BRIEFING By Anna French
Anna French is a Chartered Landscape Architect and Director at Anna French Associates Ltd.
2 What does our next generation need to think about? What skills should landscape professionals focus on to start their own practice? And how are those skills evolving in the 21st century? Anna French shares her experiences ...
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fter setting up my landscape architecture and ecology practice in 2011, I was accepted onto the Government’s Growth Accelerator Scheme, which offered part-funded business advice to companies looking to flourish. It was an invaluable source of guidance for me in the early days, and has created the foundations for the business today. Finding a good business mentor is critical when it comes to running a business successfully and my mentor helped me put together a growth plan to look at the key aspects including finance, marketing, route to market, customers and the staff team. They reinforced the notion that every single aspect of running a business is of equal importance. Running your own business, you need to focus on 14
consistently improving all areas, rather than just focusing on your speciality. They also helped setting up a cashflow forecast – getting paid on time is the perennial problem for any small business. Planning ahead can give you much more control and confidence in knowing where and when expenditure is feasible. I also found that reading the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz has helped; not only are the financial management principles extremely useful, it’s genuinely entertaining. People management skills are key to any business and it’s useful to get HR expertise on board – either internally, or through outsourcing. You’ll cover the basics of people management and, crucially, have policies in place to enable the company to bid for larger projects. One of the
most difficult areas to get right is marketing, so engage a specialist to help. Clearly communicating what you do, and why, is vital to landscape professionals and it can really help to have a sounding board to tease that out. Although social media is incredibly effective in getting your business name out there and connecting with your customers, it can be quite overwhelming; it’s also equally important to meet people in person to build lasting relationships. Technology and ecology skills are going to be crucial in the future, as the environmental professions will be dealing with issues rooted in balancing ecological design, water management, pollution control and carbon capture. We need a better understanding of these areas to lead the way in countering the impacts of
