So… you’re putting all the pieces together to start your own lawn care business. Make sure you have your business name right at the top, because there are lots of things to consider before making a final decision.

How To Develop The Perfect Name For Your Lawn Care Business

Your lawn care business name will have two jobs.  One is to be unique enough that people can remember who to call when they need lawn work done. The other is to tell the customer something about your business.  If you decide on John Nelson’s Lawn Services, (assuming you are John Nelson), your personal credibility is built into part of your company name. The downside of using your name as part of your business identity is that if you ever decide to sell your lawn care business, your name would go with it. In fact, if it has played a big part in the success of your business, the buyer will probably insist on it. But, what happens to your reputation if the buyer runs down the business? On the other hand, if you name your lawn care business something like Good Looking Lawns, there’s no personal involvement left once you sell it.

Just be sure you keep the name generic enough so you can add new services. If you name the company, John’s Lawn Mowing Service, it limits what you do.  By changing “lawn mowing” to “lawn care”, you can add trimming, gardening and other related services all under the same corporate ID. 

Will the name you want to use for your lawn care business be suitable for a web site domain name? These days, it’s vital for businesses to have a web presence, and the experts say the best domain address (URL) is your company name. To continue the above example, the best URL for John Nelson’s Lawn Services is johnnelsonslawnservices.com.  When people see your business name on your truck, or some other promotional material, they will enter your company name in their computer internet browser.  So make it easy for them to find you on the internet, and you will bring in more customers through your web site.

Also be sure to verify with your county clerk that the name you want to use is available. If it is, register it right away to reserve that name for your business.

Sometimes, its appropriate to use a  whimsical or funny company name.  The guys who created the moving company, “Two Guys and a Truck” knew the value of a humorous name.  A funny name can have some serious marketing value. 

So give your new company name a lot of thought, even if you already have one in mind that you really like.  Pick a name you love for your new lawn care business, just make sure you take everything into consideration first.

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How To Develop A Profitable Lawn Care Business

There are a lot of good reasons for starting your own lawn care company.  You might do it for the freedom that being your own boss gives you. You might do it to focus 100% on doing work that you are very good at which is making people’s lawns and gardens look great.  Or you might do it because you know you can do a better job running a business than the people you work for.  Regardless of the reason, it must be profitable enough to support you and your family.

So is it possible to make a good profit running a lawn care business?  Absolutely, most serious lawncare business owners stay in business for years.  So, what are the basics of building a profitable business that you must keep in mind to apply to your situation as you launch your lawn care business, and begin to get clients and generate revenue?

Strong Management Skills Will Keep Your Lawncare Business Profitable

Profitability is not a complicated idea.  It is basically making more money than you spend.  But it is a mistake to think you can reach profitability simply by controlling costs.  Too many businesses have gone under putting all the emphasis on efficiency and cost savings and not enough emphasis on getting new clients, and client retention.  You can see profitability when you and your crews are all fully engaged in money generating work every working hour of every day.

This can be a challenge particularly as you grow to the point where you need multiple crews.  To keep each crew on a job site, completing work and then moving to the next job site, and juggle the work and the workers each and every day will definitely test of your management ability.  But you learn the art of managing larger and larger crews and larger jobs AS your business grows beyond just you and your small collection of tools… to an empire. (Maybe empire is a bit much, but the point is to be willing to grow!)

You need to focus a good deal on these three things to keep your lawn care business growing:

1. Client retention. 
2. Bring in new clients. 
3. Cost control… making sure your crews are performing at peak efficiency while delivering top quality work to your clients. 

The kind of client focus that you need in order to become profitable must involve more than just you, the owner.  You must instill it in your lawn care business employees.  Satisfied, repeat clients are the foundation for profitability. So make sure you and your staff give each of them the “royal treatment”. 

The Best Lawn Care Advertising Is Good Old Word-Of-Mouth

As the owner and manager of your lawncare company, you must always be looking for ways to capture more business.  This sometimes means marketing and advertising .  But it also includes the best source of all… word of mouth from all those satisfied clients!

