How to Add Christmas Lighting Services to Your Landscape Business
The best landscape companies love selling Christmas lighting services, but it can be a tricky business for first timers. For one, Christmas lighting only sells in a short window of time.
Fortunately, if you’re reading this, you should be able to add Christmas and Holiday lighting to your services easily, and start turning a healthy profit this holiday season, just in time for the end of the year.
This article will show you why Christmas lighting is such a good idea, how to price your services for maximum profit, and how to start selling lighting installs instantly.
Why Landscapers Should Offer Holiday Lighting
First off, you can charge a pretty penny for this service. The kinds of people who will pay for Christmas lights will pay you really well. This is critical during late autumn and early winter, when many lawn care jobs are starting to slow down. Compared to other landscaping projects, lights are easy to install and can be done in a few short hours.
It’s also one of the best ways to boost your revenue during the winter. Offering this service allows your business to stay in the green, and it keeps your employees working happily through the slow season.
As a bonus, you can also get some fantastic pictures to market your landscaping services later, because who doesn’t love images of eye-catching Christmas light setups?
When Should You Sell Christmas Lighting Services?
The selling season for Christmas Lighting starts on November 1st, right after Halloween, and it ramps up fast, so you need to be on the ball.
Usually, you’ll see this service peak a week or two before Thanksgiving, and then it will taper off the closer you get to December 25th.
Note: if you’re reading this in November or December, it’s not too late! Keep reading, and we’ll give you a couple tips to sell a few lighting packages to your clients this year.
Step 1: Test Your Lighting Process on a Client for a Discounted Rate
You know that one client you have who really likes your work?
Ask them if they’d like to be the trial run for your service, and offer a nice discount for them. When they say yes, use this first install to figure out your process.
Go slow, work out the kinks, and make their house look amazing. Then, grab some pictures for your ads and upsells. I’ll tell you what to do with them in a minute.
How to Perform Your First Christmas Light Installation
Measure the sides and angles of each roof. Focus on the front of the property.
Buy enough lights and hanging supplies to cover the house generously. It’s better to run long than short.
Time yourself (or your team) as you install the lights. This will help you out a ton in Step 2.
We recommend this video from Lawn Thumbs to see how one landscaper hangs lights for his customers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnCu16q7MFM
Remember: be safe as you work. You will be climbing on roofs, so keep your ladders in the right position and wear gloves and shoes with great grip.
Step 2: How to Price Your Christmas Lighting Service
As with any service, you must build a profit into your price. But unlike most landscaping services, Christmas lighting has three factors that make it unique:
It has a very limited window
It requires a unique set of skills to get it right
It has increased risk because of the roof work
Each of these challenges should multiply your pricing. As a service, Holiday lighting should have a much higher profit margin than services like lawn maintenance to make it worth the extra effort and organization required. Be generous to yourself and to your team.
Choose the Right Pricing Model
You can charge by the hour, or charge by the job, or you can offer a “pick and choose” pricing model. Whichever one you choose, make sure you time yourself to guarantee a healthy profit.
Want an easy way to price?
Divide the property up into “easy, medium, and hard to reach” lighting areas. That way, you can charge based on how difficult each area is to reach. This will protect you from underpricing your services, and ensure your profits stay high.
Should You Lease or Sell Lights to Clients?
Holiday lighting is unique for another reason: you can reuse lights from year to year.
That leaves you with two major choices. Do you lease the lights to your customers (that is, do you build in a rental cost into your pricing), or do you let the customers buy them?
In the long run, leasing should cost your clients more money. Why?
Since you will probably have to cut and measure your strings of lights to each client’s specific house size, you can’t necessarily reuse lights if a client drops you. There’s always that risk. So, when you allow clients to buy the lights (or to reimburse you), you don’t need to shoulder that cost anymore.
For that reason, I usually recommend you offer a discount on the light installation service if your clients chose to buy the lights. This is doubly effective, because it helps you create a repeat customer.
Step 3: The Best Ways to Sell Your Christmas Lighting Services
Upselling is key to selling a ton of lighting work.
Your best bet is to focus on your best clients first, and work down. There are two extremely effective ways to sell a ton of lighting work:
Send upsell emails to your existing clients
Craft a short series of emails. It doesn’t have to be too fancy, just let them know that you’re offering a lighting services.
The content might say something like this:
Are you ready for the Holidays?
We’re in the area hanging lights for a few of your neighbors, and we wanted to see if you were interested in this service. For a limited time, we’re offering a “two-day deal” this week only. Sign up now, and we’ll cut 5% off your installation price!
Create irresistible ads that get your clients to buy from you NOW
This is a great strategy, and we’ve seen it work so well many times before. We talked about this strategy in our article on upselling landscaping services, so here’s the short version:
Get a list of your clients
Put them into a Facebook ads campaign
Target them with a set of Holiday Lighting ads, and watch the jobs roll in…
This is your chance to use those pictures from your first client. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, it might be worth a thousand bucks (or more), so get a good picture!
Question: “Why would I pay money to advertise to existing clients?”
Answer: because it WORKS.
For a fraction of the cost of any other marketing method, you can sell an insane amount of work to anyone who uses Facebook or Instagram (that is, almost every one of your clients).
It’s CRUCIAL to get your ads up and running as soon as possible. Christmas Lighting has such a short window, but if you time it right, you can sell a lot of work. The best part is, this work is surprisingly profitable for the work you put in.
Need some help getting set up? We’ve got your back.
Lightspeed Social Agency can build out your landscaping ads, so you can grow faster this year… and beyond. We’re a highly-experienced team that focuses only on the landscaping industry, which means we know how to help you reach your customers.
Talk to us today, and we’ll show you how we can help.
