If you love landscaping work and want to take more control over your hours and work, it might be time to start a landscaping business. This isn’t an immediate process; it takes a lot of planning and diligence. But it can be incredibly rewarding — here’s how you can do it.
What do landscapers do?
Landscapers are specialists in the outdoors, working to design, install and maintain outdoor areas in residential, commercial and public spaces. Landscape work is a combination of design, horticulture, garden care and often construction.Since they can handle so many tasks, landscapers are always in high demand. Their role can include planning and designing outdoor areas, planting trees and greenery, installing patios and fences, and maintaining gardens and lawns.
Landscaping qualifications
You don’t necessarily need any formal qualifications to become a landscaper in Australia, but it’s still important to have the right training and experience to back you up. This helps you develop key skills and gives you more credibility as a professional. The best thing you can do is go through an apprenticeship with a landscaping professional or company, giving you on-the-job training and practical experience. Being highly trained will also improve how well-regarded you are as a professional, helping you secure more business.
VET courses can also be a helpful pathway into landscaping, able to be completed through a registered training organisation (RTO) or TAFE. Courses that aspiring landscapers might find useful include:
- Certificate II in Landscaping
- Certificate III in Landscape Construction
- Certificate III in Horticulture
- Certificate IV in Landscape Design
Outside of these, it can be useful to make sure you have a valid driver’s license and a White Card if your work involves any construction.
Steps to starting a landscaping business
With opportunities for work abounding in a heap of different spaces, starting a landscaping business can be a great way to enjoy your passion for the outdoors and earn some cash for it. Here are our key steps to starting a business for yourself.
Build a landscaping business plan
A business plan needs to have a good summary of the key aspects of your business, including your name, operational plan, financial projections and growth strategy. Your plan also needs to outline your business structure, and the type of business it will be.
Try to outline overall goals for your business and what you want to achieve. Make these as specific as possible, with targets and deadlines to work towards. Having clear targets works as a motivating factor, helping you stay focused and on track with your business development. You might not reach every single goal in the time you outlined, but it’s still useful to have a set of targets to direct what you’re working towards. These are some aspects that we recommend including:
- Industry overview: You’ll need to research the landscaping industry to understand your competition, ideal customers’ preferences, and current trends.
- Financial plan: Delegate how much money is going to be spent to get your landscaping venture off the ground, and what you need to earn to be to break even. Do you have the funds to support it or will you be searching for cash from a third party such as a bank, lender, or loan company? You need to plan how much to charge, and can use accounting software to stay on top of your payments.
- Vision, mission, and goals: With your finances set, it’s necessary to write down your vision of where you want your company to go, your mission of what you want your company to accomplish, and any goals you want your company to achieve. This creates a great foundation to work off of.
- List out your products and services: Identify and document the services you plan to offer or the products you intend to sell. It can be done by:
- Listing every product or service you offer.
- Cross-checking your list with your inventory to catch any discrepancies.
- Assigning a price to each product or service.
- Organising your products and services into relevant categories.
- Reviewing your list for accuracy and making any necessary adjustments.
- Decide on your location: Consider where your company is going to operate. Will it be just in Victoria or interstate? Look at where there is a high demand for landscapers so you can put your business in the right place.
- Market analysis: Take note of the state of the current market, including trends and emerging technologies. Identify your main competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, and the services they offer. See how you can offer something unique that other landscapers aren’t already doing. By understanding the market landscape, you will be able to pinpoint opportunities for differentiation and growth.
- Sales strategy: What does success look like and how are you going to get there? Setting a sales strategy will help you measure that. In your strategy, you’ll want to set your ideal vision of success - is it reaching 100 clients? Selling your service to 8 new communities in 1 month? Knowing what you want to accomplish will help you figure out what steps to take to get there.
Register and insure
Before you can get started on any jobs, you’ll need to do a couple things first. Step one for most new businesses is to register for an Australian Business Number (ABN), which outlines your legal right to operate. You may also need one or more business licences depending on your location. Thankfully, the Australian Business Licence and Information Service (ABLIS) makes it easy to find exactly what you need. Just provide some information about your business and you’ll be pointed in the right direction.
It’s also essential to be protected in the case of any issues with different insurance policies. Key policies include property insurance to cover your tools and equipment, public liability insurance to cover claims made against you for the results of your work, and employers’ liability insurance if you have any staff. It can also be helpful to look into personal accident and business interruption insurance so you’re always prepared against the worst scenarios.
Tools
Few things are more essential to a tradie than their tools and equipment. Having the right tools for the job is essential, and for landscaping, there are a lot of different things you might need to invest in. Landscaping businesses typically need to have:
- Standard gardening tools: secateurs; shovel; trowel; rake.
- Landscaping tools: mower; edger; chainsaw; hedge trimmer.
- General equipment: gloves; earmuffs; safety glasses; ladder; wheelbarrow.
A landscape business might also use machineries like cement mixers, excavators, trenchers and mulchers, depending on the type of job.
Organise services and pricing
Because landscaping as an industry can cover a ton of different things, you’ll need to decide on exactly what services you plan to provide before you can really get started. While you might want to offer the works, be realistic about what you’ll actually be able to offer right out of the gates, based on your team, hours and equipment. This doesn’t mean you can’t add services later — it’s just about avoiding burnout as much as possible.
Once you know what you can do, you also have to plan what you’ll charge for your work. This can be difficult, because you want to make sure you’re turning a profit without pricing yourself out of competition for jobs. In general, a healthy profit margin for a trade or service business is around 15%. To get the perfect balance, check out our profit margin calculator, and read our advice on maximising your profit margins.
Marketing and promotion
Once you’ve got your registration, services, tools and prices sorted, you’re ready to get started on your marketing! To do this, you need a logo and your brand design sorted. Getting these across business cards and flyers can be a good way to get your name out there while you’re still small, and you can also invest in more direct marketing strategies like paid search or social media ads if you have the money.
Having a website is also huge, giving you more visibility online and letting potential customers find all the important information about you in one place. It can cost a lot to have a site built for you, but in the early days, you can also make use of easy page builders like Squarespace, WordPress and Wix.
Another huge driver of business for landscapers and trades is word of mouth, especially in the early stages. When you do get work, encourage your customers to spread the word to anyone they know who could use your help, and to leave you a Google review, which will help you generate trust and credibility.
Prepare to scale
When it’s early on and you don’t have too many jobs, organisation is easy. But it quickly becomes difficult to manage. Before things get too hectic, develop a system for storing your files and documents, and track all of your business activities. You might also want to invest in accounting software to streamline the tracking of quotes, invoices and purchases. If you can get these things sorted before the work ramps up, it’ll make managing your business much easier in the long run.
The best software for your landscaping business
To be prepared for the admin work that comes with starting a landscaping business, you need to stay on top of making and sending quotes, scheduling jobs, managing reports, following up on invoices, and tracking income. If you're not ready for these tasks, they can become a major hassle really quickly.The best news? Mira has features to help you with all of those tasks and more, all in one easy-to-use app. Managing your business has never been easier. Start a free trial today of our landscaping business software and enjoy access to try all of our features.