Ok, so I’m busy with my gardening business. I don’t make a lot of money but at my time of life there’s more to it than that.
It keeps me busy, active, physically fit as I can be, mentally engaged keeping track of everything that it takes to run a small business and most importantly, happy!
Now, my charges to customers range from some quoted work so it’s fixed every visit, say for mowing where everything is the same week in week out, to more variable gardening consisting of many different and varying gardening tasks to do on each visit, so these costs do change according to what needs doing.
All my customers are happy with the arrangements for the gardening I have done over the last 10.5 years!…yaay!… And then, of course, there’s always one 😁
So, at this customer’s garden where I undertake many varied tasks, the customer, by the way has done this many times, creates this type of ‘chatty blockage’ always as I’ve just finished…. Lovely to have a chat in passing, but I’m always conscious of my time and delays have a knock on effect through my planned working day.
Now, I’m certainly not a grabber. A few minutes here and there being non productive doesn’t really matter, but when it’s a case of giving my horticultural expertise which I trained for and it’s substantial in time, then I do charge as I feel it’s all part of my gardening visit.
It was questions asking about grass seed, lawn fertiliser, getting a better lawn, rose pruning, clematis pruning, cracked plant pot, rose diseases and staining to paving, (by others)…. It took time, my time, my expertise, my knowledge….so why not charge just a little bit more to impart this knowledge for my customer to understand and learn something new? Simple really?…well, obviously not!
And this became an issue I’ve not encountered before.
It was £3.00 additional cost.
The customer complained.
I explained.
The customer sacked me.
I didn’t blink an eye.
I filled the space with a new customer on my reserve list.
I’m happy!
now for a cup-of-T
Telstales 
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