Many of us dream about starting our own business. If you work for someone else, even if it’s doing something you love, there are always issues that you have to contend with.
If the work you love is lawn care, it’s common to see problems with how the people you’re working for are running the business and it makes you think, “Hey I can do better than that”.
The allure of starting your own business is that if you’re successful (we assume you’ll be), you’re the one making money off of the work of others. So maybe it’s time to stop imagining, get out there and start your new business.
There are some steps to follow in order to accomplish that dream. The most important thing to remember is that a lawn care business is just like starting any other small business and you’ll need to follow certain procedures that any other startup does.
A visit to the small business association in your town is always a good first step. They will have literature, free courses and often offer consultations with retired people who know all about how to start a business. If you can get that kind of help, you’ll get a real world education on what you must do to get your new business up and running.
One big step any mentor will advise you to take before you do anything else is to write a business plan. This is not as difficult as it sounds. It’s simply an organized documentation of your dream business combined with some real world research on how you’ll make it a reality. The primary purpose of your business plan is to give you something to take to investors, to a bank or some other lending institution to get funding to start your business.
If you have all the money, you need or if you already have the equipment you need to start your business, maybe you don’t need a business plan. However, it still is a good idea to write one. The process will force you to create a five-year plan so you set out on day one on a path to growth and success.
Even if you have enough money and equipment to get started, you’ll want to grow and expand and that might take a small business loan. That is where having a business plan in place will pay off.
Before you quit your “day job”, think about the steps you’ll take to make your new business profitable as quickly as possible. You may need to spend a few months while you’re still employed by someone else building your equipment inventory, planning for a storage facility and landing customers who will give you their lawn care business when you break off from the world of being an employee and launch your business for real.
The research you do now before you make the big step of setting up a new business will be a life saver down the road. There is a lot to learn such as whether you’ll incorporate your business or just pick a business name and get started.
You should spend some time learning about how to keep the books, do the accounting and manage both the money you make and the bills you’ll pay as a business. You can think through if you’ll employ others and get some training in what involves as an employer both financially and legally.
There is more to running a lawn care business than gassing up the mowers and going to work. By doing your groundwork work while you still have a paycheck coming in, you vastly improve your chances of success because you’ll “hit the ground running”.
2 Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
There may be many reasons why you want to start your own lawn care business. It’s a natural way for you to take your skills at creating masterpieces in the lawns of your customers and turning it into a business. It could be that you work for a lawn care company and after watching them make mistakes in their business, you just know you can do a better job.
One of the biggest reasons why people think about going into business for themselves is that they can finally be in charge of how the business will be run. One of the great joys of running your own lawn care business is that sense of accomplishment when you’re successful and you see your business grow and prosper. You can never experience this thrill if you spend your career working for other people.
How many times have you worked your fingers to the bone for a boss just to make their business more successful?
When you start your own lawn care business, there are a lot of new situations you have to get used to. The biggest adjustment will be that when you own your own business, you suddenly are confronted with this new creature called an employee. However, the employees you have on board with you will make or break your business.
That means that one of the most important skills you will develop as a manager and owner of a business will be your ability to pick, hire and retain great employees. That is because your business will truly be as strong as your weakest link.
If you used contract labor when you got busy before you turned your lawn care into a business, you developed some skills for evaluating who would be a good worker. If you did get that chance, that judgment will be invaluable to you as you build your own small army of quality employees. It’s quite a balancing act to capture enough business to keep all of your employees busy and then to think about growing your business as well.
If you get a rush of new business, you want to capture it and turn those customers long term clients. But you have to be able to add new employees to take care of all of that business and be able to trust those employees to take care of that business well so the job they do for those new customers is just as high quality as you would do yourself.
Perhaps the most important resource you can find is a labor source who can provide you with a consistent supply of workers who will do a good job for you. This can be a community network like Workforce Alliance or a local placement service, your business will benefit from having a way to recruit good employees without having to make it a full time job for you.
It seems that the balancing act of work and employees is one of the most difficult parts of owning a business to work out. You might have too much business and not enough employees you can depend on. Then you find yourself overworking the good employees you have and playing higher wages for their longer hours and you get overworked yourself, which cuts down on the time you can spend growing your business.
Or you have too many employees when the business shrinks. Then you have a decision of whether to lay off good employees that you want to have on call when your business expands.
