Is There Profit In Your Lawn Care Business?

There are plenty of good reasons to start your own lawn care company. You might do it for the freedom that being your own boss may give 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. You take pride in a sense of accomplishment. 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 is 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 a much larger company.

As a manager, job one is 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 good 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 your 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. It is much more economical and profitable to retain your customers than to get new ones.

Cause Joy!

As Strong as Your Weakest Link

When you start your own lawn care business, there are a lot of new situations you have to just accept as 'coming with the territory.' 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 your business and you are responsible, the world is a very different place.

No doubt 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 no less than "good" up to "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 skill 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 satisfied customers into long term clients. You must 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 most 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 primary job in life.

It seems that the balancing act of the amount of work and the right number of employees is one of the most difficult parts of owning a business. You might have too much business and not enough good employees. Then you find yourself overworking the good employees you have and paying higher wages for their longer hours. 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 of the many 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.