The Best of Brettish

All too often, the meejah is full of horror stories about cowboy contractors, incompetent clowns who trash both homeowners' driveways and the reputation of our industry, so when there's a story about the truly superb work done by the good contractors in the trade it deserves to be shouted from the rooftops (unless the pikey roofing rats are up there stripping lead). And so it is with the Brett Approved Installer awards for 2009 - the "BAIs"!

Brett acquired the Approved Installers scheme when then bought out Tarmac TopPave a few years back, but, by their own admission, they didn't really know what to do with it. Well, as part of the re-vamping of Brett Landscaping as a quasi-autonomous business with the larger Brett Group, the scheme has been re-appraised over the past year, and it was decided to make it an integral part of the company's sales effort.

Reliable, competent and loyal contractors are seen as essential to the required growth of the business in the year ahead, and while this re-discovery of the value of an Approved Installer scheme was first noted with the distribution of monster-sized 5kg chocolate bars early in the summer , it reached its zenith last Friday evening in the ostentatiously opulent surroundings of Fawsley Hall near Daventry in Northamptonshire, with the awards for best paving schemes undertaken over the last 12 months.

I should declare an interest. I was one of the judges for the awards, along with Peter Hughes the garden/landscape designer and Bill Brett himself. We were given a selection of photos submitted by the contractors themselves, along with a brief description of the job, with details of products used, challenges overcome and degree of customer delight. Each project was allocated to a suitable category, and then it was awarded marks out of five for qualities such as aesthetics, cutting-in, design, etc., with the marks being totted up to determine the eventual winners.

Brett Landscaping MD, Chris Droogan, announces the winners...