Michael "Dog3" Lonergan wrote:
> I think I'll be starting my own landscaping biz. I'll still get to ride my
> horse It will be easy on me. I'll have high school kids on staff.
>
> Beef stew is good. made biscuits.
>
> --
> Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste
> a hell of a lot better.
> - Robert Redford

Michael,

I'm just going to pass along my neighbor's experience:

He was a controller at a company that went broke. He didn't know what
he wanted to do, so he bought a gardener's route. It's sort of like
pool maintenance or whatever: When somebody gets tired of the job,
they just sell the business, which is just some equipment and the
customers. So every few months, the person doing the work finds out it
is actually work, and you have to do it when it's raining, and hot, and
cold, and when you don't feel like working. So they sell the route.

The customers can either stay with the new guy or try to find somebody
in the phone book. Well, since this new guy is knocking on the door
and here already, they might as well give him a try instead of going to
the trouble of finding somebody. After about three months, the
customers were telling him he was on the job longer than anybody else
had ever lasted.

Here's the kicker: He knew absolutely nothing about plants, irrigation
systems, landscaping, you name it. Absolutely nothing. He even lived
in a condo. But he was willing to do the work, and show up on time,
and be polite, and do a little extra if the homeowner wanted an extra
plant trimmed. But most of all, he spoke English. And if a plant had
spots, or the lawn was turning orange, he'd just take a sample to the
local nursery, and the people there who actually knew what they were
doing would tell him to spray with this or turn down the water or
whatever. After about a year, he was turning away more work than he
could handle.

I can't tell you how things turned out in the end because I moved about
two hundred miles away. I do know they bought a BMW and his wife quit
working. Not bad. What he did has its advantages: It's a going
business. It was cheap to buy. It lets you walk before you run.
There will be plenty of room to expand into design work when existing
clients want something bigger and better.

He just stumbled into this thing because he lost his job, and it turned
out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. The big thing is
that he was a nice guy and listened to his customers. Before, if a
customer told the gardener not to touch a certain tree, the guy didn't
understand English, saw the homeowner pointing to a tree, and he
trimmed it back to the trunk. Steve understood English and knew what
he didn't know. If he had a question, he took a sample to the people
at the nursery who did know.

Kinda long, I know. But maybe you can learn from his happy accident.

HTH,

Ken