How I Make $400,000/mo with a Landscaping Boring Business

Hello! Who are you and what have you built?

My name is Chris McManus, and I own GC Landscaping, a landscaping and pool company based in western North Carolina.

I started the landscaping company in 2019 with a $600 trailer, a van, and a mower and weed eater I borrowed from my dad. Today, we're averaging around $350,000 to $400,000 a month in combined revenue across our landscaping and pool businesses.

GC Landscaping makes up the majority of that revenue. We handle everything from weekly lawn maintenance to complete backyard transformations and new pool construction.

We also own Sparkling Pools, a separate retail business selling pool chemicals, supplies, and service. That company generates roughly $500,000 a year, give or take, and has its own management team.

On the landscaping side, our customer base is approximately 80% residential and 20% commercial.

One of the biggest things I've learned is that a customer paying us $500 a month to maintain their lawn can eventually turn into a $150,000 or $200,000 project. That's become a huge part of how we think about growing the business.

You can check out my company here: https://gclandscapinginc.com/

What is your background, and how did you get started?

I grew up on a farm in a big family, and from the time I was about seven or eight years old, I had one dream: becoming a professional motocross racer.

I hated school. It wasn't that I was stupid. I just didn't enjoy it, and I wanted to race.

By 2016, 2017, and 2018, I was racing competitively and making some money, but I was spending about as much as I was bringing in.

When I graduated high school, my parents were incredibly supportive. They told me I could continue living at home, but I needed to start contributing to the bills.

I spent about six months to a year doing odd jobs before realizing I needed something that would work around my racing schedule.

I was traveling across the East Coast almost every weekend, so a traditional job wasn't going to work. I needed flexibility, and I liked working outside with my hands.

That's when I started mowing grass.

I had some friends and family who were willing to pay me around $30 to mow their lawns. Those first few customers started referring me to other people, and the business slowly began to grow.

I kept racing and mowing lawns simultaneously for about a year and a half to two years.

Eventually, I realized motocross probably wasn't going to be the lifelong career I'd imagined. Meanwhile, the landscaping business was starting to take off.

I decided to hang up racing and put all that energy and drive into the company.

It wasn't some brilliant business plan. I didn't want to go to school, I didn't know what else to do, and I was starting to enjoy landscaping.

I figured I'd give it everything I had and see what happened.

That's really how GC Landscaping started.

How much did it cost to start your landscaping business?

I bootstrapped the whole thing.

I bought a trailer for about $600, used my van to pull it around, and borrowed a mower and weed eater from my dad.

That was basically my setup.

I already had a few people willing to pay me to mow their lawns, so I didn't need some massive investment to get started.

I just needed equipment, transportation, and customers.

Of course, what it takes to start mowing lawns is completely different from what it takes to operate the company we have today.

But I didn't start with the company we have today.

I started with a $600 trailer and borrowed equipment.

What services do you offer, and how much do you charge?

We have three main divisions within GC Landscaping: maintenance, landscape installation, and pool construction.

Our maintenance division handles the recurring work. Our installation and pool divisions handle the larger projects.

The pricing varies pretty significantly depending on the property and what the customer wants.

1. Maintenance

This is our recurring revenue business.

We send crews to properties at least once a week to mow grass, prune bushes, pull weeds, fertilize, and take care of the outdoor space.

Our customers typically sign 12-month service agreements and pay us monthly.

A smaller residential property might pay $300 to $400 a month. On the commercial side, we have properties paying $10,000, $15,000, or even $20,000 a month.

There are plenty of customers in between those two extremes.

The goal is to take care of the entire property so the customer doesn't have to worry about it.

2. Landscape installation

This is where we handle everything from smaller landscape improvements to complete backyard transformations.

A customer might have just purchased a house and want us to come in, clean things up, replace some plants, and rejuvenate the landscaping.

That could be a $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 project.

On the other end, someone might be building a $1.5 million home and want us to install their entire outdoor space.

We're talking outdoor kitchens, plants, sod, irrigation, and everything that goes along with it.

Those projects can reach $500,000.

3. Pool construction

We install new pools, and again, the price depends on the project.

A very basic pool might start around $70,000 to $80,000. More elaborate installations can run upwards of $500,000.

We got into this business after acquiring an existing pool company whose owner was looking to retire.

