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One of the most profitable additions to your lawn care service business can be the repair of irrigation and sprinkler systems. Although plumbers may do this work, it is not their area of Have a minimum charge of one hour's work and stick to it. Tell the client the
Add your name and phone number and place the ad. The sprinkler repair work and yard clean-up jobs will easily pay for the advertising and bring in extra profit. Meanwhile you also benefit from building your regular maintenance route.
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expertise and their hourly rates are often prohibitive for this type of work. There are irrigation companies that do installation that also do repair and maintenance and this is their speciality. As a lawn care operator you have an advantage with your immediate contact with an established client base, your own customers!
minimum up front. Before you actually start working you never know if it will be a ten minute job or a whole day. I could fill pages with the stories of what we've found underground once we started digging, but at the same time it's been more than once that I found the problem was the time clock was shut off or had no power.
repair work? You will need to check with your State Contractor's license board to be sure, but in most cases you do not. You would need a contractor's license to do installations of new systems that exceed certain dollar values (which vary from state to state in the U.S.A.).
service to show up (as long as they like the person's presentation and price). The best form of advertising I have found for this work is a local classified ad direct mailer. In my area this is called "The Pennysaver". Most towns and cities have something similar. It will be a small magazine or tabloid format publication that consists of classified and display advertising. It usually is direct mailed to all houses in the city or county. You can usually advertise by zip code area which makes for very good targeted advertising. I usually combine several services to make the ad more useful and cost effective. An example ad for a lawn care service might be like this:
repair, yard clean-ups, trimming.
efforts. Have a cell phone and use it's number in your advertising. You can take your calls in the field and schedule to see new clients faster (they may be just down the street). I've taken a call for sprinkler repair while doing maintenance a short distance away. I'm usually the first one there and I get the job done the same day (sometimes within an hour of the call). Competitors with answering services or that scheduled a meeting with the client later that day or evening lose the job.
If you have never done any work on sprinkler systems or with drip irrigation then get some good books on the subject and learn the basics. Your wholesale supplier is also a very good resource for information. They will have booklets and other material from manufacturers like Rain Bird, Irritrol Systems, Toro, Hunter, Rain Master, Weather-Matic, Champion, Superior and more.
