Reply To: What don’t you know (well enough)?

We were also taught that we are important and need to take control of everything landscape – the less you do the more diminished you are. This is something that took me forever to learn. It goes back to the most important thing that we need to do -Get Work. Every time we over reach we are affecting someone else’s livelihood. Some would call it “leaving money on the table”.

But here is the thing. Most of us work in a not so huge environment where we are known and cross paths with other players in our markets whether they are builders, architects, landscape contractors, nurseries, stone yards, lighting suppliers, irrigation installers, excavators, arborists, …. We can affect them by what we do and they can affect us as well. One of the biggest things is that anyone of these is a potential marketer for us.
Bringing us on board for any of these folks has the potential to enable them to make more money or to lose money they could otherwise make by using someone else. It can speed up their project or it can slow it down. We can leave open opportunities for any of them to upsell, or we can close those by over specifying. We can make their lives easier with a plan to follow, or we can complicate their lives by specifying methods that are not how they normally do things. Plenty of other examples out there, but the main point is that if you can make as many of those things positive for the people around you without compromising the job you will be a valuable asset and they will all be referring you as much as they can …. especially if the next landscape architect is not following the same philosophy – ie, doing it the way he was told to in school and by professional organizations.

When you think you can’t compete with the ones that are doing everything because they do the complete menu better than you can, you might not realize that the one thing that you can do better is serve a different menu that meets the jobs needs better.

Never underestimate the importance of making the entire design/build team happy and not just the client. The team and/or its members are going to be around a lot longer than a single landscape design client. They are potential free marketing. Just make sure that they have reason to market you over others.