The company had been around for approximately 40 years. We kept its staff, relationships, vendor connections, and industry knowledge, and used that foundation to build our pool construction division.

The retail side operates separately as Sparkling Pools. I own it, but I have management in place and don't spend much time running its daily operations.

The landscaping company is where I'm primarily involved.

How do you differentiate yourself from other landscaping companies?

I've struggled with this question for six or seven years because it's hard to answer without sounding cliché.

Everybody says they offer great service and do quality work.

But there are a few things I think we do particularly well.

The first is communication.

We're open about costs, timelines, and what a project is going to take. We're not perfect at communicating, and there's still room for improvement, but I think we're better at it than a lot of the competition in our area.

I genuinely believe that simply answering the phone puts you ahead of a huge portion of the competition in a service business.

It blows my mind how many companies don't do that.

The second thing is professionalism.

Our guys wear uniform pants, shirts, and hats. Our trucks are wrapped, and we require the crews to clean them weekly.

We also keep our job sites clean.

If I show up at a job site and there's stuff everywhere, we're stopping what we're doing until it gets cleaned up.

Those things might sound basic, but I think they matter.

When somebody is trusting you with a $100,000 or $200,000 project, the way you communicate, present yourself, and take care of their property makes a difference.

How do you get customers for your landscaping business?

For most of our company's history, we relied almost entirely on word of mouth, referrals, and organic content.

When I was first starting out, I actually thought that if you needed paid advertising, you probably weren't running your business very well.

That was a pretty naive way of thinking.

The problem with depending on referrals is that you don't necessarily control when new customers come in.

We were publishing organic content, but we weren't doing a particularly good job of staying consistent with it.

Eventually, when we reached around $2 million in annual sales, we hit a plateau.

We had enough work to maintain that revenue, but we weren't seeing the growth I wanted.

Customer churn wasn't huge, somewhere around 5% to 10%, but we still needed a way to bring in more business.

Acquiring the pool company helped increase revenue because we added an entirely new division.

However, toward the end of 2025, we were starting to plateau again.

That's when I decided we needed to get serious about marketing.

Google reviews

One of the first things we started focusing on was Google reviews.

After roughly six years in business, we only had about 12 reviews.

The funny thing is that we weren't necessarily getting bad reviews. We just weren't asking customers to leave them.

We made collecting reviews a priority and increased that number to approximately 70 or 80.

I still don't think that's nearly enough, but it's a significant improvement.

Facebook and Instagram advertising

I eventually hired a marketing company, and we're spending approximately $5,000 to $6,000 a month with them.

Instead of launching campaigns for the entire company immediately, we decided to test the strategy with our pool division.

We started running paid Facebook and Instagram ads, primarily using AI-generated content.

The results have been tremendous for us.

I estimate that lead generation for the pool division increased by roughly 5,000%.

Now, I'm not saying everybody should expect that result.

One of the reasons I wanted to enter the pool business in the first place was that our local market had a lot of opportunity. We weren't competing in some incredibly saturated market.

That likely made the advertising more effective.

But I've been extremely happy with the results. By my estimate, the sales we've generated through the marketing company in the first three months are enough to cover its fees for the next five years.

I'm constantly reviewing our expenses and profit and loss statements, trying to figure out where we can save money.

Marketing is one expense I have no intention of cutting right now.

Our plan is to run a smaller campaign for the landscaping division during our slower season, test what works, make adjustments, and then increase our advertising efforts around January or February 2027.

The idea is to figure out what works before we start spending significantly more money.

What is your money model, and how do you turn small customers into six-figure projects?

This is something we've been focusing on heavily over the last six months.

Our maintenance division currently generates approximately 20% of our gross revenue, but I want to increase that to 50%.

The reason is that these customers are worth far more than their monthly service agreements.

Let's say somebody hires us for $500 a month to maintain their property.

That's $6,000 a year in recurring revenue.

We show up every week, take care of their lawn, and make sure their property looks great.

After a while, they start trusting us.

Maybe they ask us to renovate a portion of the landscaping or add something to their backyard. Those might be relatively small projects worth a couple thousand dollars.

But what often happens is that after six, twelve, or eighteen months, the customer decides they want something much bigger.

