Hi! JP from Nebraska - New guy

[JP Landscaping]

hey everyone, Just stopping to say hello and introduce myself. I'm JP. I started a landscaping and lawn mowing business last year only part time. I also started advertising kind of late because I wasn't sure if I was going to go thru with it or not. This will be my second year and am wondering about what time is a good time to start passing out door hangers. I live in Nebraska. I plan to print out 5000 door hangers and distribute them to all homes in town. It's a town of 2500 people but I know for a fact there are a lot of customers because there are already two established lawn businesses (I worked for one some years ago). Any help from you is appreciated and I'm willing to help anyone with what I know and my experiences. Thanks

[Steve]

Lawn care business tips

Hi JP, Welcome to our forum! What kinds of things did you do last year to promote your business that you found to work? Did you do much social networking to promote yourself?

__________________
- Subscribe to my Lawn Care Marketing Blog Feed and get daily tips sent to you. Free!
Download your Free trial of Gopher Lawn Care Software.

[JP Landscaping]

Things I did to promote my business were craigslist postings, club sized fliers that I placed door to door, Telling people I knew about my new business, and word of mouth (best).

The mini fliers are smaller than door hangers and are far less expensive but don't have the hole punched out like the door hanger, so placing them on doors was a little challenging and took a little more time. I had to place them between the storm door or leave them under a welcome matt...

since I was only part time, i only distributed about 300 fliers and got 3 jobs out of them for a gross of about $7000.

Craigslist was also a great way to advertise. Estimating, i got about 60% of my business from them. I place an ad about every 2 weeks.

The city I worked at last year has a population of about 1/2 million. This year I would like to advertise more for lawn care in my home town (my parents still live there and is only 50 mins away from me) because it is much smaller and gas and driving time from house to house would be low... I can get from one end of town to the other in about 3 minutes! I can also leave my lawn care equipment at my parent's and I visit them pretty much every weekend.

I would like to focus my landscaping in the city since there is low to no landscaping needs in my home town.

** Do you know how I can get a mailing list that lists all homeowners in an area over the age of 59. I would like to focus my marketing to those potential customers.

[Steve]

Hi JP,

I did a search on here and found a bunch of mailing list discussions. One talked about using Sales Genie (salesgenie.com).

http://www.gopherforum.com/showthread.php?t=6099

Check out that post and do a search for other posts on mailing lists.

What initially got you to want to start your lawn care business?

[JP Landscaping]

thanks steve. I'll look into those searches.

I'd like to let those reading this know, I have a bachelor's in accounting and can help with questions you might have regarding accounting.

Well, I started to work with a small landscape company while in college and I liked the work. Also I had worked for a lawn care company back in high school. Since I was young I've always wanted to start my own business and have been doing small business projects on the side while in high school. When I graduated college it was either get a full-time accounting job or go for my own business.

I decided to start a landscaping and lawn care business. The first year (last year) my boss wanted to team up with me in some way because he really liked my work and I was able to lead the crew.

His was a landscaping company and I told him we could team up and I would start my business doing lawn care on my free time. Well, I ended up working for him all season and my lawn care business suffered. I only had 4 lawns. I actually ended up doing more landscaping in my business than lawn care.

This year i'm putting all efforts into my business (although my boss still wants to team up in some way). My thoughts on that is that he can sub his work to me. Although the money is in landscaping, I would like to establish my lawn care side of the business to have steady income in case landscaping slows down. My goal this year is 25 lawns.