How to grow business
Hello, I am a new business starting up. I will be starting a lawn care and landscaping business. That is my passion to be outdoors. Also helping my local community. Keep a safe clean environment, I’m wanting to get to know the business better far as to how to get my business recognized and how to make sure that my clients are happy with my business.Do you utilize battery-powered tools?
Handheld battery-powered tools have come a long way from their first iterations, especially over the past few years. I've started making the switch away from gas-powered equipment throughout the last few seasons for my business and have found the switch to be positive for my workflow and bottom line. This is a trend I believe will continue as batteries become more powerful and long-lasting. Are you utilizing any battery-powered equipment and, if so, do you have any favorites you'd like to share??Summer 2 weekly/winter 4 weekly job scheduling
Wondering if anyone has ideas of how to setup/manage jobs on the schedule across winter & summer. We have a lawn and garden care business, most jobs are on a 2 week schedule during summer. And 4 weekly in winter. So twice a year around the change of seasons I manually edit each job to change the frequency as well as the job title so I can easily see that all jobs are scheduled correctly for the season. As we grow and gain more jobs, the time involved in this is growing as well... interested to hear if anyone else has thought of a more efficient way to handle this? Currently the process is: click job on the schedule > click the Job # > click Edit > update Job Title > select "New Custom Schedule..." > enter new number and click Ok > click "I Understand" > click Update Job. Repeat for every job... this easily takes me a whole day, if not longer after interruptions from regular business operations... Seasonal scheduling is the only way I can think to really solve it - for example "every 2 weeks from September to April" then "every 4 weeks from May to August". There is a transition period between the seasons when we'll adjust jobs to 3 weekly, which depends on the growing conditions at the time, but if there was a way to set the 2/4 weekly schedule I'd just be able to tell customers that the visits are set.
Direct Call Leads
We only pay per qualified conversation with homeowners. After a few years of hunting down bad contacts, getting ghosted and wasting money on ads and ad managers we internally built out a system that only costs money when a homeowner directly calls us looking for our services. It’s been a gamechanger and we even started selling these calls to other roofers and other industries/home service companies because there’s no real risk. Either you talk to a homeowner who wants you to come out, or you don’t pay. They can be kind of expensive but our ROI is at about 3.4x for a while now using it so I’m never going back to our old methods…unless someone has a lower risk option that doesn’t consume a ton of time.
Best way to gain more clients?
Hello everyone! I am new to the entrepreneurial world. I recently started a lawn care and landscaping business. I am curious what have other had most success with when trying to gain more clients? Paying for ads on social media, go door to door and hand out flyers/cards? What's the best way to go about things?How Much Should You Really Be Charging?
The number one question I receive is tied directly to the fact, most contractors are still guessing when it comes to pricing. Overhead. Profit. Labor rate. Trip fees. They think just because they throw a number they hear their competitors use, thats all that they need. It may work, but how and what do you divide these funds is just as important for your business health. If you don’t know how to do the math, you’re not building a business. You’re surviving check to check and think you need more work, when you do not. So here’s the plan: This Tuesday & Thursday on IG, I’m walking you through our Contractor Price Builder Worksheet FREE on instagram live. We will cover: - How to calculate your real hourly rate - The difference between markup and margin - Why profit is a non-negotiable - And how to price with confidence Join the session. Bring your numbers.
Landscape Maintenance Business - Considering Restructuring Production Crews
When I first started in the landscaping business in 2015 I started running 2 person production crews that would do basic bed maintenance and mulching which is the core of business. I then for some reason or another we started running 3 person production teams likely in 2017 and have every since. Taking a long look at our payroll numbers annually and just efficiency I think it would be best to move back to a 2 person crews as we go out with a dump truck equipped with a dump trailer and walk behind skid steer so our equipment makes us more efficient to go back to a 2 person crew. How many team members are on your landscape maintenance crews? How many team members are on your landscape installation crews?
