By the way ..not my garden!
I just knew it ..
When he came in the door with his notebook and pen and carefully took down the details I knew we were in trouble.
The garden was in a state, the grass was up to your kneecaps and it had been totally neglected since the end of last summer.
I reckoned our poor Flymo wasn’t up to the job, so the idea was that we would try to find someone who could come in, give the whole place a once over and leave it in a way that we could look after it ourselves for the rest of the year.
Bear in mind that we have a nice 4 bedroom detached house in a housing estate with very average sized gardens both front and back.
After he left us we saw him pacing the front garden – It looked like he was measuring the area. Not good I thought.
The following day his quote arrived by email – €1,560 !!
Oh my god – I thought it must have been a quote for the whole year but when I read it carefully I realised it was for just the initial tidy up!
If there was ever a moment to spur me into action, this was it ..the next half dry evening the Flymo came out and together we attacked the grass – it took two more evenings and a few hours on the bank holiday Saturday but we cracked it!
We bought weed killer, moss peat, some flowers, a yard brush and spent pretty much the rest of the Saturday at it.
I totally despise gardening and this for me was a real punishment day (and evenings) and there is still plenty more to do. I don’t care enough about the garden to have it perfect and I’m sure our expensive friend would definitely have had it spick and span but to me this was not worth it.
I guess at times we are like the “gardener”.
We do take careful notes, we spend time gathering as much information as we can, we try to fully understand the prospective client’s needs and issues and the challenges they face in their sector.
Armed with this information we go away, we do our own research and we write a Marketing and PR plan for them that will hopefully achieve their objectives. We then prepare a budget to execute the plan as economically as possible.
At times this is fine and everything proceeds but there are times when it is just too much for the prospective client and they must pass – sometimes they decide to cut their own grass!
Their garden will more than likely end up being like mine but sometimes with budgets being so tight that will just have to do.
The important thing is that we all do our best to drive forward and while that can be difficult with limited resources at least ..keep driving forward.
Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion
Fuzion are a Marketing & PR firm with offices in Dublin and Cork
