Ok, you are driving around your hometown. It’s the middle of the day, and it’s hot. You can’t help but notice all the trucks carrying trailers containing professional lawn care equipment. Most advertise their business name and phone number with a magnetic sign placed on the front two doors of their vehicle.

You say to yourself, that’s it. How hard can it be? Maybe you have wondered how to start a lawn care business. As a successful lawn care entrepreneur, I’m prepared to give you some vital information to help get your lawn care business up and running. You don’t want to start any sort of business without any foreknowledge of what the business actually entails. Right?

Alright then, here’s where it gets juicy.

Lawn Care Equipment: Please, don’t go to Kmart and buy the lawn mowers on “blue light special”. You will be hurting your business actually. When a person pays you to cut their grass, 99.9% of the time, they are going to look over how good (or bad) of a job you did. Discount lawnmowers often leave ruts in yards and cut grass unevenly. A cheap lawn mower can give your lawn care business a bad name from the get-go. Another way cheap lawn mowers hurt your business is purely psychological. When your customer sees you roll up with a “cheepy” tractor most will get a negative first impression. Successful, time-tested lawn care businesses only use quality equipment like John Deere products.

Marketing: Another favor you can do for yourself while starting a lawn care business is to use cost efficient marketing. This does not include a full page ad in your local yellow pages. Yellow page representatives make big claims about how much business your ad will bring. This is true, to an extent. If you are paying $1500 a month in yellow page ads you will have to cut a lot of grass just to break even every month. The key is to place a small bold listing. This will bring you plenty of business in your first year. In most cases, you can get a bold listing for under $175 a month. This will also limit the number of customers calling around simply looking for the cheapest price. That can get very annoying, trust me.

Another way to advertise cost effectively is to use flyers. The quickest way to do it is to design a flyer on Microsoft word, print out 200-300 flyers, and start to distribute them. From my experience, the best way to distribute the most flyers in a time efficient manner is to drive through residential neighborhoods. Put your 4-way flashers on and stick your flyers in people’s newspaper boxes. Do not, I repeat, do not put flyers in mailboxes. It is a federal crime. Period.

And Finally, Business Conduct: First, some business DO’s. Do show up on time. Do perform a complete job, no matter how time consuming (if you need to raise your price, inform the customer before their next mow). Do answer your phone by stating your business name.

Here are the DON’T DO’s. Don’t show up 1-2 hours late. Don’t cut corners hoping the customer won’t notice. They will. Don’t anwer your phone by saying, “Hello?” or “Yeah?”. Don’t look unprofessional in any way.

In a nutshell, that sums up some important factors of starting a lawn care business. Follow these simple guidelines and you will be successful.

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