How to Run a Successful Lawn Care Business: 5 Management Tips

1. Simplify your quoting process

Professional estimates and quotes help you win jobs, get clients, and keep your business running. But when you’re servicing lawns all day, there’s hardly time to write detailed estimates from scratch and chase down quote approvals.

Here’s how to speed up your estimating and quoting process:

1. Create quotes with a template. Instead of pen and paper, use a lawn care quote template customized with your company branding. Templates let you add your services, pricing, photos of your products, and estimate terms and conditions to a professional, well-formatted document.
2. Send quotes over email, or through a self-serve customer portal like client hub, so your customers can view them easily. Online access to quotes allows your customers to request changes and approve the quote from anywhere.
3. Follow up frequently to remind clients to approve their quotes. Create one or two standard quote follow-up emails that you can send to all your clients, and set a schedule for yourself to send out those reminders.

Using lawn care management software like Jobber, you can create interactive and professionally designed quotes. You can even allow customers to add on optional services and approve the updated total.

2. Create flexible and efficient team schedules

When you book mowing and lawn maintenance visits, get them into a calendar that’s easy to read, edit, and share with your team.

Using a flexible scheduling tool will save you the trouble of calling your team members every time a job is rescheduled, or when job details are updated.

Here are more ways you can manage your team schedule effectively:

• Create schedules online instead of using spreadsheets or paper. Editable online schedules make it easier to reschedule visits on rainy days and respond to last-minute cancellations.
• Personalize your calendar with color coding and filters to quickly see what’s important, like job status or visits assigned to certain team members.
• Create faster routes and maximize productivity by assigning jobs to the closest team members.

READ MORE: How to create a profitable lawn mowing schedule [free template]

In Jobber, you can easily drag and drop visits that need rescheduling. To avoid overbooking, underbooking, and double booking, choose from five different views and get a clear visual of crew availability.

3. Keep clients informed and respond quickly

Great communication is how you earn trust with customers. Create a positive experience by keeping them informed before, during, and after the job.

Follow this schedule to communicate with clients consistently:

• A few days before the job, send your clients appointment reminder emails to prepare them for your visit. Include instructions to help clients remove any obstacles to your work—like keeping their lawn unwatered before you arrive or making sure their pets stay indoors.
• On the day of the job, send a quick text message saying you’re on your way or running late. This can prevent last-minute cancellations and keeps clients confident that you’ll be there.
• After the job, send a follow-up email to check if your client is happy with their lawn. Checking on customer satisfaction after every visit shows clients you care and gives you the chance to meet (or exceed) their expectations

READ MORE: 5 ways to write better customer service follow-up emails [with templates]

To save time, set these emails and texts to go out automatically using Jobber. You can schedule reminder emails and send standardized ‘on my way’ text messages before every visit without typing them each time.

Then, manage all these conversations in a single place. Using two-way text messaging, you can see what was sent, when it was sent, and which team member sent the message.

4. Make it easier to send invoices and collect payments

When you make it easy for lawn care clients to receive and pay invoices, you can get paid more frequently and improve cash flow. That makes it easier to invest in your business’s success.

There are two important steps to improving your invoicing:

1. Learn how to write an invoice that’s professional, accurate, and easy to read
2. Set up a process to follow up on unpaid invoices

To write your invoices faster, use a customer-friendly lawn care invoice template you can customize with your company branding, contact information, and pricing for the job.

5. Organize your client and job info in one place

When you and your team have all the information about a job, you have what you need to do your best work. Keep client contact information, job notes, quotes, and invoices all in one place so you can find that information easily.

Keeping this info organized doesn’t just make your admin work easier—it also helps you give every client a personalized experience.

To run a more successful lawn care business, use customer management software to:

• View past quotes, jobs, visits, invoices, and a full billing history associated with each of your clients
• Use custom fields to track whatever additional information is important to you, like entry codes or pets at the property
• Tag clients as leads to manage them separately from active clients
• Add notes and photos to a client’s work requests, quotes, jobs, and invoices