The phone stops ringing for a lot of lawn care operators right around Thanksgiving, and it doesn't start again until the first warm week in March. The trucks sit. The crew either gets laid off or gets stretched thin on whatever small jobs are left. Meanwhile the ladders, the extension cords, and the guys who spent October up on roofs trimming gutters and cutting back shrubs are all still sitting right there, fully capable of doing a different job that customers are actively looking to pay for: hanging holiday lights.
Winter Doesn't Have to Be a Dead Season
Holiday lighting installation is one of the few winter service lines that uses the exact same crew, the same trucks, and often the same customer list a lawn care business already has. The person who trimmed a customer's shrubs in October is the same person who can wrap those shrubs in lights in November. The truck that hauled mowers all summer can carry reels of commercial-grade LED strand instead. You are not building a new business from scratch. You are pointing an existing one at a different calendar.
It also solves a real problem beyond the extra revenue. Seasonal layoffs are expensive in ways that don't show up on a single invoice: a good crew leader who gets let go in November doesn't always come back in April, and re-hiring and re-training every spring costs more than most owners want to admit. A second service line that runs from mid-November through early January keeps paychecks going out and keeps your best people from taking a job with someone else over the winter.
What Holiday Lighting Installation Actually Pays
The pricing on this is well documented because so many homeowners shop for it every year. Professional installers typically charge $5 to $12 per linear foot, which works out to $250 to $1,500 for a basic roofline outline and $750 to $5,000 for a full package that adds windows, the garage, and landscaping accents, according to HomeGuide's installer pricing data. Homeowners who want permanent, color-changing fixtures pay more up front, in the $2,000 to $8,000 range for 100 to 200 feet, but that customer is buying a system, not a season, which means a bigger ticket and a repeat call every fall to flip it back on. Takedown alone, for the customer who just wants the lights gone without doing it themselves, runs another $100 to $400, and most installers plan that trip for two to four weeks after New Year's Day.
That's a meaningfully better margin than mowing. You're not competing against every other truck with a trailer on a Tuesday afternoon in June. You're one of a smaller number of local operators willing to climb a ladder in December, and homeowners who already trust you with their yard would rather write one more check to a company they know than find a stranger on a lighting-specific app.
Install, Maintain, Take Down: It's the Same Three Phases You Already Run
A holiday lighting job isn't really one job. It's an install date sometime in November, an optional maintenance visit if a strand fails in a windstorm, and a takedown date in January, all tied to the same customer and the same property. That's the identical shape as the setup, event, and takedown phases Apex Rental Pro already tracks on multi-day tent bookings: one record, three real-world dates, no separate sticky note for when the crew has to go back out. If you're already running lawn and landscaping work through Commander, a lighting job slots into the same board instead of living in a separate notebook that only the owner remembers to check.
The Other Half of Winter: Protecting What You Already Installed
Holiday lighting isn't the only cold-weather line that pairs naturally with a lawn care operation. Irrigation winterization, sometimes called a sprinkler blowout, is a short, high-volume job that most homeowners either forget or don't know they need. A professional blowout runs about $50 to $150 for up to twelve zones, according to HomeGuide's irrigation cost data, and it's cheap insurance against the alternative. Water left sitting in a pipe over a hard freeze expands and cracks it, and a broken pipe repair typically costs $125 to $400, while a cracked backflow preventer runs $256 to $572 to replace, per Lawn Love's repair pricing breakdown. Selling winterization every October isn't just an upsell, it's the thing that keeps that same customer from calling you angry in March about a flooded flower bed.
Bundle the two and you've built a real fall-to-winter calendar: irrigation winterization in October and early November, lighting installs through late November and December, lighting maintenance calls if a strand goes out over the holidays, and takedown in January. None of it competes with your spring and summer mowing routes. All of it uses gear and people you already have on payroll.
Turning a Side Job Into a System
The part that trips owners up isn't the ladder work, it's the office work. A new service line means new customers to track, new quotes to send, and a second wave of invoices landing in a season when you're also trying to close the books on the year. Winter miles add up too. Lighting jobs are spread across a wider radius than your regular mowing route, and every one of those trips counts toward the deduction you're entitled to claim, which matters more now that the 2026 IRS mileage rate has climbed to 76 cents a mile.
The equipment side matters too. A truck that ran hard from March through November and then gets asked to do one more service season without a break is a truck that needs the kind of maintenance schedule that catches a worn belt before it strands a crew on a Tuesday with three lighting installs booked. And if your whole operation still runs on a shared spreadsheet and a group text, adding a second service line is exactly the kind of change that breaks a system that was already stretched thin. A clean payment link through Stripe keeps a holiday invoice from turning into three follow-up texts, and a little personal follow-up after the install is what turns a one-time lighting customer into someone who calls you again next October, for both jobs.
You don't need to rebrand the company or hire a specialist to try this. Start with your best twenty customers this fall, quote the lighting job the same way you'd quote a landscaping estimate, and see how many say yes. If the answer is most of them, you've found a second season hiding inside the one you already run.
If you're weighing whether your current setup can handle a second service line without a second spreadsheet, it's worth a look at Apex Rental Pro's features and pricing. The same scheduling and invoicing tools that keep a Saturday wedding tent on track work just as well for a Tuesday lighting install and a January takedown.
