Understanding who your ideal client is critical to the success of your landscaping business; we need to understand who we are selling to and working so hard to please in order to set our business up for success.
We define an ideal client as the clients who are the most enjoyable to work with, are sustainable or you can build a business off of the work, and are profitable with their current pricing. Then we layer our strategy on top of this to further refine which ideal clients we want to do more work with.
For example, one of our strategic initiatives for 2021 and 2022 at Grunder Landscaping Co. is to grow our maintenance division. This is how we're doing it:
- We're targeting more commercial properties. While our main focus is still on residential work, since our shift to Aspire Software we know our numbers so well that we're able to be more competitive on commercial maintenance. Bundling snow removal with our commercial maintenance contracts is also a key part of our efforts to fill our schedule year-round and avoid involuntary winter layoffs.
- We're introducing our design-build clients to a LandKeepingTM Consultant when their jobs are near complete. We've done this for years, but we're being very intentional about trying to convert our design-build clients to maintenance contracts. We're also going back to clients we've worked with in the past to see if they are interested now.
- We're putting door hangers in neighborhoods we already have routes in. We can improve route density and improve our profitability by picking up clients in neighborhoods our trucks are already in.
- Our external messaging is prioritizing maintenance services. We're talking about the benefits of having professionals on your property in our social media posts, and reminding clients that we're setting our 2022 maintenance routes and schedules now. Ideally, we want new maintenance clients to contact us before January 1.
- We keep our existing clients happy. We survey our maintenance clients to make sure they're happy with our services throughout the year, and we're always here to fix something if it isn't right. The best marketing of all is to do good work.
Are you trying to make maintenance a greater share of your business, too? Increase sales or better manage the leads coming in? If so our upcoming Virtual Sales Bootcamp on December 15-16 is a great investment for you and your sales team. For $299 you'll get two days of sales training from Chris Psencik, an experienced green industry salesperson and coach, and myself. Register and put it on the conference room tv for your team to train together.
We'll talk to you again next week!
Marty Grunder
President & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.