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 Ron Carter explains to students how a lighting fixture will affect the appearance of the home during his lighting seminar last summer. Photo: Ron Carter and Gwen Hostnik.If you think your landscaping work can only be admired in the day, think again. With the correct lighting, you can add a new way to market what you deliver.
“A lot of landscape lighting contractors use one type of light bulb with one type of beam spread, and they put that in their entire installation,” says Jeff Dross, corporate director of education and industry trends for Kichler Lighting. “It’s a boring installation.”
Contractors looking to step-up their lighting expertise can do so at Ron Carter’s “Low Voltage Lighting Training with Hands-on Seminar” held June 13-14 and Aug. 22-23 at Kichler Lighting in Cleveland.
Carter, corporate trainer and certified low voltage lighting technician, held the seminars last summer, and taught attendees not only how to spruce up their lighting techniques but also how to sell the lighting maintenance services to installation customers, along with other lighting tips.
“I also try to teach the contractor that you don’t necessarily want even illumination across the whole front of the home,” Carter says.
“Their mission is to highlight the architectural features of it as well as be focused on the landscape itself.”
Dross says that poor lighting can negatively affect how potential customers view your work.
“It’s not going to have the ‘wow’ factor,” Dross says. “Likely it’s not going to photograph very well, so if that person tries to get another sale based on the lights that he put on the other house, Mrs. Jones in the next home is not going to really be all that excited by it.”
Using your first round of work is a great way to get your other foot in the door for selling additional services.
“It’s one thing to sell them the lighting job, but somebody has to take care of it,” Carter says. “Because the kind of people that can afford this kind of lighting, they’re not the kind of people that go out and wipe their stuff off and clean their products. “They want it done for them. I show the contractor how to add to his business.”
Fixing someone else's mistake
It’s not the most fun part of the job, but sometimes you have to solve a problem that you didn’t cause.
Carter addresses that situation at his seminar.
“One of the most important things a landscape contractor can get out of this is they may not all do brand new jobs,” Carter says. “They may inherit somebody else’s mess, and there’s a multitude of things that can be wrong with it.
“And being able to find what the root cause of the problem in the shortest amount of time is the ultimate goal here.”
When trying to fix a job, don’t diagnose a problem before checking off the basics.
If the homeowner calls up and complains that none of his lights are working, you don’t start looking at the individual lights that are around the yard.”
Carter says you should start simple and go to the power source first and find out if there is power. Then you can get more detailed. There’s no point wasting your time looking for some complex problem when the solution could be right in front of you.
“Look for the most obvious and then work your way in deeper,” Carter says. |
What’s one tip Carter has to make additional sales?
“Dress appropriately,” Carter says.
“It may sound silly, but you get some of these large properties with four guys walking around and they’re all wearing different outfits. It doesn’t look good.”
Something as simple as buying everyone the same colored T-shirts can add an element of professionalism.
“I think the homeowner knows the guys are going to be wearing jeans,” Dross says.
“If you’ve got the guys working for you for the week, you give them five T-shirts and it costs you $35, and they’ve got shirts for the week.”
Some contractors are reluctant to offer more services, even though they shouldn’t be.
“I try to give them the confidence that it’s OK to do it at that time (of quotation) and verify all that you offer just in case the homeowner decides to shop it,” Carter says.
Carter also gives tips on how to take photos of your work at night.
“One of the most important things I do is I’m teaching the contractors that attend these events how to photograph their jobs at night because not too many contractors enjoy doing a nighttime demo for a homeowner,” Carter says.
If you take good photos, it’s a lot less time to just bring the pictures to show your work instead of lugging around lights for a demo.
“You need a camera with manual settings on it,” Carter says. “By adjusting the exposure, the meter and your aperture you can become a nighttime photographer.”
While landscape contractors will be able to apply what they learn at the seminar to their businesses, so will distributor’s employees, who made need to brush-up on their knowledge of the products they are selling.
“Maybe you’ve got three guys behind the counter who are selling this stuff day in and day out and they are finding themselves inadequate in their ability to answer question,” Dross says.
For a list of Carter’s future classes, visit www.landscapelighting.com and click on the “training” link.
The author is associate editor for Lawn & Landscape. You can reach him at bhorn@gie.net.
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