Another satisfied customer

Have spent most of this week working on a front garden and driveway project. We finished it off this morning, spreading an extra tonne of slate chips and potting up a couple of standard bay trees. Our client was delighted with the end result, which can be seen here.

We had some fun at the start of the project when we started the driveway. Along the same street a 'driveway specialist' was touting for business, and they had a few takers (it was a long street). Once they'd worked out what we were doing, (our client had turned their quote down), they wouldn't leave us alone – "how much you doing this for?", "where did you get your stone?", how long is it going to take?", "where are you from?" etc.

Eventually, once we'd batted off the Spanish Inquisition, they left us alone to get on with it. 

We had plenty of nice comments from passers-by: "yours is so much nicer than that lot down the road", "they are only taking 2 days to do a whole drive", "they aren't using much sub-base" and, scarily, "some of their drives slope towards the house!"

Don't get me wrong – I'm all for a bit of competition – but if it were me and I wanted my driveway replacing, I wouldn't go with the first bloke who turned up on my doorstep.

New Year, New Improved Website!

Happy New Year!

It's -2ºC outside as I write this. With everything looking grey and miserable in the garden there's no better time to dust off the old website and add pictures from last year's work to the gallery.

Looking through the selected highlights it brings home how quickly the seasons change. Some of the shots from February and March last year look grim and depressing, but as soon as some of the plants get going it lifts everything. Have a look through and let me know what you think.

We've also made two significant changes to the way we do business this year. Firstly we've decided to stop offering a hard landscaping service, opting instead to recommend trusted landscapers to our customers. This decision wasn't one we made lightly, but last year we found that we were turning down design projects because we couldn't fit them in. Hard landscaping and project management is particularly time consuming, especially if the weather is against you, which it was a couple of times last year (see pic above from last summer!). We felt that we'd be better off focussing more on the design work and leave the hard landscaping headaches to someone else!

The second change is really us building on what proved to be a successful service last year - the online design service. We are very happy with the service we've developed, and now seems like the perfect time to push it forward. We didn't advertise it at all last year, except on the website. This year we will be more proactive and put some weight behind it nationally. We've added a new section to the website specifically for the online design service, including sample plans from successful projects.