[Nathaniel Carr]

Hey Alga I am glad to see your contribution here. Thank you for your well considered thoughts.

In that this is a discussion board I would like to further the discussion by clarifying the arangement that I have with this perticular operation.

I am the contractor. And I have been doing fine. But I want to do better than fine. SO I wooed this nursery that just started a design practice. The nursery owner is an accomplished landscape designer and he has hired a promising lady to help with the design work. He is busy with the nursery and she is taking more of a lead role on the client relations side.

This is the first time that she has worked in this capacity and I think he has given her enough rope to hang her self with, if you know what I mean. So he is almost out of the picture. I have years of experience doing the kind of work that she is learning how to do, so I really feel like the added cost of job administration doesn't have alot of value to the customer.

Our deal is that they get the work, have me look over the concept drawing and give an estimate on it. (My business model is based on giving firm bids so this is sort of a learning process for ME) They add 10% to my estimate, they write a contract and schedule a sales meeting that I attend. They get a 50% deposit, hand me my third of the total job cost and then I put it in the books. I buy the plants from them at their discounted rate (20% off retail, I could buy them else where for less) I have to mark their plants up past retail to recover my Overhead and Profit. (which doesn't seem right but I can't figure out how to run the business with out overhead recovery and profit, Can you?).

I know the designer is using the 10% GC fee to cover the cost of:
a) pulling the plants-which are not spelled out on the design because of the chance that the nursery would sell out of whatever was scheduled before a deposit check was written.
b) to recover the non billable costs associated with the design, like fussy plot surveying, hand holding, return visits because the husband couldn't get home from work in time to make the meeting, and that kind of thing. (which I would assume would be built into their Hrly rate.)

So to bring it all back together, My motivation is to do great work every day and have fun doing it (which for me means building horticulturally significant projects). Her motivation is to further her career working for a well regarded nursery. And the Nursery owners motivation is to hustle plants out the door.

We will all win from this arangement but we have to keep each others self interest in mind. The only one who loses seems to be the home owner who will be paying just a tough too much for the plants and the experience. We just need to make sure that they feel like they are getting good value.
But that is a whole other discussion...