Starting a lawn care business shares common steps with what anyone has to do to start a new business.  And a fundamental step of preparing to start your business is to write a business plan.  Sadly, people often procrastinate  on writing a business plan because they don’t know how to do it and they are intimidated by the process.  So understanding the basic steps of what you need for your lawn care business plan will help you get ready for this important step.

A business plan at heart is a document you prepare for investors or to present to a lending institution to get a small business loan to go into business.  It takes capital to start your own lawn care business.  There is equipment to buy, workers to hire, trucks and trailers to get, marketing materials to create and storage facilities to lease.  The funding will help you get that basic infrastructure in place before you have the revenue to pay for those costs.

Your business plan is a document to demonstrate to those who may give you the capital you need that you have a solid business concept.  It also discusses that the markets are there to support your business and that you have a realistic plan to build the business until you are making sufficient profits to pay back the money with interest or to give investors a handsome return on their investment.

This does not mean that you should skip writing a business plan if you already have what you need to start your lawn care business or if you have enough funding without taking on debt or investors.  The process of writing a business plan is a vital developmental step because it will force you to think through your plan for success.  You will create a detailed cost/benefit analysis which will call for you to gather real world cost values for the equipment you will need, the insurance you have to buy, the space you need to lease and to pay the workers you will need to support the business.

That research alone can be a lifesaver when you actually start your new business.  But you will also go to the next step of documenting if the market for your services is strong and how you will about growing the business over a five year period of time.  If you discover during this process that you do not have a sufficient market for your lawn care business, better to know that before you take the plunge of starting the business than after.  The process of building a business plan is a big step of taking your vision for your wonderful new business and making a real life projection of how that dream will play out in reality.

If you don’t know how to write a business plan, don’t panic.    There is plenty of help available.  Your local library or book store is overflowing with books that will guide you through the process.  The internet is also rich with resources to take you step by step through how to research each section of your business plan and then how to go about writing that plan in a way that will be understandable and reasonable to your backers.

You an also turn to the local chapter of the small business association for help.  Very often there are retired business men and women who volunteer to help a new small business person like you write your first business plan.  Don’t be too proud to accept their help.  They know what you are going through seeing your vision for a great lawn care business go from dream to reality and they know how to guide you through this important part of your planning and preparation.

When your business plan is done, you will be happy you took the time to complete this process.  Part of the document is a five year plan for success.  That means when you are done, you have a roadmap for how you will take your vision for a successful lawn care company from dream to reality.  That plan will go through some changes and revisions as you go along.  But just having a map to start with can be a huge help in launching your lawn care business on its road to success.

Most of us daydream of starting our own business.  If you work for someone else, even if it is doing something you love, there are issues that you have to contend with.  If the work you love is lawn care, its common to see flaws in how the people you are working for are running the business and to think, “Hey I can do better than that”.  Also the allure of starting your own business is that if you are a success (and we presume you will be), you are the one making money off of the work of others.

So maybe its time to stop daydreaming and get out there and start that new business.  There are some steps to follow to accomplish that dream.  The first commandment of starting a lawn care busiess is that you are still starting a small business and you will need to follow many of the procedures that any small business start up will go through.  A visit to the small business association in your town is always a positive first move.  They will have literature, some free courses and sometimes free consultation with retired people who know all about how to start a business.   If you can get that kind of help, you will get a fast track education in what you must do to get your new business up and running.

One big step any advisor you consult will have you take before you do anything about your dream of starting your own lawn care business is to write a business plan. This is not as difficult as it sounds.  It is basically an organized documentation of your dream combined with some real world research in how you will make that dream a reality.  The primary purpose of your business plan is to give you something to take to investors or to a bank or some other lending institution to get funding to start up your new business.

If you have all the money you need or if you already have the equipment you need to start your business, maybe you don’t need a business plan.  But it still is a good idea to write one.  The process will force you to create a five year plan so you set out on day one on a path to growth and success.  And even if you have enough money and equipment to get started, you will want to grow and expand and that might take a small business loan.  That is where having a business plan in  place will pay off.

Before you quit your “day job”, think about the steps you will take to make your new business profitable quickly.  You may need to spend a few months while you are still employed by someone else building your equipment inventory, planning for a storage facility and landing customers who will give you their lawn care business when you break off from the world of being an employee and launch your business for real.

The research you do now before you make the big step of setting up a new business will be a life saver down the road.  There is a lot to learn such as whether you will incorporate your business or just pick a business name and get started.  You should spend some time learning about how to keep the books, do the accounting and manage both the money you make and the bills you will pay as a business.   You can think through if you will employ others and get some training in what involves as an employer both financially and legally.

There is more to running a lawn care business than gassing up the mowers and going to work.  By doing your preparation work while you still have a paycheck coming in, you vastly improve your chances of success because you will “hit the ground running”  That fast start will get your new lawn care business off the ground for a long and successful as well as prosperous business for you.

