Overcoming the Most Common Hurdles in Your Lawn Mowing Business

Being a business owner in any industry can be challenging. You’re responsible for all your own successes and failures, and you’re the one paying all the bills and making all the decisions.

However, there can be a unique set of hurdles in the lawn mowing industry, and many new and seasoned lawn mowing professionals face them throughout their careers. If you want to be prepared for any challenges thrown your way, here are some of the most common hurdles and how you can overcome them.

Seasonal Earning Potential

Winter can be a challenging time for some lawn care service providers, particularly those who only offer a single service – lawn mowing. Homeowners rarely need their lawns mown as frequently, and weather conditions can also dictate when you can visit your clients’ properties.

Fortunately, winter doesn’t actually need to be an impossible problem to solve. You have many different solutions at your fingertips.

For example, you might decide to branch out into other services more fitting to the colder weather, such as section tidy-ups, leaf removal, mulching, tree trimming, and hedge pruning. While you can scale back these services once the mercury rises, they can be an ideal interim solution to ensure you’re still able to maintain a stable income.

Alternatively, you might like to look at budgeting for those colder months of the year while you’re still providing your summer services. Talk to your accountant about managing your money and spreading it out across all months of the year.

Administration and Accounts

No one can be good at absolutely everything they put their mind to. You might be the Picasso of the lawn mowing world, but that doesn’t mean you’ll know how to manage your books for organisation and tax purposes.

Many lawn mowing business owners find it challenging to handle the administration and accounting side of their business as well as the actual job of lawn mowing. If you know that your books possibly aren’t as tidy and well organised as they should be, an ideal solution would be to hand them over to someone who can tackle this task for you.

Accountants can be relied upon to make sure you’re fulfilling all your tax obligations, while an administration worker might handle those more finicky tasks like booking new customers and managing their payments.

Underquoting Work

When you start a new business, it’s only natural to be concerned about not getting as much work as you need to cover your bills. You can generally alleviate this problem by purchasing an existing business, but many people find themselves underquoting just to take on new clients.

While effective in the short-term for building up a client base, it might hurt you in the long run when you’re unable to make the profit you need to run a sustainable business.

If you’re about to start your own lawn mowing business, research what your soon-to-be competitors are charging. If you have the same equipment, services, and level of experience, there’s no reason why you also can’t charge the same.

Ineffective Equipment

A low-end lawn mower is more than suitable for a homeowner with a small patch of grass that they mow a couple of times a month in the summer. However, such a lawnmower is likely to be unsuitable for a commercial operator.

By purchasing ineffective, low-end equipment, you run the risk of needing to perform far more maintenance and upgrade sooner than if you bought a more suitable commercial model. As you start exploring your lawn care equipment options, take the time to read reviews and compare various brands.

The more time and effort you put into research before purchasing essential gear like lawnmowers and grass-cutting accessories, the more confidence you can have that you’ve made the right decisions.

Marketing Your Business

Once upon a time, any type of business could rely on word of mouth to have the customers lining up in their droves. However, competition is now fierce, and we need to think outside the box to be noticed, especially regarding marketing. 

Although, marketing doesn’t have to be a complicated, expensive undertaking. You might decide to purchase a franchise business, with the head office supplying all marketing guidelines for you, or you might hire a marketing guru to assist with your advertising and social media presence.

There might still be a reasonable amount of word-of-mouth marketing, but you have far more avenues to explore than simply relying on customers to notice you on the streets.

Begin Your Business With Confidence

As terrifying as starting a new business can be and as many hurdles as you might face, there’s no reason why you can’t start, own, and operate a successful lawn mowing business. Now that you’re aware of some of the most common problems, you can be in a much better position to overcome them.