Has anyone read the Resolution Foundation report? It says that a whopping 15% of the UK's working population is now self-employed.
I have no data to back me up but I would guess that the garden industry is a big contributor to these numbers.
What is worrying is that the horticulture industry, in particular, is in danger of becoming squeezed from two different directions. i.e. high numbers of self-employed pressure on price from increased competition.
This revelation is particularly startling: "those working as self-employed are now earning 40 percentage less than those who are employed".
With greater numbers starting up as gardeners the pressures on price can only lead to short-term instability.
We all know that horticulture and landscaping is cyclical and highly transient with many start-ups and failures in a short space of time but surely the horticulkture industry cannot sustain high numbers of self-employed as well as maintain good rates of pay?
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We see it every year, I've already got my first two quotes to people whos gardeners "disapeared". A good guess is 60% of new start ups in our industry dont survive more than 6 months as they simply charge too little. and a good 20% more dont survive the next year after that. The pressure is their every spring but evaporates from experience as all the cheap players move on to other employment when they cant make ends meet.
That is very interesting. I think its good that more people are trying to be self-employed.
I do wonder what is the main reason that so many do not make it. Like David said, 60% not surviving, even if that is a rough guess, is pretty huge.
I do imagine a big part of it in either not charging enough or not selling enough either my advertising and marketing or just talking to people.
-Landen
In the late '80s, people in professional industries such as IT started to go S/E as contractors. That's when the IR brought in the new rules, such as requiring you to be "employed" if a certain amount of your income was from one client.
There are two sorts of self-employed people: those who's employers are avoiding the taxes on hiring people on a permanent basis, including NI, sick pay, pensions etc., and we real self-employed workers who are sole-trader businesses. The headline numbers of S/E don't mean anything, as more people are choosing to change their contracts now.
I think we mistake people failing in our industry as business-failures. I'd bet that well over 50% of new gardeners are people trying it out, and most don't expect to succeed. They might be between jobs, newly-retired, students needing some cash, moonlighting shift-workers, or immigrant labour, either trying things out here to make a proper living, or filling in time before they go back to the sunshine.
Our industry has always been open to low-pay. If you think about it, we're not far removed from the farm workers or estate staff in the 18th or 19th centuries. That's why we need to be more professional, in order to raise the profile of the job in client's eyes.
Plumbers used to be drain-diggers, covered in festering sores from the awful conditions they worked in. They then moved on to become skilled lead-workers, but with very low life-expectancies! We should be on a par with them, how did they go from sewer-rats to £100-per-hour??
Its simple really- you sell a service not your time. Sell your time, you get treated as lower value, as for a set time the person paying is given the view that they are either masters of your fate, or can dictate the rate, type and nature of your work.
Sell a service with a set-list of tasks and the customer knows what they are getting for their money, you can choose how to deliver it and in a manner, speed and time frame to suit your business need.