,5 m3 soil per round) for my guys to go and load soil with him somewhere in the bush and spend a few days making rounds. It is hard to give them directions where to allocate all that soil. I focus on one guy who works with me all the time and already has a notion of what I want, making a round with him through the garden, explaining the work, and I mark with sticks, etc. He is the one leading everything in my absence. Giving them the garden plan to work with is useless. Anyway, everything goes much slower here and a larger project can take a lot of time. Just the hassle to get a contractor delivering stones is a multiple-day pulling-your-hairs-out activity (after you spent a month urging people at the ministry in charge of giving you the authorisation for literally picking up those stones from the ground surface). And do I charge the client for those idle hours (and nail biting) sitting on a chair in a waiting room or driving to the contractor a few times a day without any result?
It lowers the efficiency of your other activities and often you even have to drop your work to get to this one essential person, just to hear that he left early and you can come back tomorrow...
Anyway, to get to the point, I would like to have your ideas on what to charge on those days of me not being there at the site. Do I charge the truck and manhours or should I charge extra? I am the designer, the constructor and the nursery guy at the same time here, so I have my ways to establish prices for individual clients.
For example if I have to fill planters, I do not charge the work but I count through in the price of the plants, making sure I get what I deserve (because my expertise was not really necessary, though my hands were to make a decent planter arrangement).
The same goes for garden projects. Prices tend to be quite flexible, depending on expected difficulties, whether from the site or from the client. But sometimes you have to lower prices as a courtesy for all the inconvenience and tardiness and those are the ones that really hurt and turn a knot in your stomach. So I would like to make sure that on those days that my people are there I also get my share.
How do I do that? And how do I get a compensation for the work-dropping and idle hours?
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Replies
Hi Yves,
I think you've shown things are the same the world over, although the extremes of low wages and high expectations are worse than we get in the UK.
I'd advise what I do. I know a job is worth a level of costs to me if it involves buying in materials and labour. If it doesn't cover those costs, including the hassle and risk, I just let it go to someone else.
I'd aim to be small and efficient. Avoid any client you feel might be difficult: they almost always are twice as difficult once you are working for them, and you regret it in hindsight!
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the comment. I agree with the efficiency and the risk avoidance.
Unfortunately jobs here are scarce. If I have one project every week I am very happy already. So I have to confront the hassle and the delays and luckily clients here know it is all part of living and working here, especially if you depend on others.
What I cannot accept is all those idle hours and the work-dropping and there I want to find a solution.
You need to price your jobs so that you are covered for any idle time. Sadly if I don't work I don't get paid. If I am expected to drive around and go buy planters, soil, bark or stones and plants for my customers I charge them my hourly rate.
How long have you been working in Cape Verde? The place is small compared to us and you only have a limited area to expand. What if you do more work yourself? Or have you tried working with the local developers/property builders or holiday renters?
Once you found reliable people that work the way you want them to then you are starting the right way. But getting there is hard and the work attitude in a developing country is not easy. Especially in the hot weather.
What if you get some youngsters willing to learn and earn. Teach them about garden design. Teach them to read a plan, about plants etc. That will leave you time to deal with the other things.
One thing you mentioned has me worried though. You say that you take soil from the wild environment. Is there no dedicated place which sells soil or stones? Is there no other way than to take resources from the wild and potentially having a negative impact on the native wildlife and fauna?
Just an initial comment directed straight to Daniela - where else does Yves get 'soil' from when he's on Cape Verde?? By the ship load? I doubt it.
Tourism demands planting for 'pleasant landscapes', locals need work ...... and that is the bottom line.
Having just consulted on a project on one of the Ionian Islands - separated by sea and so equally hard to achieve when it comes to top quality soil - don't be so quick to cast out at Yves and his method of 'soil' collection. Where he finds it he gets it from. And if there should be some major excavation works underway on the island.....a new de-salination plant being constructed....just for an example ....... well, he'll be in the muck as we say in the UK ;->
Yves - Bravo for entering LJN with your postings.
Eugene
Sorry guys, not available for comments due to 2 days of internet cut off. Just to illustrate how things are going here...
To respond to Daniela: I only pick up topsoil from disturbed sites. Digging in the wild probably would get you a fine if they would ever catch you. Anyway, I'm an ecologist so I do mind and know where I pick up my soil. Stones I only pick up from dry riverbeds (with authorisation of the ministry) or from stone quarries.
Furthermore I can tell you things here are complicated. Gardening alone does not pay the bills and waiting around for tourism or real estate projects to actually take off is a waste of time, though they would be the ones that bring in the money. In the meanwhile my strategy is diversification, growing the plants I use and farming as well.
