Grow Your Lawn & Landscaping Business with This 2023 Business Plan
If you’re ready to build a massively successful lawn care or landscaping business in 2023, you need a powerful business plan. You need to create challenges for yourself that are:
Specific
Time-sensitive
And based in reality
You can’t just dream. You can’t just tell yourself “this year will be different.” It’s up to you to make this year different.
The process of change starts with a plan. Planning doesn’t need to take a lot of time, but if you build a strong plan right now, you will set yourself up for truly rewarding growth in 2023. Whether you’re trying to hire your first landscaping employees, or you want to grow by millions in revenue, this guide will set you on the growth track.
Get out a piece of paper and a pencil. Let’s plan your growth in 2023:
Step 1: Take a Long, Hard Look at 2022
Before you know where you’re going, you need to know where you stand.
This is the time to look at your financials from the last year. Before anything else, answer these questions:
How much revenue did you bring in?
How much profit did you bring in?
How many net clients or jobs did you gain?
What were your biggest challenges last year?
What were your biggest successes last year? (Ads that brought in new clients, systems that made your life easier, etc.)
The goal of these questions is not to judge. It’s to make yourself aware. What gets measured gets managed, and when you manage something—you can improve it. So this is your last best chance to measure your results from 2022.
Step 2: Know the Performance of Your Services and Clients
Businesses need profit to grow.
There are two major levers you can pull to grow your profits: the cost of your services, and the value of your clients.
You need to know everything about these two areas if you want to build an unstoppable growth machine.
Analyze Your Services
Did you make a profit on each job?
Which jobs were the most profitable? Which ones were the least?
You want to find patterns. The answers to these questions will tell you which jobs and services are dragging down your business, and which ones are boosting it. You might discover that lawn maintenance costs you a ton of time, and yields very little profit. Or, you might discover that your mulch services are extremely profitable. Either way, you need to know.
If you discover your services aren’t making you much money, it might be time to raise your landscaping prices. This is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to boost your growth.
Evaluate Your Clients
Who were your best clients of 2022? Which ones were the worst?
Did you make a profit on each client?
If there are clients who slow you down or who barely pay you at all, it might be time to cut them loose.
On the other hand, if you notice a pattern—for example, clients in Neighborhood A are worth twice as much as Neighborhood B—then you’ll know what kind of clients to focus on in 2023. Great business owners know they need to focus only on the most valuable clients. Let the cheap landscaping companies have the cheap clients, while you work only with the profitable ones.
Step 3: Set a Realistic Revenue Goal
Your revenue goal will depend on where you stand now.
If you’re making $60,000 a year in revenue, it’s reasonable that you might double in 2023.
But if you’re already making $3 million, you need to set a more realistic goal.
Take note of how much you grew each month last year—some months you went way up, and in others, you might not have grown at all.
Then, print this revenue goal out, or write it in huge block letters on your office whiteboard. You want this number to stare you in the face every day, as a reminder of the big, golden number that you’re working toward.
One more thing: doubling in size almost always means hiring new employees. And those big lawn and landscape companies? They’re always hiring. So if you’re going for a big goal in 2023, keep in mind that you must include hiring in your plans.
If you want to hire great people, you need to pay great wages, which is yet another reason to consider raising your prices.
Step 4: Plan Your Major Growth Projects
If you want to grow, you can’t do what you’ve always done. You need to do something different.
If you want to hit that big, golden number, you need to plan projects that are SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Realistic
Time-based
Don’t tell yourself, “I’m going to hire some new landscaping employees this year.” Instead, say something like this:
“I’m going to hire 2 employees per month in the Spring, and 1 employee a month after that. I will do this by putting up hiring ads on Indeed and by creating a referral bounty that I’ll share with my current employees and friends.”
Write it down. Put it into your plan and commit to growing your business through a specific goal.
More Growth Ideas
Hire your first employee(s)
Bid on a new commercial project
Hire crew leaders, so you can get out of the field
Hire office staff to take 90% of calls off your plate
Create a marketing plan to pursue new neighborhoods
Offer and advertise a new, ultra-profitable service like fertilization
You can do so much in a year, but don’t over-commit. Give yourself a handful of projects to work on, and set deadlines. Remember to avoid putting too much on your plate during your busy season—getting behind on your work can be so demoralizing.
And remember to accept failure as part of the process. Failure is a fantastic way to learn, and all the greatest business owners have failed more times than most people ever try.
Step 5: Start Your Marketing Right Now
Too many landscaping and lawn companies don’t advertise until it’s too late. This is a HUGE mistake.
Don’t be the kind of business owner who waits until he’s desperate for clients, and then decides to start marketing.
The best time to advertise depends on the services you sell, but there is NO reason you can’t set up your advertising engine right now. In fact, it’s better to do it during your slowest times, so you can put in the effort to get it right. The earlier you start, the earlier you will optimize and figure out what actually works.
Then, when the busy season hits, you’ll already have all the work you can handle.
Keeping your work pipeline full is one of the most important keys to growing a healthy, sustainable business that runs with minimal effort.
Need Help? Get a Great Marketing Agency on Your Side
Don’t have the time to get started?
The truth is … you can hire a great marketing agency to help your business. Our agency, Lightspeed Social, is a small, expert team of landscaping marketers who are dedicated to helping you grow your business.
We specialize in Facebook Ads, Indeed Hiring Ads, Google, and more, and we would love to work with you. Talk to us, and we’ll show you how we can help your business get more clients for less money—and we’ll do the work for you.