Starting a Landscaping Business

When starting a landscaping business, you provide landscape planning and installation, landscape architecture, lawn care, and landscape and grounds maintenance services. Your customers can range from individual homeowners to large corporations.

There are a couple of different types of landscaping businesses you can start:

1. A Landscape Contracting Business

Carry out the plans designed by landscape architecture establishments. They develop a budget for the project in consultation with the client, hire the workers and subcontractors, provide any equipment needed, and obtain the plants to install.

2. Landscaping, lawn maintenance, and ground-keeping business

Establish and maintain grounds, lawns, and gardens for homeowners as well as for governments, colleges and universities, real estate and land developers, and other private businesses.

These businesses are responsible for designing, planting, mulching, watering, fertilizing, mowing, and seeding lawns and grounds; applying pesticides; installing turf and sod; and pruning plants and trees for both new and existing landscapes. They also clear outdoor areas of debris and leaves, remove snow, and maintain all outdoor amenities and decorative features such as pools and other athletic facilities, fountains, benches, and planters.

A growing number of residential and commercial clients, such as managers of office buildings, shopping malls, multiunit residential buildings, and hotels and motels, favor full-service landscape maintenance.

There is also a growing opportunity for indoor landscaping that will continue to increase the growth of this business.

People find themselves spending more and more time in cramped offices with cold walls and lifeless entryways. By marketing to building landlords and business owners on the importance of an indoor landscape, you can open up an opportunity for a successful niche.

Valuable skills/Requirements of the landscaping business

The Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) offers certification as a Certified Landscape Professional or a Certified Landscape Technician. The hands-on test for technicians covers areas such as maintenance equipment operation and the installation of plants by reading a plan. There is also a safety test given for certification.

The cost is $500 for non-members of the organization and $275 if you become a member, which is recommended for credibility and marketing purposes. Aside from passing the required exam, you will either need a four-year bachelors degree, a two-year associate degree or a certificate approved by the ALCA. There is also a requirement of time spent working in the field, ranging from three to five years. If you don’t have one of the education requirements you should have five or more years experience in a managerial position.

How much you can make

You can work alone or build a company into a large corporation, hiring laborers to do the work. The challenge, as with any business – is finding employees with enough drive and ambition to push through hot summer days spent outdoors.

But this is where to money comes in.

For a one-man lawn care service, you can expect anywhere from $35 to $100 per lawn – with an hourly fee you would use for your estimates towards the $35 range.

There are plenty of landscape businesses that grew from a one-man lawn mowing operation and became a multi million-dollar corporation.

Startup Costs/What you need to begin

What’s nice about the lawn care business is a lot of know-how will bring you more income than fancy equipment. Understanding landscape architecture and having in-depth knowledge of the following:

• Sensitivity to landscape quality
• Ability to analyze problems in terms of design and physical form.
• Technical competence to translate design for a planned landscape.
• Solid business and customer relationship skills.