They're looking for a gardener at 7pm. You're asleep by nine.
Garden care enquiries come in after work, on weekends, from people who want it sorted this week. Cushy answers every one in under 60 seconds, works out what the garden needs and books the walk-through.
What it looks like at 7pm on a Wednesday
Nobody is at a desk at 7pm. That is exactly when people sit down and start looking for a gardener, and it is the enquiry that used to wait until morning.
What a slow reply costs on a maintenance round
Set to typical numbers for your trade. Change them to yours.
Cushy costs $11,880 a year. You'd need about 22 extra clients a year to cover it.
We assume half the enquiries you're slow on would have gone elsewhere anyway, and a 30% margin on the rest. A maintenance client is counted at what they're worth over a year, not one visit. Directional, not a forecast. The pricing page runs the same maths →
“My work is small jobs. Is $990 a month really worth it?”
Fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on whether you think in jobs or in clients. One tidy up is a couple of hundred dollars, and against that the price looks steep.
But a fortnightly maintenance client is not a job, it is a few thousand dollars a year for as long as you keep them. Run the numbers below on the annual value of a client rather than a single visit, and see where it lands. If it does not stack up for your round, we would rather you did not sign up.
Weighing it up against paying someone to answer the phone? We compare the two honestly here.
Spring is a wall, and the rest of the year is a round
Garden care has two problems at once. Spring brings a wall of new enquiries just as your existing round needs twice the visits, and the rest of the year the phone rings while you are on your knees in a garden bed with gloves on.
Neither of those is a discipline problem. You cannot pull gloves off, find your phone and hold a conversation twelve times a day.
What garden care businesses ask
For garden care, more than most trades. The enquiry usually comes in after work from someone who has been meaning to sort it for months. A reply that evening rather than the next morning is often the whole difference.
You set a minimum during setup, along with your suburbs. Anything under it gets a polite decline rather than a booking, so you are not driving across town for forty dollars of weeding.
Yes, and it asks. That is the single most useful thing it captures for a garden care business, because a regular client is worth many times a one off clean up.
Cushy replies to new enquiries. Your existing round keeps texting you directly on your own number, which does not change.
It is on the busy side. The $990 tier covers up to 50 a month, which is where most maintenance businesses sit even through spring.
Before you book anything
One price, two tiers, and the maths on whether it pays for itself.
Have a look →The five days from first call to live, and the fifteen minutes it needs from you.
Have a look →Suburbs, seasonality, and why a Melbourne spring is its own problem.
Have a look →Be the one who answered first.
Twenty minutes on a call. We'll time how long your enquiries actually sit, show you what we'd build, and you'll know by the end whether it's worth doing.
$990 a month. No contract. Miss the minute and the month is free.