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Aaaaah. Now this is EXACTLY my area.
My brother and I started our company 12 years ago as a garden centre only. My brother had not even completed his formal training... From that we built up our company from scratch, built everything between the two of us, working seven days a week 16/18 hours a day until we had a robust business with a healthy turnover.
Hand in hand with the garden center we started small with a planting team following demand and then larger and larger scale constructions. Today I have 18 staff occupied in this area. But I know EXACTLY what you are talking about and how you are feeling. At every level there is that fear of letting go. My first team 'on site' for two years was comprised of me and a helper. It was a HUGE step for us to take to step back & not be actually be productively 'billable' in the obvious sense. However - it is the only option if you are to grow and not have other areas in a growing business get out of hand. You are the boss and you have to keep an oversight. As your footprint grows this becomes increasingly important. Not easy I know, and something to be carried out with great care (don’t take your finger off the pulse for gods sake!!), but absolutely critical.
In answer to your question, my brother only used to really execute designs when there was a need to (i.e. for a construction contract or to close a contract) rather than actively looking for work. This was probably because probably the largest part of our profitability comes from this part of the business. However - two years ago we reached the point where he could not keep the designs up to standard and still run the businesses with me and so after extensive deliberations we took that plunge.
From our experience it has been a huge success - but with certain provisos:
1/ Where if I need staff in construction I will employ any enthusiastic chap who gets approval from my managers - a designer represents a far more "touchy feely" part of your business and the clients, from our experience, tend to judge you like this. (On a "feeling" after a meeting). It is CRUCIAL that you can relate to them on a deeper level, as their personalities will rub off on the clients and for the design side this has to be a personality that is at least aligned somewhat to yours. They will be spending large numbers of hours with you. If your personalities clash even slightly it will be difficult to carry out what is an 'artistic' rather than technical operation. We carried out endless interviews (nearly 40 as I recall... some kind of record for us...) and after an initial mistake that lasted two days before I made a rather dramatic "executive decision" we hit a gold nugget.
2/ We have carefully retained my brother’s signature feel on the gardens by carrying out a streamlined design operation in two stages: concept and master plan. At the beginning of each stage my brother sits down with our designer and uses a trace overlay on the site survey to pencil out his vision for the design. It is then fleshed out to a concept presentation by our designer leaving my brother free. (We use Sketch-Up for this to produce what I think are really decent results. Amazing what that program can do in the right hands. I would be happy to show you some examples of this type of work if you are interested). This then happens again but in more detail for a master plan, with the designer left to draw up and passed through a couple of revision sessions towards the latter stages. Thankfully, working all in Autocad now allows it to be easily tweaked until it is as we would want it. The clients are still involved, and sometimes invited to visit after the initial trace so than can have input and see that although the output is computer generated – the source was eye, brain and human hand.
In essence, we were petrified that in employing a designer we would not be able to fill his/her time. But in reality, employing a designer forced us to re-evaluate how and what we were billing, what we charged and what it was worth. The last six months have been hugely educational and I would say we have greatly benefited from that experience alone. By taking that step, we had an active requirement that subtly changes your psychology from “my time is free to me” to “I’m running a business here”. Sorry if this sounds stupid but this was how it was for us. We have found him invaluable for the design, and that an activity which was previously a “back-office” operation and largely unpaid, its purpose to head work to the construction, has become not only stand alone but profitable in its own right, leaving my brother with more time to dedicate to other areas of the business and producing overall better products in my opinion. In fact if anything it is more of a flagship than the construction work – something we would never have believed. But in retrospect this is inevitable – everybody talks about who designed a beautiful landscape and continues to do so long after it is built – the only time a contractors name is used again and again in the same landscape is if you are in a lawsuit! As galling as it can be – the landscape designer takes all the glory hands down.
Indeed, it is not without risks, as with any new foray in business, so please be careful as a bad experience can damage your reputation as a designer. But I can say for our part that it has been a great success. In my opinion you have the added advantage that you are working from design out to taking advantage of the pipe you have created, which is an easier direction to work in my opinion. If you are designing the gardens you have a degree of control over everything that happens there – hence getting construction work should be like falling off a proverbial log. We had no idea if we would be able to cycle up the design to fill his time – yet now I ask for a construction detail to be specced up for a supplier and what would you know – I have to wait for days in the schedule! A wait I glady accept I can tell you.
My apologies for the verbose post, but I really am passionate about this area of things (yes – probably should have been in management but this is quit a bit specific to design…) and if anyone can benefit from any of our experiences then I would be really happy. Nobody gave me any pointers and at times I could have really used some!
Consider it carefully (what every part of your service is worth to clients and the time spent doing it), do your math’s right, find the right person and I’m sure whatever decision you take will be correct. Good luck.
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Avoid amploying unlucky people - throw half the CV's you receive in the bin.
Last edited by oakleaf : 11-12-2007 at 08:15 PM.
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