Starter Kit. Idea 10 of 500. Cluster 1
Private pool and garden maintenance businesses serving the above
The mechanism, from the book
If Sri Lanka earned what the Maldives earns per visitor, the visitors it already has would bring in $2.4 billion a year more.
The first step
Clean one villa pool and tidy its garden free of charge this week, in return for photographs before and after and the owner's honest verdict. Take those photographs to the villa managers and guesthouse owners on the same stretch of coast and quote a fixed monthly visit. Three monthly contracts cover your equipment and tell you the round works.
- Who pays first
- Villa managers and guesthouse owners who need a reliable weekly service and cannot justify a full-time pool and garden person.
- What leaves today
- A green pool or a dead garden costs a villa its bookings; reliable upkeep protects the nights that bring foreign spending in.
Ask first
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a small service business that will employ staff.
- Central Environmental Authority. Ask how pool chemicals and garden waste should be stored and disposed of.
Check before you spend
That staff handling pool chemicals are trained and insured, and how chemicals and garden waste can be legally stored and disposed of.
Find out these three numbers
- How many villas and lodges within an hour's drive have a pool?
- What do owners pay now for pool cleaning each month?
- What do chemicals, tools and a vehicle cost to start?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka. Appendix
"Provide a good service, charge properly for it, and let the money follow."
A steady service, priced properly, is worth more than cheap work that needs redoing.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.