Equipment Notebook: Feb. 2000, FALL AERATION: A Pathway To Profits

Sandwiched between winter melt-down and spring clean-up, aeration has always been a scheduling nightmare for the lawn care professional.

Lately, with the very wet and late springs we have been having across North America, the opportunity to aerate has been almost lost, along with the revenues spring aeration brought into contractors’ companies before mowing revenues began.

Aeration promotes strong, healthy plants that need less water, less fertilizer and less chemical care, such as spraying to combat weeds, insects and diseases. Contractors have long been understood that strong, healthy grass often needs less fertilizer and control products to yield an attractive lawn. Many contractors who incorporate aeration into their programs know that aerated lawns require less of these inputs to stay attractive and keep customers happy.

Therefore, the loss of aeration in the spring costs contractors more than just aeration income. An ability to aerate on time can also cost result in increased callbacks from the customer for disease and insect control. Aeration is the perfect example of how 1 ounce of prevention can be worth 1 pound of cure.

How can contractors keep this income and applied benefits with the short, wet springs of late? Move the work to the fall. Many companies have moved aeration to a fall practice and experienced the extra benefits of doing so. One such benefit is time.

When the mowing season begins to slow down, contractors have more time to schedule aerations and get them done. That is time contractors do not have in the spring.

Scheduling aeration service in the fall also will allow your company to extend its billings and income longer. How long depends on how much aeration work has been scheduled.

Aeration in most parts of the continental United States can continue right up until Thanksgiving. There is no limited window of time in the fall like there is in the spring for aerations to be completed within, so contractors can schedule the work according to the labor they have available. This is a big plus when contractors have layed off their seasonal help and need to provide their full-time staff with fall work.

An additional benefit of aerating later in the growing season can often be a lawn that develops much sooner the following spring. Late fall aeration allows the soil to move and work all winter, giving the roots room to grow as the temperature allows. Experiments with late fall aeration have shown that a lawn that has been aerated later in the fall will green up and be ready for mowing earlier in the spring.

Aerating in the fall also provides contractors more time to sell the aeration service and gives them the ability to target their sales efforts to the right customers since at the close of the mowing season, the contractors know which lawns have been struggling all season and are weak. These customers are a prime target for fall aeration. And making the sale in the fall may be easier since you may have a brown lawn to point at and use as a selling tool.

Late fall fertilization can also be sold as part of the fall aeration package. Grasses that receive late fall fertilization are often up and green ready for mowing much earlier than other lawns. Therefore the combination of the late fall aeration and late fall fertilization may give companies the opportunity to get out and start mowing earlier in the spring.

Admittedly, selling a fall aeration program can be more challenging than selling a spring program. One approach may be to focus initially on current aeration customers and try to move them to a fall aeration schedule. Explain to them that the benefits they now enjoy will stay the same or increase, plus, they will get the added benefit of earlier spring green up. This is also the time to sell them on a fall fertilization program.

Then, with current customers moved to the fall timing, contractors will have time in the spring for selling aeration services to new customers who do not fully understand the benefits of aeration yet. New aeration customers want to see results immediately. Keep them on a spring program for a couple of years until they understand the benefits of aeration, then move them to a fall program.