Business 2 - MacKenzie and Green's Gardening services - age 13
The name wasn't as catchy admittedly. I wanted to just use my surname and have a play on words with Green and Gardening (if I had know at the time that I would marry someone with the surname Gardener at a later date, I would have really gone to town on the business name) However, my friend and business partner Elaine, quite justifiably, felt that her surname should also be in the title and lets face it, the surname MacKenzie does not give much scope for puns or alliteration!
We placed a well scrawled advert in the village shop window which cost us the mighty sum of 20p per week... But as all entrepreneurs know - you have to speculate to accumulate, and so we agreed to take the gamble of 2 weeks advertising, costing us 20p each. At the time that amount could have bought us a return bus fair to 'hang out' in Tring ... So it was quite a commitment to our business venture!
When the advert yielded no customers we decided, in true gypsy with spare Tarmac style, to go door to door cold calling to offer our gardening expertise (expertise = Elaine had helped her dad weed his veggie bed the week before and I had once used a mower)
Our tenacity paid off and one desperate / stupid lady agreed for us to weed her flower boarders and trim the edges. Her garden, rather Unimaginatively,had 2 long straight flower boarders, one going up each side of the garden, and the centre was laid to lawn. She agreed to pay us £5 ( between us) if we did the job well and then she made 2 catastrophic mistakes:
1. She gave us a lawn edger spade
2. She went out.
I appreciate that most teenagers have a 'money for as little as possible' mentality and I am certain she anticipated returning to a game of 'spot the difference' and some harsh negotiations over pay reductions.... How wrong she was.
Clearly she hadn't accounted for the fact that she had employed some over enthusiastic, under skilled entrepreneurs. Once we had discovered just how sharp and effective the blade was on the edging spade we got to work on those flower bed boarders. Ground Force eat your heart out... MacKenzie and Green required no architectural drawings and a team talk by Alan Titchmarsh... We had vision in our souls and this garden needed our help. In no time at all we had turned those dull straight boarders into wonderful wavey edged full sized flower beds and as our piste de resistance we had made a substantial 'circular' flower bed right in the centre of the garden .... Well - just slightly off centre as we didn't have a tape measure and when I say circular I mean as near to round as is possible with a straight edged blade and no marking out.
All in all we reduced the lawn by about 30% in total and rearranged all her plants into the new flower beds (although we didn't have a decent spade to get their root balls out so they may not have survived the move)
I can still vividly remember how proud we both were of all our hard work and had an air of certainty that we would have our wages doubled at the very least!
Luckily we weren't present for the 'ground force' unveiling ... But judging by her reaction when we later went to get our pay, I fear our efforts did not trigger the usual tears of joy and total elation that we get to witness on TV. Had Charlie Dimmock leapt out from behind a tree I think she would have had her bra-less chest stabbed with the offending edging spade.
Bless her, she looked somewhat defeated and numb when we knocked for our pay later that evening. clearly she had realised that she only had her self to blame for making that fateful error of employing teenagers with ample enthusiasm and zero experience or knowledge. she could see from our smiling, proud faces that there was no point in even attempting to highlight where we had gone wrong.... It would be the equivalent to kicking a puppy for wagging its tail!
She displayed all the signs of a traumatised victim, numbed by the shock of her pain and loss. she opened her door, handed over the £5, making no eye contacted, saying no words and quietly closed the door behind her.
We may not have been the sharpest chicks ... But we did manage to work out that all the signs would indicate that she had possibly not embraced our garden make-over with the enthusiasm we had hoped for.
It turned out that her shocked silence was short lived and within a week she had managed to share with the whole village a detailed account of her traumatic encounter with the business 'MacKenzie and Green Gardeneing Services'
And so another business met an early end and another lesson was learnt in the development of an entrepreneur - word of mouth is the best form of advertising when you are good. But It is a guaranteed cause of the demise of your business if you are not so good....
Thankfully Elsie is so beautiful she is her very own advertising campaign and all our lovely customers last year have spread the word so well we are already destined for a FAB fun filled summer 2013 .... Lets just hope it's a sunny one for all those weddings we are going to.
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