How to Run a Successful Lawn Care Business (A Comprehensive Guide)

Who doesn’t love to maintain the aesthetic beauty of their lawn? 

The finely trimmed edges of the green bushes and the pleasant-smelling mowed grass fascinate us the most. 

According to the National Association of Landscape Professionals, the landscaping industry is rising exponentially, with over 633,481 landscaping service businesses having a market size of $129 billion in the year 2022.

With the rising need to maintain lawns for residential as well as commercial clients, lawn care businesses are booming. 

The detailed tips and tricks for landscaping businesses, plus these step-by-step guides on how to run a successful lawn care business, will help lawn care professionals to level up their existing lawn care profit metrics. 

Let’s find out how.

A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Run a Successful Lawn Care Business

To run a profitable and sustainable lawn care business requires knowledge, planning, and hard work. By following some key steps around marketing, customer service, equipment, hiring, and more, you can set your business up for success.

9 Simple Steps to run a successful lawn care business

1. Research

2. Understand Your Audience

3. Decide What Lawn Care Services to Offer

4. Create a Business Plan

5. Hire Employees Rightly

6. Market Your Business

7. Decide Your Pricing Strategy

8. Customer Retention and Support

9. Integrate the Right Tools and Technologies

Give this video a good watch to practically visualize the essential steps to perform while on your way to attaining success in your lawn care business.

Let’s unfold these 9 essential steps in detail.

1. Research

Implementing the idea of starting a lawn care business from scratch can be demanding. It requires rigorous research, dedication, and consistency to achieve the desired result. 

There are several research-related areas that can be focused on when we successfully want to run our own lawn care business. 

1.1 Market research

For building a successful lawn care company, it is very much essential to know the who’s and how’s of your lawn care business. Try answering the below three questions:

• Who are your customers?
• What are their demands?
• How will you be able to meet them?

1.2 Tools & equipment research

It is very necessary for a lawn mower to have a complete understanding of what type of tools and equipment you will need for your landscaping business. For this, try answering:

• What tools & equipment do you need?
• How will you acquire them? Either by purchasing or renting? 

1.3 Competetive research

Know what other lawn care business owners are offering and how you can excel. You can make better decisions that can help you stand out from most lawn care businesses in the market. This can include pricing strategy, marketing efforts, and services offered.

2. Understand Your Audience

Lawn care companies should focus on analyzing the needs, behavior, and purchasing habits of the audience they are targeting. For this, lawn care businesses should:

• Analyze the problems, desires, and emotions that your target audience goes through.
• Create a buyer persona for your prospective customers and script down different details about your target audience that can help you get more clients and make more money in lawn care.
• A better understanding of your audience can tailor your marketing and customer management approach. 
• It can help you tailor your lawn care services and include different segments that can deliver a quality customer experience and build a strong relationship with your clients.

3. Decide What Lawn Care Services to Offer

There are various lawn care services offered by the other landscaping businesses in the market. In order to excel and get lawn care customers more rapidly, you need to adopt a user-oriented approach to rendering services.

Read this blog if you want to get lawn care customers swiftly on your doorsteps.

You need to start providing basic lawn care services first so that you can build a client database. These basic services are

• Lawn mowing
• Fertilizing
• Aeration
• Pruning & Trimming
• Weed control
• Seasonal services like snow removal

The services you provide directly impact the budget and the equipment requirements you have.

When your lawn mowing business is adapted to the basic service you provide, and once you have a sufficient client base, you can further jump upon the advanced services like

• Lawn renovation
• Tree & shrub maintenance 
• Disease and insect control
• Robotic lawn mowing
• Outdoor lawn lightening

4. Create a Business Plan

When you start a lawn care business, an effective and actionable business plan is a must. You can create or optimize your lawn care business plan based on your competitor’s performance and market approach. There are two types of business plans for every lawn business. They are

4.1  Traditional business plan:

Traditional business plans are the ones where every aspect is specifically explained in detail. It is a comprehensive document that highlights the goals, strategies, and financial projections for lawn care companies. 

The main purpose of a traditional business plan is to secure funding from banks or financial institutions.

 4.2 Lean startup business plan:

A lean startup is the complete opposite of a traditional business plan model. Here, the less comprehensive and flexible method is adopted. The main purpose of a lean startup business plan is to validate the lawn care business idea and test the assumptions about the target market. 

This approach is highly adopted by lawn mowers who are operating in an uncertain business market.

5. Hire Employees Rightly

“A great team makes a great company.” 

Mostly all business runs on this principle as manpower is a critical asset of the company. Hence, recruiting them and investing in them should be done precisely.

