Our businesses began for different reasons.
Some of us were pushed, some businesses were born of necessity. Some have a Liam-Neeson-level skillset in the pond industry and built a business around it. Some worked for others and were ready to create their own designs. Some bought something established, but if you’re reading this, it doesn’t really matter how you started. We’re here.
You’re good with people. A steady operator with a good team, a solo traveller who obsesses every detail or the steward of a long-trusted brand. Being a good pond builder is one thing. Business is a ballgame all on its own, but you know that already. Business is not a single skill, but you’d know that, too.
What you might not know is there’s a powerful marriage between operations and marketing in business, especially in the business of ponds.
To build the future we want for your business, we first need to address the goal. Then? Then we can reverse engineer it.
Noise, Goals & Pathways
There’s a lot of noise around how to build, fix and elevate your business. So many areas to improve. Time management, presentation, branding, asset management, inbox management. Not just keeping leads warm but, I mean, the EMAILS! Incessant daily spam from everyone you’ve ever bought something from. The messages about your Meta account being in breach, or generic “Hey, I came across your webpage and I’ve noticed something about your SEO. Can I send you a plan?” The silver-bullet-selling algorithm gurus directing you to every project management software, AI hack, and short course ever made. It’s a firehose of buy, buy, buy with a frequency that makes even the steadiest operator doubt what they already know, but dealing with all that noise is not the goal.
The goal is building a business and team that maintains quality whether you are running your eyes over it or not. Steady work. Warm leads. Meeting deadlines, without the burnout. A business you can train others in, on site and in the office. Something you can take a holiday from knowing the feedback from clients will be the same. Better, even. A business you could sell, one day, if you wanted.
Operations and marketing walk hand in hand here. A strong communication strategy brings the two into alignment, and that alignment is where the real work happens. Done well, it streamlines your admin time, builds the internal framework of your business and elevates the journey you and your clients take together. Warmer leads. Educated clients. Onboarding systems for staff that educate, reducing friction and paving the way for long-term retention.
To create an effective communication strategy, we take our goal and work backward. Understanding silver bullets aren’t real and quick fixes don’t last. Taking the time to course-correct will be the most cost-effective and lasting strategy you make. Starting there? We can make a solid plan.
The plan starts and ends with clarity.
A Clear Pathway
When I’m getting a clear picture of a business, I focus on three key foundations: service clarity, identifiers and values.
Service clarity is nuanced, but relatively cut and dried. We look at what kind of water features you do. What line of products you work with. If you provide landscaping or hardscaping. In parts of Australia, you need certain licenses and qualifications to provide decking and retaining walls over a certain height, for example. If your services include maintenance and repairs. If they do, is it all water features, or do you only repair and maintain your own? Do you advise DIY pond builders, or sell your designs? The list goes on.
Then there are your identifiers. Your qualifications. Time in trade. Where you operate. If you’re set up to work on commercial and municipal projects. Unique skillsets or partnerships that set you apart. Understanding your unique layering of skills and life experiences subtly frames your business. If you have a history with permaculture or nurseries or perhaps you have a background in construction.
The third foundation is your values. Your culture and approach to customer service. How you like to operate. How you want your clients to feel when they work with you. What you value in ‘good’ customer service which impacts what your clients can expect and what you expect from your team.
For those of you thinking, ‘good customer service is good customer service,’ you’re missing the point. Good customer service looks different in every business. At McDonald’s, the service is expected to be fast, convenient and relatively polite. At places like Karen’s Diner and Dick’s Last Resort, the service is intentionally rude. It’s part of the draw. In a spa, the service is calm, attentive and timely. But if we were waiting for the cable guy? We would probably just be happy if they turned up. Industry, region and operators have strong influences over the perception of good customer service. The key is knowing what it looks like in yours.
Once we’ve fleshed out the fabric of your business, we can start to map how it plays out in real time.
Mapping it Out
Your customer journey is first laid in touchstones, then completed with a wider view of the full customer experience. This mapping process produces an operations framework with room for brand and marketing inclusions. It provides a framework to manage your client’s expectations. It qualifies your leads. Provides groundwork for the systems you need, informs the capabilities of any project management software you engage. It provides stronger outlines around the processes you’re happy to let go of, identifying the potential hires you can make.
Let’s separate customer touchstones from the customer journey.
Touchstones refer to points of customer contact, universal to your clients. The customer journey exceeds active communication with your business and considers the full experience your clients undergo when you’re engaged. Allow me to clarify.
While there are other businesses in the pond industry, including retail from nurseries through to pumps and liners, we’ll look at touchstones and customer journey through the lenses of a pond building business, with a focus on the design, construct and pond ownership process. For those of you with pond maintenance and repair businesses, you’ll know those services have their own rhythms and associated processes. For the purposes of this article, we’ll just keep it simple.
The touchstones for pond builders are: first contact, qualifying, consult, design and quote, build, handover and care. Your customer’s journey exceeds those points and includes considering water features, searching their area, finding you, exploring your business through your website, socials and reviews. The verification process begins before they make the first call, send the first message or like their first post.
Once they’ve started talking to you, their customer journey includes the tools you’ve given them to communicate with their other decision-makers about your capabilities, the value you can bring to the project. How you’ve equipped your interested party to extend the power of your message and rapport beyond that initial conversation. This is where client education comes in to support the customer journey, but we’re not quite there, yet.
