How to pay yourself a steady income

Landscape work is notorious for being messy and unpredictable. We need to be methodical about creating a predictable income, and Landscape Estimator and Business Advisor Anna Turner has some helpful advice.

- 

We can't control everything that happens on a job or with a client, but we can try to build some resilience into a business to ride out the lumps and bumps, and it starts with lead generation.

Focus on building a good pipeline of leads that turn into predictable work. Work you know will, nine times out of 10, pay the bills and cause few problems.

Leads

The approach to finding leads will be different for all businesses, but here are a few ideas.

Where possible, build a base of repeat customers. Residential landscapers are probably thinking that's impossible, saying things like, “Clients only want one or two gardens built in their lifetime, so repeat customers don't work for me.”

Look further afield to the builders and landscape architects. Build strong relationships with those two and they will feed you the right customers. The same goes for commercial landscapers.