How to Take Your Passion for Gardening and Turn it into a Landscaping Business

Do you have a green thumb and the will to use it? You’ve likely transformed your outdoor space (and even as much of your indoor space as you can) into a stunning oasis. After a certain point, however, your garden will only require maintenance. Sure, some things will die back and then need to be replanted, but for the most part, there’s a limit to how much you can do to your own space.

If you’re at your absolute happiest outside designing, gardening, and using plants to really enhance your home, then you may want to look to turning that passion into a career. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, read on.

Getting Educated

You may have a knack for gardening, but when you start offering services, you’ll need far more than just colloquial knowledge. You’ll need to know it all. You can learn this usually through apprenticeships. The type of apprenticeship you go for will determine what kind of career or business you can start. Landscapers can focus on garden creation, others more on living-space focused landscaping. There’s no right or wrong, though you’ll usually want to look into learning how to design, if not build, patios and other constructs. You don’t need to do those, but you will want to know how to create them or at least the steps involved if you’re to offer these sorts of services in your future business.

Partnering with The Pros

When you first start out as a landscaping or garden designer, you likely won’t be the one actually doing the work. Even as you grow your business and expand, you won’t be the one doing the actual work. Sure, there may be a few jobs that you take on yourself, but ultimately, you’ll always need a team. When you first start out, you can work as a contractor and hire a company or series of professionals to get the work done well, and on time. As you grow, you can look into hiring people in-house.

Getting Materials: Your Bread and Butter

As you grow, you’ll increasingly need more equipment. You’ll also want to start looking into ways that you can save on each job, to either price your work more competitively or get paid more competitively, depending on which strategy makes most sense for your business at this moment in time.

One of the best ways to start doing just that is to buy all the materials you need for each job in bulk. FIS Outdoor offers several essentials like soil, mulch, and even stones at wholesale prices to help your business save significantly overall.

From there, consider renting until you can buy. This way, you don’t have to pay the high, upfront prices for specific tools, and can also avoid storage and maintenance issues. For universal tools you’ll use again and again, however, you’ll want to buy. You can save by buying second-hand, waiting for sales or financing deals, or looking into rent-to-buy models.

Expanding Your Client List

Like with all new business ventures, start with the people you know. Work for friends and family, and use the results and praises of those jobs to help you market and expand your business. It does take time and dedication, but by targeting communities who can see the work you do and hear directly from their neighbors how good of a job you’ve done, you can expand your client list effectively.