How To Make Big Money In Lawn Care
landscape business Nov 10, 2022
Whether you are just starting, or have had a lawn care business for a decade, there are things you can do to make more money. If you are just getting started, the most important thing you can do is nail down your craft. You also need to go full force into marketing and customer recruitment. Although you don’t need to keep those same customers or prices forever.
Today I am going to tell you just how you can take a small lawn care business and ramp it up to be a successful and professional business. It takes time, and hard work, but it is very possible. Taking your business from $1,000 a month to $1,000 a day is much easier than going from zero to $1,000 a month. Implement these tips, and with a little dedication, you will be there in no time.
Get Efficient
Alright so to make a lot of money in lawn care, you have to care for a lot of lawns. Plain and simple. You can’t charge a million dollars for one lawn and take forever to do it. Ideally, you should be able to do four subdivision lawns per hour. Of course, if you are cutting larger lawns that may change, but you want to be as fast as possible while keeping quality above average.
Whether you need to hire a helping hand, or get better equipment, if you can’t be fast and efficient, you are not going to make big money. Usually, you can get a lot done with a two man team. One person is on the mower, and the other one has the trimmer. Don’t forget to blow off the driveway after you are done.
If it takes you longer than that to cut a lawn, practice on the next lawn you cut. Cut it as fast as you can while still doing good work. If you keep doing that, you will get faster and faster, and discover a few tricks along the way to be a little more efficient.
Route Density
Once you have your lawn cutting down to an art, you need to put a lot of effort into improving your route density. If you have 10 lawns to cut, would it be better if those 10 lawns were all right next to each other, or spread out all over town? Obviously the former is ideal. Less driving means more cutting!
Chances are, you already have a few lawns that are relatively close to each other. You should work HARD on recruiting the nearby houses. For starters, do a really good job on the houses you have. Then go door to door and promote your services. Make sure you get online feedback from your current houses too, you can use that as an advertising tool.
This is not something that will happen overnight. You will get plenty of no’s when you are knocking. Although if you can get in front of those people online, and knock on their door, and put a bandit sign somewhere near their home, they will not be able to forget you. You don’t want to annoy them, but season after season, you can knock on their door and offer your services.
Eventually, you will build up a nice clientele that is fairly close to each other. This is going to reduce your windshield time. AKA, the time you spend driving from job to job. The less time you can spend driving, the more time you can spend working, and the more money you can make. Realistically, this can help you cut an extra 10 lawns a day.
Prune The Outliers & Lowballs
When you first start a lawn care business, you are trying to get any and every customer you can get. Although once your schedule fills up, you have to start rotating better customers in. That means you have to raise rates on your older customers, and be okay with them leaving. You can expect that the majority of them will leave, but you can just replace them with other customers that are already along your route!
That is easier said than done, but if you want to be a professional, you need to have professional work and rates. Just because it was the first client you got, doesn’t mean you need to cut their lawn across town for $20 year after year. You will lose money like that in the long run.
Instead, you gradually raise your rates overtime. Now this is something I have talked about before in dozens of videos and articles, and it is not easy. Although keeping the same prices forever does not give you any room for growth. You can charge as much as people are willing to pay, and just because you wouldn’t pay it, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t pay it.
Lastly, you want to start pruning your outliers. We were talking about route density before and getting the majority of your clients in one place. Well, if you have 50 clients in one area, but 10 in surrounding areas, it is going to take a lot of time to go out to those surrounding areas to work. You want to slowly get rid of those clients as you pick up more clients along your route. You can also have more than one route, so if you develop multiple clusters of clients that is totally okay.
Small Time vs Professionals
Another thing I wanted to mention is that you have to stop acting like “chuck with a truck” and more like a professional business. The difference in attitude between a small-time guy and a professional is huge. The small-time guy is afraid of losing clients if they raise prices, the professional knows it will make him more money in the long run.
When you treat your business as something that is bigger than just you and a mower, you will gain a lot more respect from your customers, have a different outlook on business as a whole, and start doing much better for yourself in the long run.
Just remember, focus on route density, raise your prices every now and then, prune away the outliers, and most importantly, do good work. Good luck out there!
