Lawn Care Business Marketing Tips - GopherHaul Blog

To some lawn care business owners, the client has two jobs. One is to accept the bid and the other is to approve the finished project and make payment. Between those two points they may not want to hear anything from the client at all. But as we have seen on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, the more you involve the client, the smoother you can make the job go. This comes in especially handy when you run into a problem onsite and you need the customer to hold it together and not fly off the handle.

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Do you ever wish you could ask what your competitors are doing with their marketing? What about business questions to help you find out what makes some businesses successful while others fail? A new member on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum shared with us some of his fascinating business insight. You see he is a printer and helps many lawn care business owners get their marketing material, designed, printed and shipped. He has seen a lot of what works and what doesn’t. So I asked him a bunch of business questions.

Lawn care marketing secrets

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Trying to crack open customers that live within certain homeowner associations can be tough to do. Especially if the HOA is a gated community. One lawn care business owner figured out a way to get their foot in the door with a interesting marketing tip. They shared with us their lawn care marketing secret on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, where you can download the newsletter and they wrote “we are sponsoring a neighborhood association newsletter that reaches 86 homes. Currently, we take care of two customers in this sub-division.

HOA lawn care jobs

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Have you ever taken a look at your customer’s home and seen moss on their siding or on their deck? Did you ever stop to talk to the customer and ask them if they would like it removed? There is money to be made in offering such services. A member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum shared with us how he made $465 in 2 hours of pressure washing work.

Pressure washing

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To discount or not to discount, that is the question. I have seen plenty of arguments going one side to the other on the importance of discounting a teaser service when you are marketing your lawn care business. On the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum I asked, how important do you feel it is to show the services you offer with some sort of discount being promoted vs. no discount in your marketing material? How much of an effect do you think discounts have in getting customers to sign up with seasonal services?

Should you include a discount

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When mowing season comes to an end, that doesn’t mean it’s time to relax. There is still plenty of work to be done for those who keep busy. One lawn care business owner on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum asked “well with mowing season is over, I want to drum up a lot more fall work, clean ups gutters etc. But I am not sure how to do it. What have you guys found works the best?”

One business owner suggested “here are a few things you can do:

fall lawn care marketing

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Getting your lawn care business started can mean scrambling around trying to find a bunch of basic equipment and spending a lot of cash. Some entrepreneurs are able to do this while others need to work within a very tight budget. If this is your situation, have you considered buying your mowers from craigslist? One new lawn care business owner wrote on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum and asked if this was a wise move. He asked “I want to purchase a new self propelled lawn mower but I don’t want to spend $500 for a new one. So should I buy a used one online? Also what kind should I get?”

Used lawn mower

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As we have seen from many discussions on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, you can’t sit back and wait for lawn care customers to find you. You need to actively go out and seek them. A newer lawn care business owner was warming to this concept when he wrote and asked “ok we have talked about approaching potential clients from the street for yard service as well as if they already have it and I think I may be ready to do this better. How would you recommend I work my proposal in both cases? Clearly I would avoid houses with ‘No Soliciting’ signs and for sure I would not want to say ‘hey I can do better than the company you have now,’ but how would you approach them?”

How to approach lawn care customers

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In the military they use terms like force multipliers. This term means with a given number of soldiers using certain equipment, they are able to project a larger amount of force than if they didn’t have it. The same term can be applied to the lawn care business. In this discussion we will see how you can turn your truck or trailer into a force multiplier and have it work for you while you are working on something else. Your truck or trailer can become a force multiplier, in this case, projecting outward a marketing message to attract you new customers. Let’s see how some of the members of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum are doing this.

Lawn care truck force muliplier

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Have you ever been out mowing your customer’s property and looked over at the neighbors to see the lawn could use a cut too? Did you ever decide to cut their lawn? Well a member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum told us a little story about what he has been up to and how he landed his latest account with this new marketing technique.

He wrote “It’s been a while, here’s an update! I invested in great new equipment this season. An new chainsaw, trimmer, hedge trimmer and blower.

