[pinnacle]

I am officially starting a part time lawn care and landscaping business this week. I have registered my business and am soliciting insurance quotes. Now I need to find some work. I want to start with residential projects.

Where did any of you find your first customers? Did you knock on doors, run classified ads, mail fliers? What have you found that works and what doesn't?

I realize that experience is the best teacher and most successful people are graduates of the school of hard knocks but I am not too proud to listen to any advice offered. Thanks in advance for your repsonses!

[Lawn Lad]

For me, I started as the neighborhood lawn kid. This in and of itself was probably helpful in me growing my business. What would folks think with me knocking on their doors now? I don't know. Besides, people aren't home much these days it seems.

You can try flyers, they're in expensive and you'll get a predictable response of about 1%, if you can close a sale on 1/4 calls, for ten jobs you'd need to deliver 4,000 flyers. Once you start working you may pick up more work then through referral and from neighbors watching you work. Continue to flyer the neighborhoods you're working in. Maintain a database of all the people who call you. Send out a mailer to those folks two or three times a year. They may have said no at your first pass - but they may be ready to buy later in the season or maybe next year, or two years later. We just sent a mailer out to our database and we got many calls from past customers or folks that we gave bids too but for whatever reason didn't close the sale.

In my opinion, you want to run low overhead. Phone book ads will yield tire kickers and will not get you a targeted audience. Going into teh gold clipper type mailings with coupons again may not hit your target audience and you're competing generally on price - hence the coupons. Bargain hunters look in the coupon books.

You need to know what services your'e going to offer and what market you want to serve. It may continue to redefine itself over time as you get more experience, but try to limit your service offerings as best you can to concentrate your efforts.

[Stonehenge]

In your search for customers, I have to second what Lawn Lad says - even though you may feel a great desire to offer discounts and coupons, and see that as the 'main way' or 'only way' to attract customers, avoid offering that at all costs. You offer bargains, freebies or discounts and all you will attract are the people who are after bargains, freebies and discounts. The people you want to reach are the ones who don't spend hours scouring periodicals and coupon packs for deals. You want to reach the people who are busy with work and family, are successful, and will pay to have quality, reliable work done for them with a minimum of hassle.

I also agree that phone book ads will not generate enough leads to justify the cost. I just trimmed our ad campaign way back this year because I couldn't justify spending $11,000 to get phonecalls from 30-40 tire kickers, which is a large part of what you get.


I've found door hangers to be extremely successful for us (run a search here, or read the April issue of Pro magazine to hear a bit more about our hangers). And as it would happen, one GTX sponsor does the design and printing of door hangers, biz cards and the like. They do great work, are fast and have very reasonable rates. We've used them for our new and improved door hangers (and were very pleased), and then ordered biz cards printed by them (pleased again).

I think you'll find that if you doa good job scouting, and have a professional looking hanger, you'll see results much better than what Lawn Lad mentions (for the areas where I hang them, I usually get a 6-10% in leads, and of those we tend to close 60-80%).

It may also pay to develop a relationship with the media. Sounds hard, I know. Did to me, too. But looking back on it now, I can't recall what all the fuss was about. You can get all kinds of nice PR for your company without paying a penny - you just have to be willing to work a little to get it.

Good luck!

[pinnacle]

Thanks to both Lawn Lad and Stonehenge for good info. I'll post the outcome of my efforts.