Free is Good in the Lawn Care Business…

One of the things that people who succeed in running their own lawn care business like is how you approach your work.  Unlike, when you work for someone else, you are not just doing time to punch the clock and make a paycheck.  The quest to build your own business is much more of an adventure and a huge, all consuming obsession or hobby than it is “just a job”.  There is no such thing as “punching the clock” when you own the business.  You are always thinking of ways to find new customers, make the customers you have happy so they will keep you on and recommend you to others and to fine tune the business so you are productive and profitable.

Customer service is more than just a slogan when you make your living working for a roster of loyal customers.  A lawn care business is not like a grocery store.  You don’t have hundreds or thousands of customers.  You may have a dozen or more when you start out and perhaps a hundred or so for an established lawn care business. Everything you do in building that business revolves around getting and retaining customers.  You don’t just think about customer service, you live and breathe it.

There is one principle of customer service that is one of those hidden tricks of the trade that successful lawn care professionals know. That principle is, “always look for a way to do something for your customer for free.”  This may seem to run against the concept of working for making money.  But there may be no more potent way to get new customers and to cement an existing customer as one who will stay with you for years than to occasionally find a way to give them some service that is above and beyond the call of duty.

A give away is an outstanding way to land new business especially in a very competitive market.  Even if you are talking to a potential customer that you connect to via a reference, nothing gets your foot in the door better than offering the first session of lawn care for free.  You can present this as a trial offer so the customer can get a feel for the quality work you do.  Make it no obligation so the customer knows he or she can enjoy the free service and not have to sit through a sales pitch.  You are literally letting your work stand on its own two feet.

When you go to a job site every week and spend a few hours there, it is easy to see things that can be done for the customer.  This is particularly true of a residential customer.  You may see a tree branch that should be taken down or removed from the property or a section of a fence that could use a few nails.  Part of your maintenance on the account is to visit with the customer either to deliver the invoice, discuss future work or pick up a check.

If you offer to take care of that little job that you or your crew noticed for free, that can endear you to that customer.  That little free service will come back to you in customer loyalty and in many referrals that will serve to grow your business simply because you took the time to be nice and do something for free for the good customers that you have.

Employees Are the Backbone of Your Lawn Care Business…

When you start your lawn care business, you may be able to handle a handful of customers yourself.  But if you plan to grow and to see your business prosper, you will have to take on lawn care workers as employees.  And 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 are trying to grow a business.  To be a success, you need just enough workers to handle the yards 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 will get more work in and you may need those employees.

Similarly, it is a disaster if you have a surge of business and you don’t have the staff to handle all the work.  That means you, the boss, has to get out and work on lawns when you should be doing the work of running the company.  It also means overtime for the employees you 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 turn over.  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.   But the upside of management 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 crew members because they will make you a success.

Too often, there is an antagonistic relationship between management and crews on a lawn care staff.  It is 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 turn over is so high that you meet new crew members every day.  If you manage numerous job sites, make it a point to get around to each one each day.  Stop the work and meet the 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 is 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.

You are 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. And 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 are more likely to keep them.

Doing What You Love for a Living…

There is a joy to lawn care that is hard for some people to appreciate.  To be able to work out in nature and enjoy the breeze on your cheek, the sound of birds as you work and the fresh air is just about  healthy a lifestyle as you can imagine.  And to be able to take a yard and turn it into a beautiful and sculpted work of art is a singular joy that is one of the reasons you may have decided to start your own lawn care company.

When you do for a living what is your passion in life, you really never do go to work.  Every day going out there to dive into the craft of taking care of lawns is a joy of life that to you is fun and not work at all.  Sure, there will be physical fatigue that comes with working with your hands and body all day long.  But that is the good kind of tired because you did something good with your time and you made the world a more beautiful place.

Many lawn care businesses are started by people who simply love to garden and work with lawns.  So they decided to take what is a passion and a hobby on the weekend and make it their way of earning a living.  One reason this is a natural next step for you may be that you have reached the limits of your creative expression simply working on your own lawn.  If you have more desire to work on crafting a beautiful lawn than you can use on your own home, its a natural next step to take your skill for lawn care and turn it into a business.