Mow a neighbors lawn

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Are you considering starting your own lawn care business but aren’t sure if it’s worth all the hard work? That is what one new entrepreneur was interested in knowing on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum when he asked “I am wondering how many accounts can you solo guys average per week? What can one person realistically do in an 8 hr workday? Also after fuel, equipment, loans etc… is it really worth the hard work?

Lawn care worker

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You have probably heard the word synergy before. It means the value of the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts. This holds true in many uses except potentially for this one. A lawn care business owner asked on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum if he should consider partnering up with his step dad’s company. He wrote “I am in the process of starting my lawn care business. I have 5 accounts right now, so I am barely getting my feet wet with this. I just talked to my step dad, who is in the process of starting a pest control company. I think he has about 30 accounts.

Combine lawn care businesses

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Do you have trouble coming up with a way to estimate and invoice your snow plow customers? If you do, you’re not alone. Plenty of new businesses get stuck on this but thankfully I got to talk with a snow plow business owner who shared some great advice on how to estimate and bill your snow plow customers. He also shared with us a FREE snow plow invoice card template he uses to bill his clients in his post on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum.

Estimating and invoicing snow plow customers

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It’s one of the most frustrating things to have to deal with as an owner of a small lawn care business, when you spend money on marketing and nothing is working. It can make you feel like you are in a ship that is sinking and no matter what you do to bail the water out, it comes in faster and faster. That is the problem a member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum was dealing with when he wrote “I don’t get it. I have put up lawn care fliers, handed out business cards, put adds on free internet ad sites and the local papers yet still I sit here with no calls at all. Several weeks have gone by with no calls at all. This is getting depressing. Is this the economy, am I doing something wrong? I want to suck all my marketing money back because I feel stupid paying for marketing when its not even getting my calls for quotes or anything.”

Lawn Care Marketing

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I can never get enough of good start up business advice. When ever the opportunity arises, I like to ask successful business owners to share some insight as to how they were able to cross that very difficult mine field from start up business to successful operation. The best answers are never quick two or three sentence words of wisdom but paragraphs of insightful information.

Start up lawn care business

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Have you ever been on a site to give a lawn care estimate and sensed there was plenty more work to come your way if you were able to land this account and develop a working relationship with the property owner? Did you take this into account when you gave your estimate price? Was it lower than you would normally have charged or would you never give a cost break in hopes of future work? This is a discussion we had on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum with a lot of great insight.

Cheaper price on lawn care

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We often talk on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum about the importance of social networking. How getting to know other business owners in your area can help your business grow. However what I have noticed is very few lawn care business owners I have talked to are members of their local Chamber of Commerce. A few had brought up in the past that they joined the group but ultimately left it. Either it didn’t perform the function they were looking for or they just didn’t have the time.

Chamber of Commerce

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As if starting a lawn care business wasn’t tough enough, the last thing you want to hear is negativity when you go out looking for business advice and yet it always seems to be there waiting for you. A new lawn care business owner shared with us his story on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum and it really got me thinking how there is never enough inspiration out there when you are looking to get started. That starting period is the roughest for many reasons and sometimes you just need to hear, ‘you can do it.’

Lawn care business inspiration

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Many of us over time create a list of rules we try and live by. We create rules for our day to day lives like don’t smoke and always wear your seat belt in a car. We also create rules for our businesses. But there are times, for whatever reason, we break these rules and we kick ourselves for doing it later. Maybe we were momentarily in a hurry, maybe we distracted by thinking of something else or maybe it was just that we got caught at the end of a long day and we were too tired.

lawn care business estimate

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If you are trying to promote your Fall yard leaf clean up and gutter clean out services but find going door to door takes too much time. Putting flyers in mailboxes is also a problem because it’s illegal and the Post Master can fine you. Well what about this? What if you got a whole bunch of these tiny lawn signs that you could go through neighborhoods and stick into the ground right near where the driveway meets the road to minimize distribution times?

Lawn Care Marketing for Fall

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We talk a lot on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum about how when you do something good for the community, you can get a lot of attention. Especially when you let the media know what you are doing. In a recent article on CNN it talked about a lawn care business owner who was offering free lawn mowing for single moms. It made national news, but was it worth it? That is the questions I asked and I got a lot of great responses on it that I wanted to share with you.

