How to Run a Successful Lawn Care Business

1. Narrow down your services list

It might be tempting to offer every lawn care service you can, especially when your clients are asking for additional services. But there are lots of reasons to provide just a few services, like:

• Not all services are popular or in demand year-round
• Some types of services require expensive lawn care equipment
• You need lawn care professionals on staff who can provide each specialized service

You can offer more generalized services, like lawn mowing and edging, or more specialized options such as weed control and pest control service.

Just make sure your services list is small and manageable—and you can do each service exceptionally well.

Pro Tip: While you’re picking a service niche, you should also define your service area. Keep it small enough to be easily accessible, yet big enough to ensure plenty of potential clients.

2. Advertise your lawn care services

To maintain a full schedule and keep your business profitable, you need a steady roster of clients. Advertising is the best way to reach potential customers in your area.

You can try lawn care marketing ideas like the ones below:

• Set up a profile on Google Business (formerly Google My Business)
• Run digital ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram
• Build a lawn care website
• Pass out lawn care flyers in local neighborhoods
• Put a branded decal or wrap on your company vehicle
• Set up sandwich boards in clients’ front lawns while you’re working

READ MORE:How to get your first 100 lawn care customers

3. Review your pricing regularly

To keep your business profitable, your pricing should include the cost of labor, materials, overhead and equipment maintenance, and your ideal lawn care business profit margin. 

When you’re determining how much to charge for lawn mowing and other services, you can price out each job individually using this formula:

Labor costs + Material costs + (overhead + equipment costs) + profit margin

4. Simplify your quoting process

When you’re selling lawn care services, you can beat out competitors and win more jobs by responding quickly to leads with a professional-looking estimate.

Here’s how to speed up the process when you’re quoting lawn mowing services—even when you’re busy mowing lawns all day:

• Create quotes with a template. Instead of pen and paper, use a lawn care quote template customized with your company name and branding. When you’re ready to quote, simply fill in your client’s information, services, pricing, and estimate terms and conditions.
• Send quotes over email for a faster response. You can also use a self-serve client hub that lets your customers view quotes easily, request changes, and approve from anywhere.
• Follow up frequently and remind clients to approve their quotes. Create one or two standard quote follow-up emails that you can send to all your clients, and set a schedule for yourself to send out those reminders.
• Track job costs to quote new work based on past jobs. Job costing software like Jobber tracks your profitability for every job so you can keep profit margins high. 

READ MORE: How to write a quote for a job

Lawn care business software like Jobber lets you create professionally designed quotes. To keep work moving forward, Jobber automatically sends a follow-up to customers you haven’t heard back from.

5. Upsell your services

Get more money from every job by upselling the client on other services. This also shows you care about giving your clients value and doing the best work possible.

Say a potential client is interested in regular lawn mowing, but you notice that their grass needs a good dethatching. If you can upsell them on the added service, you’ll make more money from the same job.

Jobber lets you suggest premium packages or additional services, like spring fertilizer treatment, directly in your quote. Customers can select the services they want and approve the updated total. 

WATCH NOW:Upselling tips from home service pros

6. Create flexible team schedules

When you book mowing and lawn maintenance jobs, add each visit to a calendar that’s easy to read, edit, and share with your team.

Using a flexible scheduling tool will save you the trouble of calling your team members every time there’s a rain delay or when job details are updated.

Here are more ways you can create a profitable lawn mowing schedule:

• Create schedules online instead of using spreadsheets or paper. Editable online schedules make it easier to reschedule visits on rainy days and respond to last-minute cancellations.
• Personalize your calendar with color coding and filters to quickly see what’s important, like job status or visits assigned to certain team members.
• Track other tasks and events, like scheduled equipment maintenance, to keep your crew organized.
• Create faster routes and maximize productivity by assigning jobs to the closest team members. You can also use route optimization for better time management.

READ MORE: Best scheduling apps for small business owners

In Jobber, you can easily drag and drop visits that need rescheduling. To avoid overbooking, underbooking, and double booking, choose from five different views and get a clear visual of crew availability.

