Why Start A Landscaping Business
Looking for a career that gives you the freedom to work outside, set your own hours and be your own boss? If so, starting a landscaping business may be the right move for you.
People are drawn to entrepreneurship for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being flexibility and financial independence. With a landscaping enterprise, you can pursue your passion while controlling your financial destiny.
Landscaping can be hard work, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. With landscaping, you can see a project come together right before your eyes, see your clients satisfaction with your work and earn a good living.
That said, there are pros and cons to any business ventures, so be sure to weigh your options before you jump into a new venture headfirst.
Tip #: Attract The Right Employees
Lastly, and perhaps one of the most important aspects of owning a successful lawn care business, is having the right employees for the right jobs on a daily basis. Theres a real paradigm shift being felt across all industries in virtually any type of rolewhether its seasonal or long-term: people arent willing to stay at places where their values dont align with the companys principles.
Still, with unemployment at an all-time low of around 3.7%, most of the people you may be trying to recruit are already working as employees elsewhere. Its your job to lure them away by offering a compelling company culture that makes your business both attractive to potential employees and rewarding to those already employed by your business.
All in all, by staying organized, putting customers first, and adopting new technology and practices, your business will be able to thrive in the current market. Its easy to get stuck in your ways, but following the tips outlined above will help set up your business for future success.
Shawn Cadeau is chief revenue officer at Jobber, where he is responsible for the companys global growth strategy. He also leads Jobbers sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Jobber is a SaaS platform that helps small home services businessesincluding lawn care businessesorganize operations, from scheduling jobs and managing their crews, to invoicing customers and collecting payments.
Look After Your People
When you look after your employees, they look after you and your business. Pay them what they deserve, give them opportunities to progress in their careers, reward them for their high performance and take care of their training and development needs. When people love the companies for which they work, theyre more likely to put in the hard work to make your business a success.
Lets face it. Scaling your business is hard. Like anything else in life or in business, you have to put in the time and effort if youre looking to reap the benefits. You probably wont experience growth right away, but you will see progress if you continue to implement the above growth strategies systematically and consistently.
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Try To Dominate A Specific Segment Of Your Marketplace
If you want to accelerate the growth of your business, begin to focus on the type of work that has the highest profit and pass on everything else. If you concentrate your business on just a few services instead of many, you become highly proficient at those few things and consequently much more profitable.
What Does The Background Check Cover
We use a third-party vendor to conduct a criminal records search in the state in which the business owner or principal works. Our third-party vendor uses a national criminal database to screen service professionals. Businesses will not be admitted to the network if their owners or principals have the following felonies in their available criminal records*:
- Arson
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What Do You Do If You Are Working Full Time And Are Concerned About The Risk Of Changing Careers
If you are working a full-time job at the moment then it may be too much of a leap of faith right now to quit your job and put your money into a lawn care business. You may feel that there is too much to risk. Your partner may be not 100% behind the idea. I can see where you are coming from. I have recently set up another business and I was hesitant to sell my lawn care business lock stock and barrel. If this is where you are right now that perhaps you should do what I have done.
Try both things at the same time. Keep your job and pick up a lawn after work. Then another, then another. Start working Saturdays mowing lawns. When you find yourself not having time to take on any more work because your job interferes then quit your job and go full time. This is not the best way to start a lawn care business but it does have its benefits.
- You will earn extra income while you do this You can save the extra income to get you through the first few months when you quit your job and go full time.
- You will know that your idea works You will feel much better about going full time and so will your partner because you have proved to yourself that the business works.
You dont need to jump in at the deep end if you dont feel comfortable. You can put a toe in the water and see how it goes. There is nothing wrong with being cautious.
Claim Your Yelp Business Page
Creating a Yelp Business Page will give you valuable exposure to people searching for services in your area. You can add photos of your business, customize your page, and even . Having a business page on Yelp also allows you to interact with your customers directly.
Customers are able to rate their experience with your business, which means a wealth of positive reviews for other potential customers to see. Even if you receive reviews that arent as positive, you can respond to customers and help solve any issues they may have.
Claiming your Yelp Business Page has a low barrier of entry and only takes a few minutes. Head to the Claim my business page to start interacting with your customers.
