Employees Are the Backbone of Your Lawn Care Business

When you start your lawn care business, you may be able to handle a handful of customers yourself. But if you plan to grow and to see your business prosper, you will have to take on lawn care workers as employees. And the quality of those employees will be what makes you a great success or causes you to lose customers and flounder as a business.

Management of employees is a real art when you are trying to grow a business. To be a success, you need just enough workers to handle the yards you have to care for and no more. If you have too many employees on the payroll, your costs will eat up all your profits which will hurt the company. But you may be hesitant to lay off good employees while you build the business because good employees are hard to find and sure as you reduce staff, you will get more work in and you may need those employees.

Similarly, it is a disaster if you have a surge of business and you don’t have the staff to handle all the work. That means you, the boss, has to get out and work on lawns when you should be doing the work of running the company. It also means overtime for the employees you have which cuts into profits and wears out your crews as well.

On top of these challenges, lawn care employees are rarely highly educated or looking at their jobs as careers. That means high turn over. So on any given day you can start out thinking you have enough people to fill out the crews you need to put on the road only to find holes in those crews because some employees suddenly quit, never showed up or called in sick.

These are the headaches of management. But the upside of management is when you do find some great employees who know the work and work hard. If they also know how to dress, how to behave with customers and how to take ownership over their work, those are the employees you should guard for all your life and nurture and develop those crew members because they will make you a success.

Too often, there is an antagonistic relationship between management and crews on a lawn care staff. It is important you see your employees as partners with you in your quest for success for the business. One way to do that is to empower your employees to take ownership over the success of the company. You can give bonuses or prizes for employees who have good attendance records or who interact well with customers and help build strong relationship with the clients of the business.

Get to know your crew. Even if the turn over is so high that you meet new crew members every day. If you manage numerous job sites, make it a point to get around to each one each day. Stop the work and meet the new employees and greet the ones you already know. Just that little bit of recognition will go a long way to help employees feel part of a great company and give them a desire to help you succeed. Then if you have pizza waiting for them when they return and take them all out for beers once a month, those lawn care workers will become your best friends for life.

It is important to step back and review your attitude toward the people who do the real work of your lawn care business. Resist the natural urge to resent them. This is a natural reaction when your employee costs are the largest cost item in the budget. That is as it should be in a lawn care business.

You are a service business and you have no product except for the work these employees do for your customers. If you make it a point to value them, to treat them like family and even to "like them", they will notice your attitude. They will come to like you and like the company. And that simple relationship building step is the most powerful way to build retention and to make sure that when you finally build crew of trained and talented lawn care workers, you are more likely to keep them.

Doing What You Love for a Living

There is a joy to lawn care that is hard for some people to appreciate. To be able to work out in nature and enjoy the breeze on your cheek, the sound of birds as you work and the fresh air is just about healthy a lifestyle as you can imagine. And to be able to take a yard and turn it into a beautiful and sculpted work of art is a singular joy that is one of the reasons you may have decided to start your own lawn care company.

When you do for a living what is your passion in life, you really never do go to work. Every day going out there to dive into the craft of taking care of lawns is a joy of life that to you is fun and not work at all. Sure, there will be physical fatigue that comes with working with your hands and body all day long. But that is the good kind of tired because you did something good with your time and you made the world a more beautiful place.

Many lawn care businesses are started by people who simply love to garden and work with lawns. So they decided to take what is a passion and a hobby on the weekend and make it their way of earning a living. One reason this is a natural next step for you may be that you have reached the limits of your creative expression simply working on your own lawn. If you have more desire to work on crafting a beautiful lawn than you can use on your own home, its a natural next step to take your skill for lawn care and turn it into a business.

You may run a different kind of lawn care business than the big commercial operations. There is nothing written in stone that you have to start a lawn care business that exists to become a corporate giant employing thousands of people. Perhaps you want to just own a very small lawn care operation that lets you make your full time job out of a passion you have for lawn care and working with plants. It doesn’t take that much to support that kind of lawn care business. If you get just enough customers to give you 4-5 yards to do each day, that is sufficient.

Your passion for what you do will come through when you are talking to perspective customers. But what will really make you a sought after craftsman of lawn care will be the immaculate job you will do on every lawn that is put in your care. That is because you don’t come to the job with the objective of getting it done as fast as possible so you can make a lot of money. If you created this lawn care business to give you a vehicle to do what you love to do and get paid for it, you can dawdle over each lawn and not quit until it is absolutely perfect.

That perfection will be admired by your customers and by his or her neighbors as well. Before long you will have more requests for your services than you know what to do with. Then you can pick and choose who you wish to work for. You might choose based on the whether the home owner has that same passion for a beautiful lawn that you do. Or you might select clients that can accommodate your meticulous insistence on perfection and don’t mind giving you the time to create a masterpiece out of their yards.

By approaching your working this way, you will never lack for income. You may even find yourself wooed by hotels or golf courses to bring your special vision for a truly great lawn to their environment.

