Selling your landscaping business.

Landscaping businesses sell, because the trade has something buyers want and you already own it: properties that pay every month.

What you decide over the next two or three seasons is which end of the price range you land on. Most of that work happens in your yard and your books, and this page is about the rest of it.

Why buyers like this trade.

A landscaping business with signed maintenance contracts has money arriving on a schedule. A buyer can count the properties and see next season before it starts, which is rare in the trades, and they pay for it.

The equipment helps too, because trucks and trailers are worth something on their own and give the buyer a floor under the deal. Since anyone can buy a mower, the argument over price moves straight to your contracts.

Other owners are already working on this: in Canada, searches for landscaping marketing are up 175 percent in a year. The shops that come up when a homeowner searches are the same ones that look organised to a buyer.

What landscaping buyers pay for.

Buyers pay for four things, in roughly this order.

• Maintenance contracts, meaning a full season of recurring accounts, commercial and residential, in writing.
• A crew that comes back in spring, and someone other than you who runs the day.
• Equipment that has been serviced, with records that show it.
• New customers arriving in a way the buyer can check without taking your word for it.

The last one is the odd one out, because the first three sit in your yard and your books, where you can point at them. The fourth one sits on a screen, and most owners have never looked at it.

What drags the price down.

One is contracts on a handshake. If an account isn't written down, the buyer assumes it can leave on the first of the month, and the offer reflects that.

Revenue that jumps with one big install and goes quiet until the next one is another, because buyers pay more for boring and repeating than for one good year.

The most common one is that every customer knows you and not the business. When the buyer asks how the work arrives, "people just call me" is an honest answer and an expensive one. What they are buying is next season, and your phone is not part of the deal. The guide to what your business is worth covers that in more detail.

What the buyer checks online.

You make yards look good for a living, so the first thing a buyer does is look for photographs of your work, and the first thing they find is usually four of them, taken in 2016, on a phone.

After that they count your reviews and open the website on a phone to see how long it takes. A site that looks abandoned reads worse coming from you than it would from a plumber.

I looked closely at six long-running trade businesses. Five of the six had fewer than 10 reviews after decades of good work, and every one that had a working website took 5 to 9 seconds to load on a phone. None of that reflects the quality of the work, but all of it lands in the buyer's file.

Where to start.

Start with a strategy, not a rebuild. The strategy is the same check a buyer runs, done for your side first, and it comes back as a ranked list. On most reports the top few items cost nothing but your own time.

If the list says build, that is the website side, and the plan that keeps the website working transfers when you sell. If the list says the ongoing work, that is monthly SEO, on its own bill, and it produces the reports you put on the table beside your financials.

Two or three seasons is a comfortable runway, long enough to photograph a full year of your own work and hand over real numbers instead of a story. One season is still enough to fix the cheap things.