Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
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Is there not a similar thing happening to the garden industry that blighted the plumbing industry a few years back?
Too many people seeking to few positions?
The colleges are poring out designers and landscapers there was a rash of garden designer/landscaping programmes glorifying the industry over the last 4 years, which have gone very quite lately.
It was the shear volume of ads which amazed me, normally there would be 1 page full, this week there were 3 pages admittedly I don't usually pick up this paper but the quantity looking for work was quite a shock.
Also the UK economy has just started to go very quite transportation, hardscaping products...have all increased massively. We are seeing developers walking away from multi million pound projects because the old contracts mean there is no profit now that the increases have come through. Worrying times for any business that is using credit to survive.
I was going to expand into much needed larger premises and buy a new van for the delivery side but now I think that we'll just make do.
I think there's probably a lot of career changers who see gardening/landscaping as an escape from their particular rat race, and I'm guessing that a lot of these new start-ups won't exist in 12 months when they realise just how much work is involved!
The same is happening in plumbing/carpentry - lots of career changers doing short courses to learn the trade, and then launching themselves on an unsuspecting public. 10 years ago around here you struggled to find a plumber, now you can see 20 advertising in the local paper.
The good news is that the best form of advertising is word of mouth, and it'll take these guys years to build any sort of reputation (if they don't get fed up and decide to do something else before that happens) and the established companies should be able to continue to trade successfully.
I must say it annoys me the amount of non legal companies doing work for cash and giving people an unrealistic expectation of what it costs to do the work properly. Its hard being a vat registered tax paying enterprise!
As a legal, tax paying, insurance paying...etc company we cannot afford to charge any less. The level of charge is reflected in the service we give, the efficiency, friendliness and honesty.
One last encouraging point: over 50% of startup businesses cease to exist after 2 years.... Other than bad business sense I believe the reason for this must be apparent in the service they give, or bad service they give. If they're good they'll last, if not they deserve not to and inevitably will struggle - thereafter leaving us proper businesses to get on with our good jobs!
This subject often comes up in conversation and personally I'm not worried. It's an easy industry to get into, unregulated, cheap start up costs, so it attracts a multitude of chancers and unethical people along with the bona fide companies looking for work.
A business can only last so long before it goes t*ts up if it can't deliver the goods and earns a bad reputation. So good horticultural/landscapers/designers will hopefully be in a stronger position once the economy's picked up and all the 'dead wood' companies have given up and tried something else.
I would agree that there's only so much available work out there so being multi talented is more important than ever, which means re-training, but isn't that the same in most lines of work now? Damned world doesn't stay still for 5 mins these days....
tom,dick and harry , i heard their cousin is starting very soon too; 'bodger' !!
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