Attend a LIVE Service Autopilot demo this month and  be entered to win an iPad!
Get A Demo

7 Reasons Why Lawn Care Businesses Don’t Make It

Published on May 25, 2023

The key to developing a successful, long-lasting business is to avoid the top reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it.

By avoiding the most common reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it, you can:

  • Properly price services for maximum profit
  • Hire the best employees in the midst of a labor shortage
  • Get ahead of the competition and become the leading lawn care provider
  • Establish adequate rules and procedures for daily operations and training
  • Providing a manageable, profitable list of services your business is great at
  • Streamline daily operations and automate tasks by utilizing the best software
  • Leverage the best pro marketing strategies to increase conversions and upsells

By following the expert strategies in this article, you can avoid the top reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it.

How to Hire Your Best Employees… Starting Right Now

Get Your FREE Hiring Ad Templates

1. Issues Hiring the Right Employees During a Labor Shortage

Finding and hiring the right employees during a labor shortage is one of the biggest, ongoing struggles lawn care businesses face.

While it’s easy to feel desperate to hire anyone to fill your open positions, it’s important to be sure you’re hiring the right employees for the job.

Remember, all it takes is one bad employee to cost you customers and a damaged reputation with negative reviews.

In order to find and keep the best employees for the job, you’ll want to:

Fix Your Wages in Under 10 Minutes

Get Your FREE Calculator

2. Inability to Overcome the Competition

In order to develop the most condensed, optimized routes and take over entire neighborhoods, you’ll have to find unique ways to stand out from the competition.

Take a look at a few great ways to stand out and beat the competition:

  • Focus on keeping clients happy
  • Offer excellent customer service
  • Be honest, transparent, and admit fault
  • Provide your best 110% effort every time
  • Make changes based on client and employee feedback
  • Establish a positive online reputation (e.g. socials, reviews, website, etc.)

By overcoming the competition, you can avoid the main reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it in the industry.

3. Improperly Pricing Services

One of the most common reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it is because their prices aren’t right.

Properly pricing your services is one of the biggest keys to being successful in the lawn care industry.

Plus, when you have the right resources, calculating the best prices for maximum profit isn’t as challenging as you might think.

Here’s how to calculate and implement your ideal price:

  • Track your job and crew times
  • Know your local target market
  • Keep records of your operational costs
  • Test your new price increase on your least profitable clients first

By the way, did you know that you can easily track your crews and job times using Service Autopilot?

Additionally, Service Autopilot allows you to easily view individual client profitability—without spending countless hours calculating it yourself.

Take the Guess Work Out of Lawn Care Pricing!

Download Your FREE Calculator now!

4. Inadequate Rules and Procedures for Daily Operations

Did you know that many lawn care businesses don’t make it because they have inadequate rules and procedures for daily operations?

By establishing adequate rules and procedures for everyday operations, you can:

  • Offer coherent decision-making
  • Receive optimal team productivity
  • Develop reliable, uniform services for clients
  • Properly train crews company rules and procedures
  • Provide your team and clients with clear expectations

Plus, creating these rules and procedures for daily operations isn’t as complex as you might think. Simply create rules and procedures based on the needs and goals of your business.

5. Offering an Overwhelming List of Services

When you spread your crews thin with an overwhelmingly long list of service offerings, you don’t allow your business to develop a reputation for specialties.

Depending on your business needs, it’s generally a good idea to start with 3-5 lawn care services. Then, you can gradually add more services as your crews adapt.

6. Reluctance Towards Utilizing the Best Software

A large amount of lawn care businesses don’t make it because they resist taking advantage of what the #1 lawn care software has to offer.

With Service Autopilot, you’ll have access to lucrative resources like:

When you choose Service Autopilot, you can scale faster, save time, maximize profits, and so much more. There’s no limit to the success and growth you can achieve!

Grow Your Lawn Care Business... Faster 
(and with Less Stress)​

Instant invoicing

Better scheduling

Manage your clients and employees all in one system

Start Software Tour

7. Failing to Take Advantage of the Best Marketing Strategies

By taking advantage of the best marketing strategies, you can important conquer goals, such as:

In addition, when you take advantage of the best lawn care software, you can simplify marketing campaigns by automating:

  • Upsells
  • Invoices
  • Client surveys
  • To do’s for crews
  • Estimate follow-ups
  • Past due reminders

Using Service Autopilot’s automations, you can customize campaign triggers to funnel leads and clients into the right campaigns based on their actions.

Automations allow you to automate the most mundane, time-consuming tasks—allowing you to work on higher value tasks.

The #1 Way to Put Your Everyday Tasks on Autopilot

Start Software Tour

Avoid These Common Reasons Why Lawn Care Businesses Don’t Make It

Using these expert strategies, you can avoid the top reasons why lawn care businesses don’t make it and:

  • Optimally price services for the most profit
  • Beat the competition and dominate your market
  • Equip your business with top local talent despite a hiring shortage
  • Harness the power of the #1 lawn care software to automate tasks
  • Implement rules and procedures to optimize daily operations and training

Start taking advantage of these expert strategies to avoid the most common reasons lawn care businesses don’t make it!


Related: 5 Ways to Increase Lawn Care Profits in a Recession


Originally published May 25, 2023 7:00 AM CT

Alyssa Sanders

Alyssa is the Team Lead of Creative Marketing at Xplor Field Services. Alyssa is an expert in field service industry trends, roadblocks, and solutions. When she’s not writing or creating engaging content, you can find her watching a new sci-fi series or shoving her nose into a good book.
ALL POSTS

Tags: ,

Free Downloads

Pricing Calculator

Quick guide to fixing your pricing.

Social Media Bundle

Be the the "top authority" in the lawn care industry!

Wage Calculator

Fix your wages in under 10 minutes.

Leave a Reply