Hopefully
your lawn care business was successful and you were able to reach
all of your goals and objectives for 2005. Perhaps you've been
thinking about starting a lawn care business and are gearing up
to get started in 2006. Or perhaps you've been in business for
a few years and have managed to build a successful business that
is providing you the lifestyle you were hoping for when you started.
Whatever the case, I sincerely hope this past year was good to
you.
Whatever
situation you find yourself in and with only a few hours remaining
before the New Year begins, now is the perfect opportunity to
take some time to look back and reflect on your accomplishments
during the past year. By reviewing your achievements, results,
stumbles, and setbacks of the past 365 days you can give yourself
some insight into the areas you can improve upon in the coming
year.
If
growing your business is one of your goals for the upcoming year,
then this list of 5 things to review will give you a lot of insight
into the areas that you can work on to help make that happen.
1.
Prepare a 'state of the business' report.
Just
as the President of the United States stands before our elected
leaders each year and gives a 'report' on the status of the country,
it's important you do the same for your business. Doing this gives
you the opportunity to examine, analyze, and reflect upon your
business over the past year.
Hopefully
you made some business goals at the beginning of the year and
you should use these goals as a basis against which to judge your
performance. Some of the goals and numbers you'll want to examine
include sales goals, number of new customers acquired, number
of customers retained, income vs. expense ratios, any customer
comments received during the year, and the state of your equipment.
Examining
these numbers and comparing them to your projections at the beginning
of the year will give you a good feeling for the direction your
business is headed. If things don't look so great, now's the perfect
opportunity to determine why and make plans to ensure the tale
isn't repeated again next year. If the numbers look better than
expected, pat yourself on the back and resolve to continue the
strong performance in the year to come.
2.
Review the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Now
even though marketing isn't the 'be all, end all' to success in
business, it certainly plays a role in the ability of a business
to grow and expand. Things such as equipment maintenance, employee
effectiveness, and overall expense control are all vitally important
aspects of running a successful business. However, without the
ability to attract, acquire, and retain new customers, your lawn
care business would stagnate and you'd soon find yourself out
on the streets looking for a new job.
Because
marketing plays such an important role in your ability to grow
your lawn care business, now's a perfect time to analyze how effective
your marketing efforts were over the previous year. What types
of campaigns did you do? How often did you run a marketing campaign?
What was the response percentage from each campaign you ran? What
was the average acquisition cost of a new customer? How much overall
did you spend on marketing? What was the percentage of your total
expenses?
Just
as knowing your costs for each job is important to being able
to submit a quality bid, knowing your marketing costs and expected
returns is extremely important to being able to market and grow
your business. If you're unable to answer specific questions about
your marketing efforts, that's a sure sign you need to develop
a system for tracking the results of your marketing. If you did
have a system in place and the numbers don't look so good, determine
right now to make effective marketing a higher priority in 2005.
3.
Determine your most effective marketing methods.
After
reviewing the general status of your lawn care business and the
overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you should examine
the most effective marketing method used in the previous year.
Why was it so effective? What was my response rate from this method?
What customers did I acquire using this method? What kind of customers
are they?
Once
you've determined which method was the most effective and why,
next think about ways you can carry of the things that made that
method so successful over to your other marketing efforts. Was
it a particular headline you used? Was it effective because of
the medium you used? Was it an offer that was presented? Was it
because of the market you targeted?
Whatever
you determine to be the reasons it was so effective, compare it
to those methods that weren't as effective. What changes could
you have made? What offers could you have added? What target market
could I have sent this to?
Answering
these questions will again give you a head start when it comes
to preparing yourself for the coming year and your marketing efforts
will be twice as effective. Knowing what works and why will put
you miles ahead of your competition that is still not sure where
to spend their marketing dollars.
4.
Analyze your customer lists.
Whether
you realize this or not, your most valuable asset is your existing
customer base. These people are the golden goose to your lawn
care business. It's these people that have already demonstrated
their trust in you that will help you to grow your business beyond
its current level.
To
truly utilize this valuable asset, it's important to understand
your customers inside and outside, backwards and forwards, right-side
up and upside down. Why is it so important? Because you want to
get as many customers as possible that are JUST LIKE the customers
you already have. Heck, you'd want to clone your existing customers
if it were at all possible.
By
analyzing and understanding your current customers you'll give
yourself a great deal of insight into what you can do to make
your marketing efforts more effective in the future. If it's a
residential account, where do they live? What kind of dwelling
is it? What's their age bracket? Do they have kids? What kind
of car do they drive? What do they like to do with their spare
time?
If
it's a commercial account, what kind of property is it? Who's
responsible for making purchasing decisions about service providers?
Is it a large company with many properties or a small company
with one property?
If
you'd like to grow in size and target a new customer base, analyzing
your past and present customer base will help you to do this as
you'll be able to draw some comparisons between your current customers
and the new customers you'd like to reach.
5.
Resolve to do better next year.
Finally,
no matter how well you did or didn't do in the previous year,
the benefit of a new year is that it's a clean slate. You have
another 365 days in front of you to do better than you did the
previous year.
As
my good friend Richard
Flint says quite frequently, yesterday is the room upon which
you draw experiences to use today that will help you build the
tomorrow of your dreams. In other words, use the lessons you learn
from this exercise to build a profitable tomorrow. Take the numbers,
no matter how good or bad, and use them to formulate an action
plan for 2006. Take your experiences from this past year and put
them to work as you set out to make next year a banner year for
you and your lawn care business.
Each
of these steps will go a long way towards helping you understand
your business in greater detail. Don't simply rely on your accountant
to tell you what's happening with your business. Don't just sit
at your desk and assume everything's great and that nothing could
be improved upon simply because all your bills are paid and money's
rolling in.
Take
the time to look under the hood of your business and find out
what's going on. Doing this will give you a leg-up and a head
start on all your competition and it will ensure that when you
do this again next year, the results will be all good news.
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Chestin Salisbury is President of Lawn
Care Marketing Magic, a direct response marketing consultancy
located in Charlotte, NC that focuses on the lawncare and landscaping
industry. He has been helping small businesses grow for 5+ years
by creating marketing systems that use time-tested direct response
marketing principles. Lawn
Care Marketing Magic has access to 100+ years of experience
and is capable of creating a marketing plan that grows YOUR business.
Chestin is also the chief-editor of 'The Lawn Care Marketing Magic
Minute', a weekly e-newsletter that focuses on helping your grow
your business. You can obtain a free lifetime subscription by
sending a blank email to: easytips@lawncaremarketingmagic.com
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