LAWN & LANDSCAPE — LOMBARD, ILLINOIS
Websites, snow contracts and off-season work for lawn and landscape crews in Lombard, IL.
January's money was agreed in September. By the time a forecast makes the news the routes are full, and the only thing left to sell is a very long night.
Twenty minutes. You get a written plan and a price. Nothing starts until you say so.
Snow is sold in September and delivered in January.
Every customer who signs in autumn is a customer who isn't ringing round in a panic in December, and every one who doesn't sign is a gap you'll fill at three in the morning with somebody you've never worked for. The selling window is short, it's early, and it opens while your crews are still cutting grass.
Which is why it can't depend on you having a free evening. The renewal goes out to last winter's list on a date you set, the new enquiries come in through a page written for winter rather than a paragraph tacked on to the mowing site, and the agreement gets read and returned online instead of being carried around in a truck for a fortnight.
Per push or seasonal is the entire conversation, so put it on the page.
Homeowners and property managers are weighing two different bets and most of them don't know the terms. One pays for each visit, one pays a flat amount for the winter and transfers the risk to you. Both are reasonable and both get chosen for different reasons.
Explaining that in writing does the arguing for you in advance. What depth brings the truck out. Whether salt is included or billed on its own. What happens in a winter with almost no snow, and what happens in one with far too much. Say it plainly and you'll have a shorter conversation in September and no conversation at all in March.
- The trigger depth written down where anybody can read it
- Salt and ice melt priced clearly, not left to be discovered on an invoice
- What a visit includes — drive, walks, the space in front of the door
- How a mild winter and a brutal one each get billed
At four in the morning, nobody calls twice.
The phone at that hour is a property manager who needs a lot cleared before staff arrive, and if it rings out she calls the next number on her list and you never learn it happened. You were asleep, which is entirely reasonable, and it cost you a contract anyway.
The answering bolt-on is $100 a month and it picks up at that hour, takes the address and the detail, and leaves it written down and waiting for you. Going the other way, one message to a route the night before — we're on tonight, expect us around five — stops thirty separate phone calls before they start.
Eight months a year you're not the snow guy, and they forget.
A customer who only ever sees you when it's white outside has no reason to think of you in April, even if you'd happily do the mulch, the cleanup and the cutting. That's not disloyalty. You simply never came up.
So the list works both directions. The people who take a seasonal contract hear from you in the spring about the beds and the first cut. The mowing customers hear from you in September about the driveway. It's the same handful of names, worked twice, and it's how a business stops having two separate customer bases that don't know they overlap.
Winter invoicing goes wrong in ways summer invoicing doesn't.
Per-push work generates a pile of small invoices in a fortnight, all of them for visits made in the dark, some of them disputed a month later by somebody who genuinely can't remember whether you came on the fourteenth.
Invoicing the same day, from the truck, with the date and the property on it, settles almost all of that before it starts. Seasonal contracts get billed on an even schedule so the money isn't all in one month, cards on file take care of the rest, and what's outstanding is a screen you can look at rather than a thing you worry about at the yard.
The whole cost of it, both plans.
Foundation: $250 every month, plus $250 once at the start. That's the site on a domain registered to you, the Google Business Profile built out, email at your own domain, the search work for the towns you cover, and one update a month for the asking.
Growth: $500 every month, plus $500 once. On top of everything above it carries booking that writes to your own Google Calendar, the property and contract ledger, quoting and invoicing, the automatic messages, card payments, expenses against each job, monthly reports and the sync to QuickBooks. Twelve months on a fixed date, 15 percent off if the year goes in at once, and review replies available at $130 a month if you want them handled. If you want out early, tell us in writing: you pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.
Send yourself a snow enquiry in Knox Blocks.
Knox Blocks is a working landscape business we built the whole way through. Put a request through it, then follow it into the ledger and see what a crew would be looking at on a Tuesday.
Lilacia Park at 150 S. Park Avenue exists because Colonel William Plum left the village his garden in 1927, along with something close to two hundred varieties of lilac. It's a public park that grew out of one man's patience with plants that do nothing at all for most of the year. That's worth holding on to in a village nicknamed after a flower — people here notice ground that's been looked after, and they notice it in May on the strength of work done the previous autumn. Snow contracts run on exactly the same logic, signed in one season and judged in another.
One list that knows who's on the route and who's only on the lawn.
The word covers something entirely ordinary — every customer, every property and every dollar written in one place you can search. For a crew working both seasons that means knowing which properties are under a seasonal contract, which are per push, what each is billed and what's been paid. In September it hands you the list to write to. At four in the morning it tells you the order to drive in.
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
Can customers agree a snow contract through the website?
Yes. The terms sit on a page they can read without ringing you, the enquiry arrives with the property address on it, and the agreement goes out and comes back without anybody driving anywhere. That matters most in the two weeks of autumn when everybody decides at once.
Can it handle per-push and seasonal accounts together?
It has to, because almost every crew runs both. Per-push properties get invoiced per visit with the date and the work on them, seasonal accounts get billed on an even schedule through the winter, and both sit in the same ledger with a card on file if the customer wants one.
How much of this is on the $250 plan?
The website, the Google Business Profile, email at your own domain and the SEO — enough to be found and to take an enquiry. Booking on your calendar, contracts, invoicing, payments, the automatic messages and the reports are on the $500 plan, and that's the half that earns its keep in a busy February.
Get the winter sold before the leaves are down.
Take the demo apart, then tell us how many properties you plough and how many you cut. We'll come back with what we'd build and what it costs, in writing.
How many properties do you plough?
Send that number alongside your mowing count and we'll show you what one list holding both would look like.
A real person reads this and gets back to you within 24 hours. If it's urgent, (331) 291‑7400 rings a phone.