“A Rocky Balboa Recession

From the professional magazines I read that my landscape design/build/maintenance company receives, things are picking up on the maintenance side. 

People are choosing to maintain the properties that they have and the people who do have their own properties are the most secure at this stage. It makes sense that they would protect their interests with upped lawn care, upgrading aging sprinkler systems, the works. 

My company’s irrigation division is always ready and eager to upsell landscape design services to the sprinkler repair clients. They have to dig things up anyway and now there’s mounds of loose soil. Why not do something nice and designed? 

Perhaps fewer landscape architects can go it alone in the new normal. Perhaps a lot of us have to hook ourselves up to the the landscape maintenance side and value add on that end. 

It’s another avenue of adaptation available to everybody. 

Since we know a lot of design/build business is picking up while the larger design firms are languishing I think it points to the large decrease in public spending and the fact that many private individuals still have money, some of them a lot. In our little town we have very large firms from large cities competing for public projects they wouldn’t have looked twice at five years ago. The pool that is finding work in the field, small scale residential design/build faces no competition from these large firms. It makes me think that the large firms will be battling it out for a while, a few will be left standing and we will see many smaller firms picking up work. Of course, these small firms like ours can’t make it on design fees alone, so we sell the build…that is the real money maker. The larger firms have a much harder time competing because they have such high overhead and they only sell design. In many ways, this creates a scenario that offers more opportunities for individuals to have chances they never would have a few years ago. Maybe we should be looking at this as a positive, instead of a negative. Streamlined services for the client, opportunity for young professionals to hone their skills in the field. In reality, the only thing we can do is to take this as a chance to make our own way. In the long run, those left…whether it is tomorrow or 5 years from now, will be in a nice spot professionally. There still won’t be enough LAs and I do think you will see an increase in public spending out of necessity.

Viridian is a bluish color, right? So I guess the name of the neighborhood symbolizes that it will be under water at some point.

Yeah and in our neck of the woods they don’t even put out design/build bids. It is always separate. We already do a separate design contract from the build work, so there is no guarantee either way. A design/build firm could still put in a bid that could be compared…I think it is actually a lot more efficient to have the person designing oversee the build work. Around here you see a lot of large projects won by the cheapest bidder and it usually looks like it is cheap.

If you have the ability to do your own build work I would do it. You are correct, the material costs increase our profits, which increases our ability to offer professional work. We have clients that don’t want to spend so much and that is okay, we decrease the scope of the project, not our profit/overhead. Like I said, I think many individuals still have money to spend on residential projects and some of them have great taste!