Run the business side of your gardening business without having to work it out from scratch every time.
The Gardening Business Year is a practical way to run the business side of a self-employed UK gardening business. It helps you keep on top of the decisions behind the gardening: what your business needs to earn, how your round is performing, when prices need reviewing, preparing for winter, dealing with late payments, handling weather disruption and the other situations that come with running a gardening business.
Already a member? Sign in
The first 50 members keep the founding rate for as long as their membership stays continuously active. Standard annual membership will be £149 a year.
14-day money-back guarantee on your first payment. By joining you agree to the Terms of Membership.
Doing the gardening is only one part of running a gardening business. There are customers whose prices haven’t changed for years. Jobs you know don’t earn enough, but you’ve never properly worked out why. Weeks of bad weather that throw the diary into chaos. Customers who pay late. Equipment that eventually needs replacing. Quiet winters that somehow need paying for.
And then there are the bigger questions.
Most self-employed gardeners have had to find their own answers to these as they’ve gone along. That’s what The Gardening Business Year is for.
It isn’t a course you have to complete, and it isn’t a folder of hundreds of templates you’ll never use. It’s something you come back to as your business runs.
This is where your own business starts to take shape. You’ll be able to:
The workbook doesn’t decide what you should charge or tell you which customers to drop. It gives you the numbers. You make the decision.
A practical route through the year your gardening business actually experiences. Instead of trying to remember everything at once, The Year helps you deal with things at a sensible point: preparing for the season, reviewing the round, price changes, equipment and winter planning.
When something actually happens in the business, you don’t need another article explaining the theory. You need to know what to do next.
Not another enormous to-do list. Each month, a small number of timely things to do, check and read, three at most, based on where a gardening business is likely to be in the year.
I’ll keep sharing useful observations from running my own gardening business, reading member questions and answering the useful ones together in This Month rather than one by one, and improving the product where doing so makes it more useful. No promise of endless new content for the sake of it.
Say you’ve got a customer who’s been paying roughly the same price for three years. Instead of guessing at an increase, you open your Round Review and see what that customer currently returns against what your business needs its billable time to earn. If you decide the price needs reviewing, you use Price Review to test the effect of the change. Then you open the Price Increase playbook, decide how you want to handle that particular customer, use the wording and record what you eventually decided. The next time you review your round, that decision is still there.
For illustration: if that review moves twenty regular customers by £3 a visit, that’s over a thousand pounds a year from one evening with the workbook. Your numbers will be different; the point is that one decision made properly tends to be worth more than the membership.
Or perhaps winter is approaching. You use your Winter Plan to enter what you genuinely expect to come in, the money you’ve actually put aside and the costs that still need covering. If there’s a gap, you know about it before the quiet period rather than halfway through it.
That’s the idea behind the whole product: something happens, you understand the position, you make the decision, you take the action, and you keep the record.
I’m Luke, and I run my own garden maintenance business in Yorkshire. Gardening Business Lab came from years of having to work these things out in my own business, and the same questions you read at the top of this page are the ones I’ve had to answer myself.
I tested the workbook using my own business numbers and my actual customer round, not a fictional example of how a gardening business is supposed to work. That testing changed the product when the real world exposed something that didn’t work properly, and that’s how I intend to keep developing it.
The Gardening Business Year is for self-employed UK gardeners and owner-operated small gardening businesses. It’s most useful if you already have customers and regular work, but want to become more deliberate about the business sitting behind it.
It probably isn’t what you’re looking for if you want accounting or invoicing software, a CRM, professional accreditation, business coaching, or software that automatically tells you what to charge for an individual gardening job. The Business Year helps you run the business. You remain the person making the decisions.
Standard annual membership will be £149 a year. The first 50 Founding Members can join for £99 a year and keep that founding rate for as long as their membership remains continuously active. If you cancel and later rejoin, the membership price available at that time will apply.
Your membership includes:
By joining you agree to the Terms of Membership, which you can read first.
There won’t be a free trial, but there will be a 14-day money-back guarantee on your first annual payment. You can also already use GBL’s free guides and Starter Toolkit to decide whether the way I approach gardening businesses is useful to you before joining.
No. There are free GBL resources for people getting started. The Gardening Business Year is most useful once you have real customers, prices, costs and a working year to review.
No. It helps you understand what your business as a whole needs to earn and what your existing work is returning. You still decide what to charge an individual customer or job. Individual-job pricing is deliberately separate from the Business Year.
No. You type your figures into the green cells and the workbook does the rest. There’s nothing to build and no formulas to touch, and an example gardener is already filled in so you can see what a finished one looks like.
You’ll need access to the member area and something that opens an Excel workbook: Excel, Numbers or LibreOffice. The member area works on a phone; the workbook is best on a laptop or tablet. There’s no separate GBL app to install.
No. It doesn’t replace your bookkeeping software, accountant or tax records. It’s there to help with the operating decisions around running your gardening business.
As one of the first 50 members, you keep the £99 annual founding rate for as long as your membership remains continuously active. If you cancel and later rejoin, the price available at that time will apply.
Yes. You can cancel at any time, which stops the next annual renewal, and you keep access to the member area until the end of the year you’ve already paid for. The workbook you’ve downloaded and the figures in it are yours to keep.
There’s a simple 14-day money-back guarantee on your first annual payment: ask within 14 days of joining and you’ll get a full refund. This sits alongside your statutory rights as a consumer, and you can read the full Terms of Membership before you join.
You already know how to do the gardening. The Gardening Business Year is there for everything that has to happen around it. Understand the numbers. Review the round. Make the decisions. Handle the awkward situations. Prepare for what’s coming next. And when next year comes around, don’t start again from zero.
Founding membership is open now: £99 a year for the first 50 members.