Tree Care Business Strategy: All Four Seasons

Tree care business strategy is important to remember when your business is nothing if not seasonal.

Tree care business strategy changes with the seasons. In the Spring and Summer, business is booming, with calls from new clients and repeat orders from existing clients every day of the week. In the fall, your business may change, perhaps slowing, or moving to different services like tree removal and leaf clearing.,

In the winter, business is almost always slow; a time for cost-cutting and downsizing.

For many tree care companies, this ‘cyclical’ pattern becomes so entrenched that they see it as a fact of life.

And for many companies, it’s their tree care businesses strategy. Really, it is.

But it doesn’t have to be. Because, as we’re about to show, there are a number of strategies you can use to keep your business profitable in all seasons… Not only in the lucrative summer months but even in the dead of winter, when some tree care businesses have been known to shut their doors or lay off staff to stay in business.

Without any further ado, here are the 5 strategies you can use to keep your tree care business profitable in all seasons:

Tree Care Business Strategy: Diversify

This one is a no brainer.

Tree care is a seasonal field. As the seasons change, landscapes change, as do the soil and trees. Many trees lose their leaves in the winter. As trees go into hibernation, customers typically spend less money on tree care–and if they do retain tree care services, it’s usually clearing services.

The solution is to diversify. Branch out into seasonal services like snow removal business, fall cleanup services, and firewood delivery service While many people today heat their homes with artificial furnaces, there is still a considerable demand for firewood, particularly during the holiday season. Also, felling and selling Christmas trees is another great revenue booster in the holiday season.

Tree Care Business Strategy: Foster Client Relationships

Once you have a diverse array of services in place, the next step is to prepare your clients for them. Here, fostering relationships is crucial. Maintain constant contact with your clients, in person, on social media, and by email.

This will set up a dynamic of constant communication that makes up-selling clients natural. If you speak to a client once a week, mentioning your next season’s services is natural. You can drop it in the middle of a discussion about the weather.

By contrast, if you are not fostering strong client relationships, then any efforts to sell clients on seasonal services will seem spammy. The saying “sales is all about relationships,” has never been truer than it is today, and it should be every tree care business’s mantra.

Tree Care Business Strategy: Prepare In Advance

If you want to stay profitable in all seasons, it’s absolutely crucial to be prepared.

That means:

Repairing or readying equipment that will be needed for the season ahead.
Changing your marketing or advertising to reflect changes in service offerings.
Training your employees for the tasks they’ll be working on in the months ahead.
Shutting down and storing away any equipment that will not be needed in the upcoming season.

These preparations help you simultaneously increase revenues and decrease costs during each season.

Tree Care Business Strategy: Run Seasonal Promotions

Last but not least, running seasonal promotions is crucial to staying profitable in all seasons.

As the season changes, services change. In the summer, landscaping and trimming are all the focus of homeowners and businesses. In the fall, leaf-blowing and things like aeration or holiday lighting tend to be at the top of mind. In the winter, snow plowing, firewood, and Christmas tree cutting can be lucrative services.

When going into the season you can offer specific discounts for early sign-up or do yearly contracts for commercial properties that include tree care, lawn care, fall cleanup, and plowing services. The key is to start promoting these services well before the season starts. In fact, most businesses will have signed deals for spring and summer contracts in the Jan and February and start their searches after the holiday. The same goes for plowing contracts, you will start to see peak search volume between August and September with some businesses starting to promote as early as July.

For residential or homeowner contracts, they are typically a month to a few weeks behind the season, so if the snowfall is expected in late November you might see their inquiries start in late October or early November. For springtime, usually after the first thaw, they will start looking at the yard and wanting to get services for spring clean-up.

If you know which services to offer in which seasons, you can stabilize and increase your income dramatically.

One of the keys to doing this is to take your business online.

With a good business plan and using advanced business management software, like Arborgold, you can easily control every aspect of your business, including:

Inventory management.
Crew and employee management.
Advertising and landing pages.
Emails and automated communications.

In the Arborgold Guide to Growing Your Tree Care Business, we cover each of these topics in eye-opening detail, showing how you can automate and streamline your business for increased profit in every season.