Choose the RIGHT Name for Your Lawn Care or Landscaping Business!

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about whether you should be naming your lawn care, your landscaping business, lawn care services, mowing, landscaping. What should the name of your business entail? Before we get into the show, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't Already, go to Gusto.com Bootcamp that's G-T-O.com Boot Camp. Try their software completely free for 90 days with where your employees can do time tracking and also they get finance tools based upon budgeting and all the rest of it. Once they get their paycheck automatically transferred their account and you get medical, vision and dental benefits directly from the app. Check it out. Today, go to gusto.combootcamp all right, so today we are talking about when you starting your lawn care business, should you have lawn care services in the name of the business? Should you have landscaping, should you have mowing service? And I'm going to be showing you something that you've never seen on on YouTube when it comes to deciding your name for your lawn care business. So hold on tight for that. But it definitely is going to boil down to what services you want to offer down the road. So you got to ask yourself the question, what's the goal of the business? Are you going to one day offer hardscaping? Are you one day going to offer mulch? Are you going to offer bush trimming? Are you just going to focus on mowing? I'm going to show you what things you might want to know before you actually decide this. So I'm going to show you something called Google Trends. It's nothing new, revolutionary or anything like that, but you probably haven't seen seen this in this light how to choose your business's name. So let me go ahead and show you this screen. This is Google Trends. I'm going to go ahead and put in lawn care service here. And we're going to see this is the trend over the past five years of people searching the term lawn care service. Okay. So you can see obviously during the spring you have our peak usually the first couple weeks of May every single year. It's pretty consistent. Okay. It's obviously gets a lot less search results in the wintertime. Now though, let's go ahead and compare that to landscaping service. If you enjoy this kind of comparison, that's more in depth. That does not get very many views on YouTube, by the way. I'd really, really appreciate you pushing the like button, because these do not get as many views as me mowing lawns or doing hardscaping. But it's definitely, in my opinion, the thing that moves the business needle for. So this is now landscaping service. So you can see here not as high of peaks in the spring, but definitely you can see their seasonality here, right? The winter there's less, during the spring there is more search results. Now I'm going to compare it lastly against mowing service. Okay. Again, these are search terms that people are looking for throughout the United States over the past five years. You can see obviously the seasonality, but when we look at mowing, that's the yellow here you can see same thing. Really, really busy in the springtime, slows down in the winter. There's three takeaways I want you to see here in the Google Trends charts. Number one is that lawn care service has the highest search results. The most people look for lawn care service. And this is actually a big reason. What went into why we chose Augusta Lawn Care Services is because the search terms and the SEO and the amount of people just looking for that term is the highest. Okay, so when you look over here on the left hand side, you can see lawn care service is highest, then followed up by landscaping and then followed by mowing. Now I'm not against using mowing, but this is the thing that I'm a little bit concerned about. The second thing I want you to take away from this and that is that mowing is the most seasonal business. What I mean by that is it has really, really highs, but then it also has the lowest lows in the winter. It is consistently the search term that is searched the least. And this is pretty much, you know, pretty consistent across all markets in the United States. Obviously if you're in Florida or Texas, they're going to skew somewhat, but generally we're going to have a spring rush. But when it comes to mowing, it's always the one that's the most seasonal, that during the winter goes the lowest and it has the biggest peak. So we, what we're going to look at here next is landscaping. The third takeaway I want you to look at is that landscaping has the lowest delta. When you talk about delta on a graph, it means the difference or the change, the variability or the seasonality of that service. So when I look at mowing, for example, this data point right here, at its height, the yellow line is 62. And then several months later in the winter it drops all the way down to five. I think it's the lowest it gets. So it's massive delta, big change. Whereas landscaping, although it doesn't get as high as mowing, in this case, this Data point is 34. When I go to the same point here, it's 11. So basically it means there's less fluctuation. So instead of going from 60, 60 down to 10, you know, that's a delta of like six times. It's going from like 30 to 10 for landscaping. So much less variability. Why? Because I can still do some landscaping during the winter months. So this is very, very important. I really would recommend that you check out Google Trends and look at the different names of different services. And this is a great way to determine what type of services you're going to get into in your area. Search your state, search your county. Put in different types of search terms in terms of mulch and tree trimming and mowing lawns. What, what are the things that people are searching for and when are they searching for them? This is another great tool to determine when you're going to do certain marketing campaigns. There's no reason to be doing snow shoveling in the middle of summer. There's no reason, as we're seeing on this trend chart right here, to be doing mowing services and advertising that you're doing mowing in the middle of winter when no one is searching for that term, it's going to be much more expensive on cost per click because there's no supply. There's no supply of, of. Of clicks. There's no supply of people searching. Therefore, the demand and the cost of getting a click is gonna be much, much higher. So make sure you use this tool. Another thing is when it comes to naming your business, you gotta look at, okay, maybe I get started with mowing. But if my goal is in three to five years to be doing hardscaping products or doing landscape installs or trimming bushes, or doing fall cleanups and spring cleanups. If that's gonna be the case, I might want to name my business slightly differently. So, for example, with Augusta Lawn Care, we didn't just call it Augusta Lawn Care, we call it Augusta Lawn Care Services because the services part implies the fact that we do other things in the lawn besides just lawn care treatments or mowing lawn care. So very important, the naming. Your business is going to determine what clients think your services are before they even contact you. Yes, you're going to get some mowing clients if you have Bob's Landscaping, but it's much, much more likely that you're going to get mowing clients. If it's Bob's mowing or Bob's lawn care. Now, is there a happy medium and yes, there is. You potentially could do lawn and landscape or you could do mowing and lawn care. You could, you can combine these things. Sometimes it gets a little bit long on your logo. Sometimes your URL gets really long. If you're like, you know, Joe Hilfon's Lawn and Landscape.com, you can get really long. How, however, that is a happy medium. If you're wanting to do both, kind of diversify by the fact that during the spring rush, I can capitalize on the high search terms, the high volume of search terms for lawn care and mowing. But then in the landscaping side of things, I can take care of my winter when it slows down on the lawn care and the mowing side of things. Another option, last one, is that you can do two brands. So if I'm doing Bob's lawn care and I want to get into, into pavers and we're doing retaining walls, in a few years, maybe I start with Bob's Lawn Care and then down the road I start Bob's Landscaping or Bob's Hardscaping or Bob's Patios or whatever it might be using the same brand, but then just changing the pre. The. The. The affix of the part afterwards. So lawn care or landscaping and making two separate brands. Maybe you change the color, maybe you change the emblem slightly or just, just the wording. You know, you can do Bob's Lawn Care, Bob's Landscaping, Very, very simple. That's another option. So you really want to look in the future, see what services you want to offer and make sure it aligns with the name of your business. I'm Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for more useful tips like this. And please, I would really appreciate if you push that, like button, we'll see you in the.