So you’ve decided to start a lawn maintenance business. You’re excited. You’re optimistic. You’re looking forward to growing it to be a staple in your community.
Owning a business is fun, but it’s also a challenge. I’ve talked to a number of green industry business owners, and the following four items are what they most frequently admit caused the most heartburn in the early stages of their business:
Customers
You can’t have a green industry business without customers, yet those customers can sometimes be your biggest pain in the ass. You’ll get customers that, no matter what you do, won’t be satisfied. Or, you’ll have customers that you’ll underbid because you’re new and you still haven’t figured out the nuances of bidding. Or, customers that expect you to do everything, but don’t want to pay for it.
Everyone says they love their customers, but no one admits that, at times, they can be a giant pain in the ass.
So how do you ensure your customers don’t overwhelm your business? One of our customers acts uniquely at the end of the year - they fire 10 customers every year. Each employee gets to pick one customer to fire - with a valid reason. Then, they review the profitability of each account to see which customers lose money. They fire the least profitable customers, or send them new pricing that builds in acceptable profit.
It’s certainly not an easy thing to do. When you’re trying to get a business off the ground, the last thing you think you want to do is lose revenue. But if it makes your life less stressful - and your business ultimately more profitable, it’s worth doing.
Employees
Most people who start lawn care businesses do so because they like the work - and they don’t want to be beholden to a manager. They don’t want to join the corporate rat race.
For many, they enjoy the freedom that owning a lawn maintenance business entails. Once they start adding employees, it becomes less enjoyable. Managing employees isn’t really why they started the business. But they can’t grow without help.
Managing employees isn’t easy. It’s why many small businesses start by hiring people they know - relatives, friends, spouses. But once you have to hire people outside your network, it can be difficult - and cause headaches.
Some tips:
- The old adage hire slow, fire fast is apt. If you hire for the sake of hiring, you may be firing quickly.
- Think about human resources issues before you hire. Define your processes - how are you going to compensate employees, what about raises and bonuses, what disciplinary actions will you take, what about rewards and bonus. Have a plan so that you’re proactive, not reactive, when it comes to managing employees. Documenting everything makes it easier to communicate and consistently manage employees.
- Think about your culture. What kind of business culture do you want? Culture is one of the most important aspects of a business. Making a place enjoyable to work can help you overcome things like few benefits and low pay. Studies continue to show that the two biggest factors in retaining employees is autonomy and the people they work with. People don’t like to be micromanaged and they want to work with great employees. If you have a bad apple in your business, it can bring the entire team down.
Poor Communication
Once you’ve hired multiple employees, poor communication can grind your business to a halt. For example, your sales rep may fail to communicate what was sold to your production team, causing tension. Or your office and field staff may fail to communicate important job details, angering a customer. Or, as the owner, you may not adequately communicate your company vision, which leaves your employees working toward different goals.
But communicating with your team isn’t the only problem. Poor communication with your customers also leads to issues. The key to delivering great customer service is communication. Without it, you’ll fail.
How do you communicate better? At its core, our field service software solution improves communication. Instead of phone calls from the office to the field about the work that needs to be performed, you enter it into our electronic database and send it to your crews’ smartphones and tablets. They can see a complete work history, office notes, security notes, etc.
Our service business marketing add-on, HindSite Connect, helps you communicate with customers. We highly recommend that maintenance businesses send post-service emails, what we call completion emails, to their customers informing them that they completed the job and when. With HindSite Connect Pro, you can even include a post-service survey, so your customers can rate your work, giving you important data that helps you improve your service.
Paperwork
Once your business gets big enough - usually once you’ve hired multiple crews - paperwork suddenly becomes a burden. Manual timesheets, paper contracts, estimating paperwork, field notes, invoices and customer service notes begin to pile up everywhere. Managing the paper suddenly eats away at your nights, weekends and family time.
Luckily, it’s 2015 and you don’t need to be burdened by paperwork. There’s a glut of solutions on the market that can help you eliminate paperwork. You want to be selective when choosing what’s called field service software, however, because if you’re not, you may select a solution that ends up wasting more time than it saved. You need a solution that helps you track your sales opportunities with a field service sales CRM, makes it easy to schedule lawn maintenance work, that can deliver smart routing, that enables you to capture information and mark jobs as complete in the field, that integrates to QuickBooks - the accounting platform of choice among green industry businesses according to the 2015 Green Industry Benchmark Report - and that helps you determine your profitability by job using budgeted vs. actual reporting.
Software can help alleviate many of the issues early stage lawn maintenance businesses face. If you’re interested in learning how to shop for software, download our Lawn Maintenance Software Buyer’s Guide and learn what to look for in lawn maintenance software.