Tweet
Hello, Im going to go ahead and try to start my own lawn care business. Im going to start small, just residential mowing, weeding, and blowing. If you have any advise for me as in amount to charge, advertising, ect. that would be a great help. I live in Indiana and there are quite a bit of landscaping businesses around which makes this step a little bit questionable. Any advise will help. Thanks.
-
-
reply
Hello BGJohn,welcome to the forum.
I received about 20 stedy lawn costomers plus lots of other work by plaseing a 8 1/2" x 11" flyer in the news paper,about 5000 of them. Just one stedy costomer whould have paide for the hole thing.
One way to charge for lawn service is $20 to start plus $2 per 1000sqft or $18, $16, $14 to start plus $2 per 1000sqft depending on the going rate in your airia.
I use 21" 2cycle toros
Im working on a exmark 48" walkbehind.
I think a lot of the forum members whould agre with thes tools.
Pardon my spelling and gramer, not my strong point obviously.Schield -
reply
BGJohn,
First off, congrats on the decision to start a new lawn service. Regardless of all the landscaping businesses in your area, there is a ton of grass that needs mowing every year. Plenty to go around.
Pricing and how to do it is a personal preference. Some like Schield prefer to price by the square foot. Personally I find this technique of pricing much to complicated and time consuming. We price most of our services by the hour @ $35.00 to $50.00 an hour depending on the services we are performing. The trick here is in getting good at estimating how long a particular service will take you to perform. Expect to make some rookie mistakes at first. Just chalk it up to a learning experience.
Flyers are good and can help generate initial customers and some operating capital. Although don't expect much over a 1 to 2% return on them. Door hangers work and allow you to target specific areas you are interested in doing business in. Yellow page listings are a deffinate plus and seem to attract a different type customer then news paper listings do for some reason. But keep in mind, word of mouth and good quality workmanship is your biggest advertisement.
Good luck,
CurtisComment
-
reply
Flood the areas you wish to target with DoorKnockers!!!
Start putting them out now for mowing and then hit them again about 3 weeks after the season starts for mowing work. Then you should hit them once again for shearing & pruning about mid-late May for June/July work. Then hit em yet again in June and July for late summer seeding work.
Once you have your name out there and people have seen your truck(s) the calls will definitely follow for sure.
Its best to flag for upcoming services. I keep flyer/pamphlets in the trucks at all times and when someone asks for a biz card hand 'em a flyer for upcoming work, etc.
####
I would also call around to your competition to see what they are charging for similar properties of the sizes you have currently so that you can get a feel for what the market will bear and try to assess a fair makt value from that info.Comment
-
reply
I would first of all like to say thanks for all the great advise. I feel that working full time as a firefighter/paramedic with a schedule of 24hrs on and 48 off is a great opportunity to try and start this business. Again thanks for all the advise and im sure youll here from me in the future for more tips.Comment
-
reply
I agree with Kutnkru,
Definately call up you competition and have them come out to your house or a friends house and give an estimate on the property. This way you will know what they are charging and you will be able to position yourself in the market place.
As far as advertising goes, try the newspaper or the pennysaver for your first year.“veni, vidi, vici.â€Comment
Comment