Mike Andes responds to a solo landscaper (Ben) about moving from lawn/maintenance work into larger softscape and hardscape projects. Key advice: keep existing clients "warm" with monthly outreach (email/phone), use photos/videos from smaller starter projects to market bigger work, adjust website and social media to promote desired services, start with small 1–3 day hardscape projects you can complete alone, and be realistic about crew needs for multi-week (100s of hours) jobs or consider temporary hires. Also cautions that homeowners dislike long construction timelines and that past maintenance clients can become high-value project customers if kept engaged.
Questions this video answers
About six years.
$40,000 project.
Around 300–400 hours ("3, 400 hours").
About 20–40 budgeted hours (two- to three-day projects).
Chapters
Hey Mike, I'm a solo guy. Next question, last one. Hey Mike, I'm a solo guy that has been in business for about six years. Since the start of the business, I've been doing lawn and landscape maintenance and some softscape jobs. I'm currently going to school for landscape construction and want to get into some hardscape jobs when I get my certificate and I'm comfortable with the jobs. What tips do you have to advertise and close on bigger softscape and hardscape jobs to existing and new clients? Appreciate all you do for everyone in the industry, Ben. Thank you. All right, so in terms of selling softscape jobs and hardscape jobs, definitely you need to be emailing every single month your customer database. Whether it's email, phone call, I don't care what you do. Keep them warm, keep them in your. Keep them in your. Keep yourself at the top of their mind by just staying in touch with them. Letting you know what services you offer based upon the time of year. You know, sharing new things that are developing in your local area climate wise or news or what you're doing in your business. If you have a new hire, a new piece of equipment or new service you're offering. That's what I would do by keeping your existing clients warm. Even if you did an estimate for them five years ago, they might become a customer and do a $40,000 project. Once you start doing hardscaping and you did mowing for them years ago, but now you've kept them warm. And the problem is if you just like, oh, I'm gonna send an email to all my customers, guess what? 90% of it doesn't get even opened because you haven't kept them warm. You haven't, you know, staying in touch with them every month. And so that'd be my first thing. If you want to get those type of jobs hardscaping. The second thing I would say is you are solo. Getting into hardscaping jobs can be tough because if you're taking on big hardscaping jobs that are 3, 400 hours, you're going to either need to get temp work, people that can just help you for that one job, which is tough to get good people or you're going to need to hire somebody or even two or three because when you get big jobs, people are not going to want you to work on their project for three months, even if that's what you would like to do. Just work on itself and chip away at it. Most people don't want their property looking like a construction zone for three months. And so usually bigger crews will get those jobs. So keep that in mind. Or just start small. Start with two day, three day projects that you can do by yourself that are like 20, 30, 40 budgeted hours, little flagstone pathways or little paver patios, little stuff that you could do. Start off with that and then see how it goes. Use those pictures to then market to your existing customer database, email newsletters to get more of those type of jobs. If you want to push your business in a certain direction in terms of service mix, just advertise more and more of those pictures and those videos. If you want to go towards hardscaping, post those videos. If you don't want hardscaping, take those off your website and don't, you know, don't make it such a big tab. And then on your social media, don't be posting all your hardscaping photos if you want to go towards more maintenance, right? So what you're pushing on your website and your social media magically begins to be the thing that you get more and more leads for and so you can hide or elevate certain things that are going to get you more jobs that the kind of service that you want. So.
