Let's TalkLet's TalkTwo businesses under one name - recurring maintenance won on route density and design-build projects won on a portfolio - and a calendar that squeezes a year's selling into a few spring weeks.
Give us access to your ad accounts, your Google Business Profile and a season of enquiries. We come back with how your spend and enquiries split between maintenance, lawn care and design-build, how dense your routes are, when your enquiries actually arrive across the year, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
A weekly maintenance customer is worth a steady amount every month of the season and is decided largely on price, reliability and whether you already serve the street. A design-build project is a five-figure decision made over weeks on the strength of a portfolio and a plan. One campaign and one website serve neither well, and the cheaper maintenance enquiries quietly take the budget from the projects.
Homeowners notice their gardens when the weather turns, and every landscaping company is suddenly busy at once. Companies that only market in spring pay the highest prices for attention, turn work away because crews are full, and go quiet for months. Design consultations booked in winter, and maintenance contracts renewed before the rush, spread the selling across the year.
Maintenance and lawn treatment are profitable when stops are close together and wasteful when crews drive across town between them. Most companies accept whatever customers call, wherever they live, and end up with scattered routes that look busy and earn little. Marketing that concentrates on neighbourhoods where you already work is worth more per customer than marketing everywhere.
Design-build work is sold on what homeowners can see. Most landscaping sites show a handful of unlabelled photos with no explanation of the brief, the plants, the materials or the budget range. A homeowner planning a five-figure garden needs to see finished work like theirs, and most companies give them almost nothing to look at.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
They have different buyers, different decision times and different economics, and most landscaping marketing blurs them. We give each its own campaigns, pages, follow-up and reporting, so the design-build work - usually where the margin sits - is funded on its own terms rather than losing every month to the cheaper mowing enquiries.
The companies that are fully booked in spring usually started selling in winter - design consultations while homeowners are planning, maintenance renewals before competitors call, early-booking incentives for the busy weeks. We build that calendar with you, so the spring rush fills your capacity at better prices instead of forcing you to turn work away.
A new maintenance customer on a street you already serve is worth more than one across town, because the crew is already there. We concentrate maintenance and lawn care marketing on the neighbourhoods around your existing routes, which makes every customer more profitable and every van more visible.
Maintenance, lawn treatment and design-build separated in spend, pages and reporting.
Where your existing customers are, and where new maintenance customers would be most profitable.
Finished projects documented with the brief, materials, plants and budget range.
Winter design consultations, early renewals and the spring and autumn pushes, against crew capacity.
The AI chatbot on every written enquiry and missed calls flagged for an immediate call-back.
Project contracts, recurring revenue and route density, monthly.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
Snow removal in colder climates, leaf clean-ups, holiday lighting, winter pruning and design work all give crews something to do and customers a reason to stay in touch through the quiet months. Marketed deliberately, they turn a seasonal business into a year-round relationship and make the spring renewal much easier.
In drier regions, homeowners are replacing thirsty lawns with water-efficient planting, and some water utilities offer rebates for doing so. A company that explains the options and the local rebate process reaches homeowners with a clear financial reason to start a project.
Homeowner associations, office parks and property managers buy maintenance through contracts, often by bid, on reliability and communication rather than on a search ad. A few of those accounts provide steady, predictable work that no residential campaign can match, and they need their own approach.
Irrigation systems, landscape lighting, drainage and seasonal colour are easy conversations with an existing maintenance customer who already trusts the crew. A simple upgrade programme turns a recurring customer into a project customer without any new acquisition cost.
The nearest engagement we can point at is a home goods brand rather than a landscaping company, and we will not present it as a trade case study. It is relevant for one reason: it was a seasonal business, and the offer was rebuilt to smooth the seasonal dips into year-round revenue - $2.3M in revenue and 180% year-on-year growth. That is the same problem every landscaping company faces each winter; the landscaping specifics here come from how the trade works.
Read the full case studyBetween recurring maintenance and design-build projects, and often lawn treatment as a third line. Each has different buyers, decision times and values. Give each its own campaigns, pages and follow-up, and judge maintenance on recurring revenue and route density and projects on signed contract value.
All year, in different ways. Winter for design consultations and maintenance renewals, early spring for the rush, autumn for clean-ups and next year's projects, and off-season services where your climate allows. Companies that only market in spring pay the most for attention and still end up turning work away.
Show finished work properly - each project with the brief, the materials, the plants and a budget range - and give design-build its own campaigns and a follow-up that lasts as long as the decision. Booking design consultations in winter, when homeowners are planning, fills the spring schedule with projects rather than one-off jobs.
Concentrate maintenance marketing on the neighbourhoods around your existing routes. Neighbour referral offers, yard signs where permitted and local campaigns around current customers add stops close to ones you already have, which lowers the cost of every visit.
Be careful with safety claims about any pesticide or fertiliser product. Explain instead what is applied, when, and what homeowners should do before and after - for example keeping children and pets off the lawn until it has dried - and check the rules that apply to lawn treatment advertising in your state.
It depends on your mix of maintenance and projects and on your crew capacity in peak season - not on a fixed figure. A smaller budget works best concentrated on one line of business and your core neighbourhoods, planned across the year rather than spent in a spring panic.
Yes, with a different plan. Commercial maintenance is won through relationships, bids and contracts with homeowner associations, property managers and businesses, far more than through search ads. It needs its own pages and outreach and should be reported separately from residential work.
This page is the business. These are the individual pieces of it, each written for how that discipline actually behaves in this industry.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
No pitch deck, no discovery call you have to sit through. Tell us the situation and we will tell you whether we can help.