I guess the reasonable thing to do would be to incorporate the idle time into the hours I charge. Trying to avoid being too much on site just to not to present a client too much of an exuberant bill and at the same time spending all those idle hours organising their project without any compensation is not very business-minded. I do start to get a feeling about the idleness of individual projects and maybe I could merely adjust the hours accordingly.
But it still leaves me with those days that my men are out there working and I cannot charge my absence...
Thanks for the comments!
Some of us have these idle times as well. And cannot charge for them. But I do charge a reduced rate for "shopping" or for getting information/researching, either online or in person for customers. When I go plant shopping I try to buy for more than one customer.
I thought Cape Verde is recovering from the crash we had everywhere and people are buying and building fancy properties? There was a TV program on not too long ago showing expats trying to buy, settle and retire to a less stress full life.
What are you farming? I have some distant relatives in Jamaica and I got them to use a "sophisticated" watering system I read about which was developed in Israel. Its working great. I also got them to plant things no one else is planting, going against what everyone else is planting at a particular time. Simple really, if everyone does carrots or spring onions, I got them to do cabbage, spinach, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, tobacco, etc. Less competition, more demand, higher prices, bigger income. The only problem is that they have to pay for water, which gets trucked up to them, extra costs for them, the slopes are so steep that they cannot use machinery.
Hopefully I can go again in a few years time. We will then tackle the soil erosion they are experiencing up there. We have done a lot there already, but its not working 100% as yet.
Yves,
I honestly don’t think many of us on here can really appreciate what challenges you are faced with!
I can relate a little as having lived and worked on a much smaller island but one which was a lot richer (financially).
Here in the UK we don’t understand and certainly couldn’t survive working at island pace of work! Unfortunately you are not going to change the work ethics and certainly not the bureaucracy.
All I can suggest my friend is keep chasing after the more affluent expats, factor in your idle and down time into your prices. Network with as many influential people as you can (hotel, tourist development particularly eco tourism). Consider paying bonuses to staff for more efficient working (but appreciate this may be a tough one).
Can you not store materials? I was thinking if you have to source and collect stones and soil, would it not be possible to collect more than required so that you have a ready source of materials for your next job?
You mentioned about growing your own plants – would strongly suggest you develop this further and even consider the possibility of turning this into a garden centre type operation. Whilst I appreciate that importing products are very expensive, try and get the contacts lined up ready and along with your networking hopefully you will be the person companies contact when they require products.
Bottom line you only have a very small market for your services, find your niche and keep chipping away at it. Good luck.
Some very good points here.
Get yourself a website, use the downtime to build it yourself. Its easy enough. Network and get your name out there as the go to person all matters horticultural and landscape design.
On which of the islands are you on? One of the larger ones?
Definitely try to connect with the hotel managers/directors, the tourism chambers, the building trades etc. No man is an island so to speak. Use LinkedIn as well as lots of contacts on there.
In Cuba there was a guy who grew his own plants in the back of his garden and then sold the seedlings out front on his porch. He made sure he had those plants that were difficult for a non green fingered person to germinate or grow on. During the day he worked as a gardener at one of the resorts.
You could lease land and grow on that depending on the quality of the soil? Sell to hotels or to residents.
Google the internet to see what other people are doing who live in similar situations and environments. You could get some really good profitable ideas from others out there.
Your additional issue is that you are not anywhere near a second or first world country, so importing stuff would be quite difficult. But you could try to forge links on the African continent. Its easier in the Caribbean as the US, Canada and the other more developed South American Countries are just around the corner so to speak.
But we are here and always willing to chip in with a comment ;-)
Thanks you guys! Your comments already confirm what I am aiming towards.
I think I have a privileged situation here, being exactly the agronomist every one wants to talk to and being the guy that has the nursery. Tourism here is not that much developed as on other islands as Sal and Boa Vista, where the majority of the expats go and live. I live on São Vicente, the cultural capital of Cape Verde, but there are some hotels with whom I want to create a more solid relationship with an expansion of products that can be delivered.
I had some space constraints in the past, having little flexibility in growing veg, renting land from others, but this has recently been resolved with the acquisition of a decent piece of land. So in the near future I can grow anything that comes in mind and explore the market, from mushrooms to cutting flowers and anything in between. Certainly oriented towards the more affluent islanders...
With the land comes also a lot of space for storing materials and I think you have a good point there, Graeme. Instead of doing everything at the moment itself prepare during downtime for the busier times to come.
Thanks guys, motivational words confirming I'm on the right track.
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