The Growing Cycle
Garden care by bike in the inner north
The Growing Cycle is a hyperlocal garden care biz for residential, commercial and body corporate clients across Melbourne's inner north. The business had real momentum, a loyal recurring base, a commercial anchor client, a team taking shape.
The problem
Enquiries were coming in faster than Anna could triage them. Mowing requests, one-offs, seasonal jobs and ongoing Grow package clients, all landing in the same inbox with no way to tell them apart. It got to the point where she'd stopped replying altogether. Too much noise, not enough system.
Underneath that was a bigger issue: her website was still selling the old version of TGC, the one that did a bit of everything. Meanwhile Sortscape showed what was scheduled, but not what capacity actually existed, that information lived in her head, along with the waitlist, the priority jobs, and who was waiting where.
She came to me wanting to scale. What she actually needed was a front door that matched where her business was headed, and a back end that could hold what her head was carrying.
The work
We rebuilt the website around the Grow package as the primary offer, with seasonal and one-off work repositioned as secondary, clear, but no longer competing for attention. A new enquiry flow separates Grow subscription requests from everything else, so each one is categorised the moment it lands.
On the back end, we built a waitlist database in Notion, fed automatically from the website via Zapier. Every new enquiry is scored on suburb, add-ons and frequency, then ranked high, medium or low with conditional colour-coding so at a glance, Anna can see which jobs are worth prioritising and which can wait. Alongside it, a capacity dashboard tracks team hours, route capacity and seasonal demand, giving her a clear read on how many new clients she can actually take on.
The outcome
Once live, the system removes the manual triage that had become unmanageable, replacing guesswork and inbox overwhelm with a structured, automated pathway from enquiry to waitlist to booking. Decisions that used to depend on memory and mental math, who's waiting, where they are, whether there's room all living in one cohesive system.
Working together
Anna showed up ready, stayed open, and trusted the process even when it meant reworking how she thought about her own offer. My job was to see where the complexity actually lived and cut it back to something workable. Hers was to claim the vision for a business that's clearly built to grow.
Running a business that's outgrown its own systems? I’d love to support you and your business as you grow. Get in touch with me here.