Free lawn mowing for single moms

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Do you think you have a great business model? Is your model a lot better than others. Do you feel you need more money and resources in order to grow? If so maybe you have considered franchising your lawn care business. But before you go out and start trying to sign people up, you better really think about a bunch of issues.

One member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum wrote “my biggest problem now is trying to get the money to get big. It’s a double edged sword though. You need to make money to get big, yet in order to be big, you have to have money.

franchising your lawn care business

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You may not think at first glance a lawn care customer pays much attention to the safety precautions you either take or ignore when working on their property, but they do. People keep track of when you take trimmer guards off or mower guards. They know what can happen when these devices are taken off too. You can get hurt, you can hurt somebody or you can damage property. Nothing drives a customer more crazy than to have a window broken on their house or see that their new car was damaged all because you took off a safety guard.

Mower safety

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Being that a lot of start up lawn care businesses read the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, I asked the members what equipment would you suggest purchasing now that you have had some time to see what works well and what doesn’t. What I found was quite interesting and I hope it gets you thinking. It brought up a discussion between what is the better purchase, a ZTR mower or a John Deere X749 tractor.

One member said “it depends on the situation, if you were in my shoes, cutting grass with a tractor, you wouldn’t go far.

Tractor vs ztr mower

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If you ever thought about starting your own lawn care business or pondered the idea of expanding your current business into new areas you’d be wise to do some research on the topic you are interested in. Which brings me to a discussion on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum when I asked “how much planning can and should an entrepreneur do before starting a business? Is it even possible to know what you need to know, before you get started? Should you go out and knock on doors and ask the home owners if they need lawn service and how much would they pay? Would they tell you? If you had done this would it change your plan?

Is this something others should be doing too before they even consider starting up?

Lawn care business planning

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As we have seen in the Gopher Lawn Care Busines Forum, there is quite a bit of money to be made when you offer your clients irrigation system winterization services. But it seems a lot of lawn care business owner just don’t offer it because they don’t know how to do it. Well thank to some of our members, here is a real quick and easy explanation on how to blow out an irrigation system.

The question initially popped up when a member asked “Where do you start from to blow out an irrigation system? What is the step by step procedure?”

Winterize irrigation systems

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For every year we are in business, I hope we are all able to reflect back and learn from what we had problems with so we don’t recreate the same issues next year. I asked the members of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum what they were able to learn from the previous year when I wrote “when you reflect back on the year and think of the mistakes, what stands out in your mind? Do you have advice for all of us on the issues you had to deal with that were problems that you were able to overcome?

Lawn care business mistakes

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ZTR mowers can be really heavy and they are tough to get underneath in a way that provides you enough room to get the blades off. That was the topic that came up on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. A member asked “Does anyone have a simple way of changing their ztr mower blades? I know they make jacks but I am looking for a cheap alternative. Currently I’m using some car ramps to get underneath, but I just don’t have enough clearance under there to make this an easy job. It takes me about 30 minutes to get this job done.

An easy way to change ztr mower blades

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In a discussion on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, we talked about how breaking landscape projects down into sections can really help you sell larger projects. If the customer knows that at anytime they can say ok this is enough. Or if they feel their budget is shrinking to pay for the landscape project, they will feel more in control when they know it’s not an all or nothing deal.

I asked on the forum by offering landscape jobs in stages do you feel this allows you to build a rapport with the customer? So they don’t feel like they are committed to a high value contract if they are not liking the results?

Perform landscape projects in stages

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Why travel around so much when you can sell more staying put at the same location. You may not think you are missing out on potential upsells until you read this. One of our Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum members shared with us his view on staying put and making more on upsells. He wrote “I wanted to say it is 100% clear to me that we need to stay on job sites as long as possible and I have two very recent examples.

A customer contacted me and wanted some brush cleared and a small driveway put in for his camper. I met with the client, it was a simple $1,200 job.

Sell more landscape services

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