5 Steps Before You Start a Landscaping Business

Starting a landscaping business is super exciting and you may want to jump right into it as fast as you can, but there are a few things that you should sort out first. Above all, you have to believe you can do it, but belief does not make money. So you also need a solid game plan on how you are going to attack this landscaping business head-on. After you have a solid plan, you have to have the confidence in yourself to carry out that plan. Are you confident enough to knock on one hundred doors if you have to? You also can not get bogged down with the complicated tasks at the beginning of your journey. You just have to visualize what it would look like if it were easy, and then as your business grows, you start to expand. The more you expand, the closer you get to financial freedom.

1 | Believe in Yourself

Whether you are starting a business, playing a sport, or trying to get a college degree, you have to honestly believe that you can do it. Furthermore, you have to believe that you can do it better than everyone else. Just thinking “oh I can do enough to get by” is not a good mindset to go into a new business. The reason is, building a business (a good one at least) is not easy, and it takes months and years of sacrifice on your part. If you do not believe that you can do everything that needs to be done in order to be successful, you will fail. Always remember the saying “your results will never outperform your mindset”. 

2 | Make a Game Plan

I used to be a foreman for a huge landscaping company before I started my own. While I was working there, my boss(a Marine Core Sargent), who was also my mentor, told me something one time that really broke me down and built me back up. I did not have the confidence to successfully lead a team of four or five guys on the high-end properties we often worked on. To be honest I did not really know what I was doing. Well, then my boss told me something that turned that all around. He said, “It does not matter if you have never done something before, you need to make a plan, even if it is a crappy plan, that is better than no plan at all”. 

The simple act of making some sort of game plan, and adjusting on the fly as I learned more about what I was doing, made me leaps and bounds better at my job. If you can take this simple idea and apply it to your own business, you will be surprised how much better you will do compared to just jumping into a task guns blazing.

3 | Have Confidence In Yourself

The world of business is a very complicated place. There are a million things that you will learn and have to figure out along the way. The important thing is that you do not get bogged down with the complicated problems. By complicated problems, I mean things like “how do I do marketing?”, “what sort of taxes does my business need to pay?”, or “how do I get a business license?”. All of these questions(and many, many more) you will have to figure out eventually, but do not get overwhelmed! 

You have to have the confidence in yourself to slow down for a minute and just give yourself a chance to succeed. Because if you get intimidated off the jump, and do not think you can ever figure these things out, you will fail. Just be confident in your ability to learn and adapt your business as needed. It may be hard, but it is definitely worth it.

4 | Visualize Your Success

Next, you need to visualize what your business would look like if it were easy. What I mean by that is when you are thinking about all the complicated questions about any sort of task you may face, just slow down and ask “what would this look like if it were easy”? Instead of stressing over taxes, cut a few extra lawns and hire a tax professional where you can just easily send them your documents and then boom you are done, or at least they will tell you what to do from there. 

Basically, instead of thinking about all the reasons your business will fail, think about all the reasons it will succeed. Because if you just think about the reasons you will fail and never stop and take a second to have some confidence in your abilities, you will fail. Overthinking all the reasons why your business may fail is just going to put you in a terrible mindset. If you look at your business positively and think about all the reasons why it will succeed, you are going to be  much more likely to succeed.

Let’s say, for example, you are just getting started and you are getting shirts made and business cards and you have a google calendar set up, you are making calls and filling up calendar spaces, and you are just generally getting everything set up. You do not need to worry about making a business, you need to worry about getting clients. You do not need to worry about getting clients, all you really need to do is get one client. Then everything is just rinse and repeat from there. Your business will start to build on itself in no time and you can start to expand higher and higher, which leads us to the next step.

5 | Expand

The last step is to expand, expand, expand! The more clients you get, the more you start to charge, the more valuable your time is. As your business grows, you can start to buy more equipment and even hire workers. 

The trick is to expand the top while you dissolve the bottom. When you are just starting out you have more time than you have money, so you have to spend your time to make a little bit of money. As you go along you will reinvest your earnings into your business and you become more efficient. As you start to grow and you start to develop better ways to do things, you can stop using your old ways and get better and better over time. This applies to how you cut a yard, how you market your business, your hiring process, and much more. The more you learn and expand the more successful your business will be.

Conclusion

The key to you starting a successful lawn care business is believing in yourself. You have to think that you can take whatever comes at you, because trust me you will be blindsided more than once. You also need to develop a game plan of how you will run your business, it does not have to be the best plan in the world, you can adjust it on the fly. Having overall confidence in yourself is also key to your success. If you do not think you can do what needs to be done for your business to succeed, you have already failed before you started. Then you need to visualize what your business would look like if it were easy, and do not get bogged down on all of the complicated tasks. Lastly, when your business starts rolling, you just need to expand and expand and expand. More clients mean more money, which means better equipment, hired help and puts you one step closer to financial freedom.