The basics of running a lawn care business are fairly simple. They consist of finding customers, mowing lawns, billing customers, and collecting payment. These steps are so simple in fact that they attract a lot of would be entrepreneurs into the industry each and every day. Most anyone who gets a mowing business started feels that once they open their doors, in no time they should be able to make a lot of money. As we will see by exploring this topic further, it's never as easy as it looks.
To tell this story, let me go back a bit in time to share with you some history about my family's lawn care business. It got its start back in the early 1970's. My father had recently gotten laid off from his job at a local factory. There was an oil embargo going on at the time and gas prices had sky rocketed. Long lines became the norm at gas stations and people became more conservative with their purchases.
Even though my father no longer had a job, he had a growing family with plenty of mouths to feed. Being the practical man that he was, he looked around and thought about his options. He had a lawn mower and he had a pickup truck. He had grass that would not stop growing and so did his neighbors. With all that, a light bulb went off in his head and he decided that he would start his own lawn care business.
To get started, he knocked on the local neighbor doors. When someone would open to talk to him, he would explain his situation and ask if he could mow the home owner's lawn. Thankfully, more often than not, they would say yes and he would get started mowing right there on the spot.
One time mowings, would turn into bi-weekly mowings. Bi-weekly mowings would turn into weekly mowings. Soon enough, he had more customers than he could handle by himself and with that, more family members were brought into the business as employees. From an early age, my father was adamant about two key points that he felt would allow him to grow. Customer services, he felt, was all important, followed by his feelings on the importance of re-investing his earnings back into his own business.
Each and every landscape employee who was brought on was told of the importance of customer service. The customer was to be made happy through our services. If an impasse were to come along, the employee was then instructed to put themselves in the customer's shoes and to find how to resolve the issue. What ever was needed to do in order to make the customer happy was done. Happy customers brought us more happy customers and we all saw the importance of word of mouth.
My father would say, if you have a street with one customer on it, you need to make them happy and get them to talk to their neighbors. Then you will get more customers on the same block. With more customers on the same block would come better profits because you didn't have to travel far to get from one customer to the next. The reverse was also true. If you had one unhappy customer on a street, you needed to act fast in order to appease them before they told other neighbors about their displeasing experience with you. If you didn't, you may soon lose everyone on that block.
Many new competitors would come and go throughout the years. Each spring a new group of businesses would start and spend a lot of money on fancy lawn care marketing in hopes of stealing our customer base. But a happy customer will not leave you just because of some full color brochure. A happy customer will stay with you for a long long time. This is a simple business fact I learned a long time ago that still helps our business to stay strong and continue onwards. It's also point that most other start up business owners fail to see or even realize.
Keep your lawn care customers happy. When a problem arises, ask them what is wrong and get to the root of the problem. Correct the problem before it spreads. A happy customer will spread the word about your business and help you keep your marketing costs to a minimum. Keeping those costs to a minimum will give you a stealth advantage your competitors will never see. When they can't see it, they can't go after it and will soon find themselves out of business.
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