Winback for Landscape Gardeners
You built the garden. Somebody else is being paid to look after it
Handing over an asset and then walking away from it
Full garden landscaping is £5,105. An Indian sandstone patio, £2,970. Fencing, £1,495. A garden clearance, £1,300. Turfing, £1,045.
Think about what happens after you finish a garden.
You hand over a scheme you designed and built, containing planting you chose, in a layout you set out, with materials you specified. Six months later somebody needs to prune it, feed the beds, lift and divide, deal with the first winter’s damage and keep the surfaces clean.
That person is almost never you. It is a maintenance gardener found through a local group, who knows nothing about the scheme and will, over three or four years, gradually simplify it into something easier to look after.
And when the household comes to do phase two — the fencing, the lawn, the side return, the second terrace — a meaningful proportion of them ask that gardener rather than ringing the firm that built the first phase eighteen months earlier.
You built the relationship and then let it lapse at the exact moment it became valuable.
The three dormant groups worth going back to
Completed builds with no aftercare. Every garden you have finished where nobody took on the maintenance. The message is not a sales one — it is an offer to come and look at how it has established, which almost every proud garden owner says yes to.
Phase-two households. Anyone who had part of a garden done and mentioned, at the time, the thing they could not afford that year. Those conversations happened and they were not written down. Two years on, the money frequently exists.
Lapsed maintenance clients. People who did take a maintenance arrangement and drifted out of it — usually over a winter, when the visits thinned and nobody restarted them in March.
The third group is the most recoverable and the most commonly ignored, because a maintenance round that shrinks over a winter looks like seasonality rather than churn.
The ratio
A full garden is £5,105. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. One job covers over four years.
On winback: a hundred completed gardens over four years, of which ten per cent take an aftercare arrangement or a phase-two job, is ten pieces of work worth somewhere between £1,000 and £3,000 each. That is £10,000 to £30,000 from households who already have your work in their garden, and the entire cost is a list and a spring message.
What we’d actually do
Reconstruct the build list with dates and what was actually done, including whatever was left out at the time. The left-out part is the phase-two prospect.
A spring visit offer to past builds. “We built your garden in 2023 — we are in the area in April and would like to see how it has come on.” It is genuine, it is welcome, and it produces both maintenance and phase-two work from the same conversation.
A separate approach for lapsed maintenance, timed for late February, before somebody else fills the round.
Photographs as the opening. A picture of their garden the day you finished, sent with the message, is the single most effective thing in this programme.
A maintenance offer that is actually structured — visits, frequency, price — rather than a vague willingness, which is why it did not get taken up the first time.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every completed build on a list with what was done and what was deferred
- A spring contact going out to past customers with their own photographs attached
- Aftercare arrangements attached to a real share of past gardens
- Phase-two work arriving from gardens built two and three years ago
- A maintenance round that grows through the winter rather than shrinking
The mistakes we see most
Treating handover as the end. It is the start of a decade-long relationship in a garden you designed.
Offering maintenance vaguely at handover. Mentioned once, while the customer is looking at the final invoice, it is never going to be taken up.
Letting the winter thin the round. A maintenance client who has not been visited since November is a lapsed one by April.
Never writing down what was deferred. The phase-two job was discussed on site and exists nowhere.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The build list reconstructed, with photographs, dates and deferred elements identified.
Weeks 5–8. The spring contact prepared and sent, with each customer’s own garden pictured.
Weeks 9–12. A structured maintenance offer written properly, and the lapsed round contacted before the season starts.
At ninety days the measure is how many past gardens you have been back to look at. Nearly every one of those visits produces work.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job records hold what was built, when, with the photographs from completion — which is both the list and the opening line of the message.
Because a completed build can open a recurring maintenance schedule, aftercare becomes visits and invoices on a rhythm rather than an intention that fades by August.
And a quote that was declined at the time stays on the system with its value, so the phase-two conversation starts from the actual figure rather than from memory.
The quotes that were too expensive at the time
There is a group most landscapers write off within a week, and it is one of the most reliable sources of work in this programme.
You quote a great deal. A full garden at £5,105 gets priced for households who then discover it is more than they had imagined, say they will think about it, and are never heard from again. Most landscapers assume they went to somebody cheaper.
A good proportion did not. They did nothing at all. The garden is still a mess, they are still looking at it every evening, and the reason they did not proceed was that the money was not there that year.
Money changes. A bonus, a remortgage, a payment that came in, a year of saving with a specific thing in mind. Somewhere between one and three years later a meaningful share of those households are ready, and they are ready with a figure in their heads that came from your quote.
So the declined quotes go on a list with their value and their date, and get a light contact each spring. Not a discount and not a chase — a note that you are booking for the season, with a photograph of something similar you have built since, and an offer to revisit the figures because material prices have moved.
The ones who went elsewhere will say so. The rest are exactly the customers you thought you had lost.
Questions landscape gardeners ask
Do people want me back to look at a garden I finished? Almost universally. They are proud of it and it is the easiest visit you will ever arrange.
Is maintenance worth having? It is the only part of your year that is not weather and season dependent, which is precisely what makes it valuable.
When should the contact go out? Late February for maintenance, April for the visits. Both before the season fills.
What if another gardener has taken it on? Common, and it does not stop them using you for construction. Those are different purchases.
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