5 Tips to Start a Lawn Care Business in 2024

In this video, I wanna give you five tips if you're thinking about starting a lawn care business in 2024. I've started three lawn care businesses, not on purpose. I was, that'd be tip number one. It's a bonus tip. Don't start three lawn businesses, just start one good one. And let me just say from the beginning, I still think the lawn care business is a great business to get into, okay? I really believe that. After doing three businesses, failing at another business, I think the lawn care industry is a good business. So I'm gonna give you five tips. Today's video is sponsored by Yardbook. I've been using Yardbook to run my lawn care business since 2015. If you need a software, then go to yardbook.com and sign up for a free account. The first thing I would say if you're gonna start a lawn business in 2024 is have a plan. And when I say that, I'm not talking about like some elaborate business plan that you're gonna go take to a bank to get a loan or things like that. That's not wrong, but what I'm talking about, have a plan is in your mind, at least know what direction you're trying to go. What is your business gonna look like five years from now? Are you trying to scale to multiple crews? Or is this something you wanna do by yourself? I mean, full-time, part-time, what area are you gonna be working? Are you gonna target certain neighborhoods? Are you trying to grow big and gonna spread out? Because these things matter. Let me just give you an example. If I'm gonna stay small, kind of what I do, I'm small, solo operator, and I have a specific area that I'm working in that I try to saturate and have as great a route density as I can within that area. So I have very, very profitable days because I don't drive very much, overhead is extremely low, and I keep getting more and more customers in the same area. Now, if my goal was to get big and run multiple crews, I might have to go to a wider geographical area, expand, which means I might be less efficient early on, but as time goes on, I'm gonna be able to get more and more customers, and that route's gonna become denser and denser, and thus, maybe my profits go up. So knowing where I wanna be in five years is gonna help me understand where I need to be in year one. If I know that in five years, I just wanna work by myself, then you could try to go wide, but you could also try to really saturate an area, but if you know you wanna get big one day, then you need to go ahead and target probably a bigger area and then just fill in the gaps over time. So thinking through your plan, thinking through what service you're gonna offer and what are you gonna do, what area and these things, having a plan is, honestly, sounds basic, but I don't think everybody starts off with a plan. Number two is don't do everything. Now, what do you mean by don't do everything? I had somebody mess with me this morning. They said, Jason, why don't you do aerations and aerating lawn? And I thought, well, my answer was, I said, I would prefer to go to, I do weed control and fertilization, but I used to mow grass. I would prefer to go to a neighborhood where I've got 20 yards, spray all 20 yards, and get paid on that versus if I did aeration, I might get one yard here, one yard here. I'm driving all over town, a lot less efficiency involved, an expensive piece of machinery that I can use one time a year, basically. So it just doesn't make a sense. Yeah, is it profitable? Yeah, it's profitable. But is it hard to really saturate air? What I don't wanna do is drive across town to aerate one yard, and then a week later, somebody else calls, so I drive over here to aerate another yard. I would rather have 20 to 25 to maybe even 30 yards a day than I just do the same thing over and over. Now, if you're mowing grass, that may look like five to 10 yards if you're by yourself, or when you get a crew, it may be 10 to 20 yards that you're mowing in a day in a saturated area versus a higher-end thing. Now, the higher-end, nothing wrong with higher-end. I mean, if you wanna start doing $30,000 landscape jobs, then I'll drive 30 minutes to do that, but you don't wanna get caught thinking, oh, this is a premium service, aeration. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. You can do it if you want to, but I wouldn't do it because you had three people that asked you to do it, and then you bought a $10,000 machine and you'd use it once a year on three customers. I mean, you're ROI on that's not gonna be very good. So my encouragement to people is let's start off with one thing and try to get that established. Now, I wanna mow grass, all right? Go mow grass, try to get enough customers to fill up your schedule mowing grass, and then think through expanding. You know, I don't wanna be mowing grass, and then, except on Thursdays, I go clean people's gutters because I had two people ask me about that. Well, I'm not gonna do that, or pressure washer. You know, if you wanna do all of it, that's fine, but I would prefer to do one thing well that was in demand. You know, when I think about could I go do something else? Yeah, I could go do something else, but it's not like people would quit calling me, asking me to spray their yards. So I could add a second service that would pay money, or I can just get more customers doing the one thing I'm already doing, which is weed control and fertilization, which sounds like two things, but I'm just gonna group it together and call it one thing. So that's my theory. I understand the thought behind, oh, you've got these existing customers, now I can market to those customers and add on an extra service and all that. You know, I don't wanna shut down my weed control and fertilization to go do something else, just to be honest with you. I'd rather just keep doing that. Tomorrow, I'll do the same thing. It paid well today, I think it'll pay well tomorrow. And I'll do the same thing the next day, and it should also pay well that day. And so if I can just add more of that, which I'm already doing, already established, I think that helps with your customer's view of your company because it's like, that guy does that, and that's all he does. He must be good at it. You know, that's just a perception. If I see a guy who's got a business car, he's got 12 different things he does on there, I'm thinking, is he good at