Lawn Care Business Marketing Tips - GopherHaul Blog

Finding work in the Fall and Winter can be more challenging at times than picking up mowing accounts during the Spring. Many lawn care business owners seem to struggle finding customers to service and end up having a rough time when the mowing season slows down. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In a discussion at the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum a lawn care business owner shared with us how he managed to stay so busy.

Fall lawn care referral

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Getting the momentum of a new business going can be very difficult. It can feel like you are trying to move mountains. Sometimes an entrepreneur can become overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom when things don’t happen fast enough. But how does one get things going and potentially get them going fast? It takes drive, determination but remember, anyone can do it. A member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum shared with us how he was able to submit $1 million dollars of lawn care estimates in two weeks.

Lawn care bid

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The GopherHaul guide on how to get customers for your landscaping and lawn care business - Volume 3 is now available.

Anyone can start a landscaping or lawn care business but the tricky part is finding customers. This book will show you how.

Coming up with marketing and service ideas to keep busy and profitable all year long can be difficult. Most of the times we are just not in the mood to sit and think up creative ways to make more money.

How to get lawn care customers vol.3

Well thankfully I have been able to interview thousands of lawn care business owners over the years and ask them what’s worked and what hasn’t. The responses and the follow up questions have really uncovered a treasure trove of ideas that I compiled here to share with you.

Now you don’t have to get frustrated when trying to come up with new ideas. Just keep this book around as a reference. Some of these ideas might just work right off the shelf while others might need to be altered to fit your needs. Ultimately it’s always better to have ideas on stand by just in case.

This book is the third in a series of lawn care business marketing books I have published and contains lawn care marketing ideas cherry picked from previous content I have written as well as new unpublished material.

Dream it, Build It, Gopher It!

Order this book online here. Also available on amazon.com.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were able to get a hold of a local organization’s email address database and wanted to send out email marketing material to their group? Would that be considered smart marketing or spamming? That is a great question brought up on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. A new lawn care business owner asked “here is the question. I am currently working part time at a church and have been told when the new budget goes into effect in March I am going to be eliminated. So for the last two months I have been frantically looking for a job with no luck and being unable to collect unemployment due to working for a “nonprofit”. So I have decided to go back into the lawn care business. I am curious as to if anyone has ever used e-mail marketing.

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Have you had difficulties landing commercial snow plowing accounts? It can be difficult to break through a companies layer of insulation before you get to the person in charge of making such decisions. Persistance seems to be a big part of the key to success. Let’s look into this discussion that took place on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. A new member wrote “landing a large commercial account is not the easiest thing to do but once you have them you can keep them for a very long time provided you are doing a professional job. And the amount of money you can generate for your company is great.

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The average lawn care business tends to find things slow down in the Fall and Winter but that doesn’t have to always be the case. You can go out and drum up business if you want it. Let’s look and see how a member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum did this. He wrote “yesterday I was out visiting some of my lawn care clients. Basically working out schedules and drumming up business for the winter months when a client that uses my service for things like spring/fall cleanups and hedge trimming started asking about winter snow removal. I gave them a price and they were quite happy and agreed on the contract.”

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Partnerships can be very easy to get into and very tricky to get out of. They tend to start innocently enough. You have a friend interested in doing the same thing as you, so you figure two heads are better than one and you pool your resources together. Well as we will see in this story, sometimes communication can break down and things fall apart leaving you wondering why you ever get into a partnership in the first place. This doesn’t mean partnerships can never work. They can, when the both of you are willing to work together and break down the different functions you will each perform to keep the business moving forwards.

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Have you thought about going door to door in your area to meet new potential clients and promote your Fall & Winter services to them? Is so, you might be wondering what the best way to go about this is. Are there certain things you should do or shouldn’t do in order to improve your chances of success? That is what a business owner was wondering when he got on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum and asked “I am preparing a campaign where I will personally go door to door, introduce myself and my services in a upscale area down the road from me. I half thought about having my employee do the ground pounding but figured I would be the best to represent my business in a professional manor. Are there any specific rules of engagement when going door to door like this? do and donts?”

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Giving your lawn care customers a Christmas gift may be a great way to show your appreciation of them and retain them for the next year’s mowing season. But is it really always a good idea? Also what about the type of gift you give? Should you send a holiday card instead? What works best?

That’s what a member of the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum was interested in knowing when he asked “I have a question regarding giving out a Christmas Gift to my customers.

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Running your lawn care business as a one man show has it’s advantages and disadvantages. When it’s only you performing the work and dealing with the customers, you know you are getting the job done and treating the customers the way you want them to be treated. But what about when you grow. When you add your first employee, you can still keep your eye on them, but what about when you add your 2nd crew? You can only be in one place at a time, so how should you manage the happenings of your business when you can’t be everywhere to make sure everything is done properly?

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Every once in a while I like to ask on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum, what lawn care marketing ideas have you experimented with? What hasn’t worked and what has. It seems one of the things I have learned from asking this is every time I ask it, I will get different responses! So let’s look into what some of the business owners shared with me.

One said “We’ve gained lawn care business in pretty every marketing campaign we have taken, except for two. The first being our church bulletin.

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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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