That is up to you as to whether you want to take on that kind of challenge. It could be your master work to create something magnificent from a larger setting like that. But as long as you are true to your vision for what you want to do with your time and you are doing what you love to do for a living, the details will fall into place. And you will never regret your decision to make a living with your own lawn care business living for the joy of your work rather than just working for a living.

Coming Up With the Perfect Name for Your Lawn Care Business.

The dream you have when you imagine starting your own business may be seeing that name on advertisements or on your business card for your new company.. So when you begin to get organized to finally start that lawn care business you have been dreaming about, the name you pick for the world to know your business is important. Its worth putting some thought into because your business name serves a lot of functions.

If it has been a dream of yours to own your own lawn care business for a long time, part of that dream may be having your name become part of the business name. The good of that approach is that your credibility that you already have as a lawn care professional becomes part of that name. A business name has two jobs. One is to be memorable so people can remember who to call when they need lawn work done. The other is to inspire confidence and tell the customer something about your business. If you name your lawn care company, George Hamilton's Lawn Services, (assuming you are George Hamilton), you build that credibility into part of your company name.

The downside of using your name as part of your corporate ID is that it limits you if you are thinking of building a large company that extends to other towns or spans state lines eventually. Also if you want to sell your lawn care business in a few years, you also sell your actual name as that corporate ID is a big part of the value of the business you are selling.

Another consideration in picking a corporate logo is your internet web site that you want to create to support and advertise your business. Experts in internet marketing tell us that the best internet URL is your company name. So the best URL for George Hamilton's Lawn Services is georgehamiltonslawnservices.com. For this reason keep your lawn services company name short and easy to remember. It is common for someone to see your truck signage or some other promotional material about your company and go to their web site and search for your URL using the company name. So make it easy for them to find you on the internet and that will result in more customers coming from your web site.

Also be sure you check to make sure the name you have in mind is not already taken. One way to do that is to "Google" the company name you want to use. The other is to go to your county clerk office to register your company name. They will find out if someone else has it. If not, when you register it, you are reserving that name for your company so it is protected.

There are a lot of ways you can go in picking a lawn care company name. Its not a bad idea to use a whimsical or funny company name. The guys who created the moving company, "Two Guys and a Truck" know the value of a humorous name. It is memorable to your future customers which means a funny name has some serious marketing value.

Be sure you keep the name generic enough so you can add services and the name covers what you do. If you name the company, George's Lawn Mowing Service, that is a name that 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. So give this matter some thought even if you already have a name for your company that you really like. Pick a name you love but also one that works for you and for your company as well.

As Strong as Your Weakest Link

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 work of 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 it is you who runs the show, 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 then to think about growing your business as well.

If you get a rush of new business, you want to capture it and turn those customers long term clients. But you have to be able to add new employees to take care of all of that business and be able to trust those employees to take care of that business well so the job they do for those new customers is just as high quality as you would do yourself. Perhaps the best important resource you can find 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, you will benefit from having a way to recruit good employees without having to make that your job in life.

It seems that the balancing act of work and employees is one of the most difficult parts of owning a business to work out. You might have too much business and not enough employees you can depend on. Then you find yourself overworking the good employees you have and playing higher wages for their longer hours and you get overworked yourself which cuts down on the time you can spend growing your business. Or you have too many employees when the business shrinks. Then you have a decision of whether to lay off good employees that you want to have on call when your business expands.

Above all, when you develop a strong staff of good employees, you should bend heaven and earth to take care of them. Morale in your employee ranks can be as much of a determining factor for the growth of your business as good customers or good equipment you need to take care of all those lawns that are the heart of your work. Learn to be a "good boss". If employees you know are good workers develop problems, try to work with them to return them to productivity.

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. And if you can give your employees a little part of the success you are enjoying, they will become an even more valuable asset which is a loyal crew that will work hard for you because you take good care of them.

Competing for Lawn Care Customers

We live in a free market. That means that anyone who is going to be successful has to know how to win customers away from the competition. This is no place for compassion. Granted that if you win customers away from your competitor, they will lose business which will make it harder on them to pay their bills. That is not your problem. By building a solid methodology for winning new customers, you can capture all of the lawn care market you need from the local markets and see your business succeed.

Bidding on a new job and winning a new customer is as much an art as the work of lawn care is. As the owner of your lawn care company, it falls to you to do customer relations and win new customers. There is one thing to keep in mind about how to bid on a job and that is that winning the job is about a lot more than the bid.

You would think that if you can bid the lower price, you will get the job. But home owners and property managers are smarter than that. They know that just hiring the cheapest lawn care company is not a good idea. If that lawn care company makes a mess of their property, they end up with a much worse situation than is justified by the few dollars they saved on that bid.

Your reputation is a big part of your presentation to a potential new customer. If you must present all of your credentials in a bid or an RFP (Request for Proposal), make that document well grounded in the things that are important to customers. You can bid a higher cost than some of your competition and still win the bid if the customer is convinced you are reliable and that you will do a great job on their lawn or the grounds of their business.

So include some text discussing your background, how long you have been in business and some notable customers who have used you for years. If you come recommended by a customer the prospect might know, include that recommendation letter or drop that customer's name in the proposal. The prospect will pick up the phone to verify that you are doing a great job for that customer and that live recommendation is solid gold in putting your bid ahead of the rest.