They might call me and say they love the work we've been doing and they're ready to install a pool and outdoor kitchen.

Suddenly, that customer who was paying us $6,000 a year is writing a check for $150,000 or $200,000.

And we didn't have to spend additional marketing dollars to acquire that project.

We already had the relationship.

I would estimate that something like one in five maintenance customers eventually approaches us about a larger project, although that's my rough guess. I don't have a properly tracked metric for it yet, and I should.

But it's a big part of why we're pushing maintenance so hard.

The model also works in reverse.

Let's say somebody hires our installation division to complete a $30,000 or $300,000 landscaping project.

Once we finish, they're probably going to need somebody to maintain everything.

I estimate that approximately 99% of those customers end up hiring our maintenance crews.

One of the ways we encourage this is through our warranty.

When we install new landscaping, including plants, sod, and irrigation, we offer a one-year warranty tied to us maintaining the property.

If a plant or sod dies, we'll replace it under that warranty, provided we're the ones responsible for the maintenance.

I'm not comfortable warranting landscaping that another company might improperly maintain after we've installed it.

For customers, that makes continuing with us an easy decision.

They just invested a significant amount of money in their property. Having us maintain it helps protect that investment.

And in many cases, those customers stay with us for years.

That's what I love about the model.

We can acquire a customer through maintenance, eventually sell them a large installation project, and continue collecting recurring revenue afterward.

What happens when a customer can't afford your original quote?

We don't do a tremendous amount of downselling, but I encourage our salespeople to look for other options rather than immediately walking away.

We currently have two salespeople.

For example, we recently quoted a couple of new construction projects, and the customers told us the proposals were way outside their budgets.

My response was that we should back up and present something different.

Maybe they can't afford a $400,000 backyard right now.

That doesn't mean we can't do a $20,000 backyard.

We could seed the grass, put down mulch, install a few plants, and make the property look better without doing the entire project.

I'd much rather find a way to work with that customer than lose the relationship completely.

Maybe a year later, they'll remember that we showed up on time, did great work, and took care of them.

Then they decide they're ready for a pool.

Now we're already the company they know and trust.

That's why I think it's important to offer alternatives when somebody's budget doesn't match their original vision.

We don't have to do everything at once to build a valuable customer relationship.

What does your team look like, and how do you manage operations?

We currently have approximately 22 or 23 people on staff.

Everybody on staff, including me, is a W-2 employee.

We also work with about three or four subcontractors on a regular basis, but the nature of our business doesn't require us to rely heavily on subcontracting.

Our operations are structured around the different divisions.

We have field technicians doing the actual work, crew leaders responsible for each crew, and division managers or project managers overseeing the larger operations.

Above them, we have a general manager role that reports directly to me.

At the moment, that position is vacant, so I've had to step back into some of those responsibilities.

The structure is pretty straightforward, but getting to this point took me a long time.

For the first five or six years, I tried to carry almost everything myself.

That was a mistake.

I kept hiring field technicians without putting enough management in place.

Once you're managing more than six or seven people directly, things start getting difficult.

In all my genius, I managed to get that number up to 15 or 16 before deciding I should probably put some structure between myself and the crews.

One of our first important hires was an office manager.

He's no longer with the company, but hiring him opened my eyes to how much of a difference the right person could make.

I remember thinking that this was really nice and I should probably do more of it.

About a year and a half ago, we started putting managers in charge of each division.

That was huge.

Now they're responsible for their people and the daily operations. I don't want every little problem coming to me unless it's something that genuinely needs my attention.

I'm still heavily involved in the overall direction of the company, but I don't need to manage 20 people individually anymore.

At one point, I got it down to about three people reporting directly to me.

That gives me significantly more time to focus on the things that actually move the business forward.

How do you find and hire employees?

Our approach depends on the position.

For field technicians, we primarily use Indeed and employee referrals.

One of the easiest ways for us to recruit is to tell the team we're hiring and offer a referral bonus.

For example, during our morning dispatch, I might tell everybody we're looking to fill three positions in maintenance, installation, or pools.

I'll offer a $500 referral bonus to anyone who brings in somebody who stays with us for six months.

I could probably announce that tomorrow and have ten people showing up Monday morning.

It's a pretty effective way to find field employees.

Hiring management is a different story.

Those positions take more time, and I'm much more selective.

