Okay, so you’ve bought the best lawn mower, whipper snipper, and leaf blower—and you even picked up a great lawn edger on sale. You’re also driving around in a new trailer branded with your new lawn mowing business name and phone number. You’ve got some lawn mowing customers, but you don’t understand why you are not getting more.
Should you spend more money on letterbox drops?
Should you pay someone to help you improve your website?
Should you spend money on Facebook ads or Google ads to get lawn-mowing customers?
One thing you must do for your lawn care business?
Well, before you spend (more) money on marketing for your lawn care business, you might like to consider the top reason most lawn care companies don’t get big, according to Andrew Pototschnik (aka The Lawn Care Millionaire). And that is…
They don’t answer their phone.
We understand that it’s hard to answer the phone when you’re busy mowing the lawn.
Note: In our experience, even when we’ve had guaranteed mowing jobs, some of our newly registered mowing guys haven’t even called us back later after they’ve finished mowing their lawns. They not only lost those jobs, but we don’t waste our time offering them future mowing jobs. I sometimes wonder if they realize how much mowing work they are potentially losing.
When customers call you, they’ve usually looked online and narrowed down a list of 3 or 4 mowing providers to call (unless they book mowing online). The first mowing provider to answer the phone, sound reasonable, and give a fair price will usually win the business.
So if you’re not answering your phone, you’re not only losing customers, but you’d be wasting any money you spend on marketing as well.
What if you can’t answer the phone?
Suppose you struggle to answer every incoming call while you are lawnmowing or because you are driving to and from customer mowing jobs. In that case, it might be time to brainstorm what else you could do to avoid losing valuable mowing customers.
Here are three ideas:
1. Improve your voicemail – so that instead of your potential customers hearing a generic voicemail message with no timeframe as to when you will get back to them, your voicemail message could say something like this… “Thank you so much for calling Braxton’s lawn mowing. Please don’t call anyone else. If you would like your lawn mowed, I promise to call you back within 15 minutes.” – or something similar. This should give you enough time to realize you have a voicemail message and to either turn off your mower or pull over your car to listen to it and decide if it is a customer that you would like to call back urgently or if it’s just another sales person that you can conveniently ignore.
2. Redirect your phone – if you don’t answer your phone within a few ring tones, consider redirecting your phone to someone who could answer for you (a business partner, a family member, or, if you get a lot of missed calls, maybe a physical phone answering service that helps small business people like yourself never to miss a call)
3. Register with us—If you’d prefer to mow the lawn and let someone else recruit and liaise with your customers, we invite you to register with us so we can find customers and take their bookings for you!
Note: If you want to hand out flyers or business cards, we can organize some GreenSocks business cards and flyers for you. These would have our phone number and website address on them but your business’s code on them—so we’d know that any job that came through with that code would be immediately offered to you first!
In summary…
So, if you want to grow your lawn care business (and not waste your marketing money), you need to either answer your phone or figure out a better way for it to be answered for you. Good luck with your lawn care business!