How To Grow Your Lawn Care Business Fast

I've worked with a lot of small lawn care companies over the past couple of years. I used to offer coaching services, but I wasn't passionate about business coaching so I stopped offering that. I did write a book on how I built and sold my lawn care business where I share all kinds of tips and tricks on how I managed to find success in an industry where most seem to quit before they succeed.

Very quickly, I started my lawn care business part-time in 2009 while I was working at a local lawn and landscape company. In 2011, I had to quit my job to care for my own customers full-time. In 2012, I hired my first 2 employees. In 2016, I had 7 crews out working daily. I sold that business in 2018 for a profit of $200,000 after all expenses were paid in full. Not bad!

In 2019, I helped my best friend start his lawn care company. I'm just the financial partner and I handle some of the business administration work. He was one of the crew leaders in my business, so he knew how to do the work. In 2021 his business on track to do $250,000 in revenue with 4 employees almost solely cutting grass.

That's my spiel and why I think you should take my advice instead of some dude running his mouth on YouTube. I am friends with several lawn care YouTuber's by the way. Some of these guys are putting out some seriously high-quality content, but others are not. I'm not sure if newbies can tell the difference though - that's the problem!

4 Keys To Growing A Lawn Care Business

By the way, when I say "lawn care business'" I mean any type of lawn care business. This could be a lawn treatment only company, or a lawn maintenance company, or a lawn and landscape company, etc. Even pest control, tree services, irrigation services, and other unrelated service-based businesses at the end of the day.

1. Finances
2. Systems
3. People
4. Marketing

You Need Money To Grow Your Lawn Care Business

Too many people come to me wanting a website that is going to "have leads blowing them up" on a shoestring budget. Get real. The internet is competitive and $1,000 is not going to get you much of anything these days when it comes to online marketing.

You need money for more than marketing though. You need equipment, vehicles, possibly storage space, insurance, business licenses, and then money ready to pay for materials and payroll before you get paid for the job!

#1 - Get your money right before you really start to grow your business.

You can do this by starting your business part-time like I did, or working multiple jobs to save money before you begin. Or, you can get a loan or find a financial investor like me if you are lucky enough to know someone with 10s of thousands of dollars they can float you.

Systems Will Set You Free and Produce Consistent Desired Results

Businesses are simply sets of systems and if you don't have any systems, you don't have a business. Period. You have a haphazard job at best that you created for yourself. That's not a business, it sounds more like a nightmare to me.

McDonald's is the epitome of a business that utilizes systems to a 'T' and gets rewarded with massive success because of it. Ask Jose with Spokane's Finest Lawns. Jose was a manager at McDonald's before starting his lawn care business and what he learned about systems there has allowed him to rapidly grow his lawn care business in Spokane Valley, WA.

#2 - Systems are what businesses are made of.

You need to develop systems for everything from how you answer the phone, email templates, how you mow a lawn, equipment maintenance, and so on and so forth. Everything needs a system so your employees will know WTF they are expected to do.

You Must Attract Quality People To Work In Your Lawn Care Business

The 3rd key to success on how to grow your lawn care business is people. It very well may be the most important and hardest to accomplish.

I specifically used the word attract. Yes - you need to actively market and attract the type of people you want in your business to your business. If you don't, you'll be sifting through the rift raft like all the other lawn care companies do.

#3 - A business is comprised of multiple people, not 1 person.

If you want to own a job, meaning you own a business and do absolutely everything in it, more power to you. I know several people that do this, make decent money ($50k-$80k per year), and love it. It wasn't for me, though.

I started my business to serve as many people as 'I' could but AS A BUSINESS THOUGH. The business needed to be greater than me to possibly serve more people.

My advice is to look at friends, friends of friends, and even family to find someone that has the same morals and values as you and your business do. Lawn care tasks are easy at the end of the day, you can teach anyone who wants to learn how to do the work.

If You Don't Market Your Business, It Will Not Grow

No one can hire a business if they don't know it exists! Am I right or am I right? I'm right!

Real businesses invest 6% of revenue (the top line) towards marketing their business. So, a business that does $100,000 in sales a year should be spending $6,000 on marketing if they want to grow.

