Stop Chasing Money For Your Lawn Care Business

December 28, 2017

Summary

I have been in this lawn care and landscape business for 3 years now. Yes, I know that's not very long in the grand scheme of things. I must say that unfortunately in this short time I have already had my fair share of late paying or non paying lawn care customers.

It is sad that any professional should have to chase his hard earned money after putting in countless hours on a customer’s property, but that is just the reality of this business. Or is it? I started asking myself very quickly "is there a better way?"

Fortunately through YouTube, I have met a lot of mentors that I am honored to call friends. I used this platform to turn to them to ask how they do things. I received a variety of different answers, but the one that caught my attention more than any was "prepayment"; have your customers pay you before you ever show up on their property.

I know what you are thinking, because I was thinking the same thing. There is no way anyone is going to go for this. They will look at me like I am crazy for sure. With all the extra questions I had, I started reaching out to the individuals that shared the idea of prepayment with me. One of the men that I consider a friend is John Payjack.

I reached out to John and in no time flat he was on the phone with me explaining everything. He answered every question I had and spent over 2 hours on the phone with me. The thing he said that stood out to me more than anything was "you don't have a problem asking your customer to pay you at the end of the month. You have to go at them with the exact same confidence and say ‘I take payment at the beginning of the month and will service your property after payment is made.’"

John’s statement left me thinking "is it really that easy?" I am here to tell you it is really that easy. I'm not saying that every potential customer is going to go for it. There are customers out there that have been taken advantage of by unprofessional lawn care providers. These customers will be leary of this or not even want service from you at all. You have to be willing to stick to your guns. Hold your course and continue your plan without getting that customer.

I started my transition into prepayment at the beginning of this lawn care season. I started by eliminating any customers that I had previously had payment issues with. I personally felt this to be a better tactic than to try to transition them into prepayment.

All of my customers that are great payers with whom I have never had problems were grandfathered in and stayed on their end-of-the-month billing. All new customers were informed that I do prepayment and services would not be done until after payment is made.

I have had great success utilizing this method in my business. I have gained more than 25 new clients this year and have not one time had the stress of chasing money.

In a business where we already deal with enough stress, the ability to not have to worry about if I am going to get paid for a job is a great weight of my shoulders.

If you deal with the stress of customers not paying you and having to chase them to get the hard earned money they owe you, take a long hard look at prepayment and know that there are other ways; ways that are stress free. If you don't get paid, they don't get service.