JGS Group AU

For the love of Roses - inspired by Ella

I have always loved roses but had never offered rose pruning to my clients. But that was about to change, and I soon found out that there was a way to care for roses and to focus on pruning them the right way was very important.

When Ella first introduced me to the right way to prune roses, that moment certainly changed my life, and I knew it would help my business. Finding the courage to move forward was going to be a challenge though. Ella cared enough to take time out of her already busy life to show me how to care about roses. At the time, I believed I would fail and told her that there was no way I could do it the same way as she showed me. But she believed in me and told me I could do it.

Before I share my love of roses with you, let me tell you a little about Ella.

Ella was a beautiful person, she treated everyone equally. She has a great family, and she may have had her favourite, but she never made it known who it was. She was always there for her family and friends if they needed her. Ella took me under her wing and helped me grow as a person. That’s right, she helped me grow just like I now help roses grow and I care for them just like she cared for me.

Ella has a special place in my heart because she believed in me. She was down to earth with me, and she didn’t let me get away with feeling sorry for myself. Instead, she encouraged me to do more.

Before I started pruning roses, I was just someone who rode around on my pushbike doing lawns and a little garden work. When I started pruning roses for clients, they put their trust in me and they trusted me to care for their roses. And I did. At first, I was extremely nervous, but my heart kept telling me I can do this. In my heart Ella’s belief in me kept me going.

Back then I was mainly providing garden services for local clients and those services included lawn mowing, whipper snipping and weeding. I set up my gardening business back in 2005 and I continue to grow my business and I am passionate about doing what I do in a positive and rewarding way.

I have expanded my business focusing every year on providing a rose pruning service to ensure everyone who has roses has beautiful roses every year. I had always loved roses, but it took a friend and neighbour to show me how to prune roses the right way. That friend was Ella.

I continue to grow my business because I made a promise to her that I would continue to grow my business and put as much love and passion into doing things right so that my clients are happy with the services I provide.

When Ella taught me how to prune roses, I watched her carefully and told her there was no way I could do that. I was sure I would screw it up, but Ella said she believed in me and trusted me to pruned roses the right way.

I was providing gardening services and still do but with her trust and belief in me, my business has grown incredibly and one of things I love specialising in is rose pruning.

Every year I look after my client’s roses and since COVID started I believe my clients enjoy seeing their roses blooming and being cared for by someone who loves roses. I have new service for people in the Perth area where I come and care for your roses every month.

As of today, I have pruned quite a few roses and it is looking like my best year ever. But I will continue to ensure I look after as many roses as I possibly can. It feels like a dream doing something I love every day. Rose Pruning is seasonal, but I also look and care for roses throughout the year.

If you have roses and want to keep them looking beautiful, disease free healthy, please contact me.

This year I also want to remember my trusty companion.
My friend and family member Porcia, my beautiful dog is now in heaven with Ella. She was my companion and I loved her dearly and I know in my heart she is in a better place with Ella looking out for her. RIP Porcia.

In Memory of Ella – I will always prune and care for roses the way she showed me how!

It's July it means rose pruning times I would be happy to come out for a quote to have a look at your roses

Celebrating 16 Years!

Dreams can come true…

If you had told me that over 16 years ago, I would never have believed it.

This year, 2021 I am celebrating 16 years in business, but I would be lying if I told you, it was easy, I would be lying if I told you everything just fell in my lap and everything is smooth sailing…
Life when I was growing up was tough. A child is supposed to be cared for, looked after, and loved. A child should have been encouraged to grow. One would think a teacher would help you grow, and parents would protect you and offer encouragement. But something happened and that support, love and encouragement missed me.

Instead, I lived in a world of abuse. I felt worthless. I lacked self-esteem and even my teachers reminded me that I was a failure. I hated life. I didn’t want to live in my world anymore.
I did manage to get through some schooling and growing up I hung out with the wrong crowd. I felt everything I wanted to do was going to be a challenge especially when no one had confidence in me.

When I was in school, I was put down and laughed at when I told the teacher I wanted to be a businessman. I wanted to be a successful businessman. But back then I really had no idea what sort of business I wanted to run but I wanted to prove to everyone that I could do this, I was going to succeed.

