02 Sep How to Hire the Right Custom LED Landscape lighting Designer/Builder
By Mike Gambino
Who you hire to help build your custom LED landscape Lighting system will be a huge determining factor for your project’s success.
The challenge is, you likely want to know if a designer builder is the right fit for your project before you’ve started working together. You don’t want to waste time and/or money working with someone who might not be the right fit.
The most important things to look at to assess about a landscape lighting designer builder before starting a project are:
- Quality of work. How well does his/her past work fit within the project you’re looking to do?
- Quality of communication. Whether it’s offsite or in-person, how well does he/she communicate information?
- Ability to execute. What can we expect in terms of timelines and process when working with him/her? Has he/she executed well before?
1 Assessing quality of work
Ask for a business website and at least 3 past project samples
An experienced designer/builder should have a business website and easily be able to point to at least 3 examples of past work that relates to your project.
Don’t just look at the visual appeal of their past projects. Click through the project gallery of their portfolio and note how you feel as you go through them. As you click around, do you like the signature style the designer conveys in his or her designs?
Apart from clicking the links and looking at the projects, you should also find out what role the design/build professional you’re looking at hiring played on each example project. What did they contribute? Designing the project would be a much different role than designing the system and actually being involved in the supervision and physical installation itself of the project.
When you’re reviewing the work, look for projects similar in scope to yours. A great designer who built unrelated projects to yours may have been the right fit for that job but might not be the right fit for designing and installing your landscape lighting.
If you’re prospect does not have a vast collection of high quality photos on their website, then it can be more challenging to review past work. While it’s hard not to evaluate past work based on how it looks, that’s not always the fairest representation of what was done, especially when it comes to landscape lighting.
Instead, ask the lighting professional you’re looking at working with if you can message a past client or two to see if there have been any problems after the system was installed that were related to the work done or products provided by the designer builder you’re thinking of hiring.
Ask any creative professional you’re looking to hire for at least 3 examples of past projects similar to yours and understand what level of contribution they had on each of these projects. Relate this back to the type of work you need to determine if there’s a level of experience from similar projects that would make him/her a good potential fit for your project.
2 Assess quality of communication
Have at least 1 phone call or in-person meeting before hiring
At first, it may seem like the quality of work is the most important thing to hiring the right creative professional, but from our experience, working with someone who is a strong communicator is just as valuable, if not more.
Before choosing to work with a designer or builder, it’s a good idea to have a call to get a feel for his/her ability to communicate. After seeing the portfolio of a designer, you might feel excited and ready to start the project right away. But it’s important to not just look at the quality of past work as the only qualification to hire someone.
Emailing back-and-forth is good, but having at least one conversation by phone or in person can reveal more about what it might be like working together than almost anything else. You’ll get a much stronger idea if your your communication styles are in sync or not. During the project you’ll be communicating regularly, so it’s important to at least get a taste for how this feels before you start.
When we have a call or meeting with a home or property owner we’re looking to work with, we often like to discuss the level of communication they expect to have on the project and ask how he/she typically likes to keep updated. There are many ways to communicate during a project: weekly emails, calls, a project management tool, or a combination of these things. Make sure it’s clear how communication will flow during the project and that the designer/builder you’re looking to work with will be comfortable working that way.
No matter how good the designs, how fast the build, or how amazing the result, poor communication will sink projects and end client relationships even faster than a poor performing products.
Make sure you know what communication expectations you have and discuss those before you hire anyone. Even if they change during the project, setting these expectations for communication before a project starts will help remove the most common way projects go wrong: poor communication.
3 Assess ability to execute
Get at least 3 references from past clients
An idea doesn’t exist without execution. To find out about a professional’s ability to execute, ask for at least 3 references from past clients and/or project collaborators.
Contact each reference and ask these questions:
- Was work delivered on time?
- Did the project stay on budget?
- How happy are you with the end result and how have things held up?
At the same time, input from references might hold more or less weight depending on what you’re building. For instance, if you need to work with a designer/builder to light up a residential backyard, a reference from a past commercial client that needed a sign lighted would probably not be the most valid.
Ideally, ask for references where the designer or developer you’re looking to hire had to deliver on a project that was similar in scope to yours.
Speaking with references can give you feel for how a designer/builder works and executes on a project. But at the same time, references shouldn’t be the only thing you use to make the decision of who to hire. There’s a good chance most client references you get will be good. After all, they will likely be provided by the designer or builder you’re looking to hire. Yet these references can still give you insight into someone else’s experience working with the designer or builder you’re thinking about hiring, especially if you ask the right questions.
If you’re still not sure Start with a small project
If you’re not sure about hiring a professional for a project, you can make things less risky by working on a small part of the project. This will give you a shot at seeing what it’s like working together when the stakes aren’t as high. By doing a small, initial project, this is a way to ‘date before getting married’ so to speak, and ensures both you and your creative professional feel comfortable before committing on a long-term project.
For larger projects, it’s common to set up a first milestone, which could be used as your initial project. By doing a smaller initial project, you’ll likely get the strongest idea of a designer or builder’s work quality, communication, and ability to execute compared to anything else you could evaluate.
Finding the right people to work with is one of the most challenging parts of any project. Businesses regularly cite ‘hiring the right people’ as the biggest challenge they face so don’t beat yourself up if you miss the mark hiring someone. Companies spend millions of dollars trying to hire, train, and retain good people.
By following the steps above, you’ll increase your chances of hiring the right people. It’s not easy to get it perfect every time, and chance is always a factor when it comes to hiring companies (people). The point is to balance this chance with a few more data points and push the odds in your favor.
As a reference, here’s a summary of the steps mentioned here:
- Assess quality of work by asking for a Business website and at least 3 past project samples.
- Assess quality of communication by having at least 1 phone call and in-person meeting before hiring.
- Assess ability to execute by getting at least 3 references from past clients
This landscape lighting blog is published by Mike Gambino of Gambino landscape lighting inc. all rights reserved. Mike is a professional 
landscape lighting system designer/ builder and has been designing, installing and maintaining landscape lighting systems for more than 26 years. Mike resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife and 2 sons. To visit his website go to Gambinolighting.com . To inquire about hiring Mike please click here .- Blog articles may be published with permission on other websites without editing or removing links.
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