Besides having great landscaping skills, what is going to make your landscaping business a success? Here are some tips to help you out
If you’ve spent years of your life cultivating your gardening and landscaping talents for your own use, it might be time to consider taking it into the world of business. The market of people who care about fitting their garden to needs beyond their means only continues to grow. Besides the skills, what is going to make your landscaping business a success?
If you’ve spent years of your life cultivating your gardening and landscaping talents for your own use, it might be time to consider taking it into the world of business.Click To Tweet
Build up those supplier relationships
If you haven’t done landscaping work on such a broad scale, then you’re going to have to start by getting to know the suppliers in your area. Get to learning the production cycle of all the most common materials you have need of. Know when to source them from retailers and when to go beyond them to wholesale and specialty growers. Otherwise, the selection of materials you have to work with and to offer to clients is always going to be limited.
Know your money
Money matters both to you and to your clients. For one, bidding with accurate estimation software is going to ensure that your pricing process has some transparency that builds trust in the business. But you also need to make sure you’re making jobs profitable. From maintenance to design, you need some standards of how much labor and materials account per sale. Trying to get too competitive with pricing and getting closer to sales-at-cost is going to make the business unsustainable.
Strut your stuff
Building trust with accurate estimates is an important part of growing leads. Indeed, growing leads is as important as growing gardens. From creating landscaping websites for your small business to building a network and a referrals system, you need to build a plethora of strategies to build leads. On the internet, this means making use of search engines, advertisements, social media, content marketing and more. Then you need someone tracking the analytics to figure out where the most leads are coming from and focus your marketing budget there.
Get a pipeline working
If you don’t have a pipeline that tracks different leads and projects by stage, it’s easy for your work process to get all-too-muddled up. Without the right focus on time management, you will have clashing appoints, late project starts, and dissatisfied customers. Create profiles for each lead that gets to the point of contact with the business and keep track of where they are. If one lead is at the point of negotiation, you had better prepare for a project start and schedule around it accordingly.
Don’t go it alone
You might be working solo while you get your first few jobs, but as the business starts making money and nailing the process, you’re going to need a team. Finding the best landscaping employees isn’t just about finding people with skills in the garden. You need to think about people to fit administrative roles, estimators, people who need specific licenses like positions in fertilizing and pesticide application.
Success in landscaping is all about piquing client interest and meeting client expectation. If you have the skills and you have the experiences, don’t worry too much about qualifications. A horticulture qualification might be of some help for developing your own skills, but this is one field where the work you do stands far above the certifications on your wall.
