COMPANY PROFILE
2014
Life Green Group
+27 11 959 1000 | www.lifegreengroup.co.za
company profile
The big green gardening team Editorial: Helen Lake Production: Hal Hutchison
The Life Green Group provides landscaping and horticultural services to a vast number of clients across South Africa, primarily in Gauteng. IndustrySA speaks to Founding Director, Oscar Lockwood, about their work, their young workforce and their visions of a greener future.
Life Green Group has been around for 10 years, although Founding Director Oscar Lockwood and his partner Deighton Clegg have been in the industry together for more than 30 years. Previously, they owned a company that started in 1984 - around the same time as Sandton began development. With that company, they created many of the gardens that beautify Sandton’s office parks and complexes today, and having built good relationships, are being called back as Life Green Group to maintain and recreate those gardens after building work has taken place. They originally started Life Green Group as a way of maintaining the creative side of landscaping and gardening in an industry that was becoming corporatised and profit driven. As a result, the company has seen great success from the outset, developing into a business with three fruitful divisions: Life Indoors, Life Sports Turf and Life Landscapes. Each division has its own complex needs. Life Indoors supplies indoor plants and
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gardens which the company maintain, sending in teams to water and tend to plants on a daily or weekly basis. Life Sports Turf is a very specialised division as laying foundations for golf courses and sports fields is very precise work that uses specialised equipment and skilled individuals to operate that equipment. Life Landscapes specialise in bedding in gardens and horticulture, often on a large scale, with distinct maintenance programmes in place. “All three divisions have continual ongoing maintenance. With the indoor plants, we come every week and water the plants and do whatever else needs to be done to them. On the landscaping side, we still have to maintain these office parks that we put together – whether it’s an office park or a hotel complex or whatever it is, we still have to look after the gardens themselves. Then obviously, with all the fields we do, they also require service every single week. In fact, most of them require service daily. On the really big sites, our teams stay
Life Green Group
on site, they never leave,” Lockwood explains.
KEEPING THE COMPANY YOUNG With approximately 1000 people working for Life Green Group in maintenance teams and management positions, one would think they needed people with skills and experience, but actually, the company likes to keep young blood coming into the business. “Our preference is to take people from scratch and train them our way, but it doesn’t exclude us looking at other people from the industry. We know the industry and the industry knows us,” Lockwood says, “Deighton and I are not young anymore and it’s good to get the new energy and the new computer skills and that new way of thinking – and I like that young energy in the business.” Even though the majority of their work is hands on, outdoors work, having technologically minded staff is of high importance to the smooth running of the day to day business.
“On a maintenance contract there is horticulture, but a lot of the horticulture is programmed - we fertilise all in the same month, we top dress in the same month, we compost in the same couple of months. Unless it’s a one off problem that has occurred on a site, a lot of it actually is repetitive work and you have to be really organised in your repetitive work,” says Lockwood. Another aspect for them to consider is the necessity to document and report on any damage to a site, keeping clients abreast of what is going on and also as evidence of repair work. Many young people already have the skills required to fulfil this need. “A lot of the time we are reporting to these facilities management companies and/or property companies and you need to take photographs to document the damage that might have been done by a truck that drove over the lawn. If you don’t photograph it and document it, you will end up doing a repair job and not getting paid for it. So
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company profile there are some limited skills required to do the reporting and the merging of the photographs.” Not to mention the staff management that takes place, with teams of up to 200 people, the managers need to be able to keep track of leave and rotas and this also requires limited skills in computers and mobile communication, as Lockwood explains: “It’s a lot of organisation and a lot of communication and a lot of that communication is mobile now – all the youngsters have got that automatically.” Along with the youngsters benefiting the company, Life Green is also investing time and energy into these young people, giving them the skills they need to succeed. “They’re always learning because we don’t go and make decisions without them. We tell them why we’re making that decision, what the decision is and we discuss it. So the next time they have the same problem, they don’t have to call me. They can actually make that decision themselves,” says Lockwood.
