Start A Lawn Care Business

Lawn Care Business Tips and Advice

Archive for April, 2009

Tips for Starting a Lawn Care Business

Apr 29

Posted by Lawn Care Business in bidding lawn care, customers, how much to charge, lawn business strategies | No Comments

by: Start A Lawn Care Business

The lawn care business program available from our website: www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com is packed with information about how to operate a lawn care business.  Sometimes we are asked: “What is your number one piece of advice for someone brand new to the lawn care business?”

No individual tip can sum up all you need to know about running your own business, knowing how to price your services is a tremendously important lesson to learn about running your business.

Pricing is subjective in the lawn care industry.  No one can tell you exactly how much to price each job.  Therefore, it is very important for you to develop a strong pricing strategy. Know your costs, know how much your time is worth, and know what price the market will bear. If the market won’t bear the amount you need to cover your costs then don’t do the job. You can’t make money by losing money. DUH…right? You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that basic concept.  Companies go out-of-business everyday because they can’t cover costs.

Additionally, don’t let customers talk you down in price or intimidate you because you’re new to the business…they’ll do that, trust me. If a lawn care or landscaping job is worth $30 hold firm to that price. If the customer won’t pay, walk away and find someone who will. Don’t sacrifice your rightful profit just to get a lawn care customer.

Our lawn care business package has a huge section on how to bid and estimate lawn care and landscaping jobs.  Estimating calculator software is also included with the package.  The lawn care estimator will help you estimate your lawn care jobs.

You can purchase the lawn care business package, on sale right now, from:

http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

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Landscaping and Homeowners’ Associations

Apr 27

Posted by Lawn Care Business in Lawn Care Advertising, Real Estate Clients, landscaping, lawn business strategies | 1 Comment

by: Lawn Care Business

Free Lawn Care Advertising by Landscaping a Homeowners’ Association Entryway.

Landscaping an entryway can bring many new lawn care customers. (Free Advertising)

The impact made by your landscaping work may be your best form of self advertising especially when you landscape by planting decorative shrubs and colorful perennials.

Bidding lawn care contracts within homeowners’ associations can be very profitable for your lawn care company.  Often, homeowners’ associations bid out contracts for public areas within their confines.  Pools, road right-of-way, and, most importantly, sub division entrances are included within the lawn care and landscaping arrangements.

Allowances for advertising vary from one homeowners’ association to another.  Some HOAs will allow you to place signs on completed project areas while other HOAs will place a free ad for you within their monthly newsletter and recommend you as trusted vendor within the community.

The entrance to a residential complex under the guidance of a HOA is probably the most important initial portion of your landscaping work for the HOA.  The subdivision entrance is the first impact anyone entering the subdivision experiences.  If your landscape work is dreary or unkempt it will make a negative impact on those who notice.

However, if you skillfully design your landscaping and make a spectacular impact every resident of the subdivision will notice your work and many of them will clamor to become your clients.

Free Lawn Care Advertising

Although landscape design and installation will bring you many new lawn care customers, resist the temtation to reduce your price in exchange for “Free Lawn Care  Advertising” as you might be convinced by the HOA. Great landscaping is free advertising for the HOA since residents, seeing great landscaping, will happily continue paying their HOA fees.

When landscaping for a homeowners’ association, charge fairly and do a great job.

Landscaping a subdivision entryway is free advertising for your lawn care business.

Landscaping a subdivision entryway is free advertising for your lawn care business.

Our Start A Lawn Care Business package is on sale right now for quick shipment.   For much more information about the business package, visit our website at:  http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

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Lawn care business and earth day.

Apr 22

Posted by Lawn Care Business in composting, environment, lawn business strategies | No Comments

by: Lawn Care Business

Lawn Care Businesses celebrate Earth Day

earthday1

Well, our Earth has lasted for one more trip around the Sun and here we are again at earth day.  Being lawn care professionals, we have special opportunities to make positive impacts on our environment in the way we conduct our businesses.  The green movement has long used “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” as a mantra of environmental stewardship.  Let’s look at three simple ways we can incorporate that mantra into our daily business and make it profitable for our companies.

Reduce your use of Gasoline: 

With gas prices still at historic highs, you can reduce your use of gasoline by scheduling lawn jobs in nearby neighborhoods to coincide with each other.  Reducing driving distances and multiple trips to the same area of town is a great way to reduce gasoline consumption and increase your profit potential.