Starting a new business of any kind if hard work.  That is just as true when it comes to a lawn care business as any other field of endeavor.  Before you even start putting together a business plan or talking about the idea of owning and operating your own lawn care company, its good to make sure your reasons for starting a lawn care business are good ones.  The purpose you have for going out on your own will have has much to contribute to your final success as any other factor.

There is a certain pride that you will enjoy when you have your own business.  And it is true that people who start their own companies often become very wealthy.  But even more small business people fail or make a good living but never reach tremendous wealth.  Even if you do realize huge success, that success is built on days, weeks, months and years of hard work and careful planning and development of the business.  It is not a bad goal to want to own your own lawn care business to make big money and enjoy the status of being “the boss”.  But make sure that desire for money and glory is combined with a strong work ethic and a good grasp of the realities of what lies ahead.

Perhaps the best reason to start your own business doing lawn care for people is that you love the work.  Lawn care is a terrific career if you really like to work outdoors.  You get plenty of sunshine and fresh air working on making the lawns and gardens of your customers look great.  Of course, you do endure some difficult weather sometimes but for the personality that loves being outdoors whether it is hot or cold or even rainy, building a lawn care business will be a good fit to who you are.

There is also a lot of creative expression possible in lawn care work.  The reason people hire you is to take a lawn or garden that looks bad and turn it into a thing of beauty.  You use the tools you have mastered to sculpt that outdoor space into something your customers will be proud of.  That is a worthwhile advocation for anyone.  And when you walk away from a job well done and admire the thing of beauty you made, you can get that same thrill that artists get when they make the world a more beautiful place.

Your desire to own your own lawn care business may be that you know you can do a better job than the company you work for.  If you have built up strong relationships with customers, it is very common for a skilled lawn care professional to start a new business and be very successful taking away dissatisfied customers from another service.  If your focus is on the service you do and on making your customers happy and you know how to recruit and keep skilled workers, you have the basic skills needed to be a big success running your own business.

Lawn care can be a business that will keep you busy and making money for decades.  It is somewhat recession proof because everybody need to have their lawns taken care of.  Your business is built on relationships with long term customers and that means you may never have to spend a dime on getting new customers.  Good lawn care businesses thrive on word of mouth and once the word gets about the quality work that you do, you will have more customers than you know what to do with.

If you have the skills, the aptitude and the right motivations, you can be a success starting your own lawn care business.  The research process to learn more about what it will take to start that dream business will give you the “nitty gritty” about the work that lies ahead.  If your vision, your dream and your excitement for getting your lawn care business up and running cannot be diminished by the hard work that lies ahead, you are a great candidate to own and operate a business providing lawn care to dozens of happy and grateful customers all over town.

Usually when a person thinks about starting a new business, there are a lot of costs.  But there are ways to start your lawn care business without spending a dime.  All you have to do is get a few customers and begin working to generate cash flow and then the money from those customers will help you have the funding to pay for the expenses of your business.  But you have to know how to find ways to get the business up and running and do so without spending any of your own money.

For one thing, you don’t have to spend any money to “start a business”.  You can create a company name, print up some flyers and even business cards on your home computer and presto, your company just became a reality.  Down the road you can go to the county clerks office and register your company name so nobody else can use it.  Even that usually only costs $20 or so.  It is when you incorporate to become a financial entity that the costs come up and you can put that off for a long time.

You can get your business going using the equipment you have and even the transportation you have. If you have a pickup truck and the lawn care equipment you use to mow your own lawn and take care of it, you are in business.  Use that home computer you have to create some flyers to put out on people’s doors. Take an afternoon and walk the entire neighborhood and put a flyer in each persons front door announcing you are in business.

To make it enticing, offer to give the first lawn care session to the customer for free.  All this costs you is gas.  You will get dozens of phone calls and within a couple weeks, you will have so many customers, you will be busy every day.  The money will start to flow and you will have the revenue to begin to buy more equipment and better transportation and even put a sign on your truck with your company name.

You can even find labor to work for you for next to nothing by offering a partnership in the company.  Offer to give your first workers 10% ownership in the company for the first year.  For the first couple months, there may not be any profits.  After you get a dozen customers or paying you for lawn care, you can pay your workers a portion of what you are paid.  Then at the end of the month, total up your profits.  Remember that you may wish to put back 40% of the profits for business developments.  If there is only $500 left after everything is paid for, you give your “partners” $50.  You do that for a year and you are free and clear and you got their labor in those crucial first few weeks of the business for free.

Also keep in mind that if you have good credit, you can get a credit card in the company name.  Get that card a couple weeks before the business starts and you have a little bit of funding to pay for gas and supplies.  Even if the credit card only has a credit limit of $5000, that is plenty to pay for supplies until you get payments coming in from customers.  Then you pay off the credit card from what you made from the work you have done and you never had to pay a dime of your own money even for gas or trash bags.

Eventually you may wish to expand the business to make it bigger and buy professional equipment and actually hire employees.  But if you have gotten your business up and running “by the seat of your pants”, banks and investors will in up to be back your lawn care business.  With their funding and your solid business management skills, there is no telling how big your lawn care business might get and how rich you might get by simply building a lawn care business that you started for free.