Above all, when you develop a strong staff of good employees, you should bend heaven and earth to take care of them. Morale in your employee ranks can be as much of a determining factor for the growth of your business as good customers or good equipment you need to take care of all those lawns that are the heart of your work. Learn to be a “good boss”. If employees you know are good workers develop problems, try to work with them to return them to productivity.
If you can keep a good group of employees working with you and you are always developing new talent, you will have conquered one of the biggest challenges of running your own lawn care business.
Even better, if you can give your employees a little part of the success you are enjoying, they will become an even more valuable asset, which is a loyal crew that will work hard for you because you take good care of them.
3. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
For many people who want to start a new business, getting funding is a big issue. That is certainly true when you want to start your own lawn care business. To get your lawn care business going, you need customers, equipment and workers. If you’re just starting out, you may be able to do all the work yourself, but you’re going to need the equipment to get to work right away.
One approach to getting around the startup costs issue is to use the equipment you already have. If you were a lawn care contractor before you decided to turn your operation into a full time business, you may have a lawn mower, edger and other equipment like a truck so you can begin taking care of your first customer’s needs. If not, you might be able to borrow the equipment from friends or lease it until you get enough customers so you have the cash flow to use to get good equipment.
However, many new businesses seek out a small business loan from investors or from a lending institution such as a bank. If you have a solid business idea that you can document in the form of a business plan and the lender sees that your plan to start a lawn care business will most certainly work, then you can get that loan which will fund enough equipment to get started.
One thing you must do to go to a lender for that loan is document what you need and what those costs will be. Be sure you’re complete in your evaluation but don’t pad the request. If you need a new truck to transport equipment to the job sites, include one in the funding request. However, don’t make it a luxury vehicle.
Remember, it’s in your best interest to keep the loan reasonable because you have to pay that loan back and you don’t need high loan payments when you’re trying to start a business.
To justify the loan, you’ll also have to show that you have a good business model that will result in customers and a successful startup for your new business. The bank wants you to succeed but you have to show them that you’re firmly in touch with the local lawn care market and you have a plan for bringing on enough customers to make the money you need to live and pay back the loan with interest.
This is going to take some research and a well prepared document that shows in detail how many customers you expect to start business with, how much you’ll charge for your services, how much overhead and upkeep will cost and how much of your income can go toward paying back the debt.
Each of these figures must be grounded in reality. If you already have 20 customers that you’ll bring into the business from your contract work, then you have the grounds for this evaluation because you know the kind of income you can generate from those customers.
Be prepared to document how you’ll grow the business so the lender knows you have a plan for success that will result in full repayment of the loan. If you’re using investors, they want to know they will make money from your business as well. If you do your homework and document your business well, you’ll have no trouble getting the funding you need to jump start your new lawn care business.
4. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
As we have discussed before, starting a lawn care business shares many common steps that any other new business has. A fundamental step of preparing to start your business is to write a business plan.
Sadly, people often procrastinate when it comes to writing a business plan because they don’t know how to do it and they are intimidated by the process. So understanding the basic steps of what you need for your lawn care business plan will help you get ready for this important step.
It takes capital to start your own lawn care business. A business plan at heart is a document you prepare for investors. You use it to present your business opportunity to lending institutions in order to get startup capital or a small business loan.
There is equipment to buy, workers to hire, trucks and trailers to get, marketing materials to create and storage facilities to lease. The funding will help you get that basic infrastructure in place before you have the revenue to pay for those costs.
Your business plan is a document to demonstrate to those who may give you the capital you need that you have a solid business concept. It also discusses that the markets are there to support your business and that you have a realistic plan to build the business until you’re making sufficient profits to pay back the money with interest or to give investors a handsome return on their investment.
This does not mean that you should skip writing a business plan if you already have what you need to start your lawn care business or if you have enough funding without taking on debt or investors. The process of writing a business plan is a vital developmental step because it will force you to think through your plan for success.
You’ll create a detailed cost/benefit analysis which will call for you to gather real world cost values for the equipment you’ll need, the insurance you have to buy, the space you need to lease and to pay the workers you’ll need to support the business.
That research alone can be a lifesaver when you actually start your new business. However, you’ll also go to the next step of verifying if the market for your services is strong as well as proving how you’ll about growing the business over a five year period of time.