You may run a different kind of lawn care business than the big commercial operations.  There is nothing written in stone that you have to start a lawn care business that exists to become a corporate giant employing thousands of people.  Perhaps you want to just own a very small lawn care operation that lets you make your full time job out of a passion you have for lawn care and working with plants.  It doesn’t take that much to support that kind of lawn care business.  If you get just enough customers to give you 4-5 yards to do each day, that is sufficient.

Your passion for what you do will come through when you are talking to perspective customers.  But what will really make you a sought after craftsman of lawn care will be the immaculate job you will do on every lawn that is put in your care.   That is because you don’t come to the job with the objective of getting it done as fast as possible so you can make a lot of money.  If you created this lawn care business to give you a vehicle to do what you love to do and get paid for it, you can dawdle over each lawn and not quit until it is absolutely perfect.

That perfection will be admired by your customers and by his or her neighbors as well. Before long you will have more requests for your services than you know what to do with.  Then you can pick and choose who you wish to work for.  You might choose based on the whether the home owner has that same passion for a beautiful lawn that you do. Or you might select clients that can accommodate your meticulous insistence on perfection and don’t mind giving you the time to create a masterpiece out of their yards.

By approaching your working this way, you will never lack for income. You may even find yourself wooed by hotels or golf courses to bring your special vision for a truly great lawn to their environment.

That is up to you as to whether you want to take on that kind of challenge.  It could be your master work to create something magnificent from a larger setting like that.   But as long as you are true to your vision for what you want to do with your time and you are doing what you love to do for a living, the details will fall into place.  And you will never regret your decision to make a living with your own lawn care business living for the joy of your work rather than just working for a living.

Coming Up With the Perfect Name for Your Lawn Care Business…

The dream you have when you imagine starting your own business may be seeing that name on advertisements or on your business card for your new company..  So when you begin to get organized to finally start that lawn care business you have been dreaming about, the name you pick for the world to know your business is important.  Its worth putting some thought into because your business name serves a lot of functions.

If it has been a dream of yours to own your own lawn care business for a long time, part of that dream may be having your name become part of the business name.  The good of that approach is that your credibility that you already have as a lawn care professional becomes part of that name.  A business name has two jobs.  One is to be memorable so people can remember who to call when they need lawn work done. The other is to inspire confidence and tell the customer something about your business.  If you name your lawn care company, George Hamilton’s Lawn Services, (assuming you are George Hamilton), you build that credibility into part of your company name.

The downside of using your name as part of your corporate ID is that it limits you if you are thinking of building a large company that extends to other towns or spans state lines eventually.  Also if you want to sell your lawn care business in a few years, you also sell your actual name as that corporate ID is a big part of the value of the business you are selling.

Another consideration in picking a corporate logo is your internet web site that you want to create to support and advertise your business.  Experts in internet marketing tell us that the best internet URL is your company name.  So the best URL for George Hamilton’s Lawn Services is georgehamiltonslawnservices.com.  For this reason keep your lawn services company name short and easy to remember.  It is common for someone to see your truck signage or some other promotional material about your company and go to their web site and search for your URL using the company name.  So make it easy for them to find you on the internet and that will result in more customers coming from your web site.

Also be sure you check to make sure the name you have in mind is not already taken.  One way to do that is to “Google” the company name you want to use.  The other is to go to your county clerk office to register your company name.  They will find out if someone else has it.  If not, when you register it, you are reserving that name for your company so it is protected.

There are a lot of ways you can go in picking a lawn care company name.  Its not a bad idea to use a  whimsical or funny company name.  The guys who created the moving company, “Two Guys and a Truck” know the value of a humorous name.  It is memorable to your future customers which means a funny name has some serious marketing value.

Be sure you keep the name generic enough so you can add services and the name covers what you do.  If you name the company, George’s Lawn Mowing Service, that is a name that limits what you do.  By changing “lawn mowing” to “lawn care”, you can add trimming, gardening and other related services all under the same corporate ID.  So give this matter some thought even if you already have a name for your company that you really like.  Pick a name you love but also one that works for you and for your company as well..

