Let’s imagine you have just completed an estimate for a lawn care job.  What comes next?

This is a question that is asked by lots of people who own a lawn care and landscaping business.  The important thing to realize is that the estimate is just the start of a process you should always be following.  No two business owners will have exactly the same process to be sure, but if you just give an estimate and then move on to someone else, you are going to lose a lot of work.

Let’s think about this in a bit more detail.  The customer comes to you and asks for an estimate for some landscaping or lawn care work.  You provide them with the estimate and they go away and think about it.

The next step is the most important one of all, no matter how experienced you are in business or how long your business has been running for.  You see, if you don’t follow up on all the estimates you give out, you will only ever snag jobs from those people who are eager to get the work done.  You are relying on your customer to be the pro-active one, when in reality you need to be pro-active too if you want to develop your business.

So the next step is to get in touch with them.  How you do this will depend on how the customer first makes contact with you and how you present the estimate to them.  You may provide an estimate without actually visiting them, based on sketches or descriptions of the work that needs to be done.  Alternatively you may already have visited their property to give a more detailed estimate.

A good way to encourage contact in the first place is to have a contact form on your website, by which people can get in touch with you by email.  But however you make that first connection with potential customers you need to get their phone number if at all possible.

As hard as it may be to believe, a phone number can make all the difference between getting a successful job and missing out.  You can send them the estimate for the work and then call them afterwords to make sure they have got it.  You might decide to ring them and follow up on the estimate the day after you send it.  In this case you could state that you will do this on the estimate itself.

The important thing here is that you do follow it up – even though you might be worried about doing so to begin with.  And if you change your whole way of quoting in the first place you may find the next stage is actually to begin the work itself.  There is never anything better than speaking to a customer on a face to face basis, although calling them on the phone is definitely the second best option!

Interested in starting a Lawn Care Business? Click here to learn more about our Lawn Care Business Guide.