🎯 The business: you supply, hang, maintain, take down and store the Christmas lights. Customers rent the display from you each year. It is the best-paying ninety days a lawn or window business can add, and it uses the same ladder and the same customers.
Homeowners in neighborhoods that compete, and businesses that want the storefront lit. A typical roofline and a few trees runs $800 to $2,500 for the season, with the first year higher because you buy the lights for them. Renewals are the business: most customers rebook every year with one text.
| LLC, license, insurance (ladder work) | $700 |
| Commercial-grade C9 LED lights, clips and timers for the first ten houses | $3,000 to $5,000 |
| Ladders, stand-off, harness | $500 |
| Storage bins and labels | $200 |
| All-in | ≈ $4,500 to $6,500, mostly inventory you keep |
Start selling in September; by mid-November you are hanging, not quoting. Do your own house and two neighbors’ in early October and photograph them at dusk. Price per linear foot of roofline plus per tree, all-inclusive. Collect half up front, which pays for the lights. Book takedowns for January when you install.
A $1,500 house takes two people about three hours to hang and an hour to take down. The lights cost you around $400 the first year and nothing the next four. Forty houses is about $60,000 of revenue in a season, half of it in the second year after inventory is paid for. A lawn business with sixty summer customers can sell this to a third of them.
No license. Ladder and roof work means insurance first, and workers’ comp for the helper. Some HOAs set display dates and takedown deadlines, which is a selling point for you, not a problem.
Falls, and a December service call at nine at night because one strand went dark. Storage in July takes a garage. The season is short, so a week of ice can cost you a tenth of the year. Buy commercial clips, not the hardware-store kind, or you will be re-hanging after the first wind.