Do you have a green thumb, a desire for self-dependence and love spending most of your time outdoors? That should form your starting point when it comes to establishing a home-based gardening business. However, before you start spreading the word about your new found hobby cum business, you need to learn the basics of running a successful gardening business.
First, you need to understand the merits and challenges posed by a gardening business, what you need to get started and how to get ahead of the competition. The following few tips can help set you up towards the right path.
Benefits of a gardening business
Ideally, if done well, gardening can present you with a way out of the eight-hour job. Most importantly, you get to spend your life doing what you love most. With time, you will also come to appreciate the myriad of health benefits that come with spending most of your time outdoors, interacting with nature, and physically active, both physical fitness and psychological benefits.
You also have plenty of regular work given the fact that lawns and gardens require constant maintenance. At one time you will be mowing lawns, blowing leaves, planting and watering or even pruning trees in the backyard. You, therefore, have to move from one home to another and by the time you finish up with the last, you have to go back to where you started, and the cycle continues.
As long as you are in charge of your home-based gardening business, you will have control over how much you earn. You will be free to set your own rates. Most importantly you can consider expanding your skills that allow you to include more higher-paying gardening services such as building fountains and irrigation systems. However, this comes after taking up short courses in gardening and landscaping.
Challenges of running a gardening business
You should also brace for several hurdles that come with running a gardening business. For instance, understand that gardening is seasonal and that come winter, you should expect low to no business activity and thus a dwindling income stream. You, therefore, need proper budgeting skills to last you through fall.
Like any other rapidly growing business, you will soon be struggling to provide consistent quality work in the face of a burgeoning market and ever-growing demands. Take caution when handling this challenge as it threatens the very core of your business continuity.
Ideally, these benefits and challenges vary from one business to another and are dependent on such factors like location and current market environment. You, therefore, need to conduct a proper analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (a regular SWOT analysis) to get a better understanding of your chances of succeeding in the locality. What do you need to start and grow your gardening business.
More often than not, the secret to establishing a sustainable landscaping business is setting your staff up with quality gardening tools, offering competitive services, and strong interpersonal skills. It is also a good idea to keep them stocked up with any other essential materials such as greenhouse glass.
Other essential ingredients of a successful gardening business include:
Appreciate Nature
The gardening and landscaping business can prove quite profitable, but when approached with a make-money mindset, it can frustrate you. In most cases, individuals that are naturally tuned with the love for nature and passionate about keeping it organized often have the best shot at succeeding in this business.
Remain creative
How do you convince people to subscribe to your gardening service and not your competitors? By remaining innovative about the kind of services you offer and creative on how you provide them. Invest time and interest in learning as well as experimenting new gardening ideas. Understand that everyone appreciates change, especially if it is for the better. You have a greater chance of retaining a client if you introduce to creative designs and new plants that make their garden stand out from the rest in the neighborhood.
Negotiating skills
If the figures at the national bureau of labor statistics are anything to go by, you stand to make between $18 and $20 per hour with your gardening business. Nonetheless, these prices are massively generalized and in most cases, how much you earn as a gardener highly depends on your negotiation skills. In any setting, excellent negotiation skills call for always ensuring that you have the upper hand, and landscaping is no different. In this case, you get the upper hand by continually surprising your client with quality work that surpasses their expectations.
Tips to remaining ahead of competition in your locality
Avoid shortcuts
Where do you source your supplies, and are they of the right quality? Many times, you might be tempted to cut a few corners in a bid to reduce the operational costs, especially in the face of low-paying clients. However, have you considered the effect of such actions in the long run? If you can’t offer quality service with the right quality materials below a certain price, make it clear to the client. Sometimes, passing over an opportunity is better than doing it half-heartedly and having its repercussions haunt your business later.
Viral marketing
Aim at establishing a monopoly over your local market. However, note that you can only achieve this through provision of quality work and spreading the word about your company fast. Use every marketing tool at your disposal to make this happen, from word of mouth to advertising in the local social media groups and pages as well as creating a website.
The best hedge trimmers https://t.co/dlITrOBObd
— Telegraph Gardening (@TeleGardening) October 23, 2017
Offers and discounted rates: When starting up, aim at offering superior gardening services at competitive rates, but in no obvious manner, make them understand that the prices are discounted and subject to change. Experiment this for all your new clients, and once they get a hack of your work and express interest in retaining your company as their gardener, then you can consider raising the rates gradually without arousing unnecessary suspicions and most importantly without compromising on quality.
Bottom line
As long as everybody remains busy with a nine-to-five job, you will always find someone to hire your gardening and landscaping start-up. However, you must be ready to get out the house and convince your friends and everyone else in your neighborhood when you are their best choice. Remember to back your marketing claims with quality results from your home garden and backyard. Most importantly, remember to keep coming up with innovative skills aimed at further improving your already superior services thus putting you ahead of your competition always.
