It’s a fair question. You take care of lawns. You do landscape design. You do landscape installation. You work with your hands. You have business. You started out word-of-mouth, now you get more referrals.

Sometimes you get new customers when you are working on a client’s lawn. Joe the neighbor sees you sweating your a** off and thinks, good for that guy. I don’t want to do that, but he’s doing a bang-up job. I’ll get him to do that for me.

And listen, that’s all well and good. But do you really want to rely on a customer deciding, off the cuff, to recommend your services? Don’t you want to get new customers without breaking your back in the hot, humid, swampy Wellington, Florida heat?

This is where a website comes in. And it’s better than social media. You don’t have to shill your services in some local Facebook group hoping someone is perusing Facebook for landscapers. You don’t have to come up with some subpar marketing copy and post it, even though it’s wildly insincere and couldn’t be further away from your gritty never-say-die personality that built your business from the ground up. You will use social media to help get the word out, but it won’t be the, ahem, crap, that plagues and contaminates the social media feeds of your local community.

So, if you’ll excuse my creative writing day-in-your shoes prelude, let’s get into it. There are, I’d say, five main reasons why you don’t just need a website, but why you want one, even if you didn’t know you wanted one until reading this.

I’ve spoken with landscape experts, and I feel this point is often, well, overlooked. Professionalism matters. Point blank. Period.

Let’s look at it this way. I had a landscaper when I lived in Miami. It was my first house. I didn’t know what I was doing as a homeowner. To be frank, I barely have a grasp on being a homeowner 8 years later. But this guy, I’ll leave names out, was awful. He showed up in a rinky dink truck. Thing looked like it hadn’t been washed in years. BUT, he had good reviews on Google. That’s why I hired him (digital matters - *cough cough).

Within six weeks, he stopped showing up. I, for whatever delusional and naive reason I had at the time, decided to pester him to show up so I could shell out thousands of dollars for a new yard. He did it. He tried to give me advice on how to take care of it, and then he left. He disappeared - again. He stopped answering my calls. The lawn died. My $3k was set on fire.

Pretty wildly unprofessional, if I say so myself. And so here’s my point, a website, as I’m sure you are aware, is a mark of professionalism. If I find you on google, even if it has subpar reviews - if you have a professional, sleek, fast-performing website designed to convert me - I gotta say, I’ll probably reach out then and there.

In my more recent years, if I’m looking for landscapers, and there is no website, that’s going to scream “red flag” to me. And I’m not going to hire you. Because I remember my first landscaper. The one who took my $3k and essentially buried it in my soon-to-be dead yard. Seriously, being professional matters. I will no longer work with unlicensed fly-by-night guys who say they own a landscaping business, but in reality bought a truck from the junkyard and could never be bothered to even file the proper paperwork.

Here’s why any of us start a business in the first place, money. Leads. Prospects. Customers. We want more of them, and honestly we want to do less to get more of them. Our time is our money, and the more time we spend to get leads, the less time we have to service our existing clients. The less time we have to charge customers for our services.

A website is another lead-generation tool. What’s more, it’s a lead generation tool that sells people on your services exactly when they’re looking to buy your services. It’s Joe the neighbor seeing you sweat buckets and hiring you on the spot, but with a website, you’re not even sweating buckets. You’re sitting comfortably in your living room. Or maybe you’re servicing another client where there is no perfect prospect Joe spotting you from his front door.

You can target keywords with a website. You can grow traffic to your website over time, organically, with SEO (search engine optimization).

I’m sure you have had me, (or more specifically someone similar to me), phone you up and talk about all the amazing things SEO can do for you. How it will grow your business. How it will make you a millionaire in six months. How if you just optimize your website, customers will be handing you a blank check-book and begging you to overdraft their bank account.