The real heart of profitability is customer satisfaction. You can build a reliable income from the monthly payments of a satisfied client base.  They will give you new work as you expand the kinds of services your lawn care business offers.   And they’ll gladly give you referrals by telling their friends and neighbors about the lawn service they are so pleased with.  That word of mouth marketing is free to you, and it will get you more business than any other type of advertising. 

These are all great reasons to take very good care of the lawn care customers you have, and grow your lawncare business from that base to greater profitability each year.

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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.

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Susan’s Lawn Gardens is pleased to feature this article from today’s guest author, PATRICK CASH. He is an expert on lawn care service businesses, so we feel very comfortable recommending his work to our visitors.

Using Door Hangers to Promote Your Lawn Care Service Business
By Patrick Cash

We have tried just about every way you can imagine to sell our lawn care services. One of the best, and not too expensive, was to use door hangers.
Not just any old door hangers but full color, nice looking door hangers with a place to leave a price quote for our services.

Even if a competing lawn care business does use door hangers they are most likely blah and not too interesting.

After I thought about this for a while, I decided to make some advertising materials based on the idea of “more free time” for our customers. They may be paying us for short grass or a neat lawn but the bottom line for most of our customers want to spend their time doing something other than lawn care.

Based on this idea I ended up making two pictures we can use for door hangers for our lawn care business.

The first was a picture of me pushing a mower carrying golf clubs.
The second was a picture of me carrying a fishing pole and tackle box pushing a mower.

Once I had them looking the way we wanted I uploaded these to our online color printer. I had 500 full color door hangers made (250 of each) with a simple ad on the back with a place for me to leave a quote for the price of our services.

How’d this work out? Better than expected. I can pretty much tell if I put out 100 door hangers in a good area I will get anywhere from 3 to as many as 20 calls.

I think there are two reasons these work. One is door hangers have to be taken off the door to see what they are. If they are full color and glossy they will get looked at.

The second reason is you just don’t get that many door hangers. (From a lawn care business or any other business for that matter)
Think about it. You get flyers, direct mail, etc all the time.

BUT…I can count on one had the number of time I’ve had a door hanger waiting on me when I got home.

If you’re looking to target a specific area for your lawn care business how about giving door hangers a try? You might be very surprised (and delighted) with the results.

If you are interested in the two flyers / door hangers we use to promote our lawn care business you can get them by going to our website.

If you’re interestd in starting and running a lawn care business or ways to make your lawn care business more profitable chekc out our site on starting a lawn care business

You can email me anytime at patrick@lawncare-business.com

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Susan’s Lawn Gardens is pleased to feature this article from today’s guest author, CHESTIN SALISBURY. He is a lawn care marketing expert, so we feel very comfortable recommending his work to our visitors.

Lawn Care Business Secrets – 5 Ways To ‘Winterize’ Your Lawn Care Business
By Chestin Salisbury

As the peak growing season is winding down in most parts of the country, the majority of lawn care companies are in the process of trimming back their operations as well. In areas where winter snow and ice will put a damper on lawn care services in the coming months, this doesn’t mean you have to hibernate and wait until next spring to continue growing your business.

While most lawn care and landscaping companies dislike this time of year because of everything that comes with the falling leaves (letting workers go, cutting back expenses, and most notably reduced income), it doesn’t have to be such a downer.

In fact, the next few months provide a perfect opportunity to grow your business. As normal operations slow down, you will have the chance to work ON your business and not simply IN your business.

Here are five ways that you can take advantage of the impending slow down to grow your lawn care of landscaping business over the coming months.

1. Provide Services in Addition to the Typical Lawn Care Services.

While there are many ways to grow your business, the one way that most often escapes the attention of businesses is the practice of providing more and more services to your existing customer base. Since you’ve already spent time and money in getting them as a customer and gaining their trust, why would you not want to get deeper and deeper into their pocketbooks in order to maximize customer value?

