The look of a rich green lawn is attractive, but even more appealing is the ‘green’ in your bank account from mowing it! There are loads of opportunities within this service business to fulfill your desires and needs.
So, this post is all about starting a lawn care home business. But you must consider the following pros and cons before beginning this:
Pros:
A Repeat Business: Lawn care accounts are endless, meaning continuous and consistent. Your customer base will require their lawns mowed four times a month, making for a steady book of business.
Upsells: Not only do people require their lawns maintained, they need special fertilizers and remedies for weeds and bugs nearly every 5 – 7 weeks. These methods would be deemed “consumables,” meaning recurring product usage, and this business trait makes for an attractive business model.
Scalable: You can begin by offering one service (mowing lawns) and adding other services such as liming, fertilizing, landscaping services, gardening, new sod installation, weeding, tree trimming, etc.
Flexible: There are so many methods to tailor this business to fit your requirements or expertise. You can prefer to be a sole proprietor, who does it all, or you can handle multiple lawn care teams from your office. You can choose to go after residential contracts or commercial contracts.
Entry-Level Workforce: If you ‘grow’ and require employees, most of this workforce needs no formal certification and education and can learn on the job. However, this workforce typically has a higher turnover ratio.
Seasonal: A high additional income for those who have summers off, i.e., teachers or full-time students.
Cons:
Seasonal: Unless you reside in an area where winters aren’t bad, your customer accounts hibernate mid-October. If you are searching for a year-round business, you must look for something to expand your product offering (i.e., snow evacuation) to keep business up and running throughout the winter.
Start-Up Expenses: Depending on the kind of lawn care business you choose to start; you will require equipment and something to transport this equipment.
To create a business from scratch, you could start with $1,000 (price of a lawnmower, trimmer, and leaf blower). There are different guides available on the web regarding choosing the best lawn mowers.
Also, if you want to capture your local market online due to massive growth of internet over the years, you must be aware of domain, hosting, WordPress, SEO and PPC marketing.
Competitive: Open your phone book, and you will discover numerous lawn care businesses in your area. If the market is too competitive, you will have to compete on price, which will cut into your profits. Research your area and, if feasible, speak to existing lawn care businesses about what they are experiencing in your area.
Some Economic Risk: When economic times get hard, existing domestic customers may find the need to cut non-essential expenses, and for many, outsourced lawn care is one of those.
Earning Potential of Lawn Care Business:
According to recent research, lawn care and landscaping business owners earned anywhere from $7,500 to $60,000 in their first year and as much as $200,000 to $300,000 once they were in business for a few years.
They also showed that businesses were charging anywhere from $30 to $100 per lawn cut (all dependent on size, slope, and many other factors).
This may be good for some people while not for others. It all depends on your requirement and investment that you can afford to spend in this business.
Definitely, you can increase this number by following the latest digital marketing tips. Local SEO has grown tremendously over the years and you can target hundreds of people on a daily basis using both free and paid methods.
This is technical stuff but you can learn by following different websites online, i.e., Online Earning Mentor.
Final Verdict:
In short, a lawn care business is a great way of earning handsome money. Unlike typical brick and mortar business you needn’t require heavy upfront cost.
But there are few cons as well which I have listed above that you must consider before starting this.