7. Know your numbers

We hear it from the pros on Masters of Home Service all the time. To run a successful and profitable business, you need to understand job costing and track key business metrics.

With the reporting, integrations, and AI capabilities of Jobber, you can have instant access to your business data. Get information like your average quote closing rate, invoice amount, payment timeline, and more.

AI productivity tools like Jobber Copilot can provide impactful suggestions to help you find and fix inefficiencies you might have otherwise missed.

READ MORE: AI prompts to try in Jobber Copilot

8. Communicate well with customers

Great communication and excellent lawn care customer service is how you earn trust with customers. This increases the chances they’ll leave a positive review online and refer your business to others.

Create a positive customer experience by keeping them informed before, during, and after the job. Follow this schedule to communicate with clients consistently:

• A few days before the job, send appointment reminder emails to prepare clients for your visit. Include instructions for removing any obstacles to your work, like keeping their lawn unwatered before you arrive or making sure their pets stay indoors.
• On the day of the job, send a quick text message saying you’re on your way or running late. This can prevent last-minute cancellations and keeps clients confident that you’ll be there.
• After the job is complete, send a follow-up email to check if your client is happy with their lawn. Checking on customer satisfaction after every visit shows clients you care and gives you the chance to meet (or exceed) their expectations

To save time, use Jobber’s automated customer communication features. You can schedule reminder emails and send standardized “on my way” text messages before every visit.

Manage all these conversations in a single place using two-way text messaging. See what was sent, when it was sent, and which team member sent the message.

9. Maintain healthy cash flow with fast payments

A successful lawn care or landscaping company collects payments quickly, allowing you to pay employees and handle other expenses on time—all while avoiding unnecessary stress.

Rapid billing often comes down to payment options. The easier it is for customers to pay, the faster you’ll get paid for your hard work. Here are the best ways to speed up your payment process:

• Shorten your payment terms to 14 days so you can avoid late and unpaid invoices.
• Send a professional invoice that clearly outlines the amount owed, your payment terms, and accepted payment methods.
• Let customers pay online with convenient credit card processing.
• Automate payments for recurring lawn maintenance so you immediately get paid without having to invoice the customer after each visit.
• Send reminder emails when an invoice is past due. (We recommend using these overdue payment reminder templates to send a firm yet professional message.)

10. Organize your client and job info in one place

When you and your team have all the information about a job, you and your team have what you need to do your best work. 

Keep client contact information, job notes, quotes, and invoices all in one place so you can find that information easily.

Organizing this information not only makes your admin work easier but also helps you give every client a personalized experience.

To run a more successful lawn care or landscaping business, use customer management software to:

• View past quotes, jobs, visits, invoices, and a full billing history associated with each of your clients
• Use custom fields to track whatever additional information is important to you, like entry codes or pets at the property
• Tag clients as leads to manage them separately from active clients
• Add notes and photos to a client’s work requests, quotes, jobs, and invoices

11. Ask for customer reviews

Having lots of positive customer reviews on your Google Business Profile makes your Having lots of positive customer reviews on your Google Business Profile makes your business easier to find on Google. You can also use these reviews on your website to prove the quality of your work.

Every time you finish a job with a new client, ask for a review in person, in an email, or with a text message. You can automate this process by setting up automatic review collection using Jobber Reviews.

Jobber automatically sends a text to the customers you want reviews from. When you make an invoice in Jobber, you can choose whether to send the lawn care customer a review request.

12. Win repeat business with email marketing

It’s always better to retain repeat customers than to spend resources winning new ones. Before the season starts, use email marketing to reconnect with past customers and secure lawn care contracts.

To send effective marketing emails faster, use a tool that prepares email templates and audiences for you.

When you use Jobber to create email campaigns, you can choose from premade templates that are built for specific goals and customers—and that includes your company branding.

13. Use lawn care business software

Whether you’re just starting a lawn care company or you’ve been running one for years, it takes hard work, perseverance, and the right tools for the job.

Lawn care software and other small business apps help you manage your jobs, clients, and employees. Tools like Jobber make it easy to manage everything from your marketing strategy to sales to quoting, invoicing, and payments.

READ MORE:Best lawn care apps to help you run a better business