For Karl Harrison the recession hit hard and the phone stopped ringing. Two years on and business is booming.
Features writer, Carol Miers, talks to owner of Harrison Gardens and the Exterior brand, Karl Harrison.
He'll call a spade a spade, but doesn't use a trowel. He's hard-nosed and he doesn't beat about the bush. This is Karl Harrison the landscape gardener.
A garden is a long way from being a desert and it's far from the stars, but Karl was stationed in a Middle Eastern desert when employed by the RAF, in a role that's given him a certain strength and determination.
Reach for the Stars is the translation of the the RAF motto Per Ardua Ad Astra and it is something he has adopted, the experience gave him much discipline.
He stayed twelve and a half years, but after leaving he set up his current business, Harrison Gardens in 2003.
Speaking last week he said: "It is my passion, working outdoors, getting my hands dirty, running a business and not being run by a business.
"My father went through Pershore College becoming a landscape gardener, doing lots and lots of horticultural work, meaning I was learning the tools of the trade from three to 17 years old.
"Now I employ groundworkers, builders, landscaping specialists, carpenters and other trades."
Landscape gardener yes, but he's not a 'gardener'.
"I didn't grow up with gardening I am not a gardener. I don't have a trowel, I don't do weeding I wouldn't know a weed if it smacked me on the... backside," he said cheerfully
"What you've forgotten about planting is probably what I know."
Still, having a thriving business in difficult times, what's the secret, as it's good to know these things?
"Always keep one step ahead. This year we are probably going to turn over £500,000, business is absolutely booming."
In fact, as everyone knows the crunch happened in 2008, and for him, it was a really low time, far from rosy: "The fact is that the phone stopped ringing two years ago so I thought, right how can I make it ring? and I put a fortune into my website and I told people about my website and I told people about me."
The publicity has to hit the right chord, he said, and there were techniques from the RAF that gave him some ideas:
"When I was in the RAF, if they wanted to catch your attention they would put 'free beer' in big letters on the board, then you'd go to take a look and it would say 'everyone must be on parade at 6am tomorrow morning' and you'd go 'oh no'."
In other words you've got to grab the audience. Publicity aside, he's got some other tips.
"You have to be able to get up at 5am in the morning. If you have a big row with somebody in a professional manner you can't let that ruin your day, and you've got to learn, you try things out and you listen to people," Karl said.
So business aside, he's committed to the quality of his gardens and Karl is the pragmatic designer.
He seems to maintain a niche market, in times when design with colour, aroma, and texture is à la mode: "When I am designing a garden I don't design it from a horticulturist point of view.
"I am a structural specialist and I believe function follows form - I look at the usability of the space, and I do the plants afterwards.
"I'm not a Diarmuid Gavin, I like to construct a garden, primarily using the correct structural procedure rather than, we'll just chuck a couple of slabs down here and that will be all right.”
Being an aeronautical electronics system engineer helps him in terms of putting together technologies, like the electronics of fountains or lighting.
"It's like second nature," he said, "I can calculate the expansion and contraction of wood using the characteristics of the wood as against steel, for example, when you have wood next to a steel girder in a structure."
He uses a clear design iteration method, and listens to what the clients want, sometimes this can be very surprising.
"If they pay £4m for their house, they don't want a cheap old Indian sandstone for their patio do they? Well actually this time, they did, and as much as I tried to get them to have rustic limestone, they said, No, and they should know what they wanted, they just wanted cheap and cheerful."
Is it necessarily the case that a client always prefers an RHS award winning garden designer to a more pragmatic style? He believes that being straightforward sometimes works better.
"I have this sort of no-nonsense approach to what I think is actually what the client actually needs," and yet the client who was 'sparing no expense' was not happy with the initial gold award winning designers chosen for that project.
The highlight of his business was when he was awarded a contract to provide decking for over 190 Honda garages.
Expanding into decking has been the best move in business terms. While some countries have no concept of sustainability, he says “ I don't agree with that, you shouldn't cut down forests” In Karl Harrison's case it is his decking. Exterior decking uses many secondary species of hardwood and Exterpark has FSC certification.
Catch up with Karl's methods and glimpses of Google Sketch-Up, which he calls 'priceless', and see some examples of his simulation software and iteration process on his website.
Karl Harrison's page on the Landscape juice network.
Website: Exterior Decking.
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