Top 5 Landscaping Tips and Tricks to Make Money Mowing! (Starting a Lawn Care Business)

Hey everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm going over five tips that are not necessarily the most obvious when it comes to running a successful landscaping and lawn care business. I'm going to go through them really quickly and these are ones that maybe I've mentioned in the past, but these are definitely questions I get a lot of the time and are not super commonly talked about. The first and foremost is bagged versus bulk. Alright, so bagged mulch or you can get it in bulk mulch or when I say bulk, usually you're going to a supplier or you're having it on site in your own yard in a big bin. You're having 15, 20, 30 yards of it in a big bin and then you use your loader to put it in the back of your truck or your trailer. When I talk about bagged, we're literally getting pallets of it from your supplier and it's coming in bags and it's usually gonna come in.

Not even a third of a cubic yard, like a 16th. It depends on the size. But honestly you can get mulch and soil in bags instead of in bulk. So the question is, which one should I use? Well, there's definitely some advantages to both. The advantage to bulk is you're gonna get a much better price. Typically you're going to be able to get a much lower cost per cubic yard. And the reason for that is because, well, they don't have to bag it. There's less handling of the material and typically they're gonna be able to load it in half yard increments in like one scoop of a loader or, or even if you go to a big supplier, they might have a massive scoop and get 2, 3, 4 yards in one big scoop. So definitely cheaper for bulk material. But when it comes to bag material, what's really cool is it's really great to move. You can put that in the back of your truck, throw it into a wheelbarrow, put it all wherever you need it in throughout the beds without having a whole bunch of cleanup. So the cleanup is much better when it comes to bagged because I don't have to dump it, I don't have to haul around in a trailer and then clean out the trailer when I'm done. You can literally move the bags throughout the beds and then cut them open, flip them over and you're basically done. You just have to put all the bags in the garbage now. So bagged versus bulk advantage to both. In my opinion, when you're first getting started bagged is not a bad option if you don't have a trailer, if you can't get a supplier to deliver it. Because sometimes delivery for bulk materials or wipes out the cost savings compared to bagged. Because now you gotta have a dump truck bring it to you. And you might pay $100 for delivery, depending on where you're at, depending what soil or mulch you're getting delivered. Therefore, it might actually be cheaper to get bagged and to get started. You don't need a big trailer then. Then you don't need a whole bunch of equipment to move the material or a bin at your shop. You're able to just go buy the bags, move them one by one with a wheelbarrow, cut them open. It's really simple. So to get started, bagged is not a bad option, especially for smaller. If you're doing two, three yards of bark mulch, definitely a great idea using the bagged option. If you're doing 10, 15, 20 yards of bark, the price savings is probably going to be substantial enough to use bulk materials instead of bagged. The second tip is you can turn waste into profits. So when we're doing our lawn care landscaping business, we have waste and a lot of times natural waste in the form of grass clippings or more larger types of waste like branches, et cetera. So if you're doing a cleanup and leaves and a whole bunch of debris that is larger, you might be able to run that through a tree chipper and actually create like a mulch, like a very cheap form of mulch, because usually you have mixed types of leaves and branches, et cetera. So what we used to do is we would keep the grass clipping separate from all of the branches and chipped debris, because we could actually make two different products out of that. The grass clippings could be decomposed and turned into compost, and you could actually sell that back to your customer, turning that waste into profits. Or the chipped material, the stuff from branches, twigs, things that you got maybe in a bush cleanup or a trimming job, or even a tree removal job, you could chip those up and then actually make a really kind of cheap mulch that could be used just to cover blank areas or big, wide open areas at a customer's house. And I might be able to charge 10, $15 per yard for, for that waste. It takes time to actually turn over the grass clippings, turn it into a usable compost. And you also need land in order to have that space. So that might not be easy to get started off at the beginning. Same thing with the chipping. Like you would need a tree chipper of some sort to create the wood chips. And we used to have one, now we don't. So we don't actually do the wood chips anymore or sell it back to our customers. Alright. The third thing is liability and safety. Now the great thing about this one is you can protect yourself against liability and people getting hurt. When it comes to liability. You can get professional liability insurance or commercial liability insurance some people call it. And that's gonna cover any sort of mistakes that you and your employees make on a customer's property. I remember the very first time that I used my insurance. I was just getting started my first year of business and I broke a $3,000 glass door and whole sliding door system and it cost $3,000. And I was able to use my liability insurance and I did it how? Using a weed whacker. Hits a piece of gravel, flies 100ft, hits this window, shatters it. And they need it done right away cause their front entrance to their house. And so you definitely want to make sure you have general liability insurance as well as when it comes to