Future customers want to know that you believe you are the best company for the job. You can prove that by including an enticing offer that is hard for the prospect to refuse. Give the prospective customer a "coupon" for the first yard care session for free. That costs you the labor, time and gas to perform the free service. But it is a potent marketing tool that invariably results in a contract for long term service. Also don't be afraid to include an iron clad, no questions asked guarantee of satisfaction with your work. Good customers will not abuse that and they will feel confident in using your service knowing you stand behind your work with that strong a guarantee.

Learning to write a good proposal is a skill you will develop over time. There is no "one way" to write a good bid so you can use your own personality and style in putting together your proposal to the customer. If possible present your bid to the customer in person. Then you can use your charm and establish rapport which is even more effective. But by becoming skilled at winning new customers, you will have a crucial skill that will go a long way toward guaranteeing that your business will have a long and prosperous future ahead of it.

Becoming Profitable in Your 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. But the basic reason to start any business it to become profitable and successful so you can support yourself and your family and see your business grow and succeed.

So is it possible to make a good profit running a lawn care business? Of course it must be otherwise there would not be lawn care companies that stay in business year after year. To make your own business work, there are some 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 customers and generate revenue.

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 customers and customer 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 where you can need to keep multiple crews going every day. To keep each team 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 is a test of your management ability. But you learn the art of managing larger and larger teams and larger jobs as your business grows from just you and your small collection of tools to an empire.

As a manager, job one if customer retention. Job two is gaining new customers. Job three is cost control and making sure your teams are performing at peak efficiency while delivering top quality work to your customers. The customer focus needed to become profitable must go further than just you, the owner of the business. You must instill it in your employees. It is when you can capture the business of a nice roster of repeat customers that you have the basis for profitability as you take care of the work these customers give you each week.

As the owner and manager of your lawn care company, you must always be looking for ways to capture more business. This means marketing and advertising sometimes. But it also means making sure the work you do for existing customers is done well. If there was the heart of true profitability for your lawn care business, it is not primarily cost controls although that is a vital part of any successful business. The real heart of profitability is customer satisfaction.

With satisfied customers, you can build a budget of reliable income from the monthly payments of that customer base. Happy customers will give you new work as you expand the kinds of services your lawn care business offers. And happy customers give you referrals as they tell their friends of neighbors about the lawn service they are so happy 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 customers you have and grow from that base to greater profitability each year.

Where is Your Lawn Company?

Many people who finally launch their own lawn services company do so after operating for some time as an independent contractor. This is a good way to go because you can build your customer base but keep your costs minimal. Often times you may operate like this doing most of the work yourself and so avoid having to keep "employees" or deal with partners.

The thing that may be pushing you to start your own lawn care business may be that you are just too good at your job. Your business is growing to the point that you may not be able to service all the customers without changing your profile from an individual contractor to a small business owned and operated by you. This is a natural growth and businesses that start because of this kind of growth curve often succeed because you know the business and you know how to control costs and take good care of your customers.

The problem comes when the needs of the business outgrow your physical space that you consider to be "home base" of the business. In most cases when you start doing lawn care as an independent contractor, you may use the same lawn care equipment that you use for your home. Your garage is your "home base" and you keep track of the business details on your home computer.

When you take that big step of actually starting your own lawn care business, you have a decision to make. Do you continue to use your home as the base of operations for your business or do you invest in a business location to give you offices, a larger garage and storage facilities for the wide diversity of tools and equipment you and your employees will need to take care of the business you support?

The argument in favor of operating your small business from your home is economic. If you can launch your lawn care business with little or more additional expense and avoid taking out loans, you can use the profits to buy more equipment, pay for additional workers and eventually afford a larger space. This is outstanding business management if you can pull it off.

The problem is that you often have to invest in growth before the growth is a reality. To try to grow a business out of your home and garage means there will come a time right before you finally lease space for your business that it will be overwhelming your home. That can become a big problem for your family and for keeping the equipment of your business safe and separate from your private property. It is smart to start out keeping costs low. But when the time comes to formally launch your lawn care business, that may be the time to secure a small business loan and get a separate operating location for your new business.

Building and maintaining a separate location that is the physical location of your business has some real advantages. For one thing, the people who work for you and do business with you have a place to work and interact with you that is only about the goals of your lawn care business. Your family does not have to interact with your employees or clients and you can keep your equipment and paperwork of the business in one location secure and separate. For you, it is a place to "go to work" and it gives your business a real legitimacy that is important when you are seeking to be seen a real business operating in the lawn care markets in your community.

A separate facility gives you plenty of room to store your equipment including trucks and trailers you may need to transport your equipment to each job site. It gives you room to work on that equipment, clean it and effect repairs. And if you select the right location, you have room to grow when you buy more equipment to support your rapidly expanding business. Just as you dress for success, equip your business with a "home base" that is ready for growth because you know growth will be coming. Then the physical location of your business can grow with you step by step to greater levels of success each year.