From One Truck to Two Brands – Scaling a Power Washing & Lighting Business in NJ
Hey everyone—Daniel here, owner of Garden State Exterior Solutions out of New Jersey. I started with just power washing, grinding it out one job at a time. Over time, I built Bayside Power Washing into a 5-star service, and recently expanded into permanent exterior lighting with North Pole Lighting. Now I’m running two service divisions under one company, and I’m focused on scaling the right way—better systems, stronger branding, and building a team. A few things I’ve learned: Customers care more about trust and communication than just price Systems (quoting, scheduling, follow-ups) are EVERYTHING Upselling additional services (like lighting) can completely change your revenue Right now, I’m working on: Expanding across New Jersey Hiring and training reliable team members Investing in better equipment and marketing I’d love to hear from others in the space— 👉 What’s been your biggest breakthrough when scaling past the “owner/operator” phase? 👉 And if you run multiple services, how do you keep everything organized and profitable? Always looking to learn and connect 🤝Established Two Businesses, IT & Pokémon, Pivot to horticulture?
Hi everyone, I’m looking for guidance from people who have successfully started and grown lawn care, gardening, or outdoor service businesses. I already operate two businesses, one focused on IT and AI consultation for local small and scaling businesses, and another in the trading card and collectibles space. Even with those ventures, one of the things that brings me the most peace in life is working with plants and the outdoors. Gardening has always been one of my most relaxing and rewarding hobbies. I genuinely love cloning, grafting, rooting plants, learning how different species grow, and seeing something thrive because of patience and care. I would love to build a manageable outdoor, exterior, lawn care, or gardening service that I can grow responsibly over time. I am also very interested in training to become a Master Gardener so I can better serve my community with real knowledge and long term value, not just basic maintenance. For those of you who have built businesses in this space, what would you recommend for someone starting out? What services are the smartest to begin with? What equipment is essential versus unnecessary at first? How did you price your work, find your first customers, and keep the business manageable as you grew? I am especially interested in building something sustainable, community focused, and well run from the beginning. Any advice, lessons learned, mistakes to avoid, or encouragement would mean a lot. Thank you in advance. Tldr: have so much inherited and basic equipment as hobbiest, I should mention my entire childhood consisted of 6 am wake ups on weekends and during summer to do yard work and or mulch acres on acres for my dad/grandparents. Definitely instilled the work ethic in me... as well as freckles from sun poisoned shoulders time over haha! Respectfully sent, Joshua D. Ostrowski Tomi LLC DBA Tomi Vincent Trading Co.
Hey guys I am curious about business plans for landscape business.
I just don't know where to begin with building a business plan. I have been in business for 5 years without having one. Now I see why they are so important. I need some advice on where I can go cost-effective is important. I need help building out the plan. Anyone willing to connect and see if you can help me in he right direction.How do you schedule recurring jobs without fixed dates in Jobber?
How is everyone scheduling recurring jobs with no set schedule? Jobber showed me a way to do it, But it seems like a lot of steps to schedule jobs. Example scheduling a 6 round fertilizer package. The way they showed me I can see missing a lot of services thru out the year and also taking a lot of steps. Just wanted to see how other people are currently doing this can you share how you do it?
Can Jobber track budget hours vs actual hours for a job?
Hello. I'm the GM for a landscaping company that has recently come to Jobber. I think it would be very helpful if there was an option for attaching budget hours to a job instead of adding it into the notes or setting the "Quantity" of a line item to be the budget hours. The latter can be confusing for a client because if, say, a spring cleanup is 6 hours and I put 6 under the quantity, they may not know that those are supposed to be hours. They may think they are getting 6 spring cleanups. I have the job costing tool in Jobber, and it is helpful to have. But being able to see budget hours versus actual hours per job would really help me dial in my job costing. Otherwise, I'm having to figure it out manually. It would also be helpful to see the budget hours versus actual hours broken out by employee, so I can better measure everyone's productivity.Looking for Landscape Design Software & Training!
We launched our landscaping division last year with great success. We are looking to implement a landscape design software and wondering what others are using. We mostly do yard makeovers, garden design and some light hardscaping. We would like a software that is user friendly but not too basic. The 3 that have come up when we are searching is Dynascape, Pro Landscape+ and Procreate. We are curious what other landscapers are using and why? Also, any advice on training for the recommended software. Thanks!
How do lawn care businesses manage and reuse email templates for quotes, renewals, and follow-ups?
Would love the option to select email templates. HAd that on a previous crm. for what im doing right now. i do lawn care. i have renewals i am sending out, previous customers im sending them quotes, and reaching out for other customers who used me for other services. they ea need their own opening email. on top of i offer prepay to current customers. it would be nice to be able to select the template for it to drop in where appropriate. sure have the super generic one, but sometimes they need a bit of love. as of now my work flow looks like this. create the email templates in a word document. go to create quote. then email customer. go to word document and copy and paste. yes it works. would be nice to be in house. also for the searching of templates, i will say it can get cluttered. it would nice if you open email, there is the super generic email. a button to the side, replace with a template, you click it creates a drop down menu. it would be great to have folders, that templates can be in, and then you click that folder to get where you want. they can all be there as one list, but the folders, should in theory make it easier to find what your looking for especially, if one is bad a naming them. for me it would look like (big folders) all my main services, mowing aeration seeding, christmas lights. under that i would have current customser former customers prepay email (as thats a seperat thing) etc. not sure if that makes sense.
