Prioritising Human Connection within Gardening

I am excited to announce the start of the Scotica Gardening Ltd business blog, where we intend to share professional and personal insights surrounding our experiences growing a small, services based company in a rapidly developing business environment and world. 

Over the last four years we’ve continuously adapted and developed our approaches to various aspects of the gardening business; be that creating new systems for administrative efficiency and workload management, or taking a step backwards and reflecting on our personal relationships with customers and how these small scale interactions on a day-to-day basis impact the performance of Scotica from an objective quantitative perspective. 

We recently spoke with Marlene Lowe from the Emerald Agency on her ‘Leaders in Business’ podcast, enjoying a casual conversation about our journey as small business owners. Within this conversation we touched upon an aspect of our approach we are particularly proud of; the use of modern technologies to optimise the ‘non-human’ aspects of our business to open up more time for us to prioritise the human connections we place at the centre of our approach.

As me and Angus first expanded Scotica four years ago we found that the larger we became, the more labour intensive administrative work became - which in turn reduced our ability to give each client the personable and ‘human’ experience we now prioritise. In the early days of the company we found ourselves working long hours both on site and online, making reactive decisions and constantly balancing delivering excellent service with efficient and well organised admin. As demand for our services increased it became clear we’d need to rebuild our current systems to reduce administrative load so more time could be spent on our interpersonal relationships with customers. 

This rebuilding is something I believe we’ve achieved particularly well - our rolling maintenance plans in Edinburgh and Oxford require little to no external input once put in place, all our employees have to do is turn up, check in with the client and complete the work. Our quoting systems are also low input - clients complete the form on our website, book in for a consultation and receive a quotation with incredibly minimal time spent on our side doing relatively menial, repetitive tasks. We've reduced our time doing these tasks by utilising AI servicing agents, modern scheduling softwares and web-applications within our website to optimise and streamline the customer experience. In improving our online services and systems we’ve created more opportunities to have meaningful interactions with our clients, better understanding their needs and goals. 

Developing a greater understanding of each client is incredibly important in our industry. When working with a customer we are invited into spaces that often hold significant personal, emotional value - a well maintained garden can be a place where families gather, a place where food is grown and most importantly a place where people find relaxation and peace from busy lives. Understanding the importance of green spaces within clients lives has shaped the work culture at Scotica and will continue to do so. Whilst maintaining a high level of quality and efficiency is obviously vital, we understand that the service we provide can have a much deeper impact than the physical appearance of a garden. 

I’d like to thank Marlene Lowe once again for the opportunity to speak on her podcast, as well as recognise the continued hard work from Angus Mcgregor, Harvey Berry and Sam Ward in their roles within Scotica. 

Thanks, 

Calum Lawrie