Lawn Care: Add More Green to Your Bottom Line

Many Pest Control companies have lawn care (insect, weed and disease control and fertilization) as one of their service offerings. In Florida, it is especially common. As CEO of Middleton Lawn and Pest Control I, and a great team of Middleton people, built what was the 5th largest lawn care business in the nation before we sold the company in 2005. We were also about 50% pest and termite.
While many consultants don’t know of or don’t really believe in the value of the lawn business, I can tell you, it’s a great business. It is also a needed service by property owners and a growing business with good margins. In fact, having a lawn care service offering can play a big role in driving growth and profit in your other lines of business.
For many years, I tracked the relationship between how many services a customer had with us and customer retention. Consistently, the numbers showed that the more services a customer had with one company, the less likely they were to cancel any of them. Adding a properly-designed lawn care service offering is also a great way to add exponential growth to your pest and termite company. You can also add a lawn service and do so without an increase in corporate executive staff nor any increase in administrative/CSR staff or sales staff. It’s pretty much do-able with a technician and a truck for starters; depending on how fast and how far you want to go with it. It’s not a hard thing to sell, either. One of the easiest leads to create in our industry (meaning the pest, lawn and termite industry) is a lawn service lead and there are umpteen ways to create a lawn lead in the neighborhood. Once the lead is created, the closing rates on those leads are high. In addition, every pest control and termite customer is a potential lawn customer.
Some pest control operators are skittish about starting a lawn care service. They are perhaps concerned about start-up costs, vehicle and equipment costs, chemical/product costs and/or liability. It is maybe a fear of the unknown. None of these concerns are so real, however that they should be the driver of a decision not to start a lawn care service. Lawn vehicles and equipment and lawn technicians quickly pay for themselves. A properly-designed lawn care application combined with a smart pricing strategy equates to a single digit chemical/product usage. This combination also will result in more than 95% of your lawn care service being recurring revenue.
If you want some help in setting up a lawn care service, call, text or email us at The Clendenin Consulting Group. If you’re in the business of acquiring lawn care service, contact us. If you think it might be time to sell your lawn service company, contact us. If you want some help in growing your lawn service and doing it profitably, contact us.
-Greg Clendenin