If you’d told me when I left music college with a degree in Sound Design that I’d end up running a landscaping company, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.
The original plan was to work in the music industry. Unfortunately, that dream flopped fairly early on, and I found myself working alongside different gardeners and landscapers instead.
It wasn’t exactly the career I’d planned, but I quickly realised there was a lot I loved about it.
I enjoyed being outdoors, working with my hands and, most importantly, being able to stand back at the end of a day and actually see what we’d achieved.
There was just one problem.
I didn’t particularly enjoy working for someone else.
Starting Out on My Own
Around 2014, I started gathering some work of my own.
It was small to begin with, but there was enough coming in for me to take the plunge and buy my first van. That felt like a pretty big deal at the time.
A year or so later, I upgraded to a bigger van as the jobs gradually became larger and more frequent.
By around 2016, there was enough work that I needed another pair of hands, so I took on a casual labourer to help me.
Ten years later, he’s still with me.
He’s now a fully employed member of AJT Landscaping, alongside the rest of our six-person team.
Looking back, that feels like quite an important milestone. At the time, though, I don’t think there was ever a grand plan to build a landscaping company with multiple teams. It was simply a case of doing good work, finding the next project and gradually trying to improve.
When Things Had to Change
One of the biggest turning points actually came outside of work.
I had my first child eight years ago.
Until then, my routine was pretty simple: landscape all day, come home and spend the evenings quoting, planning and dealing with everything else involved in running the business.
When you’ve got a young family, that becomes much harder to justify.
I didn’t want to build a successful business at the expense of never being there for my children.
Something had to change.
That’s when I began employing people to carry out more of the landscaping work rather than trying to physically do everything myself.
It meant I could spend more time working on the business rather than just in it – meeting clients, quoting projects, designing gardens, organising the teams and thinking about where AJT should go next.
More importantly, it gave me the opportunity to grow the business while still being present for my family.
That decision probably shaped AJT Landscaping more than anything else.
From One Van to Two Landscaping Teams
Fast-forward to today and things look quite different.
We now have six fully employed members of staff, two fully equipped and largely self-sufficient landscaping teams and four vans on the road.
The projects have changed too.
What started with smaller gardening and landscaping jobs has developed into complete garden transformations incorporating paving, decking, planting, retaining walls, pergolas, outdoor kitchens, lighting and everything else that goes into creating a really great outdoor space.
We’ve invested in better equipment, better materials and better ways of doing things.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the satisfaction of standing back when a project is finished and seeing what we’ve created.
Doing Things Properly
As AJT has grown, I’ve become increasingly particular about how we build things.
I don’t want us to be the cheapest landscaping company, and I don’t want to build gardens that simply look good on the day we leave.
I want us to build them properly.
Much of what determines whether a garden lasts is eventually hidden underground. Foundations, drainage, sub-bases, construction methods and all the preparation that nobody sees in the finished photographs.
Those things matter to us.
We’re certainly not perfect, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes while learning how to run and grow a business. But every year we try to get a little better. Better designs, better construction, better systems and a better experience for our clients.
What Comes Next?
That’s probably the exciting bit.
We’ve gone from me working out of a van and quoting jobs in the evenings to two landscaping teams, six employees and four vehicles on the road.
But I don’t feel as though we’ve reached the destination.
Far from it.
We’re now looking at what the next stage of AJT Landscaping looks like: continuing to raise the standard of the gardens we create, taking on more ambitious projects and building a company that our team enjoys being part of and our clients genuinely trust.
I never did make it as a sound designer.
But, looking back, I’m quite glad things worked out the way they did.
And hopefully, we’re still only getting started.
