What keeps your lawn care business small?
One of our forum members created a post to show off part of his fleet of lawn care business trucks in this post at the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. In the post I had a great opportunity to learn a little about what stops most small lawn care businesses from ever getting themselves up to that size. I hope some of these questions and answers can really help you push forwards farther.
Steve: “With all these trucks, I would think you would be in a great position to have insight into why do you feel the majority of lawn care business owners never get to the size you are at now?
What keeps most of them small?”
Mark: “Everyone has different reasons, but here are a few that come to mind.
1. They spend too much money on equipment, trucks, ect., before the business can support the costs. If you notice, all of my trucks are older but paid for. A nice new truck looks pretty and all, but I can do the same thing and only spend 1/10th of the cost.
2. Greed is a big killer. You must pay your helpers a decent wage to keep them. My lawn guys average $20+ an hour. I don’t have the employee turn over that most do. My workers are paid a percentage of the job, so the more work the get, the more they make.This allows me to grow without worries of help being there.
3. They never dedicate themselves. They do the lawn work as a suppliment of income and have another job too. With the security of the “day job”, many won’t strive for growth.”
Steve: “Do you have any suggestions on how a lawn care business owner should structure the percentages?”
Mark: “Foreman 20% Crew 15%. As an example, say you have a 3 man crew handling a yard that is being charged $35 per cut.
Would the foreman get ($35 x 20%) = $7
and each crew member get ($35 x 15%) = $5.25 each”
