How to grow your landscaping business in 8 steps

Once you reach the $100,000 or $300,000 milestone with your landscaping company, it can be hard to drive the same monster growth you achieved in your early years.

You need to focus on the back end of your business rather than the daily mow and blow to become a million-dollar company. Aspire provides intuitive software platforms that scale with you as you build next-level success with multi-million dollar revenue goals.

There’s plenty of advice out there for how to grow a landscaping business, but we're offering easy-to-implement strategies that deliver fast results to land new clients and achieve sustained business growth.

8 can’t-miss strategies for growing a landscaping business

1. Prioritize client retention

2. Place a high focus on employee retention and job satisfaction

3. Deliver exceptional customer experiences

4. Use budget-friendly marketing strategies

5. Diversify your services

6. Expand your landscape service area

7. Develop off-season services

8. Price services competitively

9. Offer bundled service packages

Client retention is key

You can’t grow your landscaping company if you lose customers as fast as you land new ones. Client retention is crucial to building a solid customer base that will enable your business to meet challenges and scale on your terms. 

Acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times as much as keeping an existing one. Alongside all your growth strategies, strive for zero churn.

Part of your operations should include win-back campaigns for cold leads or inactive customers. 

A powerful CRM, such as Aspire, lets you use tags to filter the customer database to find disengaged accounts. You can launch fast reactivation campaigns by emailing dozens or hundreds of clients directly from the platform with bulk actions. 

Provide high-quality service

Every strategy to expand your small business is easier if you deliver exemplary service at every appointment. High-quality service doesn’t just mean leaving properties looking incredible. It’s also providing what customers want, even if it means pivoting your services to meet the market’s needs better.

How can I get more landscaping customers for my business?

When you provide excellent customer experiences, you end up with clients excited to share your service with their friends, family, or network. 

• Activate existing customers as lead sources by creating a referral program 

• Link to review sites on invoices, bills, and email newsletters

• Ask customers to share your social media posts to their closed Facebook groups for their neighborhood, parent groups, and HOAs

Exceptional service is a crucial foundation for how to grow a landscaping business—77 percent of consumers read online reviews before choosing a service provider. Great service from friendly, experienced crews creates a positive buzz around your company.

Grow your landscaping business with a digital marketing plan

Digital marketing isn’t optional—81 percent of consumers Google brands before committing to a purchase. Your online presence is an affordable and reliable source for lead generation and should include: 

• Social media business pages

• An optimized website

• Email marketing

• A referral program

Many new landscapers make the mistake of signing up for paid online ads and Home Advisor and passively waiting for leads. 

Instead, focus your marketing strategy on word-of-mouth and online engagement to actively cultivate relationships with your target audience. 

Include print material marketing in your strategy

The advantage of active lead generation is that you can acquire landscaping customers in the markets where you want to work. Spend time door-to-door canvassing and build brand awareness with:

• Brochures and door hangs with coupons

• Business cards

• Seasonal service calendar magnets

Engaging with communities where you want to work can lead to a schedule stacked with properties in a single neighborhood, eliminating transportation costs.

Can you make a million dollars in landscaping?

During your first years of operation, growing from $100,000 to $300,000 may have been easy as you expanded your market share and services beyond basic maintenance mowing. 

But the jump from $300,000 to a million dollars or more in revenue can feel insurmountable. 

Implementing a budget-friendly digital marketing strategy and landscape business software can scale your business to a million dollars and beyond. 

Aspire helps business owners to:

• Streamline operations in an end-to-end platform 

• Eliminate redundancies and errors created by using multiple software applications for siloed operations

• Generate comprehensive financial reporting to inform growth strategies

Not only is it possible for landscaping business owners to make a million dollars, but Aspire will scale with you as you grow to the next level at $5, $10, and $15 million milestones.

Advance your client base by diversifying it

Most landscaping companies launch their business exclusively in the residential or commercial vertical. When you’ve reached market saturation, consider expanding into new verticals.

Add either homeowners or commercial clients to your base to create new revenue streams and revenue opportunities.

Adding verticals is easier when you have a robust customer management system. 

Aspire Landscape enables users to tag and filter files for both clients and properties, making it easy to sort by property type, services, and location.

Eliminate confusion and redundancies by implementing a CRM that delivers the same intuitive functionality across unlimited verticals no matter how much you expand your landscaping business. 

Expand your service area

Another strategy for growing a landscaping business is to expand the service area. Any long-term business growth plan likely includes launching new branches and divisions across the city and state. Knowing what areas to target for expansion requires market research and an engaged customer base.