That's $500 per month. Since I have built nearly 100 lawn care businesses' websites, I can tell you $500 per month is a lot of money to 95% of them - like so much they "cannot afford" it.

#4 - Market your business or watch your business slowly die.

Guess how much we spend marketing our online store iGoPro Lawn Supply? You are reading the blog on iGoPro Lawn Supply right now...

$1,950 per month.

Yes - nearly $2,000 per month is what we spend to market our business each month. I put my money where my mouth is and I make a lot of money in several different ways, most of them are passive income which I prefer.

This screenshot shows the past 7 days of BNB Lawn Mowing's Google Analytics Traffic Source Report. (6/12/21-6/18/21) Over 40 people find and click on this local lawn care business's website every day in the Google search results.

The Ultimate Marketing Package For A Lawn Care Company

After beating my head against the wall trying to help 'businesses' with their website on a shoestring budget, I said "F" it. We're going big or going home. At the end of the day, I don't have to build your lawn care business website but if you are a business that is looking to grow, I certainly would want to work with you.

So, now our services start at $16,160.50 per year. This is still less than I spend to market my business each year and the beauty of this $16k+ service is that you will have a blueprint to perform the ongoing maintenance in-house if you'd like to eliminate the cost of future internet market expenses.

I'm not going to tell you all of my secrets that I've learned by trial and error over the years getting hundreds of websites to the 1st page of Google, but I'll share the gist.

This screenshot shows the past 7 days of BNB Lawn Mowing's Google Search Console Perform Report for the past 3 months. (3/19/21-6/18/21) This shows the website often gets 40-55 people clicking through from Google search results.

Lawn Care Marketing Blueprint Bullet Points

• We include the cost of your domain and hosting for the year and free company emails for life.
• The website - 33 or so pages to start out with, each optimized for search engines and conversions, and it will look great on all screen sizes.
• SEO - We go over the top with SEO optimizations including on-site, off-site, and technical optimizations.
• 11 additional blogs - 3 are included with the initial website design/re-design.
• Fully connected to Google and Bing.
• Facebook Optimized.
• Citations - 35 or so in total plus aggregator submission.
• Google Ads and we cover the 1st $1,000 in ad spend so this is not an additional cost to you.
• Review building - It's so important to build up your review count online. We will automate this process for you!
• 7 - 1-hour screen shares so you can actually get to know what is going on online and better understand what we are doing for you, plus empower you or your team to take on some of these tasks in-house in the future if you'd like to do so.
• Continuous monitoring and improving the website, including adding pages, posting to Facebook and other social media, and Google Ads.
• The 'Website Owner File' - Upon completion of your service, we provide our client's with their website owner file which contains anything and everything you'll need to know about your domain, hosting, website, and everything else we create for you during our service.

If you can execute this blueprint for marketing online so you can grow your lawn care business fast as explained above in the bullet points, you should have no problem picking up as many ideal customers as you would like.

This screenshot shows the past 28 days of BNB Lawn Mowing's Google My Business Performance Activity Report. (5/22/21-6/18/21) Over 4 people go to BNB Lawn Mowing's website after seeing them in the map pack at the top of the search results and almost 2 click to call their lawn care business directly from the Google search results on their mobile device.

We Can Get Your Lawn Care Business Ideal New Customers

BNB Lawn Mowing is growing as fast as they comfortably can. Now in June of their 2nd full year in business (they are only 2 years old right now in June 2021) they have 4 employees, the owner isn't mowing every day, and they are looking at revenue around $250,000 operating on healthy profit margins and paying their employees very well.

We can do this for your business. It costs a little over $16,000 to do it. 

$2,525.25 to start and 1 month later –

$1,111.11 per month for the next 10 months

=$16,160.50

When you are ready to grow your business and invest in marketing like your competitors that are making money, contact us. 

We'd love to do it.

All we need from our clients is info about their business, pictures, videos, logos, and their goals. We take it from there and are always interested in working as closely with the client as they like. You can let me make all the decisions based on our experience and your analytic data, or you can be as involved with the process of our work as you'd like.

Click the link below to contact Ryan for a consultation:

Lawn Care Websites and Marketing