Here are Jonathan’s top 4 tips from his How To Start A Lawn Care Business eBook.
Several years ago, I wrote an eBook titled, “The Real Facts About How To Start A Lawn Care Business”. If you’d like it, you’re welcome to have it for free. I’ll put a link at the bottom of this video and you can click that and download the eBook for free. There’s truly no catch. I’ve given it away a lot of times and you’re welcome to it.
A couple quick thoughts on getting started in the business, just based on a few things I’ve learned in working with others over time. Hopefully they’ll be of help if you’re just getting started. One is, I would really recommend that you just go do it. I see so many people wanting to put together a business plan or think through everything, that’s great, the exercise of thinking through it’s fantastic but that’s something that can keep you from getting started and it can make you wait one more year and then one more year and then basically you wake up one day and you’ve never started the business. You’ve got a family and a mortgage and everything else and you just never got it done.
My argument is, just go out there and get started. Go make your first thousand bucks. Go do it part time, whatever you got to do. I’m not a big fan of doing it part time long because I think that it makes it easy to kind of throw in the towel when you have a backup plan. But, I’m saying just go make that first thousand bucks, do it part time, get all your ducks in a row so that when next spring rolls around you are completely ready to go and you’ve already learned some lessons, and there’s nothing to keep you from getting started.
Second, keep it simple, just focus on a few core services to get started. Don’t try to provide every other service like all of your competitors who have been doing it for ten years. You don’t have to do all that, yeah in time you might want to but just keep it simple. That’ll give you a better chance of being successful, you are more likely to make it, there’s less stuff you have to worry about, and the fewer things you do, the better you’ll do them and you’ll make more money at it. Trying to do too many things is absolutely not worth it.
I would say number three is, remember what your number one goal is. Your number one goal is to sell. Your number one goal is not to build processes or procedures or think through what might happen in six months when you hire a person. It is not to get all your ducks in a row for when you hire a manager someday or think about all of the types of equipment you could possibly need. Your job is not to optimize your business and think through all of the potential problems and risks and things that might come your way. Your only job is to sell and then when you sell, do a really good job performing that work. Everything else will fall into place. It’s going to be messy, it’s not going to be perfect, it won’t run perfectly. If your personality is where you have to have everything perfect, your ducks in a row, and you’re very process oriented, you have to fight that tendency and you just have to know that your only job is to sell because selling and making money is survival, everything else doesn’t make you money. It just optimizes the business and trims costs. Do that later. First, you sell.
Fourth, and I’ll leave it at this, think about cash flow. Most of the industry generates the invoice at the end of the month and they get paid thirty days later. How can you do that different? My opinion is charge credit cards, the day of service or the week after service. How can you speed up cash flow? Most companies fail for one of two reasons. One, they don’t have enough money, generally in the form of not getting paid fast enough, meaning they have slow cash flow, too much money is going before the money comes in so they can’t keep up, they can’t make enough money. They never have enough money to grow. That’s the first reason most companies fail. The second is they don’t sell and market. They never learn how to market their business and grow. Solve the sales and marketing thing. I mentioned that just before and now focus on cash flow. How can you get paid the fastest way possible? A lot of really smart people could have much bigger businesses if they’d solve their cash flow problems. But they don’t.
They continue to say it doesn’t work in my market. “I can’t charge clients credit cards in my market”, or whatever the story is, but unless you solve that problem you will never be able to grow. I’ve seen it over and over again. You’ve got to have as much free cash as absolutely possible. Figure out how to get paid in advance, figure out how to get paid on a credit card, figure out how to speed up that cash flow. Plumbers have figured it out, HVAC has figured it out, house cleaners get the check left at the house each day when they clean the house. Every other industry’s figured it out, so don’t follow the norm in the industry and it will help you get to where you want to go way faster. If the eBook’s of interest, download it. It’s free, there is zero catch. I hope it helps.
