Mike Andes tells lawn-care entrepreneurs to start with one service like mowing or gutter cleaning, not many. Mastering a single offering lets you penetrate the market faster. Once you build a solid business around that specialty, add other services later as a retention tool.
Michael says, I have been doing research in my market. It appears that my main competitors do everything from weed control, fertilization, any service you can think of. Is it an advantage to be starting out in the market and just offer the basic mowing, cleanup, small project, clean, cleaning gutters? I think in general you'll penetrate the market faster if you specialize because you'll get good at it. You'll figure out what works in terms of marketing faster. The generalization usually helps with churn because the more services I can offer to someone, the less likely they're going to try someone else out, and the likelihood that person has the service that I offer is high, especially if they're in a established player and they could potentially take my customer. And so many times I actually see growth happens in terms of service count as a way to lock in and reduce churn of my customer base so they stop using other providers. Uh, churn is always lower for customers that use more of your services. And so I, I would look at it as much of a retention tool, but to get started, I would focus on one thing because you can get really good at it from a sales, operations, and admin perspective. If you start adding fertilization, weed control, and all these other things. I've got to train admin on how to handle all those calls. I've got to sell all these different verticals, which are all very different when it comes to how you're going to run these ads. So I would focus on one. I'd go deep, make it large enough to where now when I go roll out the fertilization department, it's a $200,000 line of business, not rolling out from day one where it's $15,000. I'm spending an extra truck, an extra spray tank, way more operational complexity.
