[agla]

Pennscapes brought up an interesting point in another thread. That is how it makes more sense to him to Design/Build rather than deal with a client's outside designer (an LA is a subspecies of designer in my view and is covered by the term designer).

My view is that it is usually the best way to go. You can steer the job toward work that you are most skilled at, is more profitable, you can stick to materials that you are confident in, that are available, and suit your style.

You can also maintain management control of the job. There is nothing worse than someone adding on to the clients bill who interupts the flow of an experienced contractor. You lose time, timing, and have everything thrown out of sync unless the designer is in an element that is unfamiliar to you.

Homeowners benefit from design/build because they are confident that your designer can get the job built and that they are already penciled in on the schedule to have their job built. It is one stop shopping.

There are situation where an outside designer is the way to go, but for the majority design/build makes sense.

What do you think?

[Bill Schwab]

I agree, but you can make just as much money by using an outside LA, so long as you charge for the time the LA would slow your project down beyong the projected meeting times you budget in the work. Any time over and above that get charged by the hour just like the LA does.


There are also many LA's and designers that hand the plan over to the owner, and once it leaves thier hands, they did thier job and are washed clean of it. The owner assumes that all contractors will install the design as per drawn.

[PSUscaper]

I'm not sure about this, but I'm really thinking that you are more of a GC than a designer at this point.

Are they problems associated with billing time related to the work you do while supervising the project???? or is it related directly to design issues like, "we don't yellow plants and would prefer something else here" issues.

It is starting to sound like you are mingling the two together......designer and general contractor.

The last GC I met got a flat fee of $15,600 a month. No matter how much time was spent on the project. And for that much money, it shouldn't matter!!!



Maybe I'm completely wrong here, but it sounds a little bit like you are sort of shifting from design to, hate to say it, a contractor with no employees.

[agla]

I guess that the way that I write is sometimes confusing (a held a shovel a long time before I went back to school).

I am a Registered Landscape Architect. I landscaped with my father as I was growing up and had my own landscape business in the past. I have worked as a designer, a foremen, .... for a number of landscape companies. I went back to school and got a BLA in '97. I have since worked full time for design/build landscape contractors or Civil Land Planning offices.

I think my use of the word "you" is confusing because I used it to address most of "you" as being the owners of design/build landscape companies.

Many Landscape Architects that work independently charge a percentage of the cost of the landscape job and in return they are the "administrator" of the job. This means that they are supposed to act more or less like a general contractor. In absence of them doing that, the landscape contractor is usually in control of his job. In most residential jobs, the contractor is going to run his job without someone else trying to tell him how to do it.

A design/build contractor, in my view, has an advantage when the designer works for him rather than the other way around. That is the point that I think you, Penscapes, were trying to make which I agree with. The contractor's designer is going to shape the job to fit his employer's needs.

An independent designer has more of a tendency toward plants and materials that may not be easy to get, or be delicate and not fun to gauranty. They tend to have little experience building things and often complicate matters by designing things that are hard to build. Often they want to be there when you do a particular thing which throws your scheduling off, or they make a change which requires you to wait for an item before you can do something else.

On the other hand, sometimes an independent designer can bring you work that opens new opportunities. Some actually have a lot of experience administrating complicated or specialized projects which gives the contractor an opening into some new areas. That designer is doing the sales and the landscape contractor, once on the job, is building and billing. This is the real high end of residential landscaping. It is not the majority.

The majority of residential landscape clients are very cost conscious and want to deal with the least complication that they can. They are much more comfortable dealing with one company, or even one person from that company.

I think that the biggest difficulty a landscape contractor has in hiring a full time designer is that more often than not the company does not have 40 hours of design time a week. Even if the demand for design is there, speed of construction can not keep up. A designer that has enough experience in other areas of the business is essential to making the job a fully profitable one for the company. If you have someone that can go from initial client contact, can contract a design, do the design, write up the proposal (estimate), sell the landscape job, physically tag the material and get it to the job on schedule, help oversee the foreman on the site, act as PR man, and help manage the company, you are that much farther ahead than the next guy.

The problem with the multitask designer is that they are usually older and, in this business, a little banged up. Sometimes too much "fieldwork" is going to chase them away. Good foreman are hard to find and it is pretty easy to plug in the experienced guy and get him doing too much of what he was trying to get away from as a designer. Make sure you don't overburden a versatile person or you'll wind up loosing him.

Hiring in someone that just draws plans can be a little more of a problem if they don't know what you have to go through to execute the job. If the company owner is usually the designer, having someone to cyt back on drawing time is certainly helpful. Until that person has been out there seeing it built on a regular basis, the contracor will have to review the plan every step of the way before the client sees it.

I t is a big subject that can be discussed a lot.