Activate your marketing structure to:

• Use social media to engage potential customers and discover lead-rich areas

• Include surveys and referral program detail in email marketing campaigns

• Add QR codes to invoices and bills to announce planned expansion

New service areas often require purchasing new equipment and adding storage facilities for crew members to pick up their equipment and supplies, such as:

• Mowers, edgers, and blowers

• Mulch and fertilizer

• Supplies for installation and maintenance

Business management software with end-to-end functionality enables users to manage their equipment and inventory in the same platform as their schedule. 

Regardless of the Aspire plan customers select, they get full platform functionality for tracking equipment location, repairs, and maintenance schedule. 

Use a referral program to seed high-quality clients in a new service area 

Referrals programs offer a high ROI for landscapers, especially when expanding your service area. 

As part of a plan to launch in new neighborhoods, cities, or states, reach out to existing customers for referrals in the added locations. 

Target your best customers to stack your leads with new clients who pay on time, need high-profit services, and are top-tier communicators. 

Develop off-season services

Depending on your business location, demand for landscaping services may slow down or subside during winter. Remaining a strict landscape and lawn care business tramples your momentum for year-round growth. 

Wherever you’re located, from Florida to North Dakota, adding off-season services increases annual revenue, bolsters your customer base, and eliminates the drag on the growth momentum. 

Consider expanding into:

• Ice and snow removal

• Holiday decoration installation

• Winter mulching and lawn aeration

• Outdoor maintenance, such as gutter cleaning and fall clean up

• Tree and shrub installation and trimming

The scheduling feature in Aspire makes it easy to adjust or pause weekly lawn maintenance services during the winter months.

Users can also insert blank days in their calendars for winter storms, ensuring every snow and ice service is scheduled and tracked to a property. 

How profitable is a landscaping business?

Landscaping companies can run at 20 percent profit or more once they generate a million dollars in annual revenue. However, your landscape and lawn care company will hit different profitability ratios depending on the growth stage. 

Profits go down while you’re growing your business and investing in:

• Marketing

• Labor

• Equipment

Following an intense period of growth, business management software can help maximize profit by:

• Improving efficiency in daily operations

• Reducing in-office labor costs by streamlining workflows

• Improving client retention by empowering better customer experiences

Schedule a demonstration with Aspire to see how a landscape management platform can increase profitability at every growth stage.

Offer competitive pricing in your area

You position yourself to command a portion of the market by pricing your services competitively with local landscaping companies:

• Increasing marketing budgets

• Hiring more team members

• Buying additional equipment

Then, when growth slows, you can raise prices to generate additional revenue and increase your profit margin.

How do landscaping businesses make money?

Many landscapers launch their businesses with a single truck and lawn mower and can reach the $100,000 mark in their first year. After that initial milestone, profits will fluctuate as growing the business requires reinvestment of cash.

Green industry businesses make money by:

• Adding services such as lawn care, landscaping, hardscape construction, off-season maintenance, etc. 

• Growing their service area with marketing initiatives

• Offering and selling enhancements

• Ensuring they reach the desired profit margin at every job by using business management software

The landscape industry is fast-growing and accessible for new entrepreneurs and startups. Once you’re running a profitable company, there’s no limit to how much you can expand your landscaping business into a multi-million dollar operation.  

Offer bundled services to customers

You may have taken any job customers asked for the first year of operation, from installing single trees to one-off mulching or curb installation. However, as your business grows, low-profit services limit your revenue stream. 

Instead of firing less-beneficial customers, you can offer bundled services to drive new profitability from every property. 

• Only perform construction and installation for maintenance customers

• Offer discounts for bundled maintenance services

• Lower prices for year-round maintenance customers 

• Discount for off-season services for existing customers

There are opportunities to unlock new profitability in your existing operations. Bundled services eliminate one-off low-profit jobs from your schedule, increase brand loyalty, and help to reduce churn.

Use business management software to automate operations

As you scale your landscaping business and land more clients, you won’t actualize your full growth potential if you need to hire additional team members to manage brittle processes and systems. 

Before you use these tips for how to grow your landscaping business, implement management software that automates and streamlines operations. 

With a single, cloud-based platform with end-to-end functionality, you’ll unlock new profitability in your current operations and establish a foundation of streamlined processes that deliver results whether you add $1 or $10 million to your annual revenue. 

The right landscape management software for any growth stage

When scaling your business with Aspire, you get granular data and robust reporting on every aspect of your operations. Access the structure you need for consistent processes across your organization with the suite of Aspire products:

• Crew Control

• Aspire Corporate

• Aspire Enterprise

• Property Intelligence: Go iLawn and LandOne

Sustainable growth is more than data and strategy. The passion that launched your business is integral to its ongoing success. 

Wondering how to expand a landscaping business? Let the same drive and excitement from the early days of your company guide you in selecting marketing strategies, new verticals, and new service areas. Aspire will provide you with the platform to turn your passion into profits.