I might put an advertisement on Indeed because it's relatively inexpensive, but most of our management recruiting involves me or one of our managers reaching out to people we know.

It's almost like headhunting.

We might identify two or three people in the industry who we think would be great and then reach out to see whether they're interested.

My preference is always to promote from within when possible.

We've had a field technician progress into a crew leader role and then move into management, and he's done a great job.

If somebody already understands our company and demonstrates that they can lead people, I'd rather give them that opportunity than automatically hire somebody from outside.

How do you train new employees?

Training is actually one of the areas we're actively working to improve.

If somebody joins us as a field technician in June, during our busy season, they're probably going to get thrown straight into the fire.

I don't love that, but it's the reality of how we've operated.

They typically get about a week of hands-on work to see whether it's a good fit.

That's something I want to improve as we put more structure in place.

Management training is different.

I prefer to make those hires during our slower season, around the end of the fourth quarter or beginning of the first quarter.

That gives me more time to coach them properly.

They'll spend a significant amount of time shadowing me, learning the business and understanding how we operate.

If we're hiring somebody from outside the company for management, I strongly prefer someone with experience in the landscaping or green industry.

They don't necessarily have to know everything about our specific operation, but industry experience saves me a lot of time.

Ultimately, I want to keep improving our training and developing people internally so the company becomes less dependent on me.

What are your biggest goals for the business?

My long-term goal is to build a $25 million company.

That's what gets me up in the morning.

We're obviously not there yet, and we've got quite a ways to go.

Right now, we're still working on strengthening our foundation.

We've made a tremendous number of changes over the last year and a half, particularly with management, operations, and the way we've structured our divisions.

I don't want to just put the pedal to the metal without getting those things right first.

For years, I made the mistake of trying to carry the entire business on my back.

I don't want to repeat that as we grow.

I've talked to a lot of people inside and outside this industry, and I've heard repeatedly that getting through the $3 million to $5 million revenue range can be particularly challenging.

That's roughly the stage we're working through now.

I believe our current region could support a company generating around $10 million to $12 million in annual revenue.

My plan is to grow this location toward that point while making sure it's well structured and organized.

Once we have that running properly, I want to open one or two satellite locations.

That's how I envision getting to $25 million.

My goal is to get there in approximately five years.

It's ambitious, but that's what we're working toward.

If you had to restart your landscaping company with $1,000 or $2,000, what would you do?

The very first thing I'd do is start calling my contacts.

I'd reach out to people in my network, reconnect with relationships I've built, and start drumming up work.

That's where I'd focus first.

If I had absolutely nothing, I'd spend a couple thousand dollars on some sort of vehicle so I could start producing revenue.

Then I'd take it from there.

I've actually had this conversation before, and I believe that if we shut the doors tomorrow, I could get back to where we are in about six to twelve months.

That's because of the relationships and experience I've built.

I know the business now, and I know how to get work.

I wouldn't start by spending a bunch of money on things I didn't need.

I'd get in touch with people, find customers, get the basic equipment and transportation I needed, and start generating revenue.

What advice would you give someone who wants to start a landscaping business today?

In a perfect world, I wouldn't immediately go out and try to start my own company.

I'd start by doing a lot of research.

I'd identify three to five of the best landscaping companies in my area and try to interview with them.

I would want to understand which companies were growing, which ones had plateaued, which ones were stagnant, and which owners were getting ready to retire.

Then I'd find a company that was actively trying to grow and go work for them.

I'd probably spend twelve to twenty-four months there, regardless of whether the pay was exactly what I wanted.

The goal would be to learn as much as possible about how a growing landscaping company operates.

I'd want to understand the work itself, but also how the business is managed, how the teams are structured, and what it takes to keep growing.

That's the experience I wish I'd had before starting GC Landscaping.

I learned a lot of things the hard way, particularly when it came to hiring managers, building a team, and getting myself out of the daily operations.

Working for a growing company first probably would have saved me a tremendous amount of headache and heartache.

If I could go back and do it again, that's what I'd do.

I'd learn the business from somebody who's already building what I want to build, then use that experience to start my own.

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You can learn more about my company at:

https://gclandscapinginc.com/

And find more business breakdowns like this one at:

https://boringbusinessblueprints.com/

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