If you discover during this process that you do not have a sufficient market for your lawn care business, better to know that before you take the plunge of starting the business than after. The process of building a business plan is a big step of taking your vision for your wonderful new business and making a real life projection of how that dream will play out in reality.
If you don’t know how to write a business plan, don’t panic. There is plenty of help available. Your local library or bookstore is overflowing with books that will guide you through the process. The internet is also rich with resources to take you step by step through how to research each section of your business plan and then how to go about writing that plan in a way that will be understandable and reasonable to your backers.
You can also turn to the local chapter of the small business association for help. Very often, there are retired businesspersons who volunteer to help a new small business owners like yourself write a solid business plan.
Don’t be too proud to accept their help. They know what you’re going through seeing your vision for a great lawn care business go from dream to reality and they know how to guide you through this important part of your planning and preparation.
When your business plan is done, you’ll be happy you took the time to complete this process. Part of the document is a five-year plan for success. That means when you’re done, you have a roadmap for how you’ll take your vision for a successful lawn care company from dream to reality.
Keep in mind that your plan will go through some changes and revisions as you go along, but having a map to follow can be a huge help when it comes to growing your lawn care business.
5. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
As we know there are many good reasons for starting your own lawn care business. You might do it for the freedom that being your own boss gives you. You might do it to focus 100% on doing work that you enjoy. Or you might do it because you know you can do a better job running a business than the people you work for.
Nevertheless, the basic reason to start any business it to become profitable and successful so you can support yourself and your family and see your business grow and succeed.
So is it possible to make a good profit running a lawn care business? Of course, it must be otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many lawn care companies in business year after year.
Profitability is not a complex notion. It’s basically making more money than you spend. However, it’s a mistake to think you can see more profits simply by controlling costs. Too many businesses have gone under putting all the emphasis on efficiency and cost savings and not enough emphasis on getting new customers and keeping them. You can see profits when you and your crew are all fully engaged in money generating activities while you’re on the job.
This can be a challenge particularly as your business grows and you find yourself trying to keep multiple crews completing work and moving on to the next job site while promoting your services at the same time. Learning the art of managing larger teams and bigger jobs as your business grows can be a real test of your management ability.
As a manager;
– Job 1 is gaining new customers.
– Job 2 is customer retention.
– Job 3 is cost control and efficiency.
Making sure your teams are performing at peak efficiency while delivering top quality work to your customers. The customer focus needed to become profitable must go further than just you, the owner of the business.
You must instill it in your employees. It’s when you can capture the business of a nice roster of repeat customers that you have the basis for profitability as you take care of the work these customers give you each week.
As the owner and manager of your lawn care company, you must always be looking for ways to capture more business. This means marketing and advertising sometimes. It also means making sure the work you do for existing customers is done well. If there was the heart of true profitability for your lawn care business, it’s not primarily cost controls although that is a vital part of any successful business. The real heart of profitability is customer satisfaction.
With satisfied customers, you can be sure you will have a reliable income to pay your employees and cover expenses and monthly bills as you grow your business.
Keep in mind that happy customers will refer new customers, which will help you expand your lawn care business. Word of mouth advertising is free and it will get you more business than any other type of advertising, which is one of the best reasons to take very good care of the customers you acquire.
6. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
When a person is in the planning stages of a new business, it’s like preparation for vacation or a wedding because sometimes the process is full of idealism and optimism. That is healthy because when you set out to start your own lawn care business, it’s up to you to demonstrate that confidence and optimism that you know how to make this new business spring to life and how to make it a success every step of the way.
So when you read the title to this issue, you may have thought it was unnecessarily pessimistic. Well it isn’t, because you can anticipate trouble that may come to your lawn care business and still have an ambitious, aggressive and optimistic plan for growth and success.
In fact, making plans for when trouble comes is part of your success plan because you’re acknowledging that trouble will come but you’re getting ready for it so it does not derail your plan for success.
Insurance is a good example of planning for trouble even though you’re living your life with a plan for success. We live in a world where things go wrong. It takes maturity and experience to start a new lawn care business and that maturity and experience things go wrong. By having a contingency plan to go to when there are problems, you take the teeth out of trouble because it’s anticipated. When problems arise, you simply execute your plan and accommodate the trouble so your ability to provide service to your customers is undisturbed.