Reuse yard waste: 

Instead of sending yard waste, leaves, brush, and shrub clippings to the landfill, speak to your customers about making compost areas and brush piles on their property.  Composting is a great method of making free, rich, nutritious soil from yard waste that would otherwise go to the landfill.  Once fully composted, this soil can be used to pot plants or fill holes in the yard.  Managed correctly, small brush piles are superb habitats for song birds and other entertaining wildlife.  Birds build nests from gathered materials and brush piles generally break down to a very small size over a short period of time.

Recycle lawn equipment oil: 

It goes without saying (but we’re going to say it anyway) that you should recycle all oil drained from your machinery during the course of normal maintenance.  Auto shops such as Advanced Auto Parts and Autozone generally accept your used oil.  Buy a large footprint oil receptacle to capture drained oil from your equipment.  Once finished with your oil changes, take your spent oil to a recycling center.  Also, be sure to keep your oil receptacle out of the rain.  Rain displaces oil forcing it out of the container and contaminates its surrounding environment eventually washing oil into the ground or local waterway.

These are a few quick tips for earth day.  If you want to operate an eco-friendly, profitable lawn care company, look for our manuals and lawn care business software available through our website:

www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

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How to stripe a lawn with your lawn care business.

Apr 21

Posted by Lawn Care Business in customers, lawn business strategies, lawn equipment, lawn striping | No Comments

by:Lawn Care Business

Striping grass gives a professional look to your customer’s lawn.

With the simple addition of a striping kit to your commercial lawn mower (and a little practice), you can turn your customer’s lawn into a visual masterpiece.


A basic "back and forth" striping pattern.
 

After the addition of a striping kit to your lawn mower, striping is attained with directional cutting.  Directional cutting allows the striping kit on your lawn mower to bend each blade of grass in the direction of the cut.  Grass bent toward the viewer appears darker than grass bent away from the viewer.  Stripes are solely dependent on direction of the bend.  Individual stripes have nothing to do with length of cut, different types of grass on each cut, or fertilizer applied in a pattern.  However, length of cut and type of grass will change the intensity of the stripes.   Striping gives a visual appeal to a lawn that is unattainable with concentric perimeter cutting.

Striping lawns as part of a commercial lawn care business makes your lawns look professionally manicured.  Some lawn Care customers have been known to pay as much as an additional 50% to 100% of a basic grass cutting job for a striped lawn depending on the complexity of the striping pattern. Your results will vary but it shouldn’t hurt your company’s reputation to add striping services for those customers who are willing to pay extra for it. Additionally, you should notice more potential clients stopping to ask you for estimates (and advice) when they see the spectacular job you’ve done on their neighbor’s lawns. 

To learn more about how to professionally stripe lawns and increase profits for your lawn care business, visit our website at: 
www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

 

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Sub-contracting (independent contracting) your lawn care work.

Apr 18

Posted by Lawn Care Business in customers, lawn business strategies, lawn equipment | No Comments

Questions about the "Start
A Lawn Care Business" training material.

We recently received an email question concerning the feasibility of starting a lawn care company and hiring out all the work to independent contractors.  The initial email question follows with our response further below.

Hello,

I bought your Lawn Care Business
Program in February and I am trying to start a lawn care business (on the side).  I seek your feedback. I do not intend to do the work, but to be the owner/manager/promotion mgr/dispatcher… I intend to set it up where I pay lawn care workers as Independent Contractors with them using their own yard equipment. Would it work better if I bought some some lawn care equipment and rented a storage unit?

Thank you.
 

Our response is below.

Hi:

Many LCOs transition from lawn care workers to full-time managers. If you intend to manage a lawn care business without first doing the work yourself, don’t underestimate the hands-on efforts needed to keep your business running smoothly. I’m sure you can understand the infinite possibilities of things going wrong if you are not on job sites or in constant communication with your workers and your customers. Poor quality mowing jobs by your crews, equipment break downs through rough handling, payment skimming, and bad treatment of customers and/or their property, will adversely affect your lawn care business. If you are a hands-on manager, you can quickly abate these problems. However, if these problems get ahead of you, they can quickly derail your efforts of running your lawn care company.

Additionally, before you decide to hire your lawn care workers as sub-contractors, please check the laws on what a "sub-contractor" really is. If you control their timeline, their equipment, and how the work is performed, there might be legal accounting rules which disallow the workers from being considered anything other than employees. We are not experts with accounting laws so you will need to check with your CPA.

Thank you and good luck:

Keith
Start A Lawn Care Business


Support after your purchase of
our Lawn Care Business training materials

When you purchase our lawn care business program, you are welcome to ask specific questions which may not be fully covered in our training material. Our team of lawn care professionals will do our best to answer your questions. The Lawn Care Business package is a full series of manuals and software which will most all questions you have about starting your own lawn care business. www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

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