The yard care business is one of the most diverse home service industries because it offers a variety of services. From lawn care to landscape architecture, there is a property maintenance business for anyone’s specific needs. The mowing lawn business is one of those yard care trades gaining fast momentum.
Residential and commercial properties can benefit greatly from a lawn mowing business. Property owners are always searching for ways to make their yard look its best with little hassle. This is where mowing lawn business owners like you come in. You provide quality lawn care services so the property owner doesn’t have to.
As a mowing business owner, how big or small you want your company to be is in your hands. You can pursue a one-man-mow show or hire a team of people to mow with you. Choosing to touch on other services like trimming hedges and leaves removal is also another possibility.
There are many ways you can grow your mowing lawn business.
The question is: how exactly do you do them?
Keep reading and we’ll share with you the basic principles of growing your lawn care and lawn mowing business.
Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Growing your business is a matter of putting things in perspective. It pays to know where you are currently at, and what goals you intend to achieve for your business. You can do this through benchmarking.
Benchmarking means comparing your solutions to other mowing lawn businesses considered leaders in your industry. This will allow you to see your strengths and weaknesses.
Crafting a S.W.O.T. analysis is a helpful tool for determining the strengths and weaknesses of your business. This analysis also enables you to identify external forces like opportunities and threats in light of those strengths and weaknesses.
As with any business outside the lawn industry, it is important to know which areas you’re strong or weak in. This will help you decide what services to offer and how to price them. Moreover, it can guide you on what additional value you could extend to make your solutions and business more desirable.
Let’s break this down further below:
Focus and Prioritize Your Strengths
When you’re mowing lawns for a living, you gain a general feel of your expertise in the trade. It is always important to focus on your strengths and prioritize what you’re good at. For example, if you’re great at mowing, edging and blowing lawns, make them your banner offering. You don’t have to limit your offerings to only banner ads.
Most people don’t have the time or energy to maintain their lawns on their own. This is especially true for commercial businesses that have larger areas to mow. Mowing, edging and blowing lawns will reel in more business for you.
Generally, selling services you’re already good at has more business value than diversifying on services you lack the expertise in.
Why?
First, people will recognize your lawn-mowing business on those fronts. Secondly, with positive recognition comes positive reviews and recommendations. Finally, the more you engage in those activities, the more you master the craft and eliminate room for errors.
Propping up your strengths is only one-half of a well-rounded strategy. You must also consider your weaknesses to prevent getting blindsided in your quest for lawn mowing success.
Develop, Improve and Turn Your Weaknesses Into Strength
Like all lawn care businesses, you will most likely not have a jack of all trades status. While you offer one or several services under your belt, there are those beyond your field of expertise. Following the same example above, expertise in mowing, edging and blowing does not mean you will excel in canopy pruning.
These limitations could bottleneck your mowing lawn business from achieving its true potential. In order to grow your mowing lawn business, you should consider expanding the services that you offer. By doing so, you are able to attract a wider range of customers and generate more revenue.
The thing is, running a lawn mowing business is no longer just a matter of expertise. Touching on digital marketing is more important than ever. Understanding marketing tactics like digital advertising, lead generation and building an online presence are a must. If this is a weak area in your mowing lawn business model, growing your business could be a long shot.
Landscape Marketing Hero is here to prevent that from happening. For all your digital marketing and advertising needs, you can count on LMH to get your business out there. If that’s what you want, grab our FREE growth guide, Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing, to learn more.
What Are the Basic Foundations of Your Business
A solid business foundation is a non-negotiable for any successful business. As Cameron Herold puts it: the foundational elements of your company are its guiding light in times of uncertainty. That said, going back to basics is a key tool to growing your lawn-mowing business.
As a contractor that handles several workers, everyone in the team should understand your company’s basic foundations. This includes what your business is, its activities, its culture and its guiding principles.
When these basic foundations are the frontrunners in your team’s mind, they will always work in service of those ideals. Otherwise, you’ll maintain a group of half-hearted employees that might sabotage your goal for growth.