After all, lawn care is a very physical business. You have workers and machines at work and things can go wrong. You work out of doors where weather can get in the way. You work with nature and just about anything can happen even when working on the lawn of the most civilized lawn in town. Nature doesn’t care how refined the grounds are so you should be ready if nature decides to get underfoot.
Equipment failure is not something that might happen in the life of any lawn care business. It will happen. So be prepared to perform emergency repairs while on a job site. It’s also a good idea to go to each job site with back up equipment.
That may mean having a reserve lawn mower and other tools so that if a breakdown threatens the crew’s ability to complete the job, you can pull the damaged equipment off of the job and put your reserve equipment in to finish the project.
Being prepared for weather interruptions is a matter of knowing your schedule and being ready if you have to bring crews in during a sudden rainstorm. You should have a contingency plan with your customers so if you cannot perform their lawn care on a specific day, you can adjust the schedule to get the job done as soon as the weather clears up.
You can even be prepared for injury to a worker. First, hire experienced workers who know how to work with the equipment so the chances of injury are small. But always keep proper first aid equipment on hand and either you become knowledgeable in first aid and CPR or make sure someone is so if there is a medical need on the job, you can respond to it.
You should even go over emergency preparedness with your crews so, if someone is injured so badly that they need to go to the clinic or hospital, you have someone delegated to care for the injured worker while the rest of the crew finishes the job. It’s all part of being prepared for when trouble comes so trouble can come and go and not disturb the ongoing success of your business.
7. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
As we’ve discussed in a prior issues, the lawn care business is all about having happy customers. Your workers no doubt have the perception that all you do is cut grass. However, in reality you are creating an environment for the growth of your business.
The lawn care business thrives on customer service. Customer satisfaction is what will determine whether you’ll be working on a customer’s lawn one time or if you will land a long-term contract that will keep bringing in needed income.
As the owner of your business, you are the one who has direct contact with the customer. In a way, you have to have two skills. You must be a master of lawn care to guide your workers to do a professional job on each yard. You must also be a master of customer relations and even psychology to understand the customer and to find out what you can do to make that customer happy.
Part of great customer service means giving your customers many opportunities to stay in touch with you. That means if they need to call you to reschedule their yard care appointment, to ask a question or even to complain, they aren’t put through voice mail or answering machine unless absolutely necessary. If you are too busy to handle incoming calls, hire an employee or answering service so a real person can greet your customers.
Instruct your employees to have a customer service mentality. If they are working at a site and the customer comes out to talk to them, they should stop working and talk to that customer. If a sweet grandma wants to bring them lemonade, drink it! When you go onto a person’s property every week, you become a trusted part of the home. So behave like you are part of the family and that bond with the customer will serve you well.
Also, be on the alert for anything you can do for the customer that is above and beyond the call of duty. Never miss a chance to do something free for customers that you are building a long-term relationship with.
It may be no more than cleaning up a mess around the trashcans or nailing a few boards up on their back fence to keep the dog in. Those little acts of generosity will endear you the customer and build that sense of trust that results in long-term customers who recommend you to friends and neighbors alike.
In every way, behave like a guest when you are on the property of a customer. Don’t smoke or allow your employees to smoke in presence of a customer and above all, don’t throw the butts on the ground.
Dress like professionals and have in a civilized manner even when working on the lawn of your customers. Don’t embarrass your customer to his or her neighbors. Every minute you are working at a customer site, people are watching from the other homes in the neighborhood and they can see the sign on your trucks identifying your lawn care service.
Be aware of those eyes and use the time you are working to present a professional image to onlookers. Those hidden watchers may be evaluating you to use for their lawn care service too.
Maintain scrupulous behavior standards for your workers when at a customer site. You should clean up after yourself and leave the site looking immaculate when you are finished. When the job is done, go to the door and thank the customer for the chance to work for them.
As you depart with a cheerful, “see you next week”, you build relationship and expectation that you will be back when needed to knock the customer’s socks off with outstanding customer service once again.
8. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
When you start your lawn care business, you may be able to handle a handful of customers yourself. However, if you plan to grow and to see your business prosper, you’ll have to take on lawn care workers as employees. The quality of those employees will be what makes you a great success or causes you to lose customers and flounder as a business.
