Many people have the memory of mowing and maintaining lawns back in their youth. Lawn care is a trendy industry, with a lot of homeowners wanting to seek the service of a company to manage their lawns.
Households spend billions of dollars in lawn care and gardening services. And the Professional Landcare Network reported that there is an estimate of 10,000 individual lawn care service providers and 12,000 landscapers in the US alone. So if you’re thinking of starting a landscaping business, you’re entering a very competitive but profitable industry.
Generally, starting a business, whatever industry it falls into, is not an easy feat. There are a lot of tips and tricks to ensure that you tread on the right path and make your business successful. Here are some tips to help you start your lawn care or landscaping business.
Be strategic
As you know, lawn care services are very seasonal. You’re not going to get a lot of customers in the summer or winter seasons. With that, you have to strategize and plan accordingly so that your resources never run dry.
It depends on your area. But commonly, the peak season where lawn care services are in demand is during the spring. In April to early October, you’re bound to get a lot of customers. So you have to make sure you’re doing and earning enough to last you through the remaining seasons, where the demand for this niched service is significantly low.
Otherwise, you can also come up with ways to innovate your services to suit the winter and summer seasons, like snow plowing or garden watering, etc.
Start with the basics
Partly because of the lawn care startup costs, many newcomers in the industry start providing only the basic services of mowing, edging, and trimming. Especially if you’re a one-person team, you’re going to want to take on easy jobs first to gauge your strength and capabilities. This will enable you to figure out how long a specific task will take you and how many clients you can take on a day, for example.
As you start to gain more experience, expertise, and equipment, that’s when you can begin offering more advanced services.
Figure out how to price your services
Lawn care is often hard to price. Some opt to offer an hourly rate, but this is not always ideal as different types of lawns have different conditions. So you might take longer in some areas compared to others. This will make it hard to estimate the price of your services.
The ideal pricing strategy is to compute it by lawn size. This formal pricing will make your services seem more professional, and it’s suitable for both you and the client.
In pricing your services, remember not to overprice. The lawn care industry is very competitive, so households would opt to go for cheaper options. The rule of thumb is to price your services at market value. It’s only up to you how you prove to your potential clients that you can offer quality services for the price you are offering.
As you grow you’re business; you might need to make necessary adjustments to your initial plans. You can ramp up your prices, increase the services you offer, etc. It will all depend on you. Just make sure you’re sticking to what the market wants.
