How to Make a Landscaping Hobby a Business

Most people dream of making a living doing something they love. If you already love landscaping as a hobby, you could consider turning it into a career. As with any new business, you need to know more than the trade to be successful. Here are tips.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Become an apprentice. Landscapers need people like you who already have a love for the job to join their team. You can get the experience you need to start your own landscaping business. Choose a landscaping company that provides a variety of services so that you can learn as much as possible.
2. Attend landscaping seminars. Sometimes arboretums or professional landscape associations like Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) will sponsor seminars.(See Resources below.)
3. Go to college and take a 2- or 4-year program. Or, if your local community college offers adult education classes in landscaping, take advantage of those. Also, you'll need business, accounting and management classes to run a successful landscaping business.
4. Find supplementary work in the cold season that will come in handy for your landscaping career. You may not have considered you'd need plumbing and masonry skills when landscaping was just your hobby, but to make a career of it you will.
5. Continue to help out friends and family with your landscaping, but start charging for your services. Offer them discounts as you build references.
6. Collect equipment to start your landscaping business. As you apprentice or go to school, you can gradually buy your tools. You also need a way to transport your equipment. You need a rake, lawnmower, string trimmer, broom and hand tools to get started.
7. Advertise in your local classifieds to get customers for your new landscaping business--it will thrive on word-of-mouth recommendations at first. After you build a steady residential client list, put an ad in the Yellow Pages or start a website and start taking commercial clients.