By William Ross, founder of Village. I ran a landscaping and pine straw business in high school in Atlanta before I ever worked in finance.
This is the first in a series of playbooks on residential service businesses you can start with almost nothing. Every one of them follows the same ladder:
- Level 1: Solo operation
- Level 2: Owner-operator with one or two crews
- Level 3: Multi-crew enterprise
- Level 4: Financial freedom
Pine straw is the best place to start. Low cost to enter, honest work, and margins simple enough to keep in your head. Here's the whole thing.
Level 1: Getting Started Solo
What you need
- A truck. A trailer and tie-down straps help once you're hauling volume.
- A quiet leaf blower. Spend a little extra here. You'll use it on every job and you won't wake up the street.
- Straw to sell. That's the entire inventory.
The unit economics
- Short-leaf ("slash"): Buy a bale for about $3.50, install it for $6.50. You clear $3.00 a bale.
- Long-leaf ("long needle"): Buy a bale for about $6.50, install it for $10.00. You clear $3.50 a bale.
- A standard front yard in a North Atlanta neighborhood takes 40 to 50 bales. Run that math on a Saturday morning and you'll see why it's worth doing right.
Seasonality
- Demand tracks general landscaping. Slow in winter, busy in spring and late summer, tapering off through fall.
- Plan your year around that. The mistake is treating a busy April like the baseline and getting caught flat in January.
Building your lead funnel
- Go where the demand already is. Reply fast to Nextdoor posts. Be the one who answers first and shows up when you said you would.
- Make booking effortless. A customer should be able to reach you by text, email, phone, or a page they click through on their own. Village handles this for a one-person shop, so the booking happens whether or not you're free to pick up.
- Ask for the review. When a job goes well, ask the customer to leave you one on Village and on Google. Most people are happy to. They just need to be asked.
- Write down every job. Address, what you installed, what you charged. Next season those past customers are your warmest leads. Reaching back out to a happy customer is the easiest sale you'll ever make, and it's how one-off jobs turn into a recurring book.
What separates a pro from someone selling straw
The straw is a commodity. Anyone can buy it. You win on how you do the work.
- Be honest about the count. Plenty of guys say they laid 55 bales when they laid 45. Don't. Customers find out the second they get an honest quote elsewhere, and you lose them for good. Be the person who says, "There's no way you need 70 bales, your yard takes 50 at most." That sentence buys you a customer for ten years.
- Be professional about the small stuff. Reply quickly. Show up five minutes early. Shake their hand, look them in the eye, and be gracious when they reschedule. None of it costs you anything. All of it compounds.
- Don't pass your problems to the customer. Buy a bad bale and the straw's half-rotten? That's between you and your supplier. Eat the $3.50 and lay good straw. The customer never sees it, and you protect the only thing that matters: getting called back.
- Leave it cleaner than you found it. Edge every bed. Blow the driveway clean. Take a before-and-after photo. Do not be the guy who leaves loose straw scattered where he unloaded the truck.
Do all of that and customers want you back. That's the whole game at Level 1.
What's Possible at Level 2 and Up
- Level 2: You have more work than you can do alone. You hire a helper, maybe add a trailer or a second truck.
- Level 3: You're not laying straw anymore. Your time goes to managing the business, retaining customers, finding new ones, and keeping a crew.
- Level 4: At steady state you bring on a general manager. Now you have real choices: pay yourself, reinvest in trucks, trailers, and contracts for wholesale straw, or sell the business for a lump sum and maybe keep some equity.
It all starts the same way mine did. One yard, done right, written down. Go lay some straw.