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Trellis
News
The newsletter for Garden Designers
The summer holiday season has arrived, so welcome to that and to this edition
of Trellis News.
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Letters
Page -
Your opportunity to have your say, to ask questions, look for resources.
More
helpful comments on the efficacy of Yellow Pages as an advertising medium,
from Adam Bailey:
I wouldn't recommend Yellow Pages to anyone. It is horrendously expensive
and most calls are time wasters. I also did a self-designed ad when I made
the mistake of advertising in it about 5 years ago. Mine also stood out from
the rest of the crowd and perhaps that's the reason why I had so many calls.
It's not the number of calls though, it's the quality of the enquiry. Hundreds
of calls are no good if there's no (or very little) work at the end of it.
Last
month, a disheartened designer wrote about the difficulties she was experiencing
in building a solid business out of her early show success.
Jo Wilde offers the following words of comfort:
Please do not give up – If you are a good
designer, it just takes a lucky break & you will be right on track – honestly
!! I have been a designer for 17 years or so but have only been designing
gardens for a year since retraining at Warwickshire College. I too got an
RHS medal – a silver at Chelsea last year. That counts for a lot as people
like to say that their garden / scheme is being designed by an award winning
designer. Because of lucky contacts, a little smart advertising & a fair amount
of networking I am constantly in work – really exciting stuff too –truly –
so stick at it & don’t be disheartened – it’s a fantastic job.
Adam Bailey's opinion on untrained designers is:
I don't think untrained designers should be allowed to dupe the public into
paying money for low standard, and often unworkable, designs just because
they're cheap. After all, would you let a doctor perform surgery on you if
he'd never been to Medical School or allow a gas engineer to fix your boiler
if he wasn't Corgi registered or get a car mechanic to work on your car if
he's only done a few evening classes? No. Cheap, unqualified designers don't
help the industry, they only damage its reputation for being an art that demands
the highest of standards when done properly. It's good to note that there
are lots of very qualified new graduates coming out of Uni with degrees but
I don't regret that at all. It means we have to increase our standards to
stay ahead of the competition, which can only be better for the public in
general. I'd rather be up against a qualified new graduate than an unqualified,
cheap impersonator.
A
Marketing Opportunity:
For many people, the internet has become the first place they search for sources
of supplies and services, and so it makes sense for designers to have as high
a web presence as is practical for them. This can range from the expense of
designing and maintaining your own website to being listed, for no charge,
on other people's sites. One very well known and excellent UK based one is
www.gardendesign-uk.com.
It can also be useful to be listed on web based directories which have a more
general, rather than specifically garden design focus - two that I have found
recently are especially for women, and are looking for more ladies to list
their services with them. One is a new site called Women at Work, www.womenatwork.co.uk,
an online UK directory of women in business. The site is for self employed
women, freelancers, sole traders and women running small businesses. Women
can register free before 31 October 2003 and post up details of their services/business.
Anyone registering before this date will get one year's free membership. Then
they'll be invited to renew their membership at just £10 a year. There is
no obligation to remain listed and their details can be removed at any time.
The second is The Bag Lady, www.bagladyit.com, which is the leading Global
Directory for women owned businesses. Thousands of women owned businesses
have already registered and use their services. For the month of June they
received, 95,158 visitor sessions, and 79,230 Unique Visitors. They also offer
a Complimentary Business entry where you have your business details listed
and are then promoted to thousands of their website visitors and members.
In order to balance the tables, as both of the above suggestions were for
women only, I did an internet search on Google for "business directory
men" and other than a barber in Newcastle called Manely Men (groan!),
I was unable to locate one that discriminated in favour of men, although there
were many that welcomed entries from both sexes! - so I'll finish with an
apology for any imbalance and a suggestion that some time spent surfing the
net could prove beneficial for your business.
Annie Meachem
What's
your opinion on the value of a web presence, from a website to a directory
listing? How beneficial has it been for your business and what approach would
you recommend to your fellow designers? Your comments would be appreciated
- please send them to
for publication in the September edition of Trellis News.
Making Life Effortless - Part One
When I finish writing this, I'm off to pack my bags ready to drive with
my family the 1200 miles down to our idyllic corner of Portugal (we're taking
a caravan down there to stay in whilst the house is slowly renovated). Buying
the house was not only a dream come true, as I wrote about in a previous newsletter,
but the whole process of buying it was simply effortless. And who can say
that about house hunting at the best of times, let alone abroad! From the
first time of ever seeing it to being the legal owners took exactly 5 weeks,
because everything just fell into place..
I wonder how often you've noticed that sometimes life really does seem effortless
- perhaps you go to visit a potential client expecting to have to sell your
services hard, and they've already decided you're the one for them, and their
budget matches your desired figure perfectly. Or sometimes the magic of a
particular landscape seems to effortlessly translate into the perfect design
on your drawing board. Other times it can feel like a struggle - it feels
hard to find clients at all, let alone ones who are prepared to pay sensibly,
or the design process for a particular garden feels tortured, where you spend
far longer than the budget allows and still feel the design's a compromise.
Or your efforts are thwarted by clients who change their minds constantly,
or suppliers who let you down.
And have you noticed that some designers definitely seem to find life more effortless than others, irrespective of their intrinsic design or business talent? I believe that there are a series of good reasons for this, and that there are actions you can take to swing the balance in your favour. Over the coming months I'll be sharing these with you, starting in September with the first step towards achievingan effortless life.
End
piece
Until
then, I'd ask you to think about what an effortless life would look like for
you:-
How would your perfect week be?
What would you spend time doing?
What wouldn't you be doing?
Who would be there with you, and who definitely wouldn't?
How would you feel at the end of each day?
What would living an effortless life allow you to do?
Happy dreaming!
Best
Wishes
Annie Meachem
Trellis
Coaching
0845 456 9382
+44 (0) 1243 545010 (from outside UK)
email
"I help designers and entrepreneurs grow their success - who do you know who's serious about being effortlessly successful, and is willing to invest in themselves to achieve their dreams?"
"Supporting Personal & Business Growth"
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