As the peak growing season is drawing to a close in most parts of the country, most lawn care companies are also in the process of winding down their operations. In areas where winter snow and ice will impact lawn care services for months to come, this doesn’t mean you have to hibernate and wait until next spring to continue growing your business.
While most lawn care and landscaping companies don’t like this time of year because of all that leaves fall entails (laying off workers, cutting expenses, and most of all, reducing revenue), It doesn’t have to be so depressing.
In fact, the next few months provide a perfect opportunity to grow your business. As normal operations slow down, you will have the opportunity to work ON your business and not just IN your business.
Here are five ways you can take advantage of the impending downturn to grow your lawn care or landscaping business in the coming months.
1. Provide services in addition to typical lawn care services.
While there are many ways to grow your business, the one that most often escapes the attention of companies is the practice of providing more and more services to their existing customer base. Since you’ve already invested time and money in getting them as customers and earning their trust, why wouldn’t you want to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets to maximize customer value?
Adding end-of-year services like core aeration, overseeding, unpacking, and general winterizing is a perfect way to get more revenue from customers who have already shown their trust in you. If you don’t already provide these services, please do whatever it takes to add them to your service portfolio as quickly as possible.
Also, I’ve heard many say that advertising is only effective at the start of the growing season, but these add-on services also provide an excellent opportunity to expand your existing customer base. Most people want a lush, green lawn, but they don’t realize that now is the time to make that happen for next year. Educating people about this will open countless doors for you in the coming growing seasons.
Create a marketing campaign focused on these “end of the year” lawn care processes, and then market them just as you would at the beginning of the year. Postcards, door signs, and flyers are great ways to promote these services, and with a well-designed campaign, there’s no reason why you can’t capture a lot of new customers.
2. Add additional services other than lawn care.
Again, one of the best ways to grow your business is to get deeper and deeper into the pockets of your existing customers. You’ve already earned their trust, why not expand to other related services?
With the arrival of winter, it means a whole new range of services that people will be looking to pay for. People who pay for lawn care are usually willing to pay for other services, such as cleaning up fallen leaves, clearing snow and ice from driveways and driveways, trimming trees or shrubs, cleaning gutters, and even hang Christmas lights or other seasonal decorations.
These additional services not only provide the opportunity to get more business from your existing customers, but also provide you with another service to market in areas where you would like to expand your business.
Although your primary business is probably lawn care, securing customers for these new services will give you new customers to market your lawn care services to in the spring.
3. Develop a website.
As mentioned above, now that things are starting to slow down a bit, it’s the perfect time to work ON your business and not just ON your business.
what do I want to say with that? Well, getting out there and actually fixing the lawn, teaching employees, managing payroll, paying bills, and handing out collateral all constitute working IN your business. You’re doing things that have to be done to stay in business.
Working IN your business means doing the things you do to make your business run better and more profitable. These are the activities that don’t have to be done today, but doing them will result in greater efficiency, higher profit margins, and a more effective business as a whole.
The development of a website turns out to be one of these activities. While you don’t have to, creating one will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.
More and more people are flocking to the Internet to find and research products and services, including lawn care services. Having a well-designed direct response website that captures the attention and contact information of your visitors will set you up for a windfall of new business in the coming months.
4. Create a customer newsletter.
As with developing a website, this is another activity that is not critical to running a successful lawn care business. However, this is something that will go A LOT in strengthening the relationship with your existing customers.
Typically, most customers only think of you during the summer months when they are servicing their lawn or when they receive a bill. They will usually forget about you during the winter months until they get a flyer from you the next spring soliciting your business.
Creating a customer newsletter builds something called ‘presence’ and keeps you at the forefront of their minds as the expert on having a beautiful lawn. Next year, instead of having to call them to start the relationship for another year, they will call you.
The newsletter does not need to be very large or complex. At a minimum, it should contain relevant lawn care information that positions you as an expert. If you also provide additional services, a newsletter is a great opportunity to market these services or even provide special incentives to try these additional services. The key is to make it relevant and personal with just a touch of marketing.
You can create a print newsletter and then mail it to your best customers, or if you have email addresses, you can also create an e-newsletter. While the printed newsletter is more likely to be read, an e-newsletter, if done correctly, will still reach a large number of your customers and won’t cost you a dime to send.
5. Study successful direct marketing techniques.
This is another activity that falls into the category of working IN your business.
Whether you realize it or not, your primary job is not to provide lawn care services. Your primary job is to market your lawn care services because, without clients to provide these services to, you would be looking for another career.
Just as you study and look for better ways to provide lawn care services, you should also study and look for better ways to market your lawn care services. With the downturn in operations associated with this time of year, now is the perfect opportunity to learn new things that will help you be more successful next spring and for years to come.
Studying and learning the time-tested principles of successful direct response marketing will help you avoid all the hype associated with ‘flavor of the month’ marketing tactics and better know what you can do to reach your sales goals.
Just because the weather is turning cold doesn’t mean you have to hibernate until spring.
If you plan to wait until next spring to work on growing your lawn care business, you will find that you have wasted several months and many opportunities to work on your business.
Use this time to dig deeper into your customers’ pockets by expanding your service portfolio, find additional customers through related services other than lawn care, set things up that will give you more exposure to existing customers as well as those who are looking for it. renew your services and learn about ways to better market your business.