The dream you have when you imagine starting your own business may be seeing that name on advertisements or on your business card for your new company..  So when you begin to get organized to finally start that lawn care business you have been dreaming about, the name you pick for the world to know your business is important.  Its worth putting some thought into because your business name serves a lot of functions.

If it has been a dream of yours to own your own lawn care business for a long time, part of that dream may be having your name become part of the business name.  The good of that approach is that your credibility that you already have as a lawn care professional becomes part of that name.  A business name has two jobs.  One is to be memorable so people can remember who to call when they need lawn work done. The other is to inspire confidence and tell the customer something about your business.  If you name your lawn care company, George Hamilton’s Lawn Services, (assuming you are George Hamilton), you build that credibility into part of your company name.

The downside of using your name as part of your corporate ID is that it limits you if you are thinking of building a large company that extends to other towns or spans state lines eventually.  Also if you want to sell your lawn care business in a few years, you also sell your actual name as that corporate ID is a big part of the value of the business you are selling.

Another consideration in picking a corporate logo is your internet web site that you want to create to support and advertise your business.  Experts in internet marketing tell us that the best internet URL is your company name.  So the best URL for George Hamilton’s Lawn Services is georgehamiltonslawnservices.com.  For this reason keep your lawn services company name short and easy to remember.  It is common for someone to see your truck signage or some other promotional material about your company and go to their web site and search for your URL using the company name.  So make it easy for them to find you on the internet and that will result in more customers coming from your web site.

Also be sure you check to make sure the name you have in mind is not already taken.  One way to do that is to “Google” the company name you want to use.  The other is to go to your county clerk office to register your company name.  They will find out if someone else has it.  If not, when you register it, you are reserving that name for your company so it is protected.

There are a lot of ways you can go in picking a lawn care company name.  Its not a bad idea to use a  whimsical or funny company name.  The guys who created the moving company, “Two Guys and a Truck” know the value of a humorous name.  It is memorable to your future customers which means a funny name has some serious marketing value.

Be sure you keep the name generic enough so you can add services and the name covers what you do.  If you name the company, George’s Lawn Mowing Service, that is a name that limits what you do.  By changing “lawn mowing” to “lawn care”, you can add trimming, gardening and other related services all under the same corporate ID.  So give this matter some thought even if you already have a name for your company that you really like.  Pick a name you love but also one that works for you and for your company as well.

Anticipating Trouble for Your Lawn Care Business…

When a person is in the planning stages of a new business, it is like preparation for vacation or a wedding because sometimes the process is full of idealism and optimism.  And that is healthy because when you set out to start your own lawn care business, it is 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 article, you may have thought it was unnecessarily pessimistic.  It isn’t.  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 are acknowledging that trouble will come but you are 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 are 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 is 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 yard of the most civilized yard 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 is 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 rain storm.  You should have a contingency plan with your customers so if you cannot perform their yard care on a specific day, you can make adjustments to 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 of all, hire experienced workers who know how to work with the equipment so the chances of injury are small.  But 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, God forbid, 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.  Its all part of being prepared for when trouble comes so trouble can come and go and not disturb the ongoing success of your business.

Writing Your Business Plan for Your New Lawn Care Business…

Starting a lawn care business shares common steps with what anyone has to do to start a new business.  And a fundamental step of preparing to start your business is to write a business plan.  Sadly, people often procrastinate  on 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.

A business plan at heart is a document you prepare for investors or to present to a lending institution to get a small business loan to go into business.  It takes capital to start your own lawn care business.  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 are 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 will create a detailed cost/benefit analysis which will call for you to gather real world cost values for the equipment you will need, the insurance you have to buy, the space you need to lease and to pay the workers you will need to support the business.

That research alone can be a lifesaver when you actually start your new business.  But you will also go to the next step of documenting if the market for your services is strong and how you will 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 book store 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 an also turn to the local chapter of the small business association for help.  Very often there are retired business men and women who volunteer to help a new small business person like you write your first business plan.  Don’t be too proud to accept their help.  They know what you are 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 will 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 are done, you have a roadmap for how you will take your vision for a successful lawn care company from dream to reality.  That plan will go through some changes and revisions as you go along.  But just having a map to start with can be a huge help in launching your lawn care business on its road to success.

