Up Selling to Your Lawn Care Customers

When you begin to build your lawn care business, the backbone of that business is that roster of loyal customers. When you can take good care of the mowing, edging and other basic lawn care functions that those customers require of you, that is the foundation of a profitable lawn care business. But as the owner of the business, you are always thinking of ways to expand your business and reach the next plateau of profitability and growth.

One level of growth comes from gaining new customers for your existing services that you and your crew do so well. Marketing, advertising and networking to friends and neighbors of your existing customers are all outstanding ways of adding customers to your roster of loyal clients who will help you become more profitable this year. But there is another level of growth that do just much to improve the profitability of your company and that is up selling to your existing customer base.

Up selling consists of developing and offering new services to your existing customers to broaden the range of things you can do for them. Up selling has been proven to be one of the most reliable ways to increase profits and to grow your business without having to invest any money in marketing or advertising. That is because your existing customers already know you. They are aware of how good you are at what you do. So when you can offer a new service or a range of services to them that they can benefit from, they are open to your promotions because that relationship is already there.

You also have a lot of credibility with your customers as a lawn care expert and that credibility can be translated into more business from the customers you already have. By keeping your client's yards looking great, your customers develop a trust that you know what their yards and gardens need. So if you come to them with additional services that are natural add on services to what you already for them, that is a natural expansion of that relationship of trust.

An easy to implement up sell is to offer fertilization and weed control services. Since you already spend time on your customer's yard each week, it would be easy enough for you to apply the right kind of yard treatment to keep the weeds down and the yard growing full and lush for your customers. You can also apply pesticides and pre-emergent in the fall and winter and in that way offer year round services to your customers.

Once you get your customers thinking of you as their "go to" service for anything that might need to be done on the property, the range of services you can offer are vast. You can provide services as diverse as cutting and delivering firewood, repairing fence, putting and then taking down Christmas lights, cleaning gutters, tree trimming and gardening.

Before long, it will be your customers thinking of ways you can up sell to them. It will be your job to continue expand the skills and uses of your equipment and your crew to provide those services to your customers. But in doing so, you are becoming more valuable to your existing client base. And you are increasing the size of the weekly or monthly invoice those customers happily pay for your services. That is smart marketing and smart business management as well.