Get a free Yelp page
Promote your business to local customers.
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Go For The Easy Wins First
When you want to know how to get lawn care customers fast, its vital to use a variety of marketing strategiesestablish a digital presence, network face-to-face with potential customers, and employ traditional marketing techniques. Do the easy things first, like printing out business cards, establishing a social media presence, and claiming your Yelp Business Page. You can then move onto the more complex undertakings, like creating a website, and soon youll be garnering new lawn care customers.
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Create A Business Plan
Now that youve taken the first step towards building your own lawn care business, you are going to need a plan. Your business plan will help you manage risks and strive to achieve your goals in a structured way. Decide on the business structure you want for your lawn care business before you take on any jobs. It will influence your day-to-day operations, taxes, capital, and your personal liability.
Your business plan should be a guide on how to run your business and should serve your goals. Before you dive deep into it, make a brief outline. A traditional business plan takes longer and is more detail-oriented but initially, you can start with a lean plan.
Follow this brief outline as a basic framework for your business plan:
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Learn How To Grow Your Lawn Care Business Faster And What To Watch Out For
This question is from Gary. How do I manage the growth as I start to scale my company? His situation is a bit unique, so Im just going to give you a bit of context here to answer this. In Garys situation, he is about to put out $225,000 in door hangers over a six week time period to 75,000 homes.
His goal is to bring in 300 new clients and each should be worth about $2000 a year. What is unique is that, his model is one where he sells the client, and then contracts the work out to a Lawn Care Operator or to a partner. In other words, he contracts the workout to another service provider to take care of it. Its a really interesting model, and there are upsides and downsides to this business model. Hes asking, My main concern is handling the growth. Do you have any suggestions for handling the growth of this operation to maximize my possibility of success. Thank you.
In this model, the model of contracting, you immediately eliminate a lot of your problems and you eliminate a tremendous number of your scaling problem. Thats the beauty of this model. The problem with this model, is it creates a different set of problems, in term of scaling the company.
For your business here Gary, the key to scaling, is going to be technology.
You might be the guy that starts doing some of that but, pretty quickly, youve got to get some of the stuff off your plate. As your company grows and you get busy, those things will stop happening.
How Do Clients Choose A Mowing Business To Use
Price is important however it isnt the only factor that goes into a potential client making a decision about whether or not to use your services. Each client has different tastes and what is important to one person may not be as meaningful to another.
Some customers are going to go for the cheapest option and dont care about how nice it looks at the end. Despite what you might think, this might be a good customer for you especially if youre just getting started as long as they have realistic expectations on what you can achieve for their budget.
Other customers want a highly professional gardening crew to visit regularly because they take pride in their property and are happy to pay extra for it. This sort of customer is an even better one for you to have on board.
One way to stand out is branding: logos on vehicles and uniforms, well-presented staff and professional equipment which can help you justify a higher price. More on this later.
If you can find something about your business that is special about your business, this can help you stand out in a customers mind. For example, there are all-girl groups out there that some people find appealing. Think about if you were an older woman living alone: having female-only contractors could make you feel safe when you were making your decision.
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Course #: Lawntrepreneur Academy
Its true, Lawntreprenuer Academy has a wide range of courses from starting your lawn care company, to adding additional services like mulching, or aeration. The course is made by Brian Fullerton, from Brian’s Lawn Care.
The courses range from $49 to $99. Some of the courses include:
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How To Start Your Own Lawn Care Business!
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Get Started Plowing Snow!
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Profitability and Productivity Hacks
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Getting Started With Spring & Fall Clean Ups
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How To Get Started With Aerations & Overseeding!
Who is this course for? Lawntreprenuer Academy has classes for nearly any lawn care pro. And there is pretty much a course for anyone looking to grow their lawn care company.
Related Services Available From Other Pros
Lawn & Garden Care
Maureen and her crew did an outstanding job cleaning up my neglected front yard. Removed plants, relocated others, and hauled off boulders. Added decorative rock, and will be back in the spring to plant a few new bushes. Maureen listens to what you want, and makes welcome suggestions. I am so pleased, I have hired her to re-do my backyard. I have also asked her to do the maintenance going forward. Very highly recommend. I would not use anyone else!
