When you start your own lawn care business, there are a lot of new situations you have to get used to.  Perhaps you did lawn care for years as an independent contractor or you worked for someone else on their payroll.  The lawn care doesn’t change, and if that is what you love to do, you are on the right track starting your own lawn care business.  But when you’re the boss, the world is a very different place.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment will be that when you own your own business, you suddenly are confronted with this new creature called an employee.  But it is the employees you have on board with you that will make or break your yard care business.  That means that one of the most important skills you will develop as a manager and owner of a business will be your ability to pick, hire, and retain great employees.  That is because your business will truly be “as strong as your weakest link”.

If you used contract labor when you got busy before you turned your lawn care into a business, you developed some skills for evaluating who would be a good worker.  If you did get that chance, that judgment will be invaluable to you as you build your own small army of quality employees.  It is quite a balancing act to capture enough business to keep all of your employees busy, and at the same time think about growing your business. 

If you get a rush of new business, you want to capture it and turn those customers into long term clients.  But you have to be able to add new employees to take care of all of that business. Consider this:  can you trust your employees to take care of your customers as well as you would yourself?  You will soon discover that the most important resource you have is a labor source who can provide you with a consistent supply of workers who do a good job for you.  Whether this is a community that you network with to draw workers from, or a placement service, your lawn care business will benefit from having a way to recruit good employees.

Above all, when you develop a strong staff of good employees, you should bend heaven and earth to take care of them.  And if you can give your employees a little part of the success you are enjoying, they will become an even more valuable asset.

If you can keep a good group of employees working with you and you are always developing new talent, you will have conquered one of the biggest challenges of running your own lawn care business.  It will be a skill that will be a key component to long term success.