How To Prepare For The Spring Selling Season

Hey, it’s Jonathan. We’re a couple of months away from spring, and so I thought I’d give you some tips on what you can do to get ready for the lawn care rush. I will tell you what you can do now to prepare, so that when spring arrives you’re not in a situation where you can’t get it all done.

Spring is so incredibly important for all businesses. It’s such a prime selling time that we need to do everything that we can to be successful. We need to do it now. We can’t wait until the last minute. I’d really exhort you to do whatever you’ve got to do to get it ready.

Number One…prep your landscape marketing and print materials. If you’re using lead letters, street mailers, or door hangers, get it all ready now. I would recommend preparing about 3 months in advance. Anything that your guys will leave at clients’ homes, print them out and put them in Tupperware containers so that all they have to do is grab them and put them in the trucks. Think about all the systems you need to put in place right now to be prepared…anything around print…get it all organized and ready to go out the door.

Number Two…prep your hiring and employee paperwork. If you know in spring you’re going to start hiring a lot of employees, you know they’ve got to fill out I-9s and new employee paperwork. Get all the forms pre-printed and placed inside folders. If you think you’re going to hire ten guys in the spring, have ten, twelve, fifteen folders ready so that when you’re hiring, you’re not running around looking for this paperwork.

Number Three…get caught up on all the day to day operations of your business. For example, reconcile your bank accounts. Get everything ready, so that when spring comes, and you are swamped with all the new business, you can put your head down and let the systems that you’ve already put in place, run on autopilot for a few months.

Things are going to become a mess and disorganized. That’s fine. After the spring rush, and you’ve sold a lot of work, then you can come back and clean stuff up.

Number Four…focus on improving all of your online marketing strategies, including your website.

First of all, SEO is a long-term strategy. The sooner that you have your SEO campaign running, and you’ve hired an SEO company that’s doing the right things, you’re landscape company is going to be ranking on that first page of Google, hopefully within two or three months. Then slowly, over the next longer period of time, you’re going to start knocking off the higher-ranking competitors who’ve been in your market for five, ten years and have websites that are in the number one, number two, and number three spot. It’s a long-term process, but you need to start doing your SEO now.

Second, consider your pay-per-click ads. PPC is one of those great things where, if there’s no demand, you’re not going to be paying for anything. If there’s no demand, nobody’s clicking on your ads. Take a look at and revamp all of your ads. Now would be a good time to be looking at your campaigns and setting up a few additional split tests. You could go through and get rid of a couple of campaigns that were your low-performers, and you could re-write a few ads to test against your best ad that you have running now. Now would also be a good time to write some new ads. Then have those ready, so that they could be running.

Third, improve on your website. Don’t skimp by relying on free websites. It’s going to cost you more in the long run. You want to make sure that it is built on a good foundation and I always recommend that you invest in a website that you’re going to be able to use for the next five, ten years…one that you can easily add content to. That’s becoming more and more important in our SEO and our online marketing strategies.

Whether you’re doing it, or you have somebody help you, this is the time to add copy to your site. Add more personality to your website. If you know what the keywords are that people are typing into Google to search for a company like you, you could write blog posts around those topics in your website. Really be thinking about the wording and the copy on your site, so that it matches what people might be searching for on the browser, so that your site gets found.

Also, be thinking about how your website can help you convert leads into clients. You want it to be professional but also to match your company’s personality. Do some custom work on it and consider hiring a designer if you need help with that. I always recommend you put a personal video from the owner or your team leader, or whatever, on the video, telling them a little bit about your services. Talk about maybe your top five, seven points, and sell your services. Tell them why they should use you. Why are you different from the hundreds of other lawn care companies in your market?

You have an opportunity with video to connect with personality. They get to know you, and they get to see you. You get an opportunity to connect with them at a level that you couldn’t possibly connect by just setting out a door hanger with your logo on it.

It’s really worth it and it’s so easy with an iPhone, a Droid phone, a Galaxy or whatever to record a video. It doesn’t have to be overly produced. It’s not that hard.

Thank you. I hope that at least this has motivated you to go out and start thinking about how to prepare for this spring season. You know that you’re not going to have any time for at least four months. Do everything in advance, so that this year things actually happen in your lawn care business. Don’t let this year pass, where you’ll end up at the end of this year having good intentions for the next. My point being, get it done now so that it will really happen, and 2013 will be a very good year.