When most of your business comes from landscape installation, a lot of your time is spent generating new work. At LifeStyle Landscaping, Grafton, Ohio, one tried-and-true way we’ve found to attract new customers is exhibiting at our local home and garden show. Since 1976, our company has participated in at least one home and garden show annually, the most recent of which has been the Cleveland Home & Garden Show, where we’ve exhibited for the last 15 years. These shows have been an integral part of our sales and marketing strategy; we invest significant resources in them.
5 KEYS TO GREAT HOME & GARDEN SHOW |
1. Plan your display garden well in advance of the home and garden show event. This will also give you plenty of time to force plant material, if necessary, and design any special structures. 2. Involve staff members from all parts of the company to maximize creative input and keep employees busy during slower winter months. 3. Ensure that one or two staff members are on hand during the event to meet and greet potential clients, answer questions and begin the sales process. 4. Avoid committing to a garden size or style that you may not be comfortable installing for a potential client. 5. Participate in home and garden shows as regularly as possible. Attending the same show year after year shows consistency in your company and lets potential clients follow the progress of your work over time. |
While our garden designs change year after year, one thing that remains the same is the necessity to plan in the months leading up to an event. Some of the planning is determined by the show’s producers; things like the event’s theme, show floor layout and garden sizes are outlined by the event coordinators. From there, what happens inside our garden is entirely up to the Lifestyle Landscaping staff.
Knowing that the Cleveland Home & Garden Show generally takes place in early February, with input from many members of the company and our design staff, we generate a proposed garden design for the event producers’ approval by July the year prior. From there, with an approved proposal, our staff generates a final design that must be submitted by October. The producers will often ask for a plant list and overall design layout to make sure the concept we’ve run with reflects the overall theme and flavor of the event.
With a few months between submitting our proposal and the dates of the show, the entire Lifestyle Landscaping staff bands together to make the design a reality. Beyond serving as a marketing tool, participating in home and garden shows in the winter allows us to keep our staff busy during the slow season.
Meanwhile, the rest of our staff members take on other tasks. Some staff members are responsible for collecting the stone and hardscaping materials we’ll use. Also, we may have arbors, fences, water features and other special focal points to build. Much of this development process takes place at our own facility where we’ll build the structures and then determine the best way to disassemble them so we can quickly re-assemble them on-site during our four-day setup period.
Come setup time, we generally have four to six staff members on-site at the convention center to erect the special features we’ve built at the shop. As it gets closer to the day of the show we may have as many as eight or 10 staff members on hand to help install the plant material. To make sure our presence is felt during the event, we have one staff member on hand at the display during the week days and two people during the weekend days.
Overall, Lifestyle Landscaping spends $30,000 to $50,000 annually on the design and implementation of our display gardens. While some participants may use stipends offered by the event organizers as the budgets for their gardens (sometimes up to $12,000), we choose to invest more because we want to put our best foot forward in this marketing effort. While the cost might seem excessive, it’s important to remember that in order to create the established-landscape look, more plant material is necessarily than what you would normally use for a landscape installation. For the 2006 Cleveland Home & Garden Show, Lifestyle Landscaping planned for 1,000 perennials, 50 to 60 shrubs, five flowering trees and seven cut trees for our large garden. Additionally, while much of our plant material may be sold to the public at the end of the show, we retain the stone, pavers and other hardscape materials in the design for use in future landscape jobs.
Also offsetting the cost of the show is the return on investment (ROI) we receive in terms of generating new work. Admittedly, sales can vary widely from year to year based on the show’s attendance, the economy, etc. While one year you may earn one new client that turns into a $300,000 job, another year you may make 30 new sales of $10,000 or $15,000 each. Overall, the volume of work we can traditionally generate from a home and garden show ranges from $200,000 to $500,000.
Beyond that, there also can be a great residual effect – new clients that call in July to say they saw our work at the February show and are now in a position to make an investment in their landscapes.

Explore the May 2006 Issue
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