I am always aware that our website gives out mixed messages with both our commercial side and private, domestic side sharing the same little piece of cyberspace. This is compounded by the fact that our commercial side has recently completed large estate projects including a 40 plus hectare prestigious park site in London. This along with our extensive coverage of heritage projects such as Grey Friar Tower gardens and our show gardens, you can be forgiven in thinking that we only take on large commissions.

This was brought home to me the other day when I was walking along Ely High Street and my eyes were drawn to two young ladies that were extremely well dressed and wouldn’t have looked out of place n in Kings Road Chelsea – anyway these two turned out to be the Editor and Camera Journalist from the Ely Standard! As I recognised them, I stopped to thank them for some media coverage they gave us on a recent academy project. Their reply shocked me a bit as they told me they were starting a local page to promote local businesses but had not expected us to be interested because they envisaged that we were only interested in large, grand projects.

This bothered me as we have a project manager who has a life time of experience in the 5K to 20k basic domestic project market. However this was clearly not the message we were giving out so I went out to get feedback from our 5k to 20k customers .

A customer from Peterborough loved their basic design service and had immediate confidence in our project manager who designed them a paving area with their input ensuring in came within their budget – our designer then dealt with their planting requirements and the job was completed with minimal fuss… no design fees – just a quick plan a bit of a discussion and a new patio area was theirs with no loss of quality in this pared down service.

They were completely satisfied with the quality of work and the attitude of our staff saying that it was a pleasure to have the lads on site. This worked both ways as our operatives made it clear that the customer was a pleasure to work for too!

I think we are a bit like actors – terrified of being type cast – at one stage we were known as mainly doing wild and wonderful creations so we made a point of blasting away that stereotype with a contemporary show garden at Sandringham to change people’s opinions of our work.

Its very easy in any business to become pigeon holed - and with one website showcasing two sides of a business – it is easy for one area to overtake the other – but we are just as commited to our smaller projects as we are to our large projects – our main aim is that the client gets the result they want within their budget – whether that is 5K or 250k!

-Roger