any of them, or does he just do a little bit of everything to try to get by? Number three, I would say is control your expenses. I was going in the first year of my business, what I typically did almost every year, I'd get a truck, trailer, if I was mowing grass. I usually go and buy like a gently used zero-turn mower on Facebook Marketplace or something. I've been looking at it lately, I've found some that are just great deals in my area. Now, I'm not opposed to somebody going out there and borrowing the money, 0% financing, getting a brand new zero-turn, that's fine. The worst case scenario, the thing your business totally fails, you could resell it and get some of your money back. There's not a ton of risk involved with starting a lawn care business, because again, your equipment's worth money, you can resell it, you can start making money right away. If you go out there and mow somebody's grass, they pay you, you're starting to make money. So it's not like the most risk, but I do think what I wanna do is, if I was starting a business, I wanna try to make as much money as possible and start getting that cashflow coming, and then I can upgrade equipment. When you're cash strapped the first one, two, three years of your business, it just makes it challenging. You start making decisions that aren't the best decisions, you might take on work that's underpriced work, because I just need the money, you may keep piecing together a mower that's not very good instead of getting a better mower because you're cash strapped. I mean, you do what you gotta do to make it the first year, but you want to get cashflow coming in and control your expenses so that you can grow more aggressively. I mean, maybe it's spending money on marketing, I don't know, but me, like I wanna have efficient piece of equipment, you know? So I'm saying, go conservative on maybe your first lawn mower, but once you've got the customers coming in, the cash coming in, I wanna get the best lawn mower for my situation. I don't mean the most expensive, I'm saying what makes the most sense right now. If I've been using a 36-inch walk behind and I'm mowing half acre properties, that doesn't make the most sense. I might wanna go ahead and get a 60-inch mower. You know, whatever is gonna make the most sense, I wanna get that because the machinery makes a huge difference in how much I enjoy the business and also how efficient and successful I am in the business. The number four thing I wanna mention is your pricing and how to price well. Maybe not how to, but how important this is and how important it is for you to think through. I mean, think about this. Sometimes people's tendency is I'm starting out and I just need to work so I'm gonna price low. Okay, that's bad for a number of reasons. I would simply say it from this standpoint that you have customers that want a cheap price, you have customers that want a medium price, and you have customers that want a high price. And depending on where you live, that may vary what percentage are in which category. But let's just say it was all divided up equally 1 3rd each. 1 3rd want cheap, 1 3rd want middle, 1 3rd want high. The 3rd that want the high are offended and won't even consider the cheap company. They're like, no, no way I'm paying that cheap of a price. Okay, the 1 3rd that want the low price are offended at the high price. They're like, no way in the world I'm paying that high price, you've offended me. The middle ones want a middle price and they might go cheap and they might go a little more expensive if you think so. So the point being, if there's a certain amount of people that are gonna pay for one, why would you not just target the group that's going to make you the most money? So when you price yourself low, you are attracting that bottom 3rd of the people who, by the way, are the ones that are the quickest to fire you over price. You gave them the cheapest price and if somebody came in a little bit cheaper, they're probably the first ones that's gonna fire you for finding somebody cheaper. So it's attracting the wrong customer. It's affecting your money. I mean, the one thing that I don't know why it took me so long to figure out, but is this. It's like, let's just say you charge $50 a yard and your profit is $20. I'm just throwing a number out. After everything, you made $20 profit, okay. Well, if you go up the next year and you end up making $22 profit instead of 20%, instead of $20, it sounds like you made $2 more, okay, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you look at it as 10%, it's like, yeah, my price went up $2 on $50. That's a small price increase, 4%, if my math's correct. But you actually made 10% more profit, which is really the number that actually matters, okay. You were making $20 profit, now you're $22 profit. You made a 10% profit increase. So $2 doesn't sound like a lot, and $5 oftentimes doesn't sound like a lot. But when it comes down to this, your actual profit and not just the number, then it makes a big difference. Because sometimes you look at these bigger companies, their profit margin might be 10 to 15% on their gross revenue. So they might've made a million dollars, but their profit for the year after they paid everybody was 100,000 or 150,000. That's after everybody got paid and owner's salary and all this other stuff. Well, if they can increase that, go up on everybody by a few percentage points, then you're talking about a significant profit increase for these big companies. So don't think that, oh, it's just a little bit cheaper, that's not gonna hurt me. Now, the other side of it is you think, well, I'm just gonna charge a lot, look how great I am. I should be able to charge a lot because I'm great. Well, that doesn't always work either. I mean, you gotta understand if you have a market for it, if there are market for people that wanna pay a premium price, and are you really that much greater than your competitors? Because I have a lot of respect for my competitors. I can't just go out there and say, well, look at me, I'm on YouTube. I probably should be able to charge a lot more money. No, it's my competitors do a good job, and I think I do a good job. I think I'm better than some of my competitors, but I think some of them are very excellent at what they do as well. And so I can't just go in there and just say, well, my