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??
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?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.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.
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.
LANDSCAPERS: Let's unite on best practices...
Calling all landscape home service companies! We are a full-service landscaping company doing everything from irrigation, fertilizer and lawn maintenance programs to large projects. We've used Jobber for about 6 years and 'figure it out' as we go but tend to have to do a lot of manual work and workarounds. Wondering how others in the biz are best using Jobber and what kind of administrative help you employ to help manage it. For us... we have 3-4 people dedicated in the office at all times. We have 2 people dedicated to scheduling services and customer service for existing clients. We have another dedicated to billing daily, and another for administrative support to strictly field new requests and ensure people are being responded to. We use Trello to help manage all the tasks and customer status. It's a lot to manage. There's a lot of room for error. Setting up jobs is very manual. Scheduling can be pretty manual despite knowing there are ways to mass schedule in Jobber. Tags get super messy and are only so reliable. There isn't a great way to enforce good notes from techs in the field. Job Forms are only really for customer leave behinds and don't help with billing so the open notes field is really the only way to gather info from the field for invoicing... Interested in whatever others have to share that are really working for them!How do you utilize reports in your business?
I am curious to hear which reports you consider most valuable in your business and what actions are taken based on those reports if anyone is willing to share. Are there reports that you use regularly in Jobber or reports that you wish were part of Jobber? If so how do you utilize the information that the reports provide? Are changes made based on the reports? Is the data used to create the reports monitored internally for consistency? Thanks for sharing all input is helpful!
