How to Choose the Best Location and Market for Your Lawn Care Business

When people ask me how I grew Anthony’s Lawn Care & Landscaping from a minivan with a push mower and a pair of garden shears into four businesses with 70 employees serving 145 cities, they usually want to talk about marketing or hiring. Those things matter. But the decision that quietly made the biggest difference was the one almost nobody asks about: picking the right lawn care business location in the first place. Choose a strong market and everything downstream gets easier. Choose a weak one and you’ll grind for years against problems you created on day one.

I started in 2011 in Bloomington, Indiana, and I didn’t pick it because of a spreadsheet—I picked it because it was home. But the longer I’ve been at this, the more I’ve realized that the market you serve sets a ceiling on how fast and how profitably you can grow. So let me walk you through how I actually think about where to start a lawn care business, and how to evaluate an area before you spend a dollar on a mower or a yard sign.

Start with demand and competition, not just your hometown

The first filter I run any opportunity through is simple supply and demand. Here’s how I say it:

I really like going into businesses that have a high demand with a low supply. I like being in an in-demand industry. It’s basic economics 101, but it’s true.

Lawn care has built-in demand—grass keeps growing whether the economy is up or down—but demand isn’t evenly spread. Some towns are saturated with established companies; others have homeowners practically begging for someone reliable to show up. When you’re picking your lawn care business location, you’re really looking for the gap between how many people want the service and how many good providers actually exist.

Now, lawn care is often what people call a “red sea”—lots of competitors, low barrier to entry, somebody with a truck and a trailer on every corner. That doesn’t scare me off, but it does change what I look for:

If it’s a red-sea business with a lot of competitors, I like it to be where they’re not great at marketing or customer service.

That’s the real opportunity in most markets. You usually can’t be the only lawn company in town. But you can absolutely be the one that answers the phone, shows up when promised, sends a clean invoice, and follows up. In a lot of areas, the bar for professionalism is shockingly low—and that’s your way in. Drive around, call a few competitors like a customer would, and see who actually picks up. The towns where nobody calls you back are the towns where you can win.

How to read demand in a specific area

• Are there enough homes with real yards to mow, not just apartments and townhomes with shared landscaping?
• Do the people who live there have the income to pay for a service instead of doing it themselves?
• Is the area growing? New construction and new subdivisions mean new homeowners who haven’t picked a provider yet.
• When you call the existing companies, how good are they really—at answering, scheduling, and treating you like a customer?

Route density is the economics nobody talks about

Here’s the lesson that took me a while to fully appreciate: in this business, drive time is unpaid time. You don’t get paid to sit in a truck driving across town between jobs. You get paid when the mower is running. So the geography of your customer base matters just as much as how many customers you have.

Picture two lawn care companies that each mow 30 yards a week. The first has all 30 clustered in three or four neighborhoods, a few minutes apart. The second has them scattered across an entire county, 20 minutes between each stop. Same number of customers, completely different businesses. The clustered company finishes early, burns less fuel, puts less wear on equipment, and can fit in more jobs. The scattered one is exhausted, behind schedule, and bleeding money into gas tanks.

That’s why I’d much rather own a few neighborhoods completely than have one customer here and one customer there spread thin across a giant service area. When you choose your market, think in terms of tight, walkable, drivable clusters. Density isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the difference between a route that prints money and one that barely breaks even.

A simple way to evaluate a market

1. Demand vs. supply. Is there real demand, and is the existing supply weak, unprofessional, or just bad at marketing and customer service?
2. The right homes. Enough single-family houses with yards to actually mow, not just multi-family housing.
3. Ability to pay. Income levels that support paying for lawn care rather than DIY.
4. Growth. New construction and new neighborhoods bringing in fresh homeowners.
5. Density potential. Neighborhoods tight enough that you can dominate them and keep drive time low.
6. A neighborhood you can own. Somewhere you can realistically become the obvious first choice, instead of being customer #47 in a market everyone already serves.

If a market checks those boxes, you’ve got something worth building on. If it only checks one or two, keep looking—because no amount of hustle fully makes up for a poorly chosen territory.

Dominate one area before you expand

When I started, I didn’t try to serve all of southern Indiana. I focused on Bloomington and tried to become the name people thought of first. There’s enormous leverage in being dominant in one place. Your trucks are everywhere, so people see you constantly. Your reviews stack up in the same community. Word of mouth compounds because your customers all know each other. Over time that focus is what earned us things like being voted “Best of B-town” by the Herald-Times seven years running, more than 180 five-star reviews, and the #1 spot on Google for “tree removal” in Bloomington.

None of that happens if you spread yourself across a dozen towns from day one. Depth beats breadth early on. Plant your flag, get great in one market, build the reputation and the systems and the density—and let that become the engine that funds everything next. If you want a feel for what that depth looks like in practice, our local landscaping work lives over at Bloomington Landscape.

Expand on purpose, not at random

Eventually we did grow well beyond Bloomington—today we’re in 145 cities across Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina, with four businesses and more than $4.2M in revenue. But the key word is deliberately. We didn’t expand by randomly chasing jobs in faraway places. We expanded by applying the same filters that worked the first time: strong demand, weak or unprofessional competition, the right homes, room to grow, and the ability to build density in the new area instead of scattering ourselves thin.

Every new city was a decision, not an accident. That’s the whole point. The market you choose is the foundation everything else sits on. Get the location and the market right—demand, competition, density, and a place you can truly dominate—and you give yourself the best possible chance to build something that lasts.

If you’re trying to figure out where to start or where to expand next and you’d like a second set of eyes on it, I’m happy to help. You can grab a free coaching session with me here—come ready with the area you’re considering, and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right place to plant your flag.