Management of employees is a real art when you’re trying to grow a business. To be a success, you need just enough workers to handle the lawns you have to care for and no more. If you have too many employees on the payroll, your costs will eat up all your profits which will hurt the company.
But you may be hesitant to lay off good employees while you build the business because good employees are hard to find and sure as you reduce staff, you’ll get more work in and you may need those employees.
Similarly, it’s a disaster if you have a surge of business and you don’t have the staff to handle all the work. That means you’ll have to get out and work on lawns when you should be focusing on running the business. It also means overtime for the employees you do have, which cuts into profits and wears out your crews as well.
On top of these challenges, lawn care employees are rarely highly educated or looking at their jobs as careers. That means high turnover. So on any given day you can start out thinking you have enough people to fill out the crews you need to put on the road only to find holes in those crews because some employees suddenly quit, never showed up or called in sick.
These are the headaches of management. The upside is when you do find some great employees who know the work and work hard. If they also know how to dress, how to behave with customers and how to take ownership over their work, those are the employees you should guard for all your life and nurture and develop those crewmembers because they will make you a success.
Too often, there is an antagonistic relationship between management and crews on a lawn care staff. It’s important you see your employees as partners with you in your quest for success for the business. One way to do that is to empower your employees to take ownership over the success of the company. You can give bonuses or prizes for employees who have good attendance records or who interact well with customers and help build strong relationship with the clients of the business.
Get to know your crew. Even if the turnover is so high that you meet new crewmembers every day. If you manage numerous job sites, make it a point to get around to each one each day. Stop working, meet new employees, and greet the ones you already know.
Just that little bit of recognition will go a long way to help employees feel part of a great company and give them a desire to help you succeed. Then if you have pizza waiting for them when they return and take them all out for beers once a month, those lawn care workers will become your best friends for life.
It’s important to step back and review your attitude toward the people who do the real work of your lawn care business. Resist the natural urge to resent them. This is a natural reaction when your employee costs are the largest cost item in the budget. That is as it should be in a lawn care business.
Always remember you’re a service business and you have no product except for the work these employees do for your customers. If you make it a point to value them, to treat them like family and even to “like them”, they will notice your attitude. They will come to like you and like the company.
That simple relationship-building step is the most powerful way to build retention and to make sure that when you finally build crew of trained and talented lawn care workers, you’re more likely to keep them.
9. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
Advertising is a core component of any successful business. Even if you’re setting up a lawn care business, you’ll need a plan for getting new business and that plan is usually considered to be your advertising or marketing plan. When we think of advertising, we tend to limit it to Super Bowl commercials and those obnoxious ads for Geiko Insurance or used cars that come at us nonstop on TV.
But there is a lot more to advertising than that limited approach. In fact, the vast majority of businesses find ways to get new business and get the word out about their goods or services without ever advertising on television or on the radio.
Lawn care is not a “retail” operation in the sense that you don’t have to have dozens or hundreds of customers patronize you each day to make money. You build relationships with long-term customers so there really is no need to spend the large amount of money it takes to advertise on a large scale such as TV or radio spots.
But any contractor business, which is what your lawn care enterprise is, must always be building the business. Customers come and go so you have to find new customers to keep your income stable. Moreover, if you want to grow your business, you have to find ways to bring new clients onto your roster so you can afford to expand the size, scope and profitability of your lawn care business.
The good news is that you should completely ignore any temptation to go into wide scale marketing. Lawn care is a local business and the one of the great things about working on lawns for your customers is you have a small group of loyal customers that to deal with directly on a weekly basis. You may from time to time do a “one time” project for a friend of a customer. But those are courtesy jobs done for customer relations and not the heart of how you’ll make your living.
The most elaborate kind of advertising you might consider that reaches out to a large segment of the community would include flyers, a yellow pages advertisement or taking out a small ad in the local newspaper. These marketing strategies are still focused very much on your local community. Of those three, flyers may be the best because you can isolate which neighborhoods you’ll advertise in and combine the flyers with word of mouth.
Another effective type of advertising for your lawn care business is as simple as it’s powerful. By putting the name of your business on your truck and other vehicles, you get maximum exposure as you work in the neighborhoods where you have customers. People get to know the name of your business as you drive the streets locally and that advertising is highly focused because it’s seen where you already are enjoying success.