premium price, look at me. Your market can determine price, but for me, I try to be maybe slightly higher than average in my area, but I really put a big emphasis on how efficient I can run my company. I don't like losing customers. I like to provide excellent customer service, and I want to eventually start dominating neighborhoods where I have extremely profitable days, because ultimately that ends up, in my opinion, making you a more successful company than oftentimes whether or not you had a dollar or two price increase or decrease versus your competition. Fifth thing I wanna mention is staying motivated. And you say, well, I'm so motivated. I'm quitting my job. I'm gonna go out there and conquer giants and climb mountains and do it all. It's gonna be great. Well, it sounds easy to stay motivated the first week, but I will say, London can wear on you. It gets hot. People complain. Employees are hard to find. Good ones, they quit on you in the middle of the week when you don't need them to. I mean, it can be a challenge to stay motivated. And I would say this, even to people that are finding success, if you're out there and it's going well for you the first year, that might could be a little bit of a danger too. If it goes negatively, you get discouraged and you quit. But if you have too much success, that can also be a little bit of a challenge because you might become complacent or think, wow, this is so easy. Maybe it is coming easy for you. I don't know. But what I don't wanna do is, oh, look, I'm making more money than I did at my job I just left. So I'm just gonna kind of coast and take it easy. No, I'm thinking things are going well. Let me constantly be evaluating in how we can improve. What else could I do to do better? Let me say this. I don't think money is the only reason to have a lawn business and probably not even the primary reason. It is an important reason, you gotta make money. But I like the idea of just having my own business, doing work that I enjoy, honest work that provides a good service to people. I think there's a lot of benefits other than money. Now I'm trying to make money when I do that. And I'm trying to make more money this year than I did last year. But it's not the only thing that matters. So I don't wanna look at it and say, well, I did pretty good last year. So I'm just gonna kind of coast this year. No, I still wanna grow. I mean, I still wanna pick up more customers in these neighborhoods I'm established in. I still wanna be thinking, is there something I could be doing different? What would my business look like now? What could it look like five years from now? Even if I've been, I guess, finishing up my 16th year, what could mine look like differently in five years as well? So these are some things for you to think through. If you need help, there are some resources at lawncarelife.com. That's my website. I have the Weed Control and Fertilization Academy. That's for a video course for people that wanna get in to weed control and fertilization, specifically for warm season grasses. There are also the Lawn Business Master Academy for people who wanna mow grass for a business to help you. These are kind of beginner level courses to help you get started in these industries. Also, the 2024 Lawn Care Life Conference is a conference. This will be the fourth time I put it on. I have some great guests lined up to be there. This is a Friday night and all day Saturday event in Springville, Alabama, which is near Birmingham. February 23rd and 24th, and you can find the information and register for that at lawncarelife.com. The early bird ticket pricing does expire at the end of this calendar year, and it is $197, and that includes your meals, dinner on Friday night, breakfast and lunch on Saturday. We are gonna try to wrap up around four o'clock on Saturday so people can get back on the road and get back home. Thanks for watching the video. Leave a comment, and we'll see you guys in the next one. Hey, everybody, it's Jason Creel. Let me be the first to invite you to the 2024 Lawn Care Life Conference, February 23rd and 24th in Springville, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham. I've got my friend Paul Jamison, Alan Hayne, Caleb and Brittany Allman, Jeremy Vest, Naylor Taliaferro, Jeremiah Jennings, and others coming, and hopefully you coming to this year's event. We've got seats for 300 people, and this year's gonna be bigger and better than ever. This is our fourth conference to do, and the early bird ticket prices is $197. That includes all your meals. We've got a Friday night session. We've got dinner. We've got an after party. We've got breakfast and lunch on Saturday with a day full of sessions. We've got equipment to ride on, giveaways, sponsors. It's gonna be a great event, a lot of transparency, a lot of interaction, a lot of tips on how to grow your business, and a lot of fun. We hope to see you February 23rd, 24th, Springville, Alabama. I absolutely love Jason and Tracy Creel. They have humongous hearts of hospitality. They host a wonderful event. I attended it back in 2020, and I'm really looking forward to returning to sweet home Alabama for the 2024 Lawn Care Life Conference. Hey guys, I can't wait to see you at Jason's event this February. There's gonna be a lot of speakers giving as much value as they can, such as myself, as well as a lot of great networking opportunities. Hope to see you there soon. Hey y'all, I'm Alan Hay in the lawn care, and I'm happy to let you know that I will be attending the Lawn Care Life Conference in 2024, February 23rd and 24th of 2024. This is Jason Creel's conference. This is the fourth year. I've been there every year. I'll be a keynote speaker this year. I'd say there's no better place that you can go to to get the tools you need to be successful. Like-minded people, good networking. I've learned a lot about growing my business more than anything here. I tell you what, this place could not be any better. We got a lot of great information, a lot of great speakers. The food was awesome. Jason Creel has done a very, very excellent job in presenting this Lawn Care Conference. Awesome to meet some of the guys that you follow on YouTube. You're around like-minded people who also wanna grow, and you're listening to people who are just like you, who are also growing. Definitely be coming back next year.