How many accounts do you have?

[Lawn Envy]

Hey everyone. Just curious about the amount of accounts you have. Residential Vs Commercial. I'm holding strong @ 25 residential and gaining 3-5/mo

[Edmir]

Lawn care business tips

I have a total of 50 accounts this season. Last season I had only 25 accounts. Out of my 50 accounts I have 15 Commerical. I love having commercial accounts they are easy to deal with, and fair on the prices. I am trying to get out of residental accounts. They are too complicated, and some people don't want to pay hardly anything to mow their lawn? Example: "This client I have, she asked me to give her a bid on a landscaping job. Mean redoing the flower beds, and putting heavy duty plastic, along with pebble, and planting some azeelia plants." I told her I would charge her $1500 including materials, or $850 just for labor and delivery fee". She was working me on the price? So I told her to get other quotes, and to give me a call if she wanted to? She got other quotes, and then called me. I got the job. Then she wanted to add another job on top of it, for the same price I was doing the above job? I told her the other job would be $500 more. See people like this, get on my last nerve, I will most likely drop her as my costumer for trying to take advantage.

[Edmir]

What's funny about this season? I didn't have to do hardly any advertisment? By the way, yellow pages suck. I will never advertise with them? They are too expensive, and hardly got any jobs from that add.

Most of my jobs is word to mouth, and online advertisments.

Good luck guys.

[lawncrafter56]

Yea, thats just what I would do is drop a paying customer. Make it work to your advantage.
Lawn Envy would most certainly take the job she offered and all the work that comes with it next year.

[MountainViewGreenskeeper]

Originally Posted by lawncrafter56

Yea, thats just what I would do is drop a paying customer. Make it work to your advantage.
Lawn Envy would most certainly take the job she offered and all the work that comes with it next year.

to each his own.....

[Lawn Envy]

Originally Posted by lawncrafter56

Yea, thats just what I would do is drop a paying customer. Make it work to your advantage.
Lawn Envy would most certainly take the job she offered and all the work that comes with it next year.

I understand where he is coming from. And you are right I would never drop a paying customer unless I had no choice.

Thanks all for your input!!

Ray

[lawncrafter56]

I was a little rude Ray
I try not to little let any future work slip by . You have an excellent post going. Thanks

[Edmir]

Well Guys:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I run my operations my way. Therefore, If I want to drop a costumer I will.

Thanks for your tips.

[Steve]

Do you find it's been easier to get customers as you have been around longer? Was the toughest year to get customers, the first year?

[psparaco]

Well my first year 2009. I ended the year with 18 clients. I handed out flyers twice that year. and primarily focused on typical lawn maintenance (mow, trim, blow) we did no fall cleanups but gave 2 estimates for them but got beat by another company having more workers. more is not always better in my book. Out of the 6 major snow storms in maryland. I believe I did fair with sidewalk and driveway clearing considering we were doing it all on foot since i didnt have a truck last year. i drove a 2005 chevy malibu. i know steve. you would have loved to see that one. sorry i never took a pic of my mower and stuff in the trunk.


In feb or march i forget which, i got in a bad car accident (wasn't at fault) and my malibu was totaled. I ended up getting my parents to cosign for me and I bought a 2004 Nissan Frontier XE with a 6 foot bed.

I started putting out flyers the end of march 2010. I passed out roughly 500 flyers. I ended up getting several calls and signs a good bit up for lawn care. Plus My fiance and I signed our daughter up for club soccer and alot of the soccer parents hired us to service their yards. We have been fairing 28-36 clients/properties since april 1st. Grant it we have lost about 20 clients due to houses selling, people moving, people buying a mower, etc.

by the way this year my fiance and I work together. she mows and i trim/edge and cleanup. and sometimes help her mow on properties 1/4 acre or more. We tend to be able to knock out 5-6 townhomes in an hour. she is fast and highly efficient and I get more compliments on how great the lawn looks this year than last year.

Currently we have 28 clients. 13 (46.4%) is rental properties tenants. 15 (53.6%) is home owners. We have done pressure washing, bush removals, spring cleanups, top soil trucked in and applied, hedge trimming, garden weeding, gutter cleaning, making countless trips to the county landfill with bush clippings to be recycled and i think thats about it.

Last year I did a fall marketing campaign and passed out flyers about this time. I am going to do that again but with a slightly different approach. I am going to call the 3 property landlords we service tenants in (rental townhomes) and request a list of addressses of people who moved in 2 months after i distributed flyers to. All 3 have several flyers of mine for them to put in the welcome packets of new tenants. We have gotten a few referrals that way. Some of our referrals are from existing clients who referred their friends. I frequent craiglist for posting of people needing their lawns cut and we have done estimates and those who didnt sign with us, We told them we would contact them in the spring to see if they would need our services then.

Overall I think we did alot better for a second year in operation. I wanted to have 50 clients but 28 is still better than 18. We did maintain 35 clients for awhile but like i said people moved recently and we lost like 5 in one shot. I am trying to keep the homeowner/ rental tenant ratio even. homeowners we get the upsales for other services. rental tenants we can knock out quicker since our routes are super tight. I hope we have a large request for fall cleanups for leaves and such. We added 2 snow blowers to our equipment list this year and need to get them preped and service ready for winter soon.

I think that about sums up our business. sorry for the book gang.