Have you ever wondered how someone gets into landscape design? I was wondering the same thing back in 2004. I was working a generic sales job while going to school for interior design, and doing landscape design work on the side. I hated my job so when I saw an ad for a landscape designer at a local company I thought hey, why not? I knew landscaping, I could draw, and I could sell. Let’s do this!
I knew nothing about the company, located in a small stucco house in Tempe that had been converted to offices. The interview was pretty straightforward. I had a small portfolio of design work to share, some hand drawn and some done with AutoCAD. Bob, one of the owners, flipped distractedly through it. “Can you sell?” he asked. I said yes. “Are you ok working on straight commission?” I said sure.
“Great, when can you start?”
On day one I realized that this wasn’t exactly what I expected when I applied to be a landscape designer. Out of the 27 other designers on staff, only 3-4 of us had any landscape industry experience. Most had worked a variety of sales jobs unrelated to landscaping. My manager was a boat salesman before coming here! Still, I knew I needed experience. The job was commission only so the company took anyone willing to get out there and ask the most important question: what do I need to do to put you in this patio today?
New designers started off doing homebuilder front yards. This was during the real estate boom of 2004-2005 and new communities were popping up all over the outskirts of Phoenix like desert flowers after a sudden rainstorm. I drove to the design center for one of the area’s mega builders and settled into my desk. I was paid a flat fifty bucks per home to hand draw a landscape plan that used the builder-provided plants: two 15 gallon trees, 5 five gallon shrubs, and 13 one gallon perennials. Once we settled on plant placement, I pulled out a plastic tote filled with the gravel front yard options the builder allowed. I could design the backyard for them as well, and get a small commission on anything I sold there.
It was awful. My desk was the last stop for new homebuyers. These folks spent hours picking all the options and upgrades for their homes. They picked their flooring and their tile, their cabinets and their appliances. They chose paint colors and ceiling fans, light fixtures and all sorts of add-ons. They quickly became overwhelmed and began to panic at the money they were signing away. Their kids, tired of being dragged from sales rep to sales rep, were hot and hungry and cranky. That’s the point in their journey that the whole grumpy family arrived at the last stop before they were free to go: my desk. I was just the last thing standing between them and freedom. More than once I was told “bro I’m going to see this **** as I hit my garage door opener and that’s it, just do whatever and I’ll sign so we can go.”
I didn’t get a lot of upsell opportunities.
Luckily for me, I’ve always been a fan of learning by doing as much as humanly possible, so when I wasn’t doing homebuilder yards I took custom landscape leads. If someone called the landscape company and I was next on the list, I got to go meet them. I drew a lot of landscapes and I made a lot of sales. Eventually that caught the attention of my bosses. One day I got the call: “We’re putting you in the pool showroom.” If I was busy before, I was about to drink from the firehose.
The pool showroom in question belonged to a large pool builder in the Phoenix area. They had preferred vendor agreements with two landscape companies, us and our main competitor. This agreement meant that we handled all the little things that pool builders don’t do, like repairing torn down fences and putting the landscaping back together where the pool guys came in and out. It also gave us access to homeowners who were looking to create their own backyard resort and wanted to do it all in one go.
The leads were, in a word, amazing. Those of us assigned to the pool showroom waited in the conference room. The pool salespeople would finish the contract on the actual pool, and then say “do you have a landscaper lined up yet? Here, I want you to meet my guy.” The receptionist would call back to the conference room (this was still long ago enough that no one had cell service inside the building) and one of us would walk up front. If the pool was going in an existing home I’d schedule a time to meet them at the property. If the house hadn’t been built yet, I’d sometimes photocopy their survey plat and design their landscape then and there. In a few cases we would do the entire design and estimate, and sign the contract, right there in under an hour.
This job made me confident in my design skills and it made me FAST. You may recall that I said we were one of two preferred landscape companies. I never once saw a designer from the other company. We kept them out of the showroom by being quick and responsive, because here’s the thing: the pool guys were incentivized to use us. Every job I sold, I made a commission. But so did the pool company, and so did the pool salesman who referred us. The three of us who worked that showroom kept the account by making everyone a whole lot of money. In my first six months I was the number two salesperson at my company with $1.1 million in sold landscape jobs. The number one guy had sold $3.2 million in that same time period. It was wild.
The down side and what I learned
As you can imagine there was a tremendous amount of pressure with this job. If I didn’t sell landscape jobs it wasn’t just me and my bosses losing out. The pool company wasn’t getting their cut either, and they would bring in someone who could close the deals. I was working 14 hour days, trying to keep up with the volume of work. I wasn’t creating stunning, one of a kind landscape designs. I was cranking out 10-15 designs a day. I was surviving.
Arguably the worst part of the job for me was the adversarial sales approach. I love what I do now because I get to take the time to meet with homeowners and learn what they want. I find out how they want to live in the space and I help them create that reality. At this old job I was just banging out the closest thing I could to what they wanted in the little time I had, and pushing them to sign on the dotted line.
I left that company because my wife got a job as a college professor here in Virginia and we moved across the country. I don’t think I would have lasted more than another six months anyhow. It was one of several jobs I’ve had that I say were good experiences because they were such bad experiences. I learned my limits, and I learned what type of designer I don’t want to be. Sometimes that’s the most you can ask for from a job.
When we moved here I took a massive pay cut and worked as the designer for a landscape design-build company in northern Virginia. It was the right move for my growth as a designer though. But that’s a story for another time.