We talk exclusively to Khaled McGonnell, one of the founders of a new platform called fastgardener, which is connecting homeowners and property managers with professional gardeners.
You're one of the brains behind fastgardener – tell us what it is and how the idea came about.
With fastgardener’s website or mobile app, you can book a gardener in seconds. Our mission is to use technology to make garden maintenance as easy as possible. The idea came to me when I moved house and struggled to find a gardener. At the time, my daughter was a toddler, my wife and I were in full time employment and I had a daily commute into London. I hated having to take time off or eat into my weekend to get a gardener in to provide a quote, let alone actually do the gardening. I figured there must be a better way. When I saw that gardening hadn’t moved with the times, I saw a gap in the market and fastgardener was born.
What is your background?
I’ve spent my career in IT, specialising in analytics and project management, and have worked for some of the world’s largest companies, including Accenture and Deloitte.
Who are the other members of your founding team, and what do they bring to the start-up?
The fastgardener co-founders are Lynds, Neil, Mike and me. Together, we bring over 40 years of experience covering technology consulting, gardening and analytics.
Lynds was first to join and was instrumental in getting the idea off the ground by conducting huge amounts of market research and extensively testing the application. Neil is our analytics expert and we’ll be putting his skills to good use when we enrich our platform to offer personalised, prescriptive garden maintenance schedules. Mike heads up our operations and is the main point of contact for the gardeners. Having started his own crowdfunding platform and worked at a gardening firm, Mike has well and truly been bitten by the gardening and start-up bug, although he also brings extensive experience in finance and banking. I consider myself very lucky to be working with such talented and driven people.
Did you see a particular need in the UK property sector – in terms of landlords and letting agents looking after properties – for professional gardeners?
Absolutely. Fastgardener can save landlords and letting agents a lot of time. We’re set up so that it’s easy to book for different addresses and create regular bookings. You only need to deal with us, regardless of where your properties are, as we have a national network of gardeners. We also take payment electronically, so paying the gardeners isn’t a challenge either. You can manage all your bookings online, so if you have a number of gardens to maintain, it’s easy to track when the garden maintenance is due in each property in your portfolio.
Up to now, do you think gardens in commercial spaces like office complexes have generally been something of an afterthought?
There’s a depressing monotony to many office spaces. Everything’s glass and steel. Even trendy offices really only replace this with bare brick, ping-pong tables and loose-leaf teas. Greenery and open spaces for fresh air are invigorating and I’m surprised there’s not more ambitious architecture incorporating organic elements. It would be great to see something magnificent like Sheffield’s Winter Gardens inspiring new designs in the corporate space.
What areas of the country are you currently mostly operating in, and why?
Although we provide services across the country (we have gardeners in Northern Ireland and Scotland, for example), we’ve focused on the Greater London suburbs, such as Kingston, Uxbridge, Enfield and Harrow, along with the Home Counties of Surrey, Berkshire and Hertfordshire. Aside from being our home turf, these areas have a healthy proportion of our target demographic (affluent professionals), so this is why we’ve focused our marketing there.
As for the average homeowner, do you think many people struggle to maintain their own gardens?
Time is at a premium for our clients. Our customers are often busy parents, professionals with demanding careers, or busy letting agents and private landlords. We also have a lot of bookings on behalf of elderly parents. Keeping a garden maintained, particularly during the spring and summer, can be quite an undertaking. Lawn mowing, hedge trimming and weeding is time-consuming, tiring work which requires expensive tools and some botanical knowledge to do a decent job of it. Just getting a half-decent lawn mower, half-moon edger, rake and pitchfork will cost you hundreds of pounds. With fastgardener, it’s never been easier to keep on top of your garden maintenance.
How much would it cost them to get a professional gardener via your platform?
As we’re a national company, our pricing varies by region and we’re always optimising to ensure we’re offering our customers the best prices we can for a professional gardening job. Our prices currently range from £15 to £27 per hour.
As “fast” is part of your company’s name, just how swiftly would it be before tapping on your app, or clicking on your website, to get a gardener?
The booking takes about 60 seconds — less if you’ve booked before. The lead times to get a gardener to your premises vary by location, day of the week and season. For example, we’re extremely busy in May and even more so at the weekends. That said, it’s typically no more than a three-day wait and often much quicker than this.
For professional gardeners looking for extra work, what can you promise them if they sign up with fastgardener?
If you’re looking for gardening jobs, fastgardener promises no sign-up fees, no subscription fees and to only take commission for work carried out. This is less risky than paying for leads for jobs that you may not win. We build lasting relationships and business partnerships with our gardeners.
We understand you are about to launch a crowdfunding drive to help grow fastgardener. Why go that route instead of, say, taking on private investors or loans?
There are so many benefits to crowdfunding and, with Mike being a certified crowdfunding expert, we always knew that this would be our first step after bootstrapping. Conventional loans are hard to come by for start-ups and, whilst we expect to work with private or angel investors in the future, we know the crowdfunding process will produce collateral and credibility which will aid us in future funding rounds. Launching the campaign on a platform like Seedrs also gets your campaign and company loads of exposure — never a bad thing and a distinct advantage of crowdfunding over other funding channels. We’re aiming to raise £80,000 [and] these funds will give us sufficient runway to fund an aggressive marketing plan that will build the business up to £1million annual turnover, grow our gardener network so we have deep coverage in every major UK city and, if we overfund, we will also build a new online garden design service.
Thanks to fastgardener, are private and commercial gardens all around the UK about to be majorly spruced up?
Yes! Book online at www.fastgardener.com — it only takes seconds — and your garden will thank you for it. And here’s an incentive: use code DPR1705 before the end of August 2017 and get £5 off.