How to grow a lawn care business: five things that work

When someone searches "lawn mowing near me" or "gardener near me", Google shows a map with a handful of local businesses above the ordinary results. Getting into that map is the cheapest growth there is, so start there. After that, the best new customers are the neighbours of the ones you already have, and the easiest extra money is lawn work your round customers would otherwise buy from someone else.

Your Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is free and it is what puts you on the map. If you work from home, set it up as a service-area business so your address stays hidden, and list the towns and villages you actually cover rather than a huge radius.

Pick "Lawn care service" as the primary category if mowing is most of your work, and add "Gardener" or "Landscaper" as secondary categories if they fit. Then fill in the services list in plain words: lawn mowing, hedge cutting, scarifying, aeration, garden tidy-ups. Customers read that list, and so does Google.

Add photos of real jobs: striped lawns, cut hedges, your van outside a customer's house. Add a few every month through the season rather than twenty on day one. Reply to every review, good or bad, in a sentence or two.

Google will ask you to verify the profile, often by recording a short video showing your van, your tools and your signage. Have those ready before you start.

Asking for reviews at the right moment

The moment to ask is when the customer is looking at the finished job. For a new customer that is the first cut, when the lawn has gone from long to striped. For a one-off job it is when you walk them round the garden before you leave. For round customers, the first cut of the spring and the visit after a scarify are good times.

Asking in person works, but people forget. Follow it up the same day with a text or email containing your review link, which you can copy from the "Ask for reviews" button in your profile. Keep the message short: thank them for the job, say it would help a small local business, paste the link.

Leaflets on streets you already mow

A new customer three doors from an existing one is worth more than one five miles away, because the travel time is almost nothing. So put your leaflets through the doors on the streets you already visit, not across the whole town.

Make the leaflet specific: "I cut lawns on Elm Road every other Thursday. If you'd like yours done on the same day, text me." Give a starting price or say you'll quote for free, and put a phone number that you actually answer. Deliver them yourself on the day you're working that street, when your van is parked outside and neighbours can see the finished lawn next door.

If a neighbour comes over to ask while you're working, that is the best lead you'll get all week. Have a card or leaflet in the van for exactly that.

Autumn and spring lawn work

A mowing round pays the bills from March to October. Lawn renovation work adds bigger jobs to it, and you are already at the house.

Scarifying pulls out thatch and moss. It is mostly done in September and October, when the grass has time to recover before winter, with a lighter pass possible in spring. Hollow-tine aeration relieves compaction and works best in autumn while the ground is soft. Overseeding after scarifying and aeration fills the thin patches. Moss treatment and seasonal feeds fill out the year.

Offer these to your round customers first, in August, before they see someone else's leaflet. A simple "autumn lawn renovation" priced per lawn (scarify, aerate, overseed, collect the waste) is easier to say yes to than three separate quotes. Price it properly: scarifying fills a lot of bags, and taking that waste away is part of the job.

Before you add a service, check it earns more than the mowing it replaces in your day:

Prepaid seasonal contracts

A seasonal contract turns "text me when it needs doing" into a fixed round. It means one agreement per customer: fortnightly cuts from March to October, say, for a monthly amount by standing order, or for the whole season paid up front with a small discount.

Write down what the price includes and what it doesn't. Say what happens when the grass stops growing in a dry July (you still visit to edge and strim, or you skip and adjust the price) and when rain moves a visit. Say how either side ends the contract. If the customer signs up by email, by phone or on their doorstep, they usually have 14 days to cancel under the consumer contracts rules, and you have to tell them so.

Spread across twelve months, the payments also help with the quiet winter months.

A contract only helps if the visits it promises actually happen. In TradeSender you set a customer's visits to repeat weekly or fortnightly and they appear on your calendar and on the iPhone app until you change them. Repeating visits are on the Pro plan at £19 a month; the Free plan covers one person and 30 one-off visits a month (see pricing). If your work is more general garden maintenance than lawns, there is a page on how it works for gardening businesses.

Pick the one of these five you haven't done yet and do it this month. The Google profile takes an evening. The leaflets take a morning on streets you're already on.