But of all of the forms of advertising that will bring you the most business, word of mouth and networking is still the most potent. When someone needs a new lawn service, they will prefer the service being used by their neighbors based on watching you work and on the good opinion of people, they know. This is why when you’re working with a customer, maintaining a warm and responsive relationship with every customers is important.
Don’t be afraid to do a few chores for free for each customer. If they have, something unrelated to your work that needs to be done, do it for them. That good will is pure gold in marketing value.
10. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
If you asked someone outside of the business of lawn care what it takes to be a success, they would probably say that it takes an ability to do a great job taking care of lawns. It’s true that anybody who runs a lawn care business must be able to perform the functions of mowing and trimming a lawn and offer other services that customers come to expect. That might be considered a “minimum requirement” of a good lawn care business.
However, if you’re getting ready to start your own lawn care business, it’s important you understand a hidden truth about being a success in this kind of work. That truth is that it’s not about the lawns. It’s about the customers. Once you focus the majority of your energies and focus on the customers of your lawn care business, you’ll have found the key to long term success and growth that will carry you as far up toward the latter of success as you wish to go.
To get a good feel for what you need to know to make your lawn care business a success, evaluate two things. Get and understanding for why people hire a company to do their lawn care and then understand why they fire a company from working on their lawns.
If we made a list of how those two decisions are made, the ability of a company to do a good job of lawn care is on the list but it does not dominate the list. Many lawn care companies can do a fine job of taking care of lawns but do a horrible job of customer service and customer relations and they fail.
People hire a lawn care company the most often because they come recommended. That means that they find out from a friend or neighbor who worked on their lawn or they observed who worked on their lawn and they decided they liked that company. Word of mouth is the number one most potent marketing tool for any lawn care business. Word of mouth depends on one variable only and that is customer relations.
If a neighbor looks down the street at a perfectly sculpted lawn, that will draw their interest in hiring that lawn care company. When they interview their neighbor about that company, that is when the recommendation will make or break of that new customer comes your way.
Similarly, many lawn care companies who can create masterpieces out of their customer’s lawns lose the contract because they don’t understand how to interact with customers and how to anticipate their needs.
When you go onto the property of a customer every week to do their lawn care, you’re entering their private space. That customer must have a sense of trust for you and for your crew to allow that invasion of their space to happen every day.
If the people you employ scare the customers or if they behave in a way that upsets the customer, that is a sure way to lose a client even if those workers do immaculate work on lawns. That means that not only do you have to understand customer relationships, your workers must know how to handle customers as well.
Customer relations is also all about communications. The customer doesn’t want to see you drive up, work on their lawn and disappear until it’s time to pay the bill. A person’s lawn is personal to them and they want to be able to access the management of the company, which includes you, the crew chief in charge of that lawn and even the workers.
That customer should be able to walk out of their home while your workers are on the property, stop the work, talk to them, and feel like they were responsive to their needs.
That customer should also be able to call your office and get you when they have a concern or want to discuss new business. That means you don’t route customers through an automated answering service. Give them access to you, the boss of the lawn care company, every time they call.
If you’re responsive to customers, communicate with them and let you know you value you them as much as you value their lawns, you’ll win many contracts with that approach and keep those customers for years.
10. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
We live in a free market. That means that anyone who is going to be successful has to know how to win customers away from the competition. This is no place for compassion.
Granted that if you win customers away from your competitor, they will lose business, which will make it harder on them to pay their bills. That is not your problem. By building a solid methodology for winning new customers, you can capture all of the lawn care market you need from the local markets and see your business succeed.
Bidding on a new job and winning a new customer is as much an art as the work of lawn care is. As the business owner, you’re in charge of developing customer relationships. There is one thing to keep in mind about how to bid on a job and that is that winning the job is about a lot more than the bid.
You would think that if you can bid the lower price, you’ll get the job. However, homeowners and property managers are smarter than that. They know that just hiring the cheapest lawn care company is not a good idea. If that lawn care company makes a mess of their property, they end up with a much worse situation than is justified by the few dollars they saved on that bid.
Your reputation is a big part of your presentation to a potential new customer. If you must present all of your credentials in a bid or an RFP (Request for Proposal), make that document well-grounded in the things that are important to customers.
