Okay, so you’ve bought the best lawn mower, whipper snipper, leaf blower – and you even picked up a great lawn edger on sale. You’re also driving around in a new trailer that is 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 letter box 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

Yes, it’s that simple.

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. Needless to say, they not only lost those jobs, but we don’t waste our time offering them future mowing jobs. I sometimes wonder if they realise how much mowing work they are potentially losing.

As Andrew says…

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?

If you struggle to answer every incoming call while you are lawnmowing, or because you are driving to and from customer mowing jobs, it might be time to brainstorm what else you could do so you do not lose valuable mowing customers.

Here are 3 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 realise 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 to never 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’re the ones finding customers and taking the customer bookings for you!

Note: If you’re wanting to hand out flyers or business cards, we can organise some GreenSocks business cards and flyers for you, which would have our phone number and website address on them, but have your business’s code on it – 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!