The advantages of starting and running your own lawn care business are significant. Your “office” can simply be your desk at home; there is no need to rent or own any commercial space to conduct business. This is a huge money-saver! When you have to follow-up with clients or print marketing material, your commute is measured in minutes – from your bedroom to your home computer.

Assuming you take on jobs that are relatively close to your residence, your commute time to jobs is also relatively small. When you are at work, you are not confined to sitting behind a desk all day. You get to enjoy the fresh air and freedom that comes with working in the lawn care industry. You will benefit from the physical exercise that comes with mowing lawns or pruning bushes.

Finally, another advantage – and this is perhaps the most important one – is not having a boss to answer to! You control your own time, your own schedule, and your own income. You can show up at work (i.e. a neighbor’s backyard) essentially anytime during the daylight hours, leaving you plenty of freedom to schedule other activities during the day.

However, like all businesses, the lawn care business is one that requires hard work, dedication, and skill. You must be physically fit enough to handle heavy machinery for long periods of time. You must be able to occasionally lift equipment onto and off of trucks. You must be reasonably proficient at mowing lawns, and performing other routine maintenance tasks. Of course, if you intend to hire laborers to do all the actual physical labor for you, well, then you do not need to lift a pair of pruning shears, and you can just focus on the management and supervisory aspects of the business.

Recent studies have shown that there are tens of thousands independent lawn care service providers in the United States. However, the number of people actually in this industry is probably significantly larger, since many of them may not be reporting their income on tax forms. These people may be accepting cash as payment, which is hard to track, and therefore, they may not be included in some of the figures that are reported nationally.

So, you might wonder how big is the need for a lawn care business? Who would your potential clients be? Well, they include:

Individuals who cannot handle the equipment to maintain their lawns Homeowners wishing to sell their home and need to increase their home’s value by improving its curb appeal People who migrate to warmer climates during the winter months but do not want their yards to be neglected Commerical real estate property managers who have huge amounts of green space to be maintained (golf courses, gardens, colleges…)

Of course, like all businesses, this one requires hard work, dedication, and a continual commitment to obtaining new customers. However, starting a lawn care business provides fantastic opportunities to be your own boss and earn a substantial income. With solid business planning in place, the potential for success in the lawn care industry is unlimited!   

There are lots of lawn care marketing ideas out there floating around on the net. A number of them work while most basically don’t. Much funds are spent and wasted on lawn care promotion concepts that are all ego driven but do tiny to improve your bottom line. I had recently got a chance to talk with a business owner who picked up a couple of commercial lawn care business accounts even before they bought a single lawn mower.

How did they do it? It basically came down to networking. They had been providing snow plowing services for lots of years in his area to the local businesses and condo complexes. During the late Fall, a property manager at a local condo complex asked him if they offered lawn mowing services. They said no and that they didn’t know anything about lawn care. The property manager seemed upset with his current lawn care service provider and wanted to try someone new, so they offered him a proposition.

They sat him down and shared with him his previous years lawn care contract. They showed the lawn care business owner what the previous bid was on the job, they told him how lots of employees the lawn care company had on site and how long it took them to do the job. The business owner took that information and returned home that evening to think it over.

The next day they went to a local outdoor power equipment store and priced out the equipment that would be needed to do the job. Working over the figures on paper, they came to the conclusion that now was the time to jump on this opportunity and they decided then and there to get in to the lawn care business. Within one week they landed not only this one specific condo complex but another nearby one as well.Spring time was a long ways off and they had already hit the ground jogging.

The lesson to be learned by all this is to make contacts with others in your area that are potential customers. If you cannot break in at first by offering lawn care, think about offering other services that can get you in and then expand them as the need rises. You don’t must spend a lot of funds to gain customers, you basically need to network.

Summary: The following article is designed to be a starting point for people interested in developing a lawn mowing service. I have a university degree in marketing and have and created a lawn mowing service to help me finance my university education. The following article gives insight into how I marketed my lawn mowing service well enough to pay for my college education and shares the high insight that I now have after working in marketing for several years. Specifically, this article is designed to give you ideas about how to effectively market and brand your business in order to become successful.

Body

Creating demand for a lawn care and snow removal service begins with having a strong marketing strategy. I always recommend advertising in the following places:

1) Door to Door Flyers (Door to Door Flyers are fantastic because they allow you to target the specific neighborhoods that you wish to target and give you more control over the areas you work in. I personally have found that I gain about 1 customer per 50 flyers that I hand out. So if I am looking to gain 100 new customers, I know that I will need to hand out at least 5,000 flyers. Additionally, I have produced better results handing out flyers to the same homes each time I distribute flyers vs. new homes. For whatever reason, people seem to be more responsive to the ads after they have seen them a time or two

2) Asking for referrals: asking for referrals is another great way to build your lawn mowing service. I generally offer my clients a discount; say $15 off their next cut, per referral that they give.
3) Business cards and magnet car signs: having a business card on hand is great because you never know when a neighbor may approach you and ask you whether you can cut their grass beginning in a few weeks. Having a card to give them will make you look professional and increase the likelihood of your being called. Additionally, having magnetic car signs that state your business service and phone number are another great way of reaching people because they go with you everywhere you go and make it clear to neighbors that you can cut their lawn if they ask you.