Here are the two most important basic foundations you must revisit:
Revisit Your Business Strategy
As a business expands, its goals and objectives change. You might be thinking about growth in terms of numbers. For instance, adding more mowers to your team or increasing the number of houses you mow per week. But have you stopped to consider if these changes align with your original business plan?
If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Take a close look at your business strategy and make sure your actions align with its objectives.
Remember that your business strategy is your organizational master plan. All the details indicated there are meant to guide the management of your company in achieving its strategic goals.
Here are the core components of your business strategy that everyone must keep in mind:
- Vision and objectives. The vision offers a clear endgame and direction for your business. The objectives break this vision down into actionable bits to help you realize your goals more effectively.
- Core values. Making sure that your culture is reflected across every department is important. Defining your company’s core values can ensure everyone on the team is on the same page.
- S.W.O.T. Analysis. Knowing your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats is crucial to pivot when needed and double down on what’s working. By putting all your opportunities and threats in perspective, planning your course of action becomes systematic.
- Operational delivery and strategies. Operational strategies outline all the details on what and how your work should be delivered. This sketches the tasks and responsibilities of each department within your mowing lawn business.
- Resource allocation. This portion focuses on the strategic allocation of your company’s funding. Having a good grasp of your finances can help you trim down on unnecessary costs and dedicate resources for growth.
- Measurement and analysis. Finally, after looking back into your business strategy, it’s time to analyze whether the business performs accordingly. Measurement and analysis help keep your business stay closely aligned to your strategy, goals and budget.
Revisit Your Business Goals
Growth is the direct result of setting goals. Without goals, you rid your mowing lawn business of a definitive purpose and targets to strive for. Worse, the lack of objectives leads to stagnation and failure to achieve meaningful accomplishments. Needless to say, goals are important and among all business strategies, goal-setting should be a regular component of your operations.
The problem is that not every business owner knows how to set goals. More often than not, instead of creating actionable targets, they fall into the trap of wishful thinking. That is, setting targets without defined steps to achieve them.
One of the best procedures to set goals is S.M.A.R.T.:
- Specific. As mentioned earlier, goals should leave no room for ambiguity, otherwise, you may instead set wishes, not goals. Your targets must be specific. They should be resolutions that help you achieve a specific result. For example, mowing 10 houses a week instead of mowing as many lawns as possible.
- Measurable. This goes hand in hand with the previous quality, which is being specific. If you can’t measure progress, you can’t determine if you’re getting closer to your goals or not. In our mowing example, a measurable target is keeping lawn care services under 2 hours per visit.
- Attainable. Goals should be something that you can actually achieve. They shouldn’t be impossible or pie-in-the-sky dreams. For instance, mowing 20 lawns in one day isn’t attainable for most small to medium-sized mowing businesses.
- Realistic. This is closely related to being attainable. A realistic goal takes into account not only what you want to achieve, but also the resources you have. Conducting landscape designing is possible when you have landscape architects present. However, you can’t offer the same service if your company lacks that expertise. Being realistic is no different from having common sensibilities.
- Time-sensitive. Every goal should have a timeline attached to it so you can track and measure your progress. Deadlines motivate you to meet goals in a given period. Moreover, it also eliminates time wasters that keep you from achieving you goal within the timeline you set.
Develop the Method and Action You Will Do To Grow
Finally, when you’ve revisited your strategy and assessed your strengths and weaknesses, you can now develop a plan of action. Your action plan in growing your company will consider all the facts surrounding your business. This will help you determine what needs to be done first, second, and so on.
There are a lot of ways to go about growing your mowing lawn business in the 21st century. However, one that sits atop all others is strengthening your digital marketing tactics and online presence. In an age where every transaction is done through the internet, your business should be where your customers are. Otherwise, you risk being left out and dominated by the household brands in your category.
Landscape Marketing Hero can help you on that front. It begins with getting our FREE growth guide called the Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing. If you’re ready to grow your lawn-mowing business, we’ll wait for your call.