Landscape Startup

An ambitious college kid was looking to line up snow shoveling clients in his neighborhood for the coming winter. In past years, I have shoveled and used a snow blower to make a little extra cash in the winter. It pays about $100 an hour, but you can only get about 8-10 hours in before getting exhausted. Plus, if you have snow removal contracts for the winter there’s no vacationing far away for long periods of time all winter long.

Last year there were dozens of kids posting their snow removal services online every time it snowed. This year I will call up every single one of them and offer them an incentive to hand out flyers for my landscape service. I’m not sure if I should pay just a referral fee for anyone who signs up or just pay the kids to hand out flyers. After reading Jack Stack’s book, The Great Game of Business, it may be better to make a game out of getting referrals.

With the yahoo groups I can instantly email details of the contest, a sales pitch for the kids to give to their clients and pdf’s of flyers for them to print out. I can also help them increase their revenue per client every storm by providing a service to protect shrubs from being damaged by being overweighted with snow. I simply brush off the snow with a broom in an upwards motion. A few minutes of work can prevent hundreds of dollars in replacement costs and it gives me an opportunity to interact with new clients. How many landscapers out there do you think area going to stop plowing, get out of their heated trucks and brush snow off of a few plants.

I should also be able to work with the kids to salt their customers sidewalks and driveways. Most of them walk house to house banging on doors. If their clients want salting they can either call or text message me with the addresses. Yet another way to get referrals.

To sum it all up: I can either shovel snow for $100 an hour and make $800-1000 per snow storm (around here we get 2-4 a year if we are lucky) or I can work with dozens of kids going around the neighborhood getting the word out about my service. I’m thinking of sponsoring a pizza after party for all the shovelers.

It is going to be a fun winter!