Lawn care businesses are some of the fastest, cheapest, and easiest businesses to start. Possible lawn care services you can offer include:

• Lawn mowing
• Lawn edging & blowing
• Lawn fertilization
• Weed control in the lawn
• Weed control in garden / mulch areas
• Lawn seeding & aeration
• Lawn sodding (i.e. transplanting strips of mature grass onto a yard)
• Irrigation/sprinkler system installation, maintenance, and repair
• Pest control (e.g. eliminating ant hills in the lawn or spraying around a house to prevent cockroach infestations)
• Hedge trimming
• Bush trimming
• Tree trimming
• Tree planting
• Tree relocation or removal
• Adding, maintaining, and replacing wood chip mulch around trees, gardens, or flower beds
• Planting & maintaining flowers or other ornamental plants in gardens, flowerbeds, or other areas of a lawn
• Gutter cleaning (especially in geographical areas that have a lot of tree leaves in the fall)
• Lawn grading and leveling (e.g. with new soil and/or retaining walls)
• Installing boulders, gravel walkways, aesthetic pebblebeds, and stone walkways
• Pond installation & maintenance
• Water fountain installation & maintenance
• Laying cement walkways and other cement yard structures
• Seasonal holiday decoration installation, maintenance, and removal (e.g. inflatable and plastic Christmas and Halloween decorations, timed house Christmas and Halloween lights, timed outdoor tree Christmas lights, etc)
• Cement (e.g. sidewalk, driveway, walkways) pressure washing
• Pooldeck pressure washing
• Porch screen pressure washing
• Pool cleaning, maintenance, and repair

It’s easiest to start off with a subscription bundle of services such as lawn mowing, edging, blowing, and in-lawn pest control (e.g. removing any ant hills that arise). You might also want to bundle in higher-margin services like pressure washing if you are targeting residential clients in wealthier neighborhoods. Understanding your target customers is important for several reasons:

1. Whether your customer is a single family home owner or an apartment complex, it’s important to remember that people tend to be outside most often during the weekends. That means they would much rather have their lawn mowed in the middle of the week during work hours than on a Saturday afternoon. Advertising that you do that upfront (e.g. directly on your business card or flier) can make it easier to steal customers from other lawn care providers who don’t.
2. Upper middle class residential customers might prefer Thursday for lawn maintenance since that means on Saturday they won’t stain their white shoes green but they will still have a freshly cut look when they host their barbequeue. If you can guarantee their lawn will be cut either Wednesday or Thursday, then they may pay a premium for that over someone who provides less certainty about when they mow.
3. Certain landscape workers have given the industry a bad name by simply not showing up some weeks but still continuing to bill. Give your customers peace of mind by leaving a small card hanging on their door each time you mow, or leaving some small signature that lets your customer know you were there. That peace of mind is worth a lot to customers.
4. Many landscaping companies focus only on lawns and ignore weeds in mulch beds and walkways. However, weeds in mulch beds and walkways detract significantly from a homeowner’s perception of lawn quality so bundling in mulch and walkway weed control may be a smart move for your business.

Remember: Residential customers are NOT buying lawn care service. They are buying a beautifully manicured lawn to show off to their neighbors and colleagues and to enjoy with their friends and family.

Once you identify your target customers and the services you will provide, you can use the 14 tactics below to get your first 100 lawn care customers as fast as possible.

1. Leave business cards door-to-door

This is one of the most effective strategies you can possibly do. You can buy 1000 business cards for around $15. Find upper middle class or upper class neighborhoods near you and leave a business card tucked into each door. Leave an exact quote for your services penned on the back of the card (e.g. “$50/mo”). You might get a 0.5% conversion rate which means 5 new customers from those 1000 distributed cards.

2. Leave flyers door-to-door

One step up from a business card is a flyer (e.g. a 4″x6″ plastic card with advertising text & images). Flyers have more information than business cards and so typically have better conversion rates when left door-to-door. Below is an example of a lawn care company flyer. Expect around a 1% conversion rate (e.g. 1000 flyers left on doors typically results in around 10 customers).

3. Leave door hangers

One step above the flyer is the door-hanger (see image below). Door hangers typically do better than flyers with around a 2% conversion rate (e.g. 1000 door hangers should result in around 20 new customers).

4. Join Google Maps

Add your business to Google Maps with either your office or home address so that when people search for “landscaper near me” or “lawn care near me”, you show up. Make sure to also list your website and phone number, and try to get some reviews as soon as possible!

5. Google Maps advertising

If you want to get customers even faster, it may help to pay Google Maps to boost your business’s visibility in Google Maps.

6. Facebook network marketing

Facebook network marketing is very simply (and free!). You just make regular Facebook posts about starting and running your lawn care business. Your Facebook is already connect to lots of people who live in your area, and presumably many of these people already know and trust you to some degree. That means you will likely get a least a few customers this way.

7. Google SEO

Create a professional looking website for your business and start blogging about lawn care topics specific to your local area. If there are particular plants, weeds, grass diseases, weather-related lawn problems, etc that are common to your area, write authoritative blog articles about them! If you live in Seminole County, Florida, you want your website to rank on Google when someone searches for “how to eliminate crabgrass in central Florida” or “Seminole County lawn care”.

8. Location-based Google ads

Google SEO can take months to a year or more to take effect. In the meantime, you may find it effective to pay for Google ads on terms like “Seminole county landscaper” if you are trying to find customers in Seminole county. You might also consider buying ads for search terms like “landscaper near me” when searched for by someone within a 5-25 mile radius of you.

9. Instagram content marketing

Content marketing via social media can build momentum and attract customers much faster than content marketing via Google SEO blogging. Instagram reels are a great medium for this because landscaping and lawn care are very visual activities that are easy for people to watch short clips about AND because Instagram reels can be cross-published to both Instagram and Facebook (both of which have older audiences where homeowners are overrepresented compared to Snapchat or TikTok).

10. TikTok content marketing

Instagram reels are probably better than TikToks for content marketing a landscaping business, BUT TikTok is still a great marketing channel due to its massive organic reach. Even in 2023, it is MUCH easier to make a TikTok that gets 100,000 views than to make an Instagram reel that gets 50,000 views.

11. Register as a government vendor

Government agencies and departments are the best customers you can possibly have as a lawn care company (because they sign large, long-term contracts). It can take awhile for a contract to come up for bid, but when one does, you want to be ready to pounce on it. The federal government lists contract opportunities at SAM.gov, and your local city, county, and state governments likely have their own websites where contract opportunities are listed. You’ll want to register as a vendor on all of these websites so that you can bid on any government contracts that come up.

12. Cold call local property managers

Property managers hire lots of service providers, from handymen to HVAC repairmen to landscapers. A property management company may be able to hire you to maintain the grounds for an entire apartment complex or a set of 12 Airbnb houses.

13. Offer a recurring commission to real estate agents

Tell the realtors in your area that you’ll give them 10% of the sales of any customer they refer you, every single month FOREVER as long as that referred person continues to be a customer. It’s an easy recommendation for a realtor to give and could get them $5-10 per month per customer in completely passive income. That’s a pretty nice reward for just giving your name to anyone the realtor sells a house to.

14. Offer a recurring commission to ANYONE

The same 10% infinite monthly commission I just described for realtors can also be given to ANYONE. Offer your employees and existing customers the same deal. Offer the same deal to your neighbors and your neighbors’ kids. A free $5-10 per month per customer is pretty great money for kids, so you might have an unlimited growth hack if you know any kids that live near you.