For landscaping and lawn-care company owners

Every spring you get the properties ready. Get your company ready before a buyer walks it.

Big companies with investor money behind them are buying landscaping and lawn-care businesses and joining them into regional ones. If you have steady crews and a book of maintenance accounts that come back every year, a buyer wants to see it. The free Map shows you what he will see, in 10 plain questions, whether you ever sell or not.

Free. 10 questions, about 10 minutes. No sales call, ever.

Landscaping companies are being bought up, one region at a time.

An investor buys one strong landscaping company. Then it buys the next one over, and the next, and runs them all as one. They pay people to find owners like you. What they want most is the work that comes back every year: the office parks, the HOAs, the snow contracts. If you have a good book of that work, you are on a list. The only question is whether it holds up when they look closely.

The free check

In about 10 minutes, you'll see

Where you stand

The Map asks 10 plain questions and puts your company on one of five stages: run, release, prove, attract, command. It shows how much of the business keeps running when you are not on site.

Your weakest spot

The one place a buyer would look first. Maybe your maintenance accounts renew on a handshake. Maybe one property manager is a big share of your work. Maybe your crew leaders could walk out tomorrow with your customers.

What to do next

The part of the book Buyer-Ready that fits your stage. Then, if you want the tools, the Buyer-Ready Kit ($297) to fix it at your own kitchen table, over the slow months.

A composite, built from real deals

Gene is a composite from the book Buyer-Ready, built from real owners, with the figures rounded and blended. He ran a mechanical services company in the Northeast. A buyer called on a Tuesday in March. Six weeks later, over dinner, he heard fourteen million dollars. He shook the man's hand.

One cut came from a line most owners never read. The deal said Gene had to leave a certain amount of cash and bills owed to him in the business at closing. The buyer set that amount from its own spreadsheet. It landed $600,000 away from where Gene expected, and it came straight off his price. After that and the other cuts, the cash at the wire was $9.8 million.

Landscapers get hit by this harder than most. Your cash looks one way in April and another way in December. If the buyer picks the wrong month to measure, you pay for it. An owner who knows his own seasons, on paper, can argue back.