You can bid a higher cost than some of your competition and still win the bid if the customer is convinced you’re reliable and that you’ll do a great job on their lawn or the grounds of their business.
So include some text discussing your background, how long you have been in business and some notable customers who have used you for years. If you come recommended by a customer, the prospect might know, include that recommendation letter or drop that customer’s name in the proposal.
The prospect will pick up the phone to verify that you’re doing a great job for that customer and that live recommendation is solid gold in putting your bid ahead of the rest.
Future customers want to know that you believe you’re the best company for the job. You can prove that by including an enticing offer that is hard for the prospect to refuse. Give the prospective customer a “coupon” for the first lawn care session free.
That costs you the labor, time and gas to perform the free service. It’s a potent marketing tool that invariably results in a contract for long-term service. Also don’t be afraid to include an iron clad, no questions asked guarantee of satisfaction with your work. Good customers will not abuse that and they will feel confident in using your service knowing you stand behind your work with that strong a guarantee.
Learning to write a good proposal is a skill you’ll develop over time. There is no “one way” to write a good bid so you can use your own personality and style in putting together your proposal to the customer. If possible, present your bid to the customer in person.
Then you can use your charm and establish rapport, which is even more effective. By becoming skilled at winning new customers, you’ll have a crucial skill that will go a long way toward guaranteeing that your business will have a long and prosperous future ahead of it.
12. Starting a Profitable Lawn Care Business
Many lawn care businesses go idle when the weather is not cooperative. People in the construction business know what it means to have to fill months of their schedule waiting for the weather to be friendly so they can work. Teachers also are idled throughout the summer but not for weather reasons.
However, when you’re operating your own lawn care business, you may not be comfortable with simply not working through the winter months. Not only is that hard on your business, it’s hard to keep employees when they cannot make a living when it’s cold and icy outside. The bills still have to be paid, even when lawn care is not as much of a hot business as it’s in the spring and summer.
One way to generate business is to offer lawn care services that are perfect for the winter months. There are things that can be done to a lawn such as turning a section in preparation for replanting and the laying down of pre-emergent chemicals that will stop weeds from growing in the spring.
Tree and shrub trimming are perfect winter lawn care activities because the best time to trim trees is when they are hibernating. By building your skills and equipment to help people with their tree needs, you can find work in the wintertime.
Of course, winter is also a good time for you to do your internal maintenance. If you do have a week when you have no contract work to do, take advantage of those days by cleaning, repairing and tuning your mowers and other equipment. If you have property and buildings that you use for your business, this is a good time to do repairs, painting and other chores that you couldn’t get to during the goring season.
From a business perspective, it’s a good idea to bank some funds in preparation for these months. Even if you have some fall back work you can turn to during the winter, your business will have expenses to be paid. By setting aside a percentage of your revenue during the 8-10 productive months of the year, you have a slush fund to use for repairs and maintenance or simply to financially get by until you can begin working actively on lawn care jobs when the weather improves.
It’s also a good idea to do some creative thinking about how you’ll use months when lawns are under ice and snow and you cannot perform your primary mission in life. In states that get very wintry, there may be plenty of work to be had in snow and ice removal.
You can discuss this service with your lawn care customers. They know and trust you and they may be quite open to contracting with you on a “per job” basis to come and clear the ice and snow from their driveways, porches, steps and sidewalks when Mother Nature unloads.
Many lawn care businesses also diversify and offer services that are similar to lawn care but customized to the seasons. You may have the equipment to put up Christmas lights for people who want a beautiful display but are not physically able to decorate their houses, lawns and roofs to fit their vision.
With your crew of trained people, you can get up on those roofs and put those Santa Clause figures and lights wherever your customers want them. These contracts come with automatic follow up work taking down those Christmas decorations so they can be stored for next year.
Use your imagination to find viable ways to keep you and your crew busy all winter. There is often work available on Christmas Tree farms helping people cut trees to take home for the holidays. If you have the tools and the skills, you can even offer indoor maintenance work or fence repairs that can be taken care of during the months that you’re waiting for the return of lawn care jobs.
By being creative, you can keep your crew active all winter long and even keep the budget of your lawn care business working so you don’t lose any ground on your path to success just because it’s cold outside.
