Top Niche Ideas

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.

To start a business in any field of expertise, the first step to success is to know what you are doing.  While it may not seem that it takes tremendous experience to mow lawns, running a full service lawn business requires a knowledge of equipment, an ability to offer a variety of lawn and garden services and a knowledge of customer service and expectations that do require some experience and wisdom in order to see the kind of success you want.

The best way to learn the nuts and bolts of actually running a lawn business is to work for one.  This “paying your dues” phase is about more than just showing yourself able to do the various jobs that a professional lawn care specialist can do.  It is about sitting under the guidance of someone who is running their own lawn business and “spying” on how it is done and how your bosses handle various situations to keep the business moving forward toward success.

What initially inspires someone to start a lawn care business is their love of the work.  But what goes on in addition to doing a great job making your customer’s lawns look great is what is the difference between a lawn care worker and someone who is running their own small business that is focused on lawn care.  And perhaps the most important aspect of that business is marketing.

The primary way of getting new busiess when you run a lawn care company is word of mouth.  Pay attention to the boss when you are working for a lawn care company as a way of learning the ropes.  When you go on a job with the boss and owner of the lawn care company you work for, you will notice he spends as much time talking to the customer as he does doing the work.  That is the heard of marketing because by making happy customers, your boss will get referrals.  That is also very smart marketing.

By taking a job in a lawn care company, you are in the finest “college of lawn care” there is.  You are in the school of real life.  You will see why your boss’s company is a success.  You will also see failures and problems that crop up and how that lawn care company you work for handles those roadblocks.  If they do a great job resolving problems, they will be profitable and you can learn from their success.  If problems cause the business to lose money, you can learn from their mistakes at no expense to you.  That is also solid gold training you will use when you start your own lawn care company.

You will have to decide whether to confess to the lawn care company you go to work for that you are there to learn now to run a successful operation.  In some cases, that will endear you to the boss who will give you private lessons in management, taxes, accounting, recruitment, marketing, maintenance and all of the aspects that you must be good at to make your lawn care business thrive.

But it is possible that if you tell your current boss you are there to learn the business in order to start a competing business, that can create bad feelings or even cost you the job.  So you may have to keep your true motivations for being there to yourself.  Nonetheless, continue to do a good job for your boss while paying scrupulous attention to everything that lawn care company you work for has to do to be successful as a business.  You might even take notes and write up what you learn each day.  When you finally step out of the “employee” role and strike out on your own, those notes will be your Bible on what to do and what NOT to do to be a success with your lawn care business.  Your time in training will be time well spent when you avoid the pit falls and see your new lawn care company grow from the first day of operation on out.

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.  And it is 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.

But if you are getting ready to start your own lawn care business, it is important you understand a hidden truth about being a success in this kind of work.  That truth is that it is not about the lawns.  It is about the customers. And once you focus the majority of your energies and focus on the customers of your lawn care business, you will 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 busiess.  And 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.  But 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 are 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 is 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 and 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 are responsive to customers, communicate with them and let you know you value you them as much as you value their lawns, you will win many contracts with that approach and keep those customers for years.

Advertising is a core component of any successful business.  Even if you are setting up a lawn care business, you will 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 will 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 will advertise in and combine the flyers with word of mouth.

Another quite effective type of advertising for your lawn care business is as simple as it is 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 is 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 are 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. As you get more well known, your company gets well known and you add customers with little more effort at advertising than that.

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.