Start A Lawn Care Business

Make money with a lawn care and landscaping business.

Posts Tagged lawn care customers

Lawn Care Business Customer List – Mid Summer Expansion

May 17

Posted by Lawn Care Business in advertising lawn care, lawn business strategies, lawn care customers | Comments off

We dedicate a large portion of our lawn care business guidebook to the concept of building a highly profitable lawn care client list. You can learn how to turn your low profit customers into a highly profitable lawn care business customer list that will make you thousands more dollars between now and the end of the year.

Low Profit Lawn Care Customer List

If you operate a lawn care business, you probably know the relative ease of gaining customers through competitive (lowball) bidding practices and expensive advertising. While the strategy of lowball bidding and expensive advertising will build a large client list, it is probably not a desirable customer list. Unfortunately, many new lawn care companies fall into the trap during their first few months in business of acquiring low paying customers with difficult to manage lawn care needs.

Highly Profitable Lawn Care Customers

Now that summer is in full swing, it is time for you to weed out your low-profit customers and begin building a highly profitable customer list. By now, you have identified your good customers versus the ones that are barely making you any money for the amount of time and effort you spend on their lawns.

The questions you probably have are:

1) Should I drop low paying customers?

2) How can I attract higher paying customers?

We do not suggest you drop low paying customers as a first course of action? Instead, our lawn care business training course supports methods of increasing the amount of money your customers pay you each month. Increased rates and nominal services increased with higher profit margins will dramatically increase the amount of money each customer pays you. Yes, you might lose some customers. However, we have developed a solid customer psychology strategy to help you retain many, if not most, of your customers.

Lawn Care Business Training Guide

Higher paying lawn care customers can be attracted via careful marketing of your lawn care business. Again, our lawn care training guide teaches you how to specifically target higher paying customers and develop strategies to build a highly profitable list of high paying customers.

If you are languishing with low paying lawn care customers, take steps right now to increase the profit of each lawn care customer.





Visit our main website (click the “Start A Lawn Care Business” link at the top of this page) to learn more about our lawn care business training course.

Tags: ,

No-Mow Zones Create Bird Habitats

Mar 31

Posted by Lawn Care Business in natural lawn care | No Comments

During March and April much of the country is in the middle of bird mating season.  After birds lay their eggs, they go through an incubation period of several weeks after which parents need several weeks to feed and raise their fledglings.  Mid-March through August is prime bird mating (and fledgling raising) months.

Setting aside “no-mow” areas in your customers’ lawns encourages native birds to thrive in your area.  No-Mow areas do not have to be large and they needent detract from the aesthetic value of the lawns you mow.  The size of a no-mow zone will depend on the size of the lawn and the extent to which your customer is willing to dedicated as a natural area. 

Within a typical subdivision style residential lawn, a simple strip 5 feet to 10 feet wide at the back of a customer’s property allows a minimal amount of space for Killdeer and other ground nesting birds to prepare their nests and raise their young.  Bigger lawns allow for larger no-mow zones. 

Though no-mow zones require a minimal amount of care, they are not necessarily completely unkempt.  These area can be naturally landscaped with items such as birdbaths and bird feeders.

For more information on the addition of natural “no-mow” zones to your lawn care customers yards, see the document:

Helping Birds At Home
Backyard Habitat for Birds

Tags: , , ,

Free Advertising for your Lawn Care Company? Think Again!

Feb 10

Posted by Lawn Care Business in advertising lawn care, Lawn Care Advertising, lawn care customers | No Comments

Lawn care is a competitive business.  As with any competitive business, you have to advertise your company to get customers.  Right now is one of the best times of the year to advertise heavy.  Customers that you acquire right now will, likely, be with you for the rest of the year.

As with all business principles, there are right ways to advertise and wrong ways to advertise.  I am noticing a disturbing trend that lawn care companies are using to advertise their businesses this year.  And I think they are making mistakes. 

After I finishing for the day, I stopped into a gas station to fill up my truck to prevent an empty tank tomorrow morning.  As I reached for the gas nozzle, I noticed about 1/2 a dozen stickers with the name of a local lawn care company printed on them.  The stickers covered the panel of the gas pump and a few of them were placed to obscure the gas price display.

Lawn Care Advertising

Improper Lawn Care Advertising

Do you think this lawn care company will attract good customers by using this type of advertising scheme? 

Personally, I think this is the wrong way to advertise a lawn care company.  Very few potential customers will respond favorably to this type of advertising.  More-so, potential lawn care customers are turned off by this tactic.  Instead of attracting clients, this company will garner complaints, destroy their goodwill, and potentially lose existing customers.

If you are thinking about using this type of marketing for your lawn care service, please think twice.  There are legitimate forms of free advertising available that are not nearly this obnoxious.

