How to Build a $100,000 Lawn Care Business
Building a lawn care business that makes $100,000 in revenue takes a lot of work. There are no shortcuts. However, there are a handful of strategies and mindsets that will make growing your lawn business so much easier.
Most lawn businesses never reach the $100,000 mark. Why?
Because most owners don’t put in the time to learn the fundamentals of growth. They start working, and they think “if I just work more hours, I’ll make more money. That’s all I have to do.”
Work smarter. Focus on the business practices and marketing tactics that will earn you true growth, and you will get to the level where your business starts growing on its own.
I’m going to show you the 3 most important strategies that will grow your lawn business to $100,000 and beyond. When you get these systems right, you will elevate yourself above the competition, and see the real potential in your business.
Strategy #1 - Only Sell to the Best Clients
There are two kinds of lawn care owners:
One is a generalist. He’ll take any work that comes his way, as long as the price is right. From mowing to gardening to stump removal, he will do it all. He even repaired someone’s gutters once, because they offered him a nice paycheck.
The other is a specialist. He only offers a couple of services, but he does them really well. He’s an expert at his work.
Who has a better chance of hitting $100,000 per year?
Why Specialists Make More Money
Specialists are professionals who get very good at selling a few services only to their ideal clients. Become a specialist, and your path to growth becomes so much easier:
First, specializing lets you sharpen your efficiency to a razor’s edge. Companies that specialize in mowing residential properties can accurately predict down to the minute how long it will take them to finish 20 properties in a day, including drive time, breaks, and refueling.
This kind of predictability allows them to see exactly how many jobs you need to sell to hit your yearly goal. Instead of guessing, you can say something like “I need to pick up 15 more clients by June to hit my goal.”
Second, it helps you nail that pricing sweet spot. Because you specialize in one or two services, you know exactly how much they’re worth and you can charge a premium. Most lawn care owners price too low because they don’t take the time to finetune their pricing, which causes them to lose money on every single job.
Meanwhile, the Specialist always gets a healthy profit. This quick guide can help you figure out if you need to raise your prices.
Last, specialists only work with the best clients. They identify their ideal client, and they only chase those people.
For lawn care, your ideal client is someone willing to pay a premium price for a premium lawn care service, and who also lives near your other clients. These kinds of clients will love your work, and they will always trust you to do a great job. They’re low-hassle, low-stress, and because they’re so easy to work with, you get to spend more time on growing your company, instead of dealing with complaints.
If you specialize, price your services right, and start chasing only your ideal clients, your revenue will grow at an incredible rate. Nail this strategy down, and you will stand head and shoulders above the smaller competition in your area.
Strategy #2 - Find and Nurture Better Employees
Without employees, you will never grow past your limits. You only have so much time in a day, but good employees will multiply your working hours every day.
If you want to build a truly impressive lawn care business, one that can easily hit $100,000 in revenue (and more), you need employees.
More than that, you need to find great employees:
Dependable
Cares about quality
Works at a reasonable, sustainable pace
If you own your business, you will be the hardest-working employee. It’s not fair to expect your employees to work as hard as you, because they have far less to gain. They make a wage, while you own a business. You work harder because your rewards are far greater.
But most employees want to work. They want to do a good job and it’s up to you, as the owner, to keep your employees motivated and engaged in their work.
There are a number of ways to do this:
First, always pay your employees a healthy wage. Anyone can go work inside at a fast food restaurant with air conditioning for $18/hr or more these days. So why should they work outside, in the beating sun, all day long?
If you can’t find any good employees, you might want to look at your wages. You are competing with every business around you for the same group of employees. If you can’t pay better than a fast food chain, how can you expect to get anyone but the most desperate (and unreliable) employees?
Some lawn care owners have also figured out how to pay for performance. Employees get bonus compensation based on the number of jobs they complete, the quality of those jobs, and the overall company performance.
This helps your employees feel responsible for the company’s performance because they can earn more by helping your company perform at the highest standards.
Beyond wages, having a great work culture can help you find better employees. If your employees like you, and they like the way you run your business, they’ll recommend that their hard-working friends apply to work there, too.
The most overlooked tactic here is the hiring strategy itself. Most owners will only hire when they have a spot open. This is a huge mistake—because the hiring process takes a long time, and if you’re already behind you will feel pressured to hire bad applicants.
Don’t do this. Instead, you want to keep your bench of new applicants topped off, as often as possible. To do this, we strongly recommend you keep your hiring process open and run hiring ads, especially during your busy season.
Strategy #3 - Be a Smarter Marketer
How do you get more clients?
How do you find more profitable clients?
How do you keep your company growing all year long?
The answer is marketing.
When you advertise your company in the right ways, finding clients and generating more revenue becomes a walk in the park. You just have to focus on the right things.
Here are the two most important marketing tactics to get your lawn business to $100,000 a year (and beyond):
1. Upsell Like Crazy
If you don’t upsell to your existing clients regularly, you are leaving money on the table.
Your existing clients are a great source of revenue because they already know you, they already love your work, and you already service their property regularly.
A good upsell will cost you very little time and will return a huge profit.
Find a service or two (like mulching or fertilization) that you can upsell to your favorite clients. Send them an email or run retargeting ads to this group, and you will get a nice bump in your revenue for almost no effort.
The next level: build upsells into your sales process, and you will automatically increase the revenue you make on every single client.
2. Target Specific Neighborhoods
Too many owners take work wherever they can get it. This is the path to headaches, stress, and “barely profitable jobs.”
The smartest way to grow? Build incredibly dense routes in profitable neighborhoods.
If you execute strategy #1, and you get very good at a specific set of services, you can tailor those services to a specific neighborhood. Your goal is to own as much of that neighborhood as possible, which allows you to spend less time driving and more time getting jobs done. With careful planning, we’ve seen some lawn owners double the number of jobs they get done in a single day by focusing on route density.
How do you actually sell to a specific neighborhood? You can send out flyers and door hangers, which might work, but a more effective strategy is to use Facebook’s local targeting ads. With this tool, you can outline a specific zip code or target houses in a focused area, and send those houses your ads.
Lightspeed Social Agency is a marketing agency that specializes in this kind of strategy. We help lawn care owners like you build highly efficient and profitable routes by building, executing, and optimizing digital ads for your business.
If you want to see how we can help your business, contact us here. Our team of expert marketers specializes in the Green Industry, and our mission is to multiply your growth and help you grow the business of your dreams.