Adding year-end services such as core aeration, over seeding, dethatching, and general winterization is a perfect way to extract more income from customers that have already demonstrated their confidence in you. If you don’t already provide these services, do whatever you need to do to add them to your portfolio of services as quickly as possible.

Also, I’ve heard many say that advertising is only effective at the beginning of the growing season, but these add-on services provide an excellent opportunity to expand your existing customer base as well. Most people want a lush, green lawn but they don’t realize that right now is the time to make that happen for next year. Educating people about this will open countless doors for you in the growing seasons to come.

Create a marketing campaign centered on these ‘year-end’ lawn care processes and then market just as you would at the beginning of the year. Postcards, door hangers, and flyers are excellent ways to promote these services and with a well-designed campaign there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to pick up a slew of new customers.

2. Add Additional, Non-Lawn Care Services.

Again, one of the best ways to grow your business is by getting deeper and deeper into the pocketbooks of your existing customers. You’ve already gained their trust so why not branch out into other related services?

With the coming of winter, it means an entirely new range of services that people will be looking to pay for. People that pay for lawn care service are typically willing to pay for other services such as cleaning up fallen leaves, clearing walks and driveways of snow and ice, trimming trees or shrubs, cleaning gutters, and even hanging Christmas lights or other seasonal decorations.

Not only do these additional services provide an opportunity to get more business from your existing customers, but they also give you another service to market in areas you’d like to expand your business to.

Even though your primary business is probably lawn care, securing customers for these new services will give you new customers to market your lawn care services to in the spring.

3. Develop a Website.

As previously mentioned, with things begin to slow down a bit now’s the perfect time to work ON your business and not just IN your business.

What do I mean by that? Well, going out and actually servicing lawns, teaching employees, running payroll, paying bills, and passing out advertising materials all constitute working IN your business. You’re doing things that have to be done in order to stay in operation.

Working ON your business involves doing things you do to make your business run smoother and more profitably. These are the activities that don’t have to be done today, but doing them will result in increased efficiency, higher profit margins, and a more effective business all together.

Developing a website just happens to be one of these activities. While it doesn’t HAVE to be done, creating one will give you a decided advantage over your competition.

More and more people are flocking to the internet to find and research products and services, lawn care services included. Having a well-designed direct response website that captures the attention and contact information of your visitors will set you up for a windfall of new business in the coming months.

4. Create a Customer Newsletter.

As with developing a website, this is another activity that isn’t critical to running a successful lawn care company. However, this is something that will go a very LONG way towards strengthening the relationship with your existing customers.

Typically, most customers only think about you during the summer months as you’re servicing their lawn or when they get a bill. They will generally forget about you over the winter months until they get a flyer from you next spring requesting their business.

Creating a customer newsletter develops something called ‘presence’ and it keeps you in the forefront of their minds as the expert on having a beautiful lawn. Next year, instead of you having to call on them to initiate the relationship for another year they’ll be calling you.

The newsletter doesn’t need to be very big or complex. At the very least, it should contain some relevant lawn care information that positions you as the expert. If you provide additional services as well, a newsletter is an excellent opportunity to market these services or even to provide special incentives to try these additional services. The key is to make it relevant and personal with just a touch of marketing.

You can create a hard copy newsletter and then mail it out to your best customers or if you have email addresses, you could also create an electronic newsletter. While the hard copy newsletter is more likely to be read, an electronic newsletter, if done properly, will still reach a large number of your customers and it won’t cost you a dime to send.

5. Study Successful Direct Marketing Techiniques.

This is another activity that falls into the category of working ON your business.

Whether you realize it or not, your primary job is not providing lawn care services. Your primary job is marketing your lawn care services because without customers to provide these services for, you’d be looking for another profession.

