Its Not About the Lawn. Its About the Customer
If you asked someone outside of the business of lawn care what it takes to be a success, they would probably say that it takes an ability to do a great job taking care of lawns. And it is true that anybody who runs a lawn care business must be able to perform the functions of mowing and trimming a lawn and offer other services that customers come to expect. That might be considered a "minimum requirement" of a good lawn care business.
But if you are getting ready to start your own lawn care business, it is important you understand a hidden truth about being a success in this kind of work. That truth is that it is not about the lawns. It is about the customers. And once you focus the majority of your energies and focus on the customers of your lawn care business, you will have found the key to long term success and growth that will carry you as far up toward the latter of success as you wish to go.
To get a good feel for what you need to know to make your lawn care business a success, evaluate two things. Get and understanding for why people hire a company to do their lawn care and then understand why they fire a company from working on their lawns. If we made a list of how those two decisions are made, the ability of a company to do a good job of lawn care is on the list but it does not dominate the list. Many lawn care companies can do a fine job of taking care of lawns but do a horrible job of customer service and customer relations and they fail.
People hire a lawn care company the most often because they come recommended. That means that they find out from a friend or neighbor who worked on their lawn or they observed who worked on their lawn and they decided they liked that company. Word of mouth is the number one most potent marketing tool for any lawn care busiess. And word of mouth depends on one variable only and that is customer relations.
If a neighbor looks down the street at a perfectly sculpted lawn, that will draw their interest in hiring that lawn care company. But when they interview their neighbor about that company, that is when the recommendation will make or break of that new customer comes your way. Similarly, many lawn care companies who can create masterpieces out of their customer's lawns lose the contract because they don't understand how to interact with customers and how to anticipate their needs.
When you go onto the property of a customer every week to do their lawn care, you are entering their private space. That customer must have a sense of trust for you and for your crew to allow that invasion of their space to happen every day. If the people you employ scare the customers or if they behave in a way that upsets the customer, that is a sure way to lose a client even if those workers do immaculate work on lawns. That means that not only do you have to understand customer relationships, your workers must know how to handle customers as well.
Customer relations is also all about communications. The customer doesn't want to see you drive up, work on their lawn and disappear until it is time to pay the bill. A person's lawn is personal to them and they want to be able to access the management of the company which includes you, the crew chief in charge of that lawn and even the workers. That customer should be able to walk out of their home while your workers are on the property, stop the work and talk to them and feel like they were responsive to their needs.
That customer should also be able to call your office and get you when they have a concern or want to discuss new business. That means you don't route customers through an automated answering service. Give them access to you, the boss of the lawn care company, every time they call. If you are responsive to customers, communicate with them and let you know you value you them as much as you value their lawns, you will win many contracts with that approach and keep those customers for years.
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