As the peak growing season is waning in most parts of the country, most lawn care companies are in the process of cutting back on their operations as well. In areas where winter snow and ice will affect lawn care services in the coming months, this doesn’t mean you have to hibernate and wait until next spring to continue growing your business.

While most landscaping and lawn care businesses dislike this time of year because of everything that comes with leaf fall – letting go of workers, cutting expenses, and most of all, reducing revenue. ), it doesn’t have to be so depressing.

In fact, the next few months provide a perfect opportunity to grow your business. As normal operations slow down, you will have the opportunity to work IN your business and not just IN your business.

Here are five ways you can take advantage of the impending slowdown to grow your landscaping and lawn care business in the months to come.

1. Provide services in addition to typical lawn care services.

While there are many ways to grow your business, the only way that often escapes the attention of businesses is to practice providing more and more services to your existing customer base. Since you’ve already invested time and money in getting them as customers and earning their trust, why wouldn’t you want to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets to maximize customer value?

Adding in end-of-the-year services like central aeration, overseeding, hulling, and general winterizing is a perfect way to get more revenue from customers who have already shown their trust in you. If you don’t already provide these services, do whatever it takes to add them to your service portfolio as quickly as possible.

Additionally, I’ve heard many say that advertising is only effective at the beginning of the growing season, but these ancillary services also provide an excellent opportunity to expand your existing customer base. Most people want a lush green lawn, but they don’t realize that now is the time to make that happen for next year. Educating people about this will open countless doors for you in the coming growing seasons.

Create a marketing campaign focused on these “end of the year” lawn care processes and then market just as you would at the beginning of the year. Postcards, door hangers, and brochures are great ways to promote these services, and with a well-designed campaign, there’s no reason you can’t attract a large number of new customers.

2. Add additional services other than lawn care.

Once again, one of the best ways to grow your business is by digging deeper and deeper into the pockets of your existing customers. You have already earned their trust, why not branch out into other related services?

With the arrival of winter, it means a whole new range of services that people will be looking to pay for. People who pay for lawn care are generally willing to pay for other services, such as clearing fallen leaves, clearing snow and ice roads and paths, trimming trees or shrubs, cleaning gutters, and even hanging Christmas lights or other seasonal decorations.

These additional services not only provide the opportunity to get more business from your existing clients, but also provide you with another service to market in areas where you would like to expand your business.

Although your primary business is probably lawn care, finding clients for these new services will give you new clients to market your lawn care services in the spring.

3. Develop a website.

As mentioned above, with things starting to slow down a bit, now is the perfect time to work on your business and not just your business.

what do I want to say with that? Well, going out and tending the lawn, teaching employees, handling payroll, paying bills, and distributing advertising materials all constitute work IN your business. You’re doing things that need to be done to keep you going.

Working in your business involves doing the things you do to make your business run more smoothly and profitably. These are the activities that you don’t need to do today, but doing them will result in greater efficiency, higher profit margins, and a more effective business overall.

Developing a website turns out to be one of these activities. While it doesn’t HAVE to be done, creating one will give you a decided advantage over your competition.

More and more people are flocking to the Internet to search for and research products and services, including lawn care services. Having a well-designed direct response website that grabs your visitors’ attention and contact information will set you up for a new business windfall in the months to come.

4. Create a customer newsletter.

As with developing a website, this is another activity that is not critical to running a successful lawn care business. However, this is something that will go a long way towards strengthening your relationship with your existing customers.

Typically, most customers only think of you during the summer months when you are repairing their lawn or when they receive a bill. They will usually forget about you during the winter months until they receive a flyer from you next spring requesting your business.

Creating a customer newsletter develops something called “presence” and keeps you at the forefront of their minds as the expert on having a beautiful lawn. Next year, instead of having to call them to start the relationship for another year, they will call you.

The newsletter does not have to be very large or complex. At the very least, it should contain relevant lawn care information that positions you as an expert. If you also provide additional services, a newsletter is an excellent opportunity to market these services or even to provide special incentives to try these additional services. The key is to make it relevant and personal with just a touch of marketing.

You can create a print newsletter and then mail it to your best customers or, if you have email addresses, you can also create an email newsletter. While the newsletter is more likely to be read on paper, an ezine, if done right, will reach a large number of your customers and it won’t cost you a penny to send it out.

5. Study successful direct marketing techniques.

This is another activity that falls into the category of working on your business.

Whether you realize it or not, your main job is not to provide lawn care services. Your main job is to market your lawn care services because without clients to provide these services to, you would be looking for another profession.

Just as you study and search for better ways to provide lawn care services, you should also be studying and looking for better ways to market your lawn care services. With the slowdown in operations associated with this time of year, now is the perfect opportunity to learn new things that will help you be more successful next spring and for years to come.

Studying and learning the proven principles of successful direct response marketing will help you avoid all the hype associated with ‘flavor of the month’ marketing tactics and better understand what you can do to reach your sales goals.

Just because the weather is turning cold doesn’t mean you need to hibernate until spring.

If you plan to wait until next spring to work on growing your lawn care business, you will find that you have wasted several months and many opportunities to work on your business.

Take advantage of this time to dig deep into your clients’ pockets by expanding your service portfolio, finding additional clients through related services other than lawn care, implementing things that will give you greater exposure to existing clients as well as those who seek. their services and learn about ways to better market your business.