fastgardener

Market

Target market

Our target market are cash-rich, time-poor people who need help maintaining a garden. We believe they will pre-dominantly be in the AB socio-economic category and often owner-occupiers. As such, typically 35+ years of age with children and/or pets. They may be highly paid professionals whose jobs will typically entail a commute to major urban centres.

Our focus is mainly on London's "Green Belt" and the Home Counties.

We also serve property management companies. Following lean start-up philosophy we're not pre-empting who our market is and are instead working to meet real customer needs, and trying to adapt our business to better service such requirements and demands.

Characteristics of target market

Annual spend on gardening worldwide is £144bn. There are estimated to be 71,820 professional gardeners in the UK. With an average income of £17,763, we estimate that £1.27bn is spent on professional gardeners in the UK each year.

A recent survey (AXA, 2017) indicates that on average people in the UK spend £473 per year on their garden, and considerably more in the South East and London where this number rises up to c.£600 per year.

Another survey (Churchill, 2011) suggests that 6 million (12 per cent) Britons pay for cleaners, gardeners, handymen and other forms of domestic help.

To our knowledge, there is no prominent national brand for professional domestic gardening services in the UK and the market is very fragmented. In some areas, local firms can dominate, although operational capacity tends to limit expansion beyond a small geographical area.

Marketing strategy

Whilst we intend to concentrate our marketing efforts on digital - Google Adwords, Facebook and Twitter promotions, SEO - we also intend to invest in physical media such as magazine inserts and door-drop media. We are also looking to work with local schools to run regular awards for art and poetry based on a gardening theme. This should give us great community engagement but also engaging content that people may want to share via social media.

We also intend to activate PR and engage journalists in the major newspapers (all the major papers have established gardening sections) and special interest publications (e.g. BBC Gardeners’ World, Gardens Illustrated, etc.)

Finally, our aim is to set up trade stands at major events (e.g. RHS Flower Shows, etc.) to build brand awareness.

Competition strategy

We believe we have 3 main groups of competitors: job posting sites such as Gumtree, lead-sellers such as Rated People or Bark, and direct competitors. We view local gardening firms as potential partners and collaborators, not competitors.

To our knowledge, lead sellers (e.g. ratedpeople.com) charge subscription fees and charge per lead. We have no sign-up or subscriptions fees – it’s free. With lead sellers, there is a risk that a gardener pays for a lead but doesn’t win the job. With fastgardener, gardeners only pay a commission for jobs they’re getting paid for. The lead sellers are generalists who provide a portal for most professional services.

We believe that focusing on gardening enables us to provide a better quality of service. We also believe that our focus will enable us to ultimately outcompete on SEO as we will have better domain authority.

We expect our target market will generally avoid using Jobs boards (e.g. Gumtree) given the friction of the search and selection process, and prefer to use our service as it’s quick and convenient.

We have identified a couple of companies who we believe are close competitors and who we closely monitor. One is geographically limited, hires staff in-house, and offers other services (e.g. cleaning). We should have lower overheads as a result of leveraging the “gig economy” rather than hiring internally.

The other is a recent entrant and only offers services in a very small area of the country. We have no geographic restriction. We can operate wherever our gardener network allows us which already goes as far afield as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Our specialisation should, ultimately, enable us to outcompete on the crucial aspect of organic search.

We believe funding will allow us to aggressively grow, consolidate a first-mover advantage and expand our service to provide a comprehensive garden design, landscaping, and maintenance service that, to our knowledge, none of our competitors offer.