Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
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I simply pop a quick reply asking for an address and phone number and never expect anyhting to come of it. It's not worth wasting time on this type of enquiry.
Yeh why is it they do that? We get them a lot- glad it isn't just us!
The other day i got this one:
Afternoon
Please could you give me some sort of outline of your charges for the following work
Lawn Mowing
Flower bed weeding
Leaf collecting
Hedge trimming
General maintenance
They sent the email from South Africa, with a South African phone number.
Then we got this one:
Would like to know if you could give me a quote on my back garden and fencing. Fencing is pretty poor and unstable in high wings and the garden is badly laid and poor quality turf. Ideally, would like a good, strong fence and attractive grassing perhaps with a feature, maybe a rockery. Not a big job but if you could give me an idea of what you could do, that would be great. Both my wife and I work long and unsocial hours but we hope can find a mutually agreeable time to meet up?
Have emailed and rang them- but no answer.
I do the same as Jp- ask for an address and say we do free quotations.
Totally perplexes me!
Yes we get them all the time, sometimes with photos and mostly timewasters although the odd one has been a really good job.
My fav was someone who sent in a picture and they said the garden could do with a grass cut, there was a rotary washing line in the picture but all you could see was the tips as the grass was so high!
We usually get one or two a week, I think some people think you can quote by email!
I think EVERYONE gets them - whatever job you do, I know friends in the motor and tyre trades and they all get them on a regular basis.
To my mind, every enquiry should be treated as a potential job, that is unless it is a service that I don't provide (e.g paving) or is out of my scope of works (e.g tree surgery). In this case, I provide where ever possible the details of well known, reputable local tradesmen that offer the appropriate service and ask the source of the enquiry to mention my business when calling.
Otherwise, I employ the same response as most others on here, a polite thanks for the contact, an explanation that as a business, we do not work hourly but by the job (and an explanation of the reasons why), a request for the clients address/details (if not already provided) to attend their address for a free, no obligation quote etc...
The online contact form through my website at www.anpservicesspalding.com generates quite a few interesting and most importantly LOCAL leads and actively encourages potential customers to give full details by giving clearly defined boxes for address, email and phone number etc...
How about on the contact page you have something like 'we can offer free site visits to discuss your exact requirements with a no obligation quote, we are unable to provide a quote by email alone, wether or not pictures are supplied'
just a thought, apologies if this is already the case as im sure plenty of people/clients would ignore it anyway and still fire off an email! ;-)
for this exact reason i dont have an email/contact form on my website
I'm not a fan of contact forms as they are quite impersonal so I just supply my email address.
Dan,
I'm not a fan of contact forms either and don't have one on my website. HOWEVER, it was pointed out to me that many people who are browsing the web won't have a dedicated email account in something like Outlook in which case they can't just click on your email to contact you. It's something I need to rectify!
Dave
www.the-gardenmakers.co.uk
I have received this on 3 different e-mail accounts all associated with lawn care.
I think it is another lawn treatment company trying to find my prices out as when I reply requesting contact number/address to look at the job I never hear any more.
Hi,
I have a small lawn (around 80m2) which gets quite water logged and is prone to moss, especially in the winter months. Please can you give me a quote and some further info on the packages you are able to offer? Please can you include quotes for scarification and hollow-tine aeration?
Many thanks
Lindsay Pollard
It can be competitors fishing for prices. We had an e-mail the other day asking for a price for a conservatory roof clean. Asked for a rough price and we said sorry we prefer to offer specific quotations, we can do an estimate based on pictures but for a full no obligation quotation we would need to visit.
Anyway, pictures are duly emailed over and the idiots had only left their own equipment lying around! Clearly they were trying to find out how much we would charge for doing the same work.
Just e-mailed back saying that pictures weren't sufficiently accurate and that we needed to visit. Shock horror no reply :) They probably looked at the pictures and realised what they'd done.
Unfortunately, as discussed at great length on LJN, pricing by the hour IMO is what's stopping professional people in this industry from reaching their full earning potential.
The trouble is that it's classed by the majority as an unskilled trade, I once heard it described as a 'craft'.
If you compare it to the trade of a gas fitter or electrician, there are strict regs that need to be adhered to and they seem to have fixed their average call out at £60-70 plus parts plus additional labour. If you try and explain this logic to a client regarding gardening or similar, you are often met with a baffled look, they turn the quote down and try to find the phone number of auntie joan's friend from the legion who does it for £8 per hour.
You then have the people who, since they own a lawn mower and an electric strimmer will simply not justify paying someone else to do what they feel they could do themselves if they could be bothered. How many lawns would you need to cut at £20 a throw in order to run a professional business and make a profit after all the deductions?
j p grass roots said:
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