Summary: http://www.gopherforum.com - Are you afraid of hearing the word no? Is it keeping your lawn care business from growing? This fear afflicts more of us than we would probably care to admit. A new lawn care business owner shared with us his insights as to how fearing the word �no� had stifled his growth for some time. He wrote us on the Gopher Lawn Care Business forum and said �I have been in the lawn care business since 1973 and it is still one of my passions of life. I have worked for large corporations and small landscapers and have taken every opportunity to learn as much as I can. I now work for myself. I hope to continue learning from you folks and have no problems at all with sharing my experiences and knowledge with any of you. I have great customers and am looking to expand on services I offer and neighborhoods I service in my area. I�m going to do this a little at a time in steps so as not to scare people off.� You have been in the business for quite some time! What do you feel about the differences between working for all those companies and running your own business? Any thoughts as to why you decided to make the jump and how you did it? �I would suggest to all that I have NEVER been afraid to tell a lawn care customer or potential customer that I didn�t know the answer to something, but I always made it a point to get back to them with an honest, sensible solution to problems they presented to me. It took me a long time to accept that some people can have differing views of things that will not agree with what you are presenting. For the longest time, I was scared to death to hear �NO�. I suffered economically, physically, and psychologically to keep from hearing that dreaded two-lettered word. I would suggest that we have to accept some failures in order to appreciate our successes. None of us wants to lose money in our daily endeavors, nor should we. I decided to go out and start my own because at a certain point, I figured out I can take my knowledge to the public and not be stuck or limited by my �boss�s� imagination. The freedom to be my own representative out there in the world was too strong to ignore. I�ve gone back to work for other people from time to time but have finally settled on my independence and am truly enjoying myself. Yeh, I think I�ll do this until I�m forced to retire.� With all of your experiences, what advice do you have for the new lawn care business owner who is trying to attract customers? What have you found that works and what doesn�t? �My advice to everyone would be to make up some fliers or have them made up for you. You can be as fancy as you can afford but be careful not to make it too long. Keep it short and sweet. Identify your services offered and maybe your service call policies, along with guarantees and licenses. We all have differing ideas about details but getting to the point is more a plus than a minus. You can always expand on what you are offering once you get in the door. Eyeball to eyeball is still the best way to sell yourself to anyone. I speak from experience, folks.� So if we can learn from his year of experience, it�s that should constantly try to learn from others. Don�t be afraid to hear the word no and to really sell yourself, get out there and talk to people eyeball to eyeball. If you are in need of free lawn care marketing material for your lawn care business, please visit our site at http://www.gophersoftware.com. We have hundreds of free lawn care logo, flyer, door hanger and web templates you can download and use for your lawn care business. We also have free lawn care business contracts, estimate and proposal forms. Download our trial version of Gopher Lawn Care Business Software. Gopher will help your lawn care business schedule and invoice more customers in less time, allowing you more time to grow or enjoy your life. Check out my lawn care business blog at http://www.lawnchat.com and my lawn care business forum at http://www.gopherforum.com
