7 Christmas Light Business Mistakes to Avoid

Whether you’re a new or established business, avoiding the most common Christmas light business mistakes can ensure your long-lasting and profitable success.

Use this article to avoid the biggest Christmas light business mistakes in order to:

• Mitigate liability
• Maximize profits
• Increase client retention
• Keep your best employees

Even though these common Christmas light business mistakes are damaging, they’re relatively easy to avoid when you follow the basic pro strategies in this article.

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1. Maintaining the Same Prices Every Year

By maintaining the same prices every year, you’re essentially leaving profits on the table.

Between the inflation of labor, transportation, and materials, it’s crucial to reassess your prices every year.

Plus, since holiday light installation is a one-time installation each season, many clients will forget your old prices.

Remember, price increases allow you to:

• Expand your services
• Scale faster with maximum profits
• Adequately compensate your team
• Properly maintain commercial equipment
• Continue to provide high-quality holiday lighting services

2. Failing to Choose a Reputable Commercial Light Supplier

Before we get started on why finding a reputable commercial Christmas light supplier is fundamental to your success, let’s talk about light distribution.

It’s important to note that the most successful Christmas light businesses buy their own commercial lights and lease them out to clients every year.

This way, you can:

• Minimize light troubleshooting
• Ensure consistent, high-quality commercial lights
• Maintain a clean, professional installation outcome
• Streamline the lighting installation training process
• Easily keep the spare parts you need on-hand at all times
• Ensure all lights are properly stored and maintained from year to year

As a result, in order to sell holiday lighting services at a premium price point, it’s critical to choose a reputable commercial supplier.

After all, clients won’t want to pay a premium for residential lights they can easily buy on their own.

Don’t make one of the most common Christmas light business mistakes that bottlenecks so many businesses.

Instead of buying residential equipment or purchasing from random suppliers, it’s vital to choose a reputable commercial holiday light supplier.

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3. Using Faulty Equipment

Faulty equipment is one of the biggest Christmas light business mistakes that can quickly kill your profits.

Take a look at a few of the most common ways holiday light businesses use faulty equipment:

• Choosing subpar equipment
• Using a client’s personal lights
• Not properly maintaining equipment or maintenance
• Failing to replace old, broken, or outdated equipment

Remember, faulty equipment can:

• Decrease client satisfaction with subpar work
• Increase labor costs with constant troubleshooting
• Delay other jobs due to the continual troubleshooting
• Reduce employee satisfaction and increase burnout due to frustration

For these reasons, it’s important to be mindful of the equipment you choose for your business. Plus, it’s equally important to prioritize routine maintenance and equipment fixes.

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4. Not Utilizing Your Existing Lawn Care Clients

If you’re a dual holiday light and lawn care business, then you have the ultimate advantage of being able to easily convert existing lawn care clients into holiday lighting services.

One of the easiest ways to maximize this incredible valuable advantage is by launching an automated email marketing campaign.

Then, you can kick your campaign up a notch by offering incentives, such as:

• Referral offers for gift cards, tickets, or experiences for every successful referral
• Exclusive discounts or upsells for existing lawn care clients purchasing light installation

Plus, did you know you can easily launch your automated email marketing campaign in Service Autopilot using automations?

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5. Forgoing an Ironclad Contract

An ironclad contract is crucial to securing the long-term success of your business because it mitigates:

• Lawsuits
• Client conflicts
• Potential liabilities

Plus, the right contract allows you to:

• Create mutually trusting relationships with clients
• Set clear expectations and obligations for both parties
• Ensure there are no miscommunications between either party

As always, remember to have a trusted lawyer or legal consultant review the contract before putting it into use.

Also, it’s vital to review the contract every year for updates. This way, you can update the contract as various events and complications arise. 

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6. Forgoing Pre-Season Visits

Even if you’ve had the same client for many years, it’s still important to conduct pre-season visits every year.

Before you begin installing lights, you’ll want to ensure nothing has changed on the property since the previous season.

These are a few of the main items your crews should look for at pre-season visits:

• Look for roof hazards
• Document pre-existing damages
• Check for electrical limitations or hazards
• Determine if an electrician is needed before installation

Then, you can ensure every job is safe for your crews. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to document any pre-existing damages or create action plans based on electrical limitations.

By the way, did you know, you can easily add before/after photos and job notes on-the-go using the best software? This is one of the easiest ways to document pre-season visits!

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7. Hiring and Onboarding Mishaps

Hiring and onboarding mishaps are one of the leading Christmas light business mistakes that can hinder long-term success and profitability.

When you focus on maintaining a full, well-trained, talented team, you’ll be able to focus more on high-quality services and profitability.

Take a look at some of the best ways you can keep your team happy and high-performing:

• Streamline all training to be uniform
• Focus on safety training to minimize injuries and liabilities
• Prioritize software training and use it to track performance progress
• Use GPS and time tracking to enhance team performance and profitability
• Standardize as much equipment as possible to simplify the training process

Plus, you can easily transition your existing lawn care employees into Christmas light installation—virtually keeping them on your team year-round.

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Be Successful By Avoiding These Common Christmas Light Business Mistakes

By avoiding these top Christmas light business mistakes, you can

• Minimize potential liabilities
• Hire and keep the top local talent
• Maximize profits on your services
• Make clients happy to return every year

Finally, you can avoid these most common Christmas light business mistakes, and use these expert strategies to scale faster and promote long-term success!

Related: How Profitable Is the Christmas Light Business?

Originally published Dec 5, 2023 7:00 AM CT