LANDSCAPES OF THE RICH & FAMOUS
J CONTRASTS
oe Schmo pulls his twenty-year-old beater of a push mower out of his garage and whacks at his lawn with a blade that more closely resembles the business end of the rake he’ll use to clean up the mess afterwards. He’s not too particular about his “landscape” efforts because he’s worrying about the mortgage, the wife’s car that’s smoking more than his late grandfather or the [fill-in-the- blank] household crisis of the day. At the other end of the scale, we find landscape clients who measure the length of individual blades of grass to ensure uniformity and have needs that are, let’s say, “spe- cial.” Most of us, no matter the profession, tend to work with, and for, people who fall somewhere in between the extremes above. As any service compa- ny comes to recognize, dealing with a wide spec- trum of clients is what makes business interest- ing. What makes those dealings profitable is the ability to be flexible and adapt to situations as they change.
Christopher Joyce runs Joyce Landscaping in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one of the largest land- scape organizations in the region servicing residen- tial and commercial prop- erties of all sizes. Chris also owns Always Green of Cape Cod, Inc., spe- cializing in custom lawn fertilization and tree & shrub fertilization, as well as Grassroots Irrigation,
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LANDSCAPE PROFESSIONALS 25
Inc., providing design, installation and service of irrigation sprinkler systems.
Chris has longtime dealings with—to be honest—very rich clients. His staff of landscape professionals is trained to deal with any request a client may make. Such as? According to Chris, the easy requests are things like replacing plants because “I don’t like that col- or of pink flower.” It isn’t “pink enough,” in which case his staff removes all the flowers and replaces them with ones of a deeper color. Ka-ching!
Chris reported that one client asked if his staff could move her daughter to college. What did they do? They rented a box truck and moved the daughter to college
Rich & Famous continues on p.26 2
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36