Landscaping is the practice of bringing a stretch of dirt, rocks and greenery into beautifully sculpted grounds with grasses, shrubs, blooms, trees and water features carefully balanced for color, emotion and viewing pleasure. In the last 50 years, an ever-expanding number of property owners have been posing the question: Why not continue this gorgeous display into the night?

"About 13 years ago, I was working for a landscape nursery doing landscape design and installation," says Frank Douglas, a landscape designer in Tallahassee, Fla. "I had a landscaping client who said that she wanted to do some lighting. It started a whole line of business that's led up to making $180,000 last year, and will probably top $200,000 this year. It's almost all through people seeing my work and word of mouth, and people wanting lighting installed within their landscaping."

Douglas has found landscape lighting to be economical in terms of cost doing business. "Lighting is very, very low overhead. You just need a pickup truck with a little ladder rack or a pipe rack on top, enough just to get your supplies around. I've gotten to where I can install a $5,000 system in a day with myself and one helper."

Douglas partnered with Nightscaping®, a lighting company. "My impression when I was starting up, like a lot of the buying public, was that low-voltage lighting was cheap stuff that fell apart," Douglas says. "I came to find out very quickly that Nightscaping's® product was anything but that."

A contractor came to work with Douglas and helped him design and install his first job. He had never performed electrical work and, in fact, claims to have never even spliced a wire. When they flipped the switch on that first installation, he was sold. "That first night when the lights came on, my jaw dropped and I said, this is for me, this is going to be great."

Douglas started installing lighting jobs on the weekends as a side business in addition to his landscaping. At the time, lighting was not common in Tallahassee, but he found that after completing a few jobs, word spread, others started to see the installations, and the business continued to grow. Now, he says he doesn't have to "sell" jobs at all; customers call him after seeing one of his installations and being referred to him.

Douglas was enrolled in a program called Nightscaping® University, a weeklong training where he learned about design, installation and more. "There was discussions of nighttime photography, technical and marketing issues and how to expand your client base," Douglas says. "In addition to the technical information, the thing I really enjoyed was the roundtables with other contractors from all over the country in which we could compare stories and swap ideas, share opinions, ideas and knowledge."

Other training and business aids available from the company include Information on Demand, shared information from the experience of a pro, CDs on a range of products and techniques, workshops to introduce products and techniques and a computer drawing program called DynaSCAPE3.

Douglas has found the company's support to be first-rate. "I'll never forget when I was doing a job, and I'd only been doing it for a couple years. They'd set up this new style of transformer, and I didn't know how to wire it right. I was out there in the yard at 5:30 or 6 in the evening and I got on my cell phone to Nightscaping®. Next thing I know, Bill Locklin, the president of the company, is on the phone telling me what to do."

It wasn't long before Douglas discovered another way to generate income from landscape lighting. Being in his best promotional interest to make sure an installation looked perfect with no burned-out bulbs, he decided to implement a maintenance program. He sent out a mailing inviting his customers to sign up; the majority of them did, and he hired extra help to service them. Most customers are on a quarterly program, so every three months the maintenance worker checks over a system and makes sure all lights are connected, working and aimed correctly.

After five years of continued expansion, Douglas went to work as a landscape designer with Tallahassee Nursery, bringing the lighting business with him. Now, instead of a side venture, it is incorporated into the nursery's many offerings.

For more information, visit www.nightscaping.com

©2007 by Moose River Publishing, reprinted with permission

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Question Of the Week...

Q: When using the Nightscaping® Dominator control system, can I use a second timing function to control lights wired straight into the Powercenter^(TM)?

A: No, any additional timing function will interfere with the Dominator causing it to not operate properly.  If you have additional lights that you do not want wired into the Dominator system, Nightscaping® recommends that you use a second Powercenter^(TM) with the timing system of your choice.

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