I was very satisfied with their work. They were very responsive and did what they said they were going to do. I would use them again.
they did a fine job
HomeAdvisor allows Service Professionals to post information about themselves and their business on their profile. HomeAdvisor does not review or verify the information representations set forth in those profiles as they are self-reported by the Service Professional.
HomeAdvisor verifies state-level licensing where applicable – note: some states require local or county level licensing and you should verify whether or not your pro is properly licensed. To find more licensing information for your state, visit our
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Discover Your Target Audience
Your target audience is homeowners within a 25 mile/ 40KM distance of where you live. This is flexible if youd like to service more rural areas or target entire states.
Homeowners are easy to spot, so choose a specific area that youd like to focus on. Once you have a good idea of who your customer is, you can start marketing your business to them.
Unlock Success By Email Marketing For Lawn Care Businesses
Did you know, for every $1 spent on email marketing, theres an average return of $36?
In addition, consumers purchasing through emails spend approximately 138% more than those who dont receive email offers.
Plus, 80% of professionals state email marketing as their biggest driving factor of success in customer retention efforts.
In fact, the next closest channel to email marketing is social media in which, only 44% identified it as a driving factor of customer retention success.
When you take advantage of email marketing for lawn care businesses, you can:
- Upsell services to existing clients
- Communicate job status with clients
In addition, the low cost of email marketing makes it one of the most lucrative tools at your disposal.
This is because emails provide a non-intrusive way to ask for a conversion.
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Start An Equipment Maintenance Plan Now
Ed Ramsden highly recommends starting your equipment maintenance plan early to avoid last minute set-backs. Tracking the condition of your tools is essential for your teams success.
He explains, ultimately servicing equipment is the business owners responsibility. You paid for it!
Ive found that my employees dont care as much as I do about the condition of the equipment. But, the crews use the equipment every day. They will notice things about the equipment that you might not.
You need your crew to pass that information along to you. You need to be involved in preventative maintenance.
A really simple thing Ed did was make his crews complete a daily checklist:
- Check the oil level on the mower
- Ensure the equipment tied down properly
- Check if the air filter is clean
- Does something need more oil
- Check the tire pressure
I made sure that the crew was responsible for checking at the beginning of the day, and reporting damages if they made damages at the end of the day.
If they didnt I made it pretty clear that they would lose pay if we couldnt get on the road every morning because the equipment wasnt working properly
If you dont have a crew, make sure you double check everything the night before with the same type of checklist. Its handy to keep basic maintenance tools on hand.
Eds developed a relationship with a local auto mechanic too, which he turns to for emergency repairs, just in case.
Your Own Business Your Way
You will establish a new business concept with a brand name existing for many years and an extensive customer base. You can rely on the complete support of Lawn Care Company in terms of brand recognition and customer contact. The brand has been proven and constantly grows due to its good reputation and solid training standards. These standards ensure high professional skills and consistent quality. Your lawn care company representative will also be able to provide you with growth possibilities via business expansions.
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The Bottom Line On Courses To Grow Your Lawn Care Business
Taking a course on how to start your lawn care company can be a great way to start your company, or grow your business that is already in operation.
Even if you cant afford to take one of these lawn care courses, there are tons of free resources and communities where you can collaborate with other lawn care pros to find the info you need.
But at the end of the day, the lawn care business is one where you really just need to dive in and get your hands dirty.
Franchise Or Do It Yourself
One of the first decisions you have to make is whether youd like to join a franchise or go it alone and start a business from scratch.
The advantages of franchising are that you already have a brand and customers there ready to go when you sign up, and more work will automatically be assigned to you as new clients join within your area.
There is less pressure on you to be a business whiz and you have a lot more support because the franchiser has a vested interest in your success.
On the flip side, some downsides of buying a franchise are that you’re locked into an agreement so you cant always do things your way . Once your agreement has finished, the franchiser has no obligation to renew your contract.
When you start a business from scratch its much scarier and definitely a lot harder, but youll always know that youre in charge of your own life. Some people prefer to live like this but its not for everybody. Youll have to weigh up both options yourself.
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