Starting A Gardening Business By Single Mother

by Kristy
(Australia)

Lawn cutting and gardening business

Hello, I am Kristy and I am 26 years of age. Being a single mother since the age of 21, I found it very hard to find a job that was flexible enough with the hours I needed and would accept that I had been out of the workforce for 6 years.

Because I couldn’t afford to buy new clothes for my child and myself I frequented garage/yard sales. One particular sale I went to had a lawnmower for $50, this was a lot of money for me to expend, but I was already paying someone $20 a month to mow my lawns and I knew it was a great buy.

My mother was with me and we decided if we pooled together we could buy the lawnmower and start a lawn mowing round of our own. We put up flyers on community notice boards, undercutting the price of others by starting our prices at $15 and also offered yard tidy up services and weeding services.

It took about a week before I started getting calls, and by the end of the first week I had made enough to pay for the lawn mower and fuel. That was with only 2 clients who had also requested some weeding.

After about 2 months word of mouth had gotten around and I was averaging about 3-4 jobs a day, which gave me the chance to buy additional equipment such as a whipper snipper and a blower.

As I reinvested into my business I was getting more and more work, I started to drop leaflets in letterboxes and my business seemed to double overnight.

I now employ 2 other people to keep up with the demand; with our competitive pricing and quality workmanship we made quite a name for ourselves.

Anyone can succeed if you have an idea and the drive to succeed and not all businesses require a big initial outlay of money. It requires persistence and hard work but if you are willing to put in that initial effort you can be rewarded very well for it.

From what I have found, there are plenty of people out there who are willing to pay people for a service if it makes their life easier, with a lot of families being double income household’s people need services that will save them time.

For anyone wanting to try this I recommend just starting small like I did, it doesn’t take much time to build a good name for yourself if you are honest and don’t take short cuts in your work. People will pay for quality