Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
Replies
I would suggest you can't. If you stop doing maintenance for your existing client base they will have to get another gardener to do it. I am sure that the new gardener would also be happy to mow the lawn.
Very difficult re existing customers - you could try and find an alternative gardener for them, but then you'd have to trust them to stick to not working on the lawn. What if customer wanted them to? etc. Hard.
Way to do it is to only offer lawn/hedge services to new customers and gradually phase out old from a position of strength.
Agree with others, I reckon your cancellation rate will be very high. The customer certainly won't want to do it themselves and I wouldn't think many gardeners would want to pick up the bits you don't want either.
I turned down some jobs where I only get to do the grubby hard backbreaking work. I want to do the whole garden or bust. Of course this is within reason.
I do only lawn cutting as well. Sometimes they ask me to prune something or remove weeds too.
If the garden is so large that two or more gardeners can work it without getting in one another's way then its do-able.
But you will find that those with smaller gardens will drop you and look for a new gardener who does the whole job.
As an unqualified person in respect of garden knowledge and without the certificates of any kind who is going to pay the sort of hourly rate that can be achieved by mowing grass.
I wouldn't suggest that you could drop the maintenance side and retain the grass cutting without problem. It's a matter of gearing up for a quality grass cutting service and advertise accordingly. For instance I sharpen the blades on my mower every day. A bit unnecessary perhaps but I advertised the fact and now with 90 customers to show for my efforts I am very happy.
Around where I live no one advertised a quality grass cutting service, stripes, neatly trimmed edges etc.
I first advertised in this way and bingo attracted clients that didn't just want their grass cut but wanted it to take on the look of a classic English mowed lawn. I sometimes double mow as it intensifies, imo the stripes and that is what sells again imo.
As mentioned before with 90 lawn cut customers it generates a lot of hedge/bush trimming jobs for the Autumn & Winter, more than I can possibly get through taking into account the bad weather days to work between.
Good Luck.
Gordon. Do you simply say no when customers ask you to weed and do other time consuming jobs or have you a way of getting the lawn job without the extras.
Seems to me, if it can't be done with an engine attached, someone else can get their hands dirty and do it.
Yes I simply advise that I cut and shape things.
I don't dig anymore. The last person that I weeded for died earlier this year at 101. I put a post on here about the great old gent.
".......a quality grass cutting service, stripes, neatly trimmed edges etc......." "...I sometimes double mow as it intensifies, imo the stripes and that is what sells again imo......" Isn't that what 'lawn care' is all about?