What don’t they tell you? Well one, obviously I was exaggerating. Two, they don’t tell you it takes time. Or if they do, they don’t tell you how much time. Or if they do tell you how much time, they don’t press the point - because heck, they’re making a sale. They don’t want to tell you it’s a minimum of six months to see any spike in traffic. Sure, sometimes it happens in three months, but being candid, that’s rare. It’s usually a minimum of six months. Sometimes a year. But, once it starts to grow, it really, actually, truly does grow.

And when Peter the digital Joe the neighbor Googles, “landscaper near me”, lo and behold - there you are. With your badas* website, designed to convert, that has pictures of your completed projects. That has your story of how you started this company, of how you support yourself and your family with it, of how you give back to your community with physical sacrifice every day. And who can disagree with a pitch like that? Especially when they already have their credit card out, ready to buy.

I think this is an obvious one. If I’m considering two landscaping companies, and one has a website, and the other doesn’t - everything else is the same - who am I going to choose? The website one. Clearly.

Again, mark of professionalism. I learn more about the company who had the website, I have more trust in them because I’ve learned more about them, of course I’m going to pay them instead of the guy without a website. Enough said.

This is an interesting, also oft-overlooked benefit of a website. Let’s just look at some hypothetical numbers of a business.

Say your company does annual revenue of $100k. But, no website. That’s just the money you have brought in depending on referrals and word of mouth to build your network. That’s your book of business.

Now say, same company, but with a website. And that website has been up for five or six years. It has been well-maintained. It looks great. It converts customers. In fact, it converts, say, 10 customers a month. Every new customer pays you $150/month or so on maintenance. Maybe some of those customers wanted a full-fledged landscape renovation and pocketed you $5k upfront (or $3k like my favorite guy). So let’s look at the below:

So, same company, but the one with a website is now bringing in an extra $6350. This is not unrealistic, or unreasonable in terms of new leads. And if you’re bringing in an extra $6350 every month, you just increased your annual revenue by, drumroll, $76,200. All because you have a website.

Also, as I’m sure you know, those maintenance customers are more than likely recurring monthly revenue, but let’s not get into that for the sake of keeping the math simple.

Okay, so say you were looking to sell your company. Many times businesses will sell at around 3x their annual revenue. So with no website, maybe you could sell it for $300k ($100k x 3). With a website, you can now sell it for $528,600 ($176,200 x 3). That’s not even including the fact your website keeps bringing you more customers. More growth. More revenue. Higher sales prices. More recurring customers. Even more revenue. Etc.

That’s for real. You nearly doubled the value of your company, should you choose to sell, because you maintained a website for five or six years. Who is going to turn up their nose at nearly a quarter million dollars because you want to save $150/month (shameless plug - yes I do websites for $0 down, $150/month).

There is an important principle of marketing dubbed inbound marketing. Give it a Google, or I’ll do it for you, that at its core says this: build it and they will come.

Essentially, offer your words of wisdom online re:landscaping and post them to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever, and then link to a more informative article expounding upon that very concept (this is a super dumbed down version of inbound marketing and I’m sure actual marketers would talk at length about this - but I’m a website guy, so I’ll stick with the dumbed down version for now).

Talk about why what grass you pick for what climate matters, and explain it. Explain your recommendation. Educate those unfortunate homeowners like myself who don’t know lawn grass from St. Augustine grass, and when people see your post on Facebook, they’ll want to learn more. They’ll click through to your website.

They will learn more. They will learn more from you. You will become the subject matter expert. And who doesn’t want to hire the subject matter expert?

Plus, when people are searching those very questions on, oh I don’t know - Google, guess who pops up?

You do! Bang, another lead, another customer. As your reputation as a subject matter expert continues to increase, what happens next? Your value goes up. Your customers perceive you as having greater value. And what happens when you have greater value, when you communicate a greater perception of value? You charge increased rates, because you have more value. Now maybe those $150/month customers are $200/month. Maybe that $5k job is now $7k.

Making more from doing less, just like your website brings in more leads from you doing less, yet again. All to talk about what you do everyday, in order to educate those ignorant souls like myself.

So, the million dollar question, or maybe better-put, the $528,600 question - does a landscaper need a website? You tell me.