If you are starting your lawn care business this year or if you are attempting to advertise heavily to expand an existing business, our lawn care business guidebook package includes a great section on advertising your company.  Proper advertising will gain your company many more clients than resorting to placing stickers on gas pumps.

For more information, visit our home page:

http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com
Start A Lawn Care Business

Tags: ,

Is Lawn Care a Luxury?

Jan 27

Posted by Lawn Care Business in advertising lawn care, economy, lawn care customers | No Comments

Dave Ramsey, the financial guru, answered a question recently from a listener to his radio program:

Dear Dave,

We currently pay to have our lawn mowed each week. This expense is figured into our monthly budget, but we’re not quite out of debt yet. My wife says this is a luxury at this point, and I should cut the grass myself until we’re out of debt. What do you think?

Dave’s answer to this lawn care question was very close to the way we would have answered this question.

We believe most financial questions should be answered from a standpoint of a cost/benefit analysis.  In essence, does the cost of the product/service outweigh the benefit of that product/service. If the cost outweighs the benefit then it is a luxury.

Dave Ramsey mentioned that a Doctor or a Lawyer with a high income can easily afford to hire a lawn care company. In fact, high income households SHOULD hire lawn care companies instead of doing the lawn themselves as they will make much more money performing their careers than they will pay for lawn care. Ramsey goes on to state that someone earning $12/hour will probably not earn enough at their job in the amount of time they would save by hiring a lawn care professional, therefore, they should cut the grass themselves.

We think Dave’s answer if pretty good. However, we can think of many examples when a $12/hour employee would hire a lawn care company and a Doctor would cut his own grass. Ability to take time off work is a great example. $12/hour employees often have their work lives dictated to them by their bosses. They often have to work double shifts and weekends because their bosses tell them to. They are often scrambling for extra hour of overtime they can get to increase their paychecks.

Doctors, on the other hand, often have much more autonomy in their jobs. They are able to take time away from work and if gardening or lawn care is their hobby then they don’t want to hire lawn care professionals even if they can afford it.

As a lawn care business owner, it is wise of you to consider your customer’s cost/benefit analysis. Seeing their budget through their eyes can help you point out how valuable your services are. Yes, we all want roster full of high income clients. However, sometimes, a $12/hour employee often needs, and is willing and able to pay, you to cut their grass on a weekly basis.

Our lawn care business guidebook has a great section showing you marketing strategies to help you gain a wide range of lawn care customers. We believe you need a good mix of lawn care customers to have a truly successful operation.

Learn more at our main website:
Start A Lawn Care Business
http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com

Tags: , ,

Dealing with Complaining Lawn Care Customers

Jan 25

Posted by Lawn Care Business in lawn care customers | No Comments

Dealing with lawn care customers is often a tricky balance at best.  You, as a lawn care business owner, must attempt to understand the customer’s expectations of a job you are bidding and then balance those expectations with the amount you charge for your services.

As careful as you are to balance a customer’s expectations with the price you are charging for a particular job, you will likely run into an occasional customer who is determined to be dissatisfied with any level of service you offer.    Ugh…those customers are annoying and they can derail an otherwise perfect day.  A perpetual complainer wastes your time and drains your enthusiasm.

As you gain experience in your lawn care business, you will learn to watch for warning signs during the initial customer contact and during the bidding and estimation process.  Proper interpretations of warning signs will help you avoid problem customers.  We are not speaking about an otherwise good customer who has an occasional gripe about your service.  Instead we want to help you avoid problematic customers who have never ending streams of complaints and continuously misinterpret the services you agree to offer.

We recently had a problem customer.  The annoying fact is that we gave this customer the exact same level of service that we offered our other customers.  We spent a great deal of time attempting to understand the customer’s complaint and determining if we had done something wrong.  To our dismay, the customer simply turned out to be one of those whiners in life that are never satisfied with anything.  I’m sure you know those type of people; they always feel that someone is doing them wrong and no matter what you do, you can’t help them to see the value in the product and service you offer.

After almost 20 years associated with the Lawn Care Industry we feel we have developed a “pretty good” strategy at avoiding perpetual complainers.  However, ocassionally, one or two problem customers get through our screening process.

Do you feel that you get more than your fair share of complaining customers?  If you are providing great service at a fair price, maybe the problem is your screening process.  To learn more about how to properly interview lawn care customers, read our main webpage about our Lawn Care Business training package.  We have included a great section showing you how to identify and weed out problem customers.

Learn more on our main webpage:

http://www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com
Start A Lawn Care Business

We have found that the overwhelming majority of our customer are very willing to pay a fair price for equally fair service.

Tags: