lawn care services

[basman]

Is it possible to be sucessful mowing,edging and doing some cleanup,pruning and general lawn care for customers (residential) without getting into full landscape services; or am I limiting myself too much? I am owner/operator with no helpers.

[Rustic Goat]

IMO, what you've described, is really what I would consider work to be done by a regular LCO. Landscaping, to me, infers, the hardscape aspect of that side of the business. Of course the pruning to be done by an LCO would be quite limited by comparison.

[basman]

lawn care services

Thankyou for your input. I choose to attempt to concentrate on lawn care maintenance and avoid landscape services. I am hoping that this would allow me to do more service calls instead of "in-depth" services. There are a substantial amount of guys who also do this, but I feel higher customer service and work quality might set me apart from the others. At some point in time I will have to include additional services to stay competitive and busy.I am just starting out,hopefully for now this will be the right approach. Any other comments would be welcome and appreciated. thankyou.

[First-alarm]

Bling-Bling

There is ALOT more money in landscaping. I promise if you do one Landscaping job you'll change your mind and that's all you'll want to do.

Brian

[Elwood]

Really, lawn care and landscaping are two different animals.

If maint. is all you want to do, it can be done very successfully. It gets boring after a while, but you need to create systems, then replicate them over and over for each crew.

Not much "creative" about lawn care, but the income can be very good if done right. Also, when the economy gets tough, installs will slow a lot faster than maint.

You need to hook up with an "install only" company and trade referals. Another angle is to follow him up with a maint. package and give the install company a fee for a signed contract as a "thank you". Most who have an installation done will go with the recommended maint. company, especially if he introduces you and you can set up a program that everyone likes.

Good LUck!

[justmjc]

I agree with you on this topic. I too am only really interested in the lawn maintenance. For some reason, the landscaping $ sounds great, but I don't know why I really don't have an interest for it. I just throw on some headphones and go to work. Since it's all second nature, I don't seem to mind. Oh well I suppose.

[grasschaser]

You can do like my company does and that is lawn and landscape mantenance. We make alot of money by doing this. We have installed landscaping for existing customers. What we do is charge a maintenance fee and every time we service the property we pull the few weeds and tip the shrubs once a month. Then when needed we remulch the garden when needed for an aditional charge. Since we service most properties every week it only takes a few minutes to service the gardens but adds a good portion of money at the end of the month. I write the work provisions in the contract so they know what is to be done and it is just added to the normal lawn service bill.

[maple city]

Elwood hit it in his post. When you do lawn care, you'll be getting regular income. When you do landscaping, you may hit hard times where people just can't afford to have that type of work done. Things are tight in our area right now. I've seen very little landscaping work done around here this year.

We provide the following services:
mow, trim, blow (general mow)
edging
gutter cleaning & gutter guard installation
leaf clean-ups
minor tree work
trimming bushes
aerating
dethatching
mulching
snow plowing

This is quite a bit. Keeps us pretty busy. When we do get a call for landscaping work, we refer it to someone else. We just don't have time for it.

Make sure the name of your company describes which direction you are going it. Don't call yourself basman lawn & landscaping if you are only going to do maintenance work.

[texas_aggie_98]

Yes, it is very possible. I have over 175 residential lawn maintenance customers and over 30 commercial accounts. I don't do any landscaping.

[texas_aggie_98]

Yes, it is very possible. I have over 175 residential lawn maintenance customers and over 30 commercial accounts. I don't do any landscaping.

[ram man]

How long did it take you to get all those accounts texas aggie?

[mikeslawnservice]

Maple City,

Where do you buy your gutter guards from.
I was reading a book a few weeks ago and it recommended installing gutter guards. I am not sure if you just buy them at a home depot type store or if you buy them wholesale on-line.

Any info would help greatly. Thanks,
Mike