The customer journey
The customer journey is very much about how you make your clients feel. We’ve covered what happens around the first conversation. Let’s explore what happens for your clients after that.
You get to the stage they want you in for an onsite consult. How do you let them know you’re coming? Setting reminders in the calendar for you both, or do you still just shoot them a text or an email? Are you still manually communicating routine processes, or missing appointments because one of the parties forgot? After you’ve provided an onsite consult, how long will it take to provide a comprehensive design and quote? Do you send them an email after the consult, thanking them for their time and providing an ETA to prevent the ‘when can I expect this’ follow-up email? And we all fall behind sometimes. Do you have a follow up template when deadlines get extended and the timeframe needs adjusting, or are we hoping they’ll hang in there a little longer?
The customer journey includes what happens when shipments stall or rain delays a project. It includes what it’s like for your customers when your team is on site. It’s delivering things on time, giving your clients the tools to operate the feature once it’s completed. Making sure your clients have reasonable expectations in what it takes to maintain a closed aquatic ecology. How they predator proof their pond. How to spot a problem, how to deal with it and when it’s time to call the professionals.
The goal is to provide such a high-level service that, when opportunities to showcase the project in video projects, Open Pond Tours or garden shows, your clients opt-in without reservation. They jump at the chance to write a testimonial or review. They feed their social circles with excitement about their new pond, and how they got it. The unbeatable power of word-of-mouth referrals.
So how do we take these touchstones and customer experiences and turn it into a framework that builds a resilient business?
It’s time to talk communication. But how to begin?
A Practical Plan
It would be simple enough to say, “Start small. Email templates, administrative systems that support the customer journey.” Without a strategy or visual maps, that stuff is a great foundation, but – honestly? – it’s not very exciting. It can be very dry and if you don’t know the next step, it would be easy to give up and say it doesn’t work.
Trust me when I say, if you’re in business, this is the only thing that works. No matter your industry. Every time.
Communication strategies are built through three key areas: internal, external and client education.
Internal communication is more than templates and administrative systems that support your customer journey. Policies and procedures establish and preserve your company culture. They guide how your customers are treated, how your team treats each other. They hold the tools to maintain your standards. Important things like upholding the quality of work. ‘Common sense’ things like your team remembering not to park clients in, play music too loud or be a cause for conversation between neighbors. Outside interest in the project, of course.
Part of creating a healthy company culture is spelling out what you want to be ‘common’ in your business. I know it’s easy to throw our hands up and say certain things ‘should’ be done in a certain way but we’re all just people. We’re all living with our own version normal, with our own blind spots and bad habits picked up over time. Documenting how you want your team to turn up and be mindful in their duties is one of the privileges we get as business owners. With all the pain and energy it takes to run a business, one of the things we really get a say in is your company culture. To carve out a little space in our corner of the world so it resembles something that feels right for you, the people you work with and the people who engage you to bring their water feature dreams to life.
Client Education
Do you have points in your process where you find your clients require more depth and breadth in the information you provide? Client education is the solution. Where service clarity defines what you offer and customer journey is how people experience it, client education defines how confidently everyone moves through it together.
The need for stronger client education tends to show up around the touchstones in your customer journey. The way I support my clients is by developing robust stage-based information documents and magazines, both digitally and in print. The big ones are initial contact and handover, though this will vary. A wider range of services, commercial clients, early education centres, or properties with boards and committees will each bring their own layer of complexity. Sometimes the call for stronger client education is localized – weather or pest related.
You will know where you need stronger client education because you will get frequent communication about the same things. It can take years to identify and address the knowledge gaps in your business. That is normal. But every time you create a proactive document that addresses the knowledge gap, your clients will immediately start making faster, more informed decisions.
External Communication
If your internal communication is the backbone of how your business runs, your external communication is the face of it. Your branding, your marketing, your presence in the world. And like everything else in your communication strategy, it works best when it tells the same story.
Marketing works best when it feels like you. Not a version polished beyond recognition, but the real expression of your business: what you do, how you do it, and why people should care.
Understanding what makes your business tick makes your message stronger. Finding content ideas is not anywhere near as daunting. It reflects your personality, your processes and your projects. Your website and assets will be informed not just by your services, but your unique take on your trade. Copy, photography, videography, graphic design and events are all just tools to tell the story you now know so well. I unpack this further in my POND Trade article on industry awards, which explores how one builder used their brand story to powerful effect.
So Now We Begin
Having an overarching communication strategy for your business is not a nice to have. It is a must have for serious operators. These foundations will not silence the noise, but they will give you the tools to recognise it, manage and tune it out.
Operations and marketing are often treated as separate entities. Oil and water, never blending. While the skill sets are often quite different, they’re both forms of communication. They have different shapes and different immediate purposes but, long-term? Long term they share the same goal. It’s up to us to set it up.
About the author:
Zara Graham is is an Operations & Development Consultant with a specialty in Pond Building businesses. Starting Zara Graham Consulting in 2020, she first worked with ponds from the client’s side of Waterscapes Australia’s Lake Gkula project in 2019 and has been working with pond builders ever since.