Here are a few things that should be taken into consideration while you hire employees for your lawn care business:

• Check the experience of the candidate you are hiring. Ensure that they have sufficient command over various lawn care equipment and tools.
• Physical health also matters at the time of hiring the right employee.
• Next thing to consider is the required licensing and certifications. Some local jurisdictions require lawn care professionals to get certified, hence it is essential to check the same. 
• Match your job description requirements with the resumes you received. The candidate’s skills and expertise should be parallel to the job description you are seeking. 

6. Market Your Business

Marketing your lawn mowing business and promoting it to the target audience helps you create a successful lawn care business.

To implement effective marketing strategies, you need to market your business through effective marketing channels. There are a few marketing tools through which you can do marketing effectively. They are

• Social media pages
• Email marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Online advertising
• Referral marketing
• Paid ads
• Build a strong website 

There are a few marketing tips that should also be kept in mind while you implement the marketing strategies.

• Build your own personal identity to give a boost to your lawn care business. Design an attractive logo, and have a unique business name with an unbeatable motto that ultimately separates you from the rest of the competitors in the lawn care industry.
• Keep a check on what your competitors are doing and what are their pain points which you can work on and excel.
• Market your business online through all the physical business cards as well as using the marketing tools mentioned above.
• Asking for feedback once they are happy with lawn care work you provide, is your knight in shining armor. Potential clients can get triggered if you focus on word-of-mouth marketing.

InvoiceOwl helps you get valuable online customer reviews and leverage your word-of-mouth marketing efforts.

7. Decide Your Pricing Strategy

After deep research on the pricing strategy, now it’s time to finalize yours. But there are few questions that need to answer first:

• How will you implement the lawn care pricing strategy? 
• Are there any parameters that you have set and on whose basis you are going to set your prices? 
• What are the methods on whose basis you will decide the prices?

There are several factors that you need to focus upon before determining the price:

• Calculate the relevant material and labor costs along with the additional overhead costs incurred
• Define the break-even point
• Analyse the rates already prevailing in the market
• Create estimate templates for your lawn care business to know your overall costs
• Decide the profit margin ratio
• Lastly, set the reasonable price

Also, there are various pricing models, on the basis of which price can be determined. Among them few are listed below:

• Hourly-wage rate – This pricing strategy is to be adopted when you are unaware of the duration or how long it will take to get your lawn care job done. 
• Flat rates – It is a fixed rate pricing strategy that will ensure that a determined rate is levied no matter how long it takes to complete the job.
• Square footage rates – The standard of measurement here is square feet of the area you are landscaping. This will not be evaluated on the fixed-wage rate or hours spent. 

8. Customer Retention and Support

Ensure that you focus more on retaining your satisfied customers rather than shifting your focus toward customer acquisition.

Begin by marketing to your target market with an approach to minimize your marketing budget by scaling your customer retention. 

It can help you increase positive word-of-mouth marketing and help you channel your business and personal finances towards important aspects.

Offer discounted services to your existing customers and make them feel special to increase retention rates.

9. Integrate the Right Tools and Technologies

Focus on integrating the right tools and technologies to minimize efforts and streamline your lawn care business management.

When the world is moving towards digitalization, why don’t you try once? 

In order to be more focused on your other business matters, you can welcome digital estimates & invoices in your business, easy management of client data, and effective review request flow.

And to your amazement, InvocieOwl can help you with this.

12 Best Practices to Make Your Lawn Care Business Profitable

1. Always track expenses meticulously to understand the actual job costs.
2. Precisely conduct a competitive analysis to set profitable pricing.
3. Schedule client appointments strategically to maximize productivity and minimize downtime.
4. Offer flexible and client-specific scheduling options to meet different customer needs and improve efficiency.
5. Deliver exceptional customer service to cultivate loyalty and trustworthiness.
6. Offer loyalty programs and referral incentives.
7. Utilize route optimization software for efficient travel and reduced fuel costs.
8. Identify and render complementary services your existing customers might need.
9. Bundle services to create attractive packages and increase average order value.
10. Build a user-friendly website showcasing your services and expertise.
11. Engage on social media platforms to connect with potential customers.
12. Encourage customer reviews and actively solicit feedback to find further areas of improvement.

InvoiceOwl Offers You Quality Financial Management Support

InvoiceOwl is the leading estimate and invoice software for lawn care businesses that can streamline your business operations and help you manage your finances with finesse.

You can achieve great profits by providing well-vetted estimates, invoices, and purchase orders. The software offers pre-build quality templates that you can use to minimize the time and effort of creating financial documents.