Landscaping Business Tips from J&J Property Pros

Hi, I'm Janna from J&J Property Pros. If you're watching this, congratulations—you have started a landscaping business or you're about to start one. Again, congratulations! Now, as a new business owner, you may feel super excited to start—almost like a honeymoon phase. Then, over a little while and a bit of time goes by, you start to find yourself feeling a little bit overwhelmed, a little bit anxious. And again, that's probably because you're starting to find that you are wearing multiple hats in your business—be it an accountant, a doctor, a therapist, a lawyer, and perhaps even an Ivy League marketing guru and social media specialist. You can add all of that to the list of hats that you feel like you're wearing.

Don't worry, because one of the greatest things we did as we've grown our business was to recognize our own pain points and begin to build our team. And we're not just talking about our internal team either. This team is what we like to call our internal-external functions team. We're talking about other professionals outside of the landscaping industry we have brought alongside of us to outsource the things we found were bringing added stress to our lives and detracting us from actually being able to continue to keep growing our business.

Our first hire was our accountant. When we first started out, we did a lot of our own accounting and even bartered lawn services with our old CPA, and so that's how we kind of did it in the beginning. But as our business grew past our family, we knew we needed to hire someone who understood the ins and outs and where we wanted to grow and take our business. We highly recommend finding an accountant you trust to help you achieve your business goals as soon as you can. It's always nicer to get a letter from the IRS and just be able to hand it right over to your accountant and not have to worry about it or whether you filed everything properly or not. Again, at some point, you may even want to actually hire a financial advisor or financial planner to work alongside your CPA—if your CPA can even have those business recommendations on their own, a lot of CPAs can. So again, it's just finding what works for you and your business. These conversations for us are ongoing and they're part of our overall growth strategy. Being in constant communication with someone who has that financial background and understands our business and has a grasp of our business and where we want to take it is such an invaluable member of our team. So again, can't recommend hiring an accountant as soon as you possibly can.

While thankfully we don't need a full-time doctor on the team, we do try to make sure that we have proper med kits and safety gear in each truck, on our job sites, and in our cars because you never know when you might get a nick or a cut. You do want to have proper first aid and safety equipment in your vehicles whenever possible—we always recommend it.

Now, for some clients, mini therapy sessions may be in order, and you may need to talk them through things about the process of your job that's going to be taking place, how things are done. But always remember to set clear boundaries and expectations. It's so important—we cannot stress it enough. While again, you may feel like your client's therapist, boundaries are necessary for your mental health and for the health of the business.

Our next hire was a web designer and marketer who helped bring to life our vision for a beautiful, sleek website that was easy to navigate, SEO friendly, and mobile friendly as well. For us, again, we knew what we wanted, but we also knew that achieving this goal would take us forever as we tried to just manage the daily ins and outs of operating our business. So again, for us, it was super important and so therefore we just outsourced it. Our website became operational in one weekend, and while we had a lot of input, we also got to manage the weekend operations of our business—like getting things for projects, managing our team, and having estimates go out for projects—all while this website was being done. We didn't have to do any of the coding or background work that goes into building a beautiful SEO-friendly website. So again, it was such a great decision for us to just hire and outsource that aspect and be able to let a professional handle it.

Our latest hire has been our lawyer. We honestly are so thankful that our paths crossed. While we haven't had thankfully many major issues, having a professional to be able to look over the template contracts that we had has been an absolute godsend. Clients who try to wiggle out of a contract like that have a whole new level of respect for you when you say, "Oh, I have been advised." So whenever you can get legal advice from a professional, we highly recommend just do it.

We also highly recommend having a good insurance broker on the team who understands what types of insurance are needed for your particular business. Basically, all of this to say, sometimes spending money on an outside team saves you time, money, and heartache in the end.

For more business tips, follow ECHO MEANS BUSINESS on all social media platforms and at ECHOMEANSBUSINESS.COM. Thanks again for watching and we will see you here soon. Bye!