4) In the most popular local newspaper in your area (by advertising in your local newspaper you will advertise in a place where people traditionally and often go to find a lawn mowing service. In my experience, I have had much better results when I made the advertisement very clear like this:
Downers Grove Lawn Mowing Service
-Locally owned & operated
-Most Lawns $35 per cut
-Call Now: 630-XXX-XXXX

Please note: the advertisement is easy to understand and clearly states what you do (Lawn Mowing) and what you want the reader to do (Call Now). The newspaper is far to cluttered by ads that really don’t say anything about the company they’re suppose to describe and you can differentiate yourself by making your ad easily understandable

5) Building a Website & Utilizing Google Ad Words: Building a website and using Google Ad Words is one of the most effective ways to market a lawn mowing a snow removal service because by having a website, you get the information out there that you exist, and by using Google adwords you can target the people you are looking for by the keywords that they type in. For example, if someone types in Naperville Lawn Mowing Service, you can pay Google to make your ad one of the 1st that shows up. By doing this you are only getting quality traffic to your website. One month, I gained over 20 new weekly customers as a result of using Google ad words.

In summary, I hope you learned a few more things about marketing that you can apply to your business.Naperville Landscaping Company

Grass; I always thought it was just that short green stuff I played football on and rolled around in when I was a kid, but as it turns out, grass is a bigger deal than I’ve ever given it credit for. There are magazines, books, websites, clubs, and innumerable businesses that specialize specifically in grass: knowing and teaching how to make a lawn as green, thick, and healthy as it possibly can be. In fact, in 2003, it was an $11.6bil industry, but this industry is more than just grass, it’s called lawn care. If you’re an entrepreneur interested in starting a home based business that will be profitable and enjoyable, entering the lawn care world as a professional may be a good way to go, and here are some great lawn care franchises to get you there.

Lawn Maintenance

There are a few different angles from which to approach lawn care as a business. The most obvious side of the industry is the actual work of maintaining the lawn itself, and there are three businesses I would recommend for their excellence in the market.

Spring-Green Lawn Care is a longtime powerhouse in the lawn care world, providing top-notch service to homeowners in 24 states for the last 30 years. Franchisees with this mobile franchise receive a week of initial training and a few days of on-the-job training before starting out as owner/operators; fertilizing clients’ lawns, controlling diseases and insects, aerating, and maintaining trees and hedges around the lawn as well. And that simple beginning can quickly turn into a more profitable operation with the franchisee overseeing a larger group of employees actually doing the work.

Home lawns aren’t the only option in the business, though; there are also small business opportunities in the field of commercial lawn care. U.S. Lawns is a company that has been franchising successfully since 1986. Their goal is to provide the corporate professionalism necessary in commercial landscaping with the personal touch of a small business. Franchisees need no previous experience to succeed with the business, and overhead is low, while business is very constant, as commercial clients tend to be repeat customers for a long time.

Since its inception in 1991, NaturaLawn of America has been the nation’s leader in organic lawn care. Unlike their competition, NaturaLawn of America refuses to use harsh chemical treatments to rid lawns of weeds and insects; instead, they fight disease and promote growth with only natural solutions. Increasingly, this is the preferred method of care for many consumers, and thus demand for this kind of business is growing.

Lawn Cleanup

Not all problems in a person’s yard are threats to the lawn, though; sometimes, the threat is to the people walking across the lawn instead of the lawn itself. It may not be a danger, per se, but dog waste in the yard is definitely an eyesore and an inconvenience, and there is a special class of lawn care businesses that concentrate on getting rid of it.

Doody Calls and Pet Butler are the big names in the pet waste management industry, each providing professional waste pick-up and removal to innumerable clients around the country. Their systems are incredibly well-planned and brilliantly functional, orchestrating numerous mobile units that run their circuits around town while tracked by GPS to check progress. Marketing plans are made available to all franchisees through central computer systems, and communication between franchises is encouraged to maximize effectiveness. It may not be the most glamorous work in the world, but it is certainly profitable, sometimes turning up to a 49% profit margin, and running in a $40bil-and-climbing pet market, the prospect of future business growth is a definite possibility.

Lawn Boundaries

Another opportunity for working in lawn care without having to worry about the maintenance of grass is with a franchise business called Kwik Kerb. Today, it has become incredibly popular to have artistic concrete boundaries between the lawn and planters in the yard, and that is precisely the product and service that this work from home business provides. Aesthetically, the product is pleasing to the eye, but it provides a very functional purpose as well, drawing a clear boundary between yard and planter that doubles as a barricade, keeping any weeds and diseases from the lawn out of the flower bed, and visa versa. There are many benefits to this business, aside from high profit margin in the world of landscaping, and one of those is that this particular brand of landscaping doesn’t require continued service, so once the franchisee finishes the work for a client, the project is complete. Some business owners like the consistency of repeat business, but for those who like to get a job done and move on to another, this is a good choice.

If getting your hands dirty at work is important to you, and you really find satisfaction in growing a deep, emerald green lawn, lawn care may be just the business for you to get into. With any of these franchises, it could easily be the road to success and financial freedom.