So, I gave up on so many things because I was always told I was good for nothing and if you believe it then nothing goes well, and I was often in trouble …

Thinking back on my life it didn’t help that a family member took a liking to me and abused me sending what confidence and self-respect I may have had to the deepest pit on earth. I had to get out before I hurt someone. I ended up leaving the country I was born in and came to Australia. It wasn’t easy and living the way I did was hard. I hung out with the wrong people, but I really wanted to find a job.

I needed to prove that I could do something with my life…
I needed to make a name for myself and by leaving New Zealand felt like it was the only way I could do that. The put downs and the abuse I suffered at the hands of people I trusted, increased the desire to move away from my home in New Zealand to Australia where I could start my life over.

Leaving New Zealand though meant starting from scratch. I only had a few things and a small amount of money.

I lived in a guest or boarding house for a while because I really couldn’t afford anything else. I found a job and kept working in Brisbane and I felt I kept going round and round in circles and I really my life wasn’t changing very much. I really wanted to start my own business, but not in Brisbane. I made the decision to move to Perth.

I found a place to live and discovered life was still tough and some days were much harder than others. I had my trusty push bike though and with that, I got to work. I started lawn mowing. It wasn’t much but it was a job. It was my job and my business.

I pushed my lawn mower to each job; I carried my whipper snipper and blower around the streets of Nollamara and Westminster for one year and after that I needed to do more than just mow lawns. I saw an ad for a guy that made trailers for push bikes and asked him to make me one. I was set. I continued like that for quite a few years until I met Ella.

Ella was my neighbour, and we were talking in her garden one day. She showed me how to prune roses and how to do it the right way. I told her that there was no way I could ever do that. Her response was… ‘yes you can…’

I watched her prune roses and all the while she was encouraging me to move forward and try, I have never looked back. I love to rose prune so much; it is now a passion of mine to encourage clients to look after their roses with my help.

Ella trusted and believed in me, and we became good friends, and I became close to her family also.

Life isn’t always easy. Ella taught me so many things and she also showed me how to adapt to change and how to add rose pruning to the services I could offer. But life is always built on challenges as well and I almost gave up my business because when Ella was hit with that horrible disease called cancer, I found it too hard to go on. I didn’t want to go on because Ella was the only person in my life to believe in me. She encouraged me.

I sunk into a depression that was so hard I was prepared to give up everything, but Ella’s family had other ideas. They told me that Ella would want me to continue doing what I do best. Looking after my client’s gardens and pruning roses.

They have always supported me and with Ella’s passing they are there for me when I need help.

Ella showed me how to grow as a person and how to be a person who can adapt to some changes. Her words have stuck with me today and if it wasn’t for Ella, I would never have had the confidence in myself and in my ability to grow my business.

Starting my business and growing my business has improved my life. Before she died, I made her a promise that I would build my business.

With that confidence I got on my bike and continued visiting the customers I had and even found some new ones as well. With her belief in me I knew I could grow my business. I was terrified when I turned up for the first rose pruning job. In fact, I was shaking but I could still hear Ella telling me I could do this, and I did.

Moving on though I have never thought running a business was easy… 16 years ago I started John’s Gardening Service. It was just me. I even had a website built because that is what a business does. Having the right tools in place to run a business helps it grow.

But again, it wasn’t all smooth sailing, but I certainly learnt to overcome problems even when one web developer lost my online presence after taking over from another developer, it was just an issue that had to be dealt with. Fortunately, at that time I had already talked to Toni who made a backup copy of my website for me just in case something went wrong.

Little did I know that the other guy would delete it before he worked on a new website for me. I quickly declined his offer to assist because he had no back up at all and I realised he didn’t know what he was really doing. I called Toni and asked if she could help and knowing the urgency, she was able to get my old website back up and running very quickly and we then went on to talk about building a new one.

But I was limited to what I could do because it was still just me.
Back in 2013 I realised my business wasn’t growing so I made the decision it was time to take on people to help me and that could help make my business grow. It was at this time I decided to upgrade from my pushbike and trailer to a Ute. I needed a Ute to get around with my brother so we could travel further, and we could provide a gardening service to more people. At that time, I was only providing domestic garden service.

In 2014 my business kept growing and in 2015 when I had my first call from a commercial business. I wasn’t confident but I tried not to show it. They called me because they weren’t happy with the other business providing that service. I listened to what was being said and what they needed and put a quote together.