safety. Because things like that happen, but also it happens to our physical bodies and people. We're around equipment that can take off fingers, hurt your limbs. There's a lot of things that can really hurt a body when it comes to lawn care and landscaping, especially if you're dealing with big equipment. And I actually had to go to the hospital one time because I was underneath a dump truck. I got my hoodie caught inside the PTO and I had to go to the hospital. These are the type of things we're going to run into. So what can you do to prevent those types of that type of liability and bodily injury? You could have better safety meetings. So every single week, every couple days, have a meeting with your team. Go over any sort of of protection around eye protection, ear protection, safety measures around big equipment. Like for example, I shouldn't have been going underneath a dump truck while it was on. That was dumb. And so you definitely can have safety means to prevent those type of injuries from happening. Number four, and this comes to your business, how do you make it more successful? Number four is do what your competitors are not willing to do. And at the end of the day, some of this seems commonsensical. But when you get really, really busy, a lot of times these are the type of things that fall through the cracks when you're growing your business. But if you want to grow a successful business, all you have to do is do what your competitors won't. And some of those things are simple, like answering your phones when the phone rings. Yes, you could leave it to message and get back to them tomorrow. But by then they've asked five other people for a quote. And yes, you could do the estimate with them tomorrow, meet with them in person, talk about their project and get the estimate to them next week. But by then they've got three or four other proposals. Answer your phones, get the estimates back to them as soon as possible, when once you've met with them. These are the type of things that most of our competition in the lawn care and landscaping industry do not do. And if you do them, you're gonna get more customers if you just show up on time. If you tell the customer, hey, I'll be there between 11am and 12 noon, show up between that timeframe and if you're gonna be a little bit late or early, give them a call and let them know. These are the type of things that, although they seem common sense, don't happen much in this industry. And if you do them, you're gonna separate yourself from the competition. Alright? The fifth and final tip that I have for your lawn care landscaping business is know when to drop a customer. Recently we had one of our customers we had to drop and the reason for that was because one of our employees went to their house and this customer was literally complaining about what they looked like and if they were dirty and they didn't have. They complained about the job and everything. But I was there in person, there was nothing wrong with the job. And this person kept calling the office and making a big deal of it and then said negative things to the face of the employee. This is mean being mean. So we had to drop that customer. Another location for Augusta Lawn Care. This past week we had to drop a customer after they literally convicted of putting weeds in their lawn. After the first service of mowing, after they had let it go overgrown, and we literally tried to work with them. We did a couple more services for them. They disputed our invoices, we gave them a couple charges back for free. The manager went back in person and talked to them. We tried to do everything possible and we just couldn't make this person happy. So I promise you, 80% of your profits are coming from 20% of your customers. So do not worry about dropping one or two of them or the ones that are causing you the most headache. A really easy way to kind of eliminate these people that cause you the most headache is just raise your prices across the entire board. And the people who usually drop you are the ones you don't want anyways, the ones that are always calling after every single service, wasting your time, the office time, complaining, really reducing the morale of the team because they're always pointing out negative things that aren't even or making stuff up and they're costing you time. You have to be on the phone with them every single service, talking about what they didn't like and how it could have been better and then disputing invoices. That is a bunch of wasted time. Drop those people as fast as you possibly can. This one tip alone will save you a lot of gray hair and a lot of time stressing out about customers. Go and get the next customer. There's so much work out there. There's so much work to be had and more customers to be had. Do not stress out the one or two that are calling on the weekends calling you every single service and are just at the end of the day never going to be pleased with your service. Gently refer them to somebody else, let them know you're not a good fit. And perhaps it's actually a logical way that you can explain it to like, look, we are a bigger company. We cannot talk to you every single service and let you stand over our shoulder and pick one weed at a time. We're going to come through, we're going to do services fast. We have 20 projects in a day and we need to get to those quickly. We're not going to be the type of a company that might work best for you and then refer them to someone else. Have a list of two or three other providers that might be smaller or bigger or fit different segments of the population better than you actually would. This is a great way to build trust with the customer by saying, hey, we're not the best fit for you. Here's someone else that's going to serve you better. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com I hope you build a great, successful lawn care business and these five tips help you do that.