Becoming Profitable in Your Lawn Care Business…

There are a lot of good reasons for starting your own lawn care company.  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 are very good at which is making people’s lawns and gardens look great.  Or you might do it because you know you can do a better job running a business than the people you work for.  But 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 would not be lawn care companies that stay in business year after year.  To make your own business work, there are some basics of building a profitable business that you must keep in mind to apply to your situation as you launch your lawn care business and begin to get customers and generate revenue.

Profitability is not a complicated idea.  It is basically making more money than you spend.  But it is a mistake to think you can reach profitability 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 customer retention.  You can see profitability when you and your crews are all fully engaged in money generating work every working hour of every day.

This can be a challenge particularly as you grow to where you can need to keep multiple crews going every day.  To keep each team on a job site, completing work and then moving to the next job site and juggle the work and the workers each and every day is a test of your management ability.  But you learn the art of managing larger and larger teams and larger jobs as your business grows from just you and your small collection of tools to an empire.

As a manager, job one if customer retention.  Job two is gaining new customers.  Job three is cost control and 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 is 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.  But 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 is 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 build a budget of reliable income from the monthly payments of that customer base.  Happy customers will give you new work as you expand the kinds of services your lawn care business offers.   And happy customers give you referrals as they tell their friends of neighbors about the lawn service they are so happy with.  That word of mouth marketing is free to you and it will get you more business than any other type of advertising.  These are all great reasons to take very good care of the customers you have and grow from that base to greater profitability each year.

Learning the Tricks of Marketing for Your Lawn Care Business…

It is easy to get intimidated by some of the roles you take on when you start your own lawn care business.  You may be an expert at lawn care and everything that goes with it.  You know all about how to buy great equipment and how to keep it in good working condition.  You know all about lawns, gardens and how to support just about any request your customer’s might make of you pertaining to the outdoor space around their homes or businesses.

But being a busiess person means knowing about things you may have never wanted to know about such as accounting, management, taxes, social security, withholding, leases and employee benefits.  But these elements are just as important as the work you do at a customer site if you hope to be a success as a lawn care business.  One of the area of expertise that you should get over that sense of intimation about is marketing.

You don’t have to become an advertising expert to find the right marketing plan to promote your lawn care business.  On the other hand, if you want to succeed and see your business grow, getting the word out to new customers is a must.  You know that any business sees a steady turnover of customers.  While lawn care is all about long term relationships with clients, you do need to replenish your client roster continuously.  But more than that, if you want to grow, you should have  marketing plan in place that will bring you new customers regularly so you can enjoy the growth you want to see your service go through.

There are many avenues of expression that you can use to reach out to new customers.  There is television and radio advertising, newspaper ads, billboards, magazine advertisements, flyers and many more.  The first rule of thumb is to see marketing strictly as a means to the end of getting new customers.  Avoid the temptation to get too creative or “show off” in your marketing.  Just because Geiko and Sonic put funny advertisements on TV, that doesn’t mean you have to.  Those commercials are expensive to make so to afford to use that kind of high end advertising, you have to justify it in terms of potential new business.

You may get to the point in your growth that those flamboyant and fun commercials are a good fit to your marketing objectives.  But make sure your marketing goals are 100% built around your business needs so you don’t make the mistake of spending a lot of money or marketing that is not making your business lots of money in return.

Fit your marketing plan to the size of your business and to who your future customers are.  Many times a very simple and inexpensive form of marketing is also the most effective for getting you new business.  That sign that you had made up to put on the side of your company trucks and vans is outstanding a marketing.  You will get most of your new business from people who see in working in the neighborhoods where you already are successful.  By simply making it easy for people who see you out and about to contact you, many times you never have to do anything more to get all the customers you need.

By taking advantage of the least expensive and most productive advertising and marketing first, you can see your business grow while keeping your marketing budget under control.  Then when your lawn care businesses as big as Sonic or Geiko, then you can employ cavemen and cartoon lizards to get the word out about your business.