The number one best way to win new landscaping work? A job well done.
There’s a way to make some leads come in organically, without your client needing to actually provide the referral: It’s branding on your trucks.
Your trucks are like a moving billboard for your company and your work. They show the neighbors that you’re the ones responsible for the way the property looks.
We get a ton of new leads coming in that say they’ve “seen the trucks in our neighborhood” when we ask how they heard about Grunder Landscaping Co.
I’ve had our company name on the side of my truck since soon after the business began in the 1980s, and we’ve been intentional with how our trucks are branded since then. Here’s what we do.
Consistent colors and fleet
All of our trucks are dark green, and all of our sales and leadership vehicles are black. We keep the colors as consistent as we can.
We have standard trucks for each type of work. Consistency in the fleet helps with both brand recognition and streamlining operations and maintenance. Our sales vehicles are Toyotas, hardscaping trucks are Kenworth and our landscaping and maintenance trucks are Isuzu.
Simple branding
Every vehicle in our fleet is branded, and we keep it simple with an all-white decal on green vehicles or a green and white decal on black ones. The information on our trucks is just our company name, logo and phone number. We don’t include our website because people can (and do) search for our company name based on that information.
Truck wraps
As we’ve been replacing our landscaping trucks, we’ve been using Eby’s aluminum beds. The toolboxes on these vehicles look fantastic with a wrap on them, and we opted to keep this design simple to coordinate with our non-wrapped vehicles.
We have some lawn care trucks that are also wrapped; again, we keep the design simple.
I’ve seen some really cool, elaborate truck wraps from other landscaping companies, and I’m not advocating against that at all. That design doesn’t fit in with the overall look and feel of our other branded materials, but if it fits yours, that’s great.
I’ve learned from studying other successful brands and talking to people much smarter than I am that having a consistent look and feel makes a huge difference in how memorable a brand is. Our brand has always relied heavily on the color green, our stylized “G” logo mark and clean, simple lines.
Whatever your brand is, find a way to represent it consistently everywhere it appears. We have a talented graphic designer who helps us by designing elements that we can carry through in our truck wraps, postcards, on our website and on our social media. We didn’t start out with that kind of resource. We started out with a simple white magnetic sign printed with our logo, created with stock fonts. We’d put it onto the side of the truck when we were using it for work.
It wasn’t fancy, but it was effective. So, start where you’re at and find a way to capitalize on those rolling billboards. Maybe it’s time to look around and ask, “Does our branding effectively tell the community who we are?”
Come see our full fleet, inside and out, during our Grunder Landscaping Co. Field Trips this fall. You can tour my facility, learn from my team and see how we set our team up for success. Learn more at growgroupinc.com/glc-fall-field-trips.