ICONIC CONTRACTS Life Green Group was recently awarded the
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maintenance contract for Sun City who, after 37 years with their previous contractor, decided to change. “For us it was iconic that they chose us and it is also iconic in terms of the botanical offer that Sun City has – it is a very special garden designed by a very special man who some people call a genius and I think he is.” Lockwood is referring to the Landscape Architect, Patrick Watson, who designed the Palace Gardens and the Lost City Jungle. “It’s nice to have those kind of jobs, you know, they’re good to do. What’s really nice about the Sun City contract is that it’s an inspirational contract – you get excited when you go there. It’s a job that even if you’ve been doing gardening for 30 years, you can go there and get inspired by it because it’s so clever and so well done.” In 2013, Life Green Group was the overall winner of the South African Landscapers Institute (SALI) Shield for Excellence in Landscaping for the work they did on the Alexander Forbes Head Office in Sandton. The contract required the movement of large amounts of soil and horticulture up all seven floors and even trees as far up as the seventh floor
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We SPECIALISE in: •
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Sports construction utilising artificial synthetic turf for football( full field and five-aside), hockey fields and cricket pitches as well as multipurpose arenas/surfaces (football, tennis, hockey and cricket)
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Inflatable football arenas for team building, corporate functions, private events, and fundraising.
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5-A-SIDE football agencies under the AFRICA UNITED FOOTBALL FIVES brand.
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company profile
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Life Green Group itself. “That’s a special job in itself and something that we’re very proud of,” Lockwood tells us.
TAKING IT GREEN
LO O K
F O R T H E
H A N D T H AT
C O U N T S
One of the values at the very core of the Life Green Group is their determination to have a positive effect on greener practises in gardening. “When we came back into the industry, one of the opening statements that Deighton and I made is that anybody can mow lawn, you just need a van and some lawn mowers and you can mow lawn. We didn’t want to be that kind of maintenance company, we wanted to be a company that was going to be green because fundamentally, we are green people,” Lockwood says, “We are the one bunch of contractors that somebody would employ on a site which can actually motivate a different way of thinking… People may like it or not like it, but they will know, for example, that there is a compost heap or some kind of composting system on that property which relates directly to their own garden.” The company is finding, however, that most clients and businesses are responding positively with a big push to start reducing
the carbon footprint of business in and around Johannesburg. “We’ve found that businesses are taking us on very positively and, in fact, are asking us to report on our contribution to the carbon foot print saving they’re making on their properties,” Lockwood says. In fact, the company can get involved in other parts of their clients’ operations to help assist in greener running of the site. “The second phase of the greening, composting and reducing of the carbon foot print is to try look at the kitchen waste and find ways of absorbing the kitchen waste into the compost system and we’re doing that quite successfully on quite a few sites. That’s proving to be a further carbon foot print saving on the sites themselves. Some of the companies that we’re doing this with now are asking us to separate the cardboard and the paper and the plastic for them and they organise to get it taken away,” Lockwood explains. This movement towards a greener way of life for businesses is a priority to Life Green Group and something they base many of their business practises on, an example of which is questioning
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company profile whether the use of pesticides and herbicides is necessary and if so, what types they should be using. Another aspect of this is reliance of wildlife on things like urban islands and water features. “These islands are massive receivers of wildlife in the evenings, where they may roost or nest. They find a safe place of refuge because these office parks are quite quiet in the evenings,” says Lockwood, “There’s a big push and I think it’s probably the next generation of gardening… I think we need to find ways of becoming positive contributors to the greater environment that we’re living in. I don’t propose any job that we do unless I actually propose that process because I think it’s important. Whether the client takes it or not is irrelevant, but we propose that process.”
A GROWING FUTURE The Life Green Group is expanding very quickly, a clear mark of their achievements, but Lockwood
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expresses that they are cautious of expanding too quickly. “We’re growing really fast. I always believe that you can’t grow a business faster than 30% (a year) because your staff won’t be able to keep up… If you’re growing at faster than 30%, your wheels are starting to rattle a bit. We like to keep it at 30% and we’ve done that every year, considering we’ve never bought a business and we are 10 years old now. We have definitely exceeded 30% growth compounded. We’ll carry on doing that.” At the moment, this is certainly set to continue with one of their current contracts being a major one, Lockwood tells us: “It’s for a large shopping centre in Port Elizabeth. It’s a very big contract. It’s big landscaping on a massive scale with thousands of trees going in.” And so, even after their 30 years in the industry, a decade of which they have spent running the Life Green Group, Lockwood has this to say: “We love what we do. We’re passionate gardeners.”
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Gearhouse SA
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