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I used to think that sometimes doing one time aerations or any little job would be a good foot in the door. Sometimes it is, many times it doesn't. You've already seen the affects from your efforts and I'd say you're right to stop doing them at your current pricing.
For people that call us with their one time projects in the spring we charge more than we do for our contract customers. We don't advertise it per se, but I will let pepole know if they're debating becoming "regular" customers as opposed to "will call" type customers that they do pay a slight premium (which they will then see in the comparion pricing).
I don't turn away the customers that call us each year because we do get repeat business from them. I thought I wouldn't do lawn care only for people since it took away from our core maintenance business - but we're slowly building the route and making it a worthwhile add on.
I'm of the mind that a small phone call for a simple job can often lead to much more work. Often the customer doesn't know what they want and once you begin to share some ideas and show them the possibilities for their yard they'll take additional steps. This is obviously more rare, but has happened enough that I explore different options with people when I meet with them - and more times than not we do more work for them than what they had originally called us for simply because they don't know what all they want.
Back to the aerations - get a better buck for them to make them worthwhile. You might find also that you if you let the customer know that you'll continuously reschedule them from year to year until they cancel that you'll have a 90% plus renewal rate without having to resell. Send out a post card the month before and the customer will have to then call to cancel, otherwise you're coming out. You might have one or two folks that have moved since the last year, so you might loose out on getting paid, or you pick up a new customer. But the loss on one or two jobs far outweighs relative to sales cost being able to go out and do 50 or 100 scheduled aerations that you didn't have to resell.
I guess this is in keeping with the idea that if you put a maintenance contract in front of a customer each year - they will have to decide if they want to hire you, if they even pull aside the time to make the decision and then send back the contract/agreement. Better to make it automatically renewing from year to year, make the decision for them, and then they will only have to act to cancel the service. Often people are lazy and won't bother cancelling and just have you continue to perform the service without giving it a second thought.
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