0161 723 2000
8AM to 5PM
0161 723 2000
8AM to 5PM
Once again, it’s JKSL’s Operations Manager with the answer to a question nobody asked: ‘How are the revisits going?’
For many people, particularly clients of ours who are housebuilders, or private residents selling their own properties, our revisits are the forgotten part of Japanese knotweed treatment – but it’s something that Japanese Knotweed Solutions pride ourselves on being good at.
Even digging out and removing Japanese knotweed from a site is not 100% effective unless you remove every bit of the plant – literally down to the last gram. So, it’s best practice that a company carrying out Japanese knotweed works should come back to check the site, even if it’s just to check that the works have been a success. Where there is re-growth on site, as there will be at the early stages of a chemical herbicide treatment program, then this means you can carry out further treatment quickly and effectively.
So, it’s clear that site revisits are an important part of any Japanese knotweed treatment – and the same is true for many other invasive weeds, including Himalayan balsam and Giant hogweed. These hardy invaders keep coming back, sometimes because they lay down banks of seeds which can keep sending up new plants for many years. In the case of Japanese knotweed, which doesn’t produce viable seeds in the UK, revisits are required because the plant’s hardy rhizome (root system) can keep providing the plant with energy to grow, even when the application of herbicides like glyphosate prevent the plant from storing energy reserves.
This year, JKSL have well over 700 active sites UK-wide, and we have carried out in excess of 1,000 revisits (and that doesn’t include all of the initial works that we have carried out this year as well)! This represents a significant challenge for a small business with less than a dozen teams working on the road, and ends up with our dedicated Revisit Teams doing an average of around four visits across the UK every single working day for six months!
Such an achievement comes with its challenges – JKSL are working on sites over a period of up to five years (sometimes more), and these sites can change hands; land managers come and go, and sometimes we even find ourselves reminding our clients that they have paid for our services!
Many of these sites are also developed during this period, which means that our teams need to provide advice, feedback, and very occasionally to tell our clients’ contractors to stop what they are doing before they cross-contaminate the whole site!
So, it’s really important that we have knowledgeable, experienced, reliable staff, and at Japanese Knotweed Solutions, we have a great team of people managing the revisits, and some fantastic staff who work as full-time, dedicated Revisit Teams.
We have had great continuity over the years with our Revisit Teams, and the people doing most of this year’s final revisits are the same people who visited the sites when we were starting treatment off five years ago; this experience of the sites and our clients is invaluable in offering a premium service.
Another great thing about this continuity is that the team have developed strategies over the years to manage the issues that we run in to along the way (I do sometimes feel like referring to them as “coping mechanisms” during the busiest part of the year). The way we communicate with our clients and their tenants and neighbours, the way that we manage our site information and the high levels of training that our teams achieve means that we can be effective in treating invasive species in almost all circumstances.
There are odd bumps in the road, but managing these is another part of being good at what we do, and by resolving issues quickly and effectively, we build up trust and understanding with our clients.
This expertise is being passed on to newer members of the team, including our third dedicated Revisit Team and our current Operations Assistant, who is the “voice behind the curtain”, doing the significant job of calling, writing to and emailing our clients to book in all of our visits as well as sending out reports on every single visit.
I would be very surprised if any other company in the industry is carrying out such a high volume of visits throughout the year, with such a high level of customer service to their clients and I am really proud of the team that I work with to get these results year on year for our clients, and which make Japanese Knotweed Solutions so successful in the long run.
Chris Oliver, Operations Manager, Japanese Knotweed Solutions Ltd
INNSA Conference 2018 November 15, 2017The next INNSA (Invasive Non Native Specialists Association) Annual Conference for 2018 will be held at The Riverside Centre, Pride Park in Derby on Thursday 25th January.
Rodger Burnett will be returning to give an update on the ongoing Japanese knotweed battle a homeowner is having with Network Rail. We also have Mark Sexton from Wiggett Group discussing the due diligence all developers go through before developing a site.
As usual the day will offer BASIS points.
Places cost £50 (incl. vat) per person. To request a booking form, please email Gemma Keeling [email protected]
A Story for our Times …. November 15, 2017
Those of you that know me will know that I like cars. Those of you that know me better will know that I’m a bit particular about keeping my cars clean and immaculate – I think ‘anal’ is the word that most people would use about my approach.
Mikes car rules –
– Though shall not step on the sills of Mikes cars when getting in
– Though shall cleaneth ones shoes before entering the vehicle
– No food shall be eaten in Mike’s cars
– The volume control shall always be on an even number
…..you get the drift.
Cars will be cleaned and polished at all times. I think it’s my way of creating order in my life, when the cars are clean, all is well with the world.
With most of the cars that I’ve had one of the main niggles that I have is car mats. Car mats get dirty, car mats get soiled …and dirty car mats can make a vehicle look old and scruffy when in reality it’s just a bit of TLC that’s required to the car interior. I usually upgrade the car mats to the ‘superior’ or ‘luxury’ edition – I’ve even bought carbon fibre car mats for one particular car.
A few years ago I bought an Audi RS4 – beautiful car, quick, economic and a really versatile form of transportation. Imagine my horror when seeing the really cheap, crappy car mats that the vehicle arrived with. I contacted Audi service department and ordered some new mats thinking this would resolve the issue. Once the service department called and said that new ones were in stock I called in to pick them up – horror again – exactly the same as the cheap shite the vehicle already had???
I eventually resolved the issue by buying mats from an alternate supplier who advertised in the back of one of the car magazines.
Moving on from the RS4 I bought an RS6 – again same issues with the car mats being both cheap and nasty. I contacted the after-market supplier who advised that they could now do car mats with an RS6 logo on the mat – and colour coded to match the car. I tell you what – when these babies arrived it was like all my Christmases had arrived at once….absolute perfection ….highest rating possible on the Mike Clough qualityomitter ….
The car finally looked finished, the interior just sang of quality and luxury, I couldn’t have been happier.
So – dear reader – and we get to the point of my story. Imagine my horror when I rang to order a new set of mats – to be told …. ‘sorry mate we aren’t allowed to make these any more…’
Whaaaaat ????
I quizzed him up – what’s the problem ….? He advised me that they had been raided by Audi who had taken all their stock of mats, and all their templates – and advised them that they would be sued if they started to make them again.
This doesn’t mean that Audi will be starting producing these quality mats.
This doesn’t mean that Audi even wanted a cut of the proceeds from the sale of these mats ….
This just means that Audi didn’t want their customers to have the choice of a quality product to put in their cars…
How f**king childish is that ….?
Mike C
