Top Niche Ideas

Before you can start your own home business, the one

thing that you should do is to designate a place for

you to work. The area that you work in should be free

of distractions and have a computer,a desk, a phone, a

connection to the Internet, and, if possible, a

bathroom. This way you will have everything you need

until you take your lunch break.

Something to remember is that you are ‘at work’ in

this area. An ideal solution is to have every

distraction taken care of. This means that you have

someone looking after your child, if possible. If your

child is younger than school age, hire someone to look

after them during the day.

This may seem strange since you are working at home,

but would you take a baby into your office with you?

Probably not – your boss wouldn’t allow it. Having

someone look after them while you are working ensures

that you will get everything done during business

hours.

If your children are school age and old enough to

understand, let them know that you are working, and

that you should only be disturbed if it’s an

emergency. If they are still young, have someone watch

them after school.

This may seem like an unnecessary expense, but if you

are talking to someone on the phone they won’t take

you seriously if they hear a crying baby in the

background, or children fighting. You want to make

yourself seem as professional as you can so that

people know they can trust you.

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.

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.

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.