By 2016 another business, a real estate business called me and wanted me to go and quote a job. It was at this time that I spoke to Toni, and we started making changes to everything I was doing to cover commercial business. Toni did everything she could with the website and even though Google took a while to start showing I was providing commercial gardening services; it finally took off.

Remember I said that I never had it easy? Well back in 2017 for whatever reason businesses were struggling. I was starting to feel worried I would lose everything. And when I heard another guy talking about his business struggling, I made the decision that I had come too far to let my business fail. I called Toni and we talked about it.

It was a case that if normally waiting for someone to call didn’t work then it was time to think outside the box and try something different. I’d never seen myself as a person to drop flyers into people’s letter boxes or drop into businesses and drop my cards off. But I did. And to top it off I started another business, which didn’t quite work out, but it hasn’t stopped me. I have continued growing my business.

Through 2018 & 2019, I grew my business even more introducing high-pressure cleaning, some handy man services, some small landscaping jobs and more. And I now travel further to see clients and to work with them to improve the look of their gardens and properties.

Now one of my issues is I hate change and I really don’t like it when things go wrong and in any business things will go wrong. Through 2017 I lost my temper quite a bit because I want things to be perfect and I expected everyone to drop things and be on the same page as me. I have learnt to calm down and think before I say things. My anger issues stem back to when I was treated poorly, and I have had to learn how to deal with that.

Toni has helped me and so has Ella’s family which is good. I have also had to learn to work with others because I can’t do everything myself. My brother Robert works with me, and he gets up in the morning and does the work that I ask him to do. But I won’t say it is easy.

I have also taken on others in that time and especially when I needed help with a landscaping job. Unfortunately, I trusted the wrong person and the job was not up to scratch. My mistake was trusting him to do it properly when I discovered he really didn’t know how to work as a professional and because I was busy working on other jobs, I couldn’t be there to project managed the job.

I learnt by my mistakes and even though the rest of the job was great, I lost a customer because of this poor workmanship of this other guy. And no, I am not going to name him as I believe it is now in the past and I have moved on.

2019 was a huge year. My business continued to grow, and I was working on many different gardening projects for small business, commercial and domestic clients.
I felt on top of the world. We had introduced different ways to grow my business and made plans to push rose pruning, landscaping and other services that I was keen to improve on.

At the end of 2019, Covid happened. It was at the end of 2019, but it wasn’t here in Australia yet… and then it happened. In March 2020, the Ruby Princess sailed into Sydney with sick people on board. And someone screwed up by letting all those passengers off. They travelled everywhere taking it with them and spreading it around the country.

I was scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought I would lose my business and I had some heated discussions with Toni. All I could do was see what happened. At one stage they were talking about shutting everyone down, go into lockdown and it did happen for a short time, and I had to postpone some jobs while others simply cancelled.

No one wanted to take any chances. I had to get on board and have COVID messages in my emails and on quotes that went out and I had to take precautions.

The best thing our Premier here in WA did was lockdown the state. Because I could get back to work and continue growing my business.

In 2021, I had survived and yes, we are still a state in lockdown but it’s a little different, we are working and thriving because all the hot spot states are locked out of WA. Of course, I still must abide by the rules set by the WA government, but I have not stopped working. My business has grown. I have taken on more people to help me and I now contract work out to them to help me get through to all the jobs that I have taken on.

Earlier in the year I rebranded to JGS Group AU from John’s Gardening. I have a custom-built invoice system and as this month passes, I am ready to do more. I have a private group for gardeners around Australia and a group of Facebook for people who love roses.

I am in the process of building up my rose pruning business as well and after a fantastic year of doing something that I love in a big way, my goal is to do more in 2022.

I have learnt to accept help and I am looking forward to the future and putting my new business plan into place for the next 4 – 5 years.

Today I have been in business for 16 years. I look back on where I have come and sometimes it feels like a dream. It’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of worries but also a lot of people who have helped me stay on track.

Like I said before, it’s not easy running your own business but I had always wanted to have one and I am not about to fail. I made a promise to my friend Ella that I would continue to grow my business and I am doing just that. Dreams can come true… and I am living in that dream!

John Kelly
Owner – JGS Group AU