Just as you study and look for better ways to provide lawn care services, you should also be studying and looking for better ways to market your lawn care services. With the slow down in operations associated with this time of year, now’s the perfect opportunity to learn new things that will help you be more successful next spring and in the years to come.

Studying and learning the time-tested principles of successful direct response marketing will help you to avoid all the hype associated with ‘flavor of the month’ marketing tactics and you will better know what you can do to reach your sales goals.

Just because the weather is turning cold doesn’t mean you to have hibernate until spring.

If you plan on waiting until next spring to work on growing your lawn care business, you will find that you’ve wasted several months and many opportunities to work ON your business.

Take advantage of this time to get deeper into your customer’s pocketbooks by expanding your portfolio of services, find additional customers through related non-lawn care services, put things in place that will give you greater exposure to existing customers as well as those lookingyou’re your services, and educate yourself on ways to better market your business.

Chestin Salisbury is President of Lawn Care Marketing Magic, a direct response marketing consultancy located in Charlotte, NC that focuses on the lawncare and landscaping industry. He has been helping small businesses grow for 5+ years by creating marketing systems that use time-tested direct response marketing principles. Lawn Care Marketing Magic has access to 100+ years of experience and is capable of creating a marketing plan that grows YOUR business. Chestin is also the chief-editor of ‘The Lawn Care Marketing Magic Minute’, a weekly e-newsletter that focuses on helping your grow your business. To learn more about these lawn care direct marketing systems and to sign up for the weekly e-newsletter, visit http://www.LawnCareMarketingMagic.com

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Susan’s Lawn Gardens is pleased to feature this article from today’s guest author, PATRICK CASH. He is an expert on lawn care businesses, so we feel very comfortable recommending his work to our visitors.

Marketing Your Lawn Care Business
By Patrick Cash

Lawn Care Marketing

Marketing your lawn care business is one of the most crucial components for success besides having the right equipment or the job. For some lawn care service owners, marketing is their least favorite part of the business. They’d rather be out working than drumming up business. But your lawn care business is dead without a good marketing system in place.

Let your marketing slack and you are sure to feel the burn soon after. Lawn care marketing doesn’t have to be a chore if you lay out some good habits and stick to your plan.

First, you need to get a good lawn care business name and logo. Something that is good and memorable enough so that people think of you when they have a job that needs filled. Your logo and lawn care business name should be on your lawn care business cards, flyers, trucks and equipment.

Drop your lawn care business cards at local restaurants, car dealerships, and anywhere else there is good public traffic. Lawn care flyers are cheap ad easy to spread around town yourself, or you can pay a student to canvass the town for you. Just make sure your business logo and name stand out and that you pay attention to how your offer stands up to the competition.

Your crew should have t-shirts with your logo and business name on them when working. Some owners like hats for this purpose. But the “canvas” of a t-shirt is bigger and can be seen by drivers going by the job site.

Be Creative When Thinking of Lawn Care Marketing Tactics

Offer an incentive program for your best customers. This is a BIG lawn care business-booster and it works like a charm. Have some business cards made up that have a discount on them for first-time customers. These cards need to be presented to you by first-time customers and on the back you should have printed the name of your regular customer (who you gave the cards to).

Offer 5-10 cards to your regular customers that they can give away to friends and family. When someone redeems the card, you give a discount on service to the customer who gave them the card as a thank-you for helping them market your lawn care business.

Don’t be afraid to take a small loss to gain a new customer or to reward stable customers for helping you market your lawn care business. You are going to beat the competition more often and gain more long-term clients this way.

Lawn care marketing relies heavily on word-of-mouth advertising. So be mindful of this when servicing your current clients. Going out of your way and going the extra mile on the job will net you plenty of referrals. Neighbors talk. You want your customers saying nice things about you and your work so you can grab the extra business your customers are more than happy to set you up with if they like your work.

For more info on starting and running your own successful lawn care business check out my other articles or visit me at http://www.lawncare-business.com

You can reach me by email at:
patrick@lawncare-business.com

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