The Top 5 Ways to Survive a Lawn Care Hiring Crisis

A lawn care hiring crisis affects countless businesses across the nation, and yours is no exception. However, there are ways you can survive until the calm before the storm.

Fortunately, a lawn care hiring crisis doesn’t mean you have to stop growing your business. Instead, you need to find NEW, innovative ways to continue your lawn care business growth.

In this quick guide, you’ll get the top 5 pro strategies to help you survive a lawn care hiring crisis so you can:

• Properly increase your prices to accommodate higher labor costs
• Utilize the best hiring strategies used by lawn care business owners
• Explore various ways to keep your best employees for years to come

… And so much MORE!

By the end of this article, you’ll have everything you need to survive and thrive during a lawn care hiring crisis.

1. Put Your Lawn Care Business Growth on Autopilot

In order to survive the lawn care hiring crisis, you’ll need the best lawn care software to save time and money by streamlining your everyday operations and putting everything on autopilot.

The #1 lawn care software gives you the power to take back your business and optimize your employee efficiency by freeing up their time for more important things.

With Service Autopilot, you and your employees have the ability to instantly complete everyday tasks that used to take extra time.

Now, you can experience optimized everyday operations:

• Instant invoicing
• Automatic routing
• Detailed reporting
• Same-day payments
• Estimates from anywhere

When you use Service Autopilot, the sky's the limit.

Utilize these features (and more!) to help decrease your workload so you can survive the lawn care hiring shortage.

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2. Raise Your Lawn Care Pricing

In the last year, compensation has increased 2.6%, wages/salaries have increased 2.7%, and benefits have increased 2.5%.

With the rising employment cost, it’s important you reevaluate your lawn care pricing to ensure you’re still meeting your goals.

As a result, you need to raise lawn care prices on clients who aren’t meeting your goals.

Here’s a quick 5-step process for raising your lawn care prices:

1. Find your break-even point, then take your profit goals into consideration.
2. Raise your prices on unprofitable clients first.
3. Don’t raise your prices during the selling season (you don’t want clients going to your competition). Raise your prices during the middle of the season, end of the summer, and the beginning of fall (or the end of your season).
4. Before rolling out the price increase to everyone, test your price increase on your least profitable clients first.
5. Send a letter explaining to your clients why their prices are increasing, and really sell them on it.

In order to make your life easier, I suggest using a great lawn care software, like Service Autopilot, to instantly pull the information you need.

Also, be sure to download your FREE lawn care pricing calculator, and fix your pricing in less than 10 minutes!

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Here's a FREE pricing calculator to help you grow your lawn care business - so you can know that your jobs actually make money.

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3. Take Advantage of the Best Lawn Care Hiring Strategies

During a lawn care labor crisis, it’s important you know how to take advantage of the best lawn care hiring strategies.

First off, in order to find the right employees, you need to be able to attract the right candidates. Here’s how to do it in three steps:

1. Make your lawn care business look professional by utilizing the top lawn care marketing strategies.
2. Focus your efforts on creating effective, low-cost Facebook Ads to target specific neighborhoods.
3. Use your local connections to network and ask vendors, great existing employees, friends, and family for recommendations of great talent.

Then, once you attract potential candidates, you’ll have to make sure they’re the best lawn care employee for your business.

Check out our FREE lawn care hiring guide to ensure you’re properly screening them and asking the right questions.

Want to know how to find, train, AND keep great employees?

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4. Prioritize Your Lawn Care Employee Retention

Now that you know how to hire the right lawn care employees, you need to know how to keep the great ones that you already have.

In order to keep your amazing employees, you need to make sure you’re properly compensating your lawn care employees.

Plus, the right lawn care employee salary helps you to keep the talent you already have as well as attract new talent.

Use these steps to set your lawn care employee wage at the right, competitive amount:

1. Price your services right.
2. Know the average wages in your market.
3. Pay your employees well - typically, your overhead (including your salary) should make up about 12% of sales.
4. Incentivize your employees to stay with things like bonuses for consecutive years worked and annual pay raises.
5. Obey Overtime Laws.

Now, you have a basic understanding of everything you need to know about the best lawn care hiring practices.

Pro Tip! Simplify the process of calculating your lawn care employee salary with our FREE lawn care employee wage guide and calculator.

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In addition to properly paying your employees, there are numerous other ways you can prioritize your lawn care employee retention.

Here are a few ideas for motivating your employees all year long:

• Lay out a career path for them
• Award gift cards “just because”
• Host monthly drawings for prizes
• Provide end-of-year or seasonal bonuses
• Be an example to your lawn care employees
• Implement a commission program for new clients
• Provide a membership to a gym or warehouse club
• Privately and publicly acknowledge their accomplishments
• Address their mistakes and provide a path for improvement

These are just a few of the many ways you can keep your employees during a lawn care labor crisis. When in doubt, ask your best employees what types of motivating compensations they’d like to see!

5. Implement Robotic Mowers into Your Workforce

While robotic mowers might not be a feasible solution for all businesses during a lawn care labor crisis, it just might be the right solution for you.

If you mow small lawns, and many of your jobs are weekly maintenance trims, then robotic mowers might be the answer to your lawn care hiring problems.

For instance, a robotic mower might cut out the need for an extra employee if your employee could be edging while the robotic mower is mowing.

Even though these robotic mowers typically only mow about one acre, you might be able to use it to help your employees finish jobs faster.

Consider how many lawns you need to mow versus how many acres your robotic mower can mow. This will tell you how many mowers you’ll need to help you decide if robotic mowers are feasible for your lawn care business. 

How to Hire Your Best Employees… Starting Right Now

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Keep Growing Your Business During a Lawn Care Hiring Crisis

It’s easy to get intimidated by a lawn care hiring crisis. However, you now have everything you need to utilize these top strategies and keep growing your business during a lawn care labor shortage.

When you know the right steps to take, you’ll have the power to do things like:

• Keep your best lawn care employees
• Hire the top talent in your local market
• Put your lawn care business growth on autopilot

Follow these pro strategies, take back control of your lawn care business, and start thriving again!

Related: Lawn Care Hiring Guide: How to Hire the Best Employees

Originally published July 8, 2021 4:28 PM