The top complaint is “The guy didn’t show up”. Another top complaint that I hear is that, basically, “This guy didn’t close the gate”. “They don’t close the gate”, “they don’t do what they say they’re going to do”, basically, that’s the top complaint.
I think the top complaint is, “They didn’t show up and they didn’t do what they said they were going to do.”
I guess the third complaint, I’m just going to mention the complaints, another complaint is saying “They didn’t do a good job, and they messed it up, and they didn’t fix it”. That’s where our guarantee comes in.
When we get new clients, we often get new clients that are saying, “We had a guy, and he didn’t do this part, and he wasn’t good at this part, he tried to build this retaining wall, he did some interlocking, he didn’t finish this area, I don’t like how he did this.” The client is complaining, or the client is mentioning their concerns to the company, and the company’s saying, “We’re going to lose money, and we’re not going to finish it. This is done,” and leave it and take it how it is.
That’s the difference with us is, we’re not going to leave until it’s finished, until they’re happy, and if they’re just absolutely not happy, we’ll pay them to get someone else to make them happy. That’s the top complaints that I’ve noticed, for sure.
we had a competitor who was installing a new retaining wall, interlocking and adding in some new sod. Basically, this company had given this client a design and told them that they’re going to go ahead with this design. The client went and purchased this company to go ahead and start the work.
The company started the work, and every so often, and I know a lot of people notice this, every so often that company would take off a Thursday or Friday, and say, “OK, we’re going to come in a couple of days,” leaving lots of material just sitting on their driveway, just sitting there. There are stones there, there are HPB stones, there’s cut stones on the driveway, and the job just doesn’t seem to be progressing.
This lady was mentioning that she had some family coming in from England, and they needed the patio done and they needed all the stuff done with interlocking so they have places to park. It was just delays in service with the jobs, and it just ultimately didn’t get completed. When her family did show up, she was left to have a party in the park that was across the street, and it was very, very frustrating for her. She said that was why she called us. That was just a simple horror story.
Now, I guess I wanted to mention one more horror story. I kind of mentioned an example in the e-book that we have, of a client hiring a company to do a sod job. They hired the company. This is a client that I had, that’s where I got the story from. They hired a company to do the sod job, and they hired them over the phone, said, “Go ahead and install the sod.”
They met the guy and said, “Go ahead and install the sod.” The guy went off to work, and when he came home, his lawn was a swamp. His front lawn was a swamp because it just had tons and tons of mud everywhere on the lawn. He didn’t see the company. The lawn care company was nowhere. He saw the turf was taken off and left in the driveway. There was just tons of mud everywhere, the sprinklers were going off. He ran in the house, and a portion of his basement had water in it because it was soaked for so long.
He ended up turning off the pipes somehow and calling the company and asked them what was going on. They said they broke the pipe, they didn’t know how to fix it right away, they didn’t know how to turn off the line, and they went to go get somebody to fix it for them. They didn’t have a key to get inside. What happened was they hired an amateur.
The guy didn’t know how to turn off the sprinkler system, how to cap it. He didn’t know how to handle the scenario of something being broken. They didn’t take the necessary precautions of calling the Dig Company, the “Call Before You Dig Company”, which we have here in Toronto. They didn’t take the necessary precautions to ensure that those things won’t happen. That happens all the time, even with really good companies. The ones that aren’t detail-oriented, they bump into those problems all the time with hiring staff that you can’t depend on. You can’t depend on staff all the time to know exactly what to do.
If he hits a pipeline, does he know what to do? What are you going to do? We thought these things through, about what happens if we hit a pipe, and we can’t get inside the person’s house. Do we know to cap off the line until somebody gets back? Do we know to stop the water from coming out of the pipe so it doesn’t start to swamp?
After seeing scenarios like this, we actually have to listen for each and every one of those. The client ended up calling us, and we fixed the lawn. We actually recommended a company to clear out his basement, but it was covered by insurance, thank God for him, somehow he got it covered. That whole story is just a strong example of a major nightmare that can happen if you hire the wrong guy.
