Do you ever think about starting your own lawn care business? For example, are you offering time off with PTO (paid time off)? Is there health insurance? Are there benefits or bonuses? Keep in mind that compensation is likely to be as important to employees as the hourly rate. Hourly pay is old school, “the normal way lawn care professionals are paid for years. Sometimes it makes sense to offer a fixed annual salary. Like the pay-for-performance model, hourly pay and salary models have some drawbacks.
For example, there is a potential lack of ownership and a lack of incentives. Whether you choose to pay an hourly wage, pay by the day, or pay based on performance, there are a wide variety of factors to consider when determining the salary structure. Senior landscape designer Karl Naegler from Rochester, New York, has seen it all in his more than 20 years of experience. Remember, salary and pay are still very important to employees, but many consider benefits to be in the conversation as well.
Many companies close to me ask their customers to accept a weekly, biweekly or monthly program. The best thing about a lawn care service is that you can often do enough during the season to relax and unwind during the cold, winter months. To find the average lawn care salary in your area, a good place to start is to check a job posting website to see what other local lawn care companies are offering on their job listings. If you have a garden business, you'll need insurance for lawn care companies if you accidentally damage a customer's property.
As with mowing your lawn, it helps to research how much other lawn care companies in your area charge. Although you don't need to have gardening skills, you'll need to at least learn the fundamentals before starting your lawn care business. That's for good reason, to a certain extent, since the markets, the services offered, and the structure of the landscaping companies themselves are very different.