Top Niche Ideas

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.

When you start your own lawn care business, there are a lot of new situations you have to get used to.  Perhaps you did lawn care for years as an independent contractor or you worked for someone else on their payroll.  The work of lawn care doesn’t change and if that is what you love to do, you are on the right track starting your own lawn care business.  But when it is you who runs the show, the world is a very different place.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment will be that when you own your own business, you suddenly are confronted with this new creature called an employee.  But it is the employees you have on board with you that will make or break your yard care 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 is 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 best important resource you can find is a labor source who can provide you with a consistent supply of workers who do a good job for you.  Whether this is a community that you network with to draw workers from or a placement service, you will benefit from having a way to recruit good employees without having to make that your job in life.

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.  It will be a skill that will be a key component to long term success.  And 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.