We are a residential and commercial landscape provider in Toronto. We do a variety of services, but, with doing such a variety of services, it’s hard to give a guarantee for many different companies. With our company, we have a powerful guarantee that we have now on our website.
Basically, we’re not like the average company. If you have a problem, or if anything happens, or if you become unsatisfied with our service for any reason, if you’re not happy with how the work turned out, if you’re not happy with the end result or the timing that we told you or anything, we’ll try to fix that immediately. We will, we’ll fix it right away.
If you’re still unsatisfied with the way we fixed it or how we handled the issue, we’ll pay a competing company of your choice to fix it. You can choose the company you’d like to fix it, and we’ll pay them to do it for you. That’s our guarantee for our company.
With that sort of a guarantee, we honor it. Recently, we had an issue, as companies do here and there, and one of our employees went to a property to do a sodding job. We have a client that I can mention that will back this up. He went to go do a sodding job, he grabbed his Bobcat and a sod cutter. He was instructed to do the front lawn.
For some reason, I guess it slipped his mind, we’re all human, and he forgot. He started to clear the backyard, which was huge. It was on a slope and it was massive. He tore out the whole lawn, tore out everything. He tore out the front lawn. He filled up two extra bins. We ordered one bin to remove all the debris. He ordered another bin and they filled up two bins.
We had those bins hauled away, and the job tripled in cost. Our profits went to nothing, I think we lost on the job. Now, a lot of companies would try to negotiate the cost with the client, would go back and say, “Hey, look, we’re going to do the backyard, the guy didn’t mean to rip it out, could you just pay us a little bit more?”
What happened was the client knew that we removed sod, the complete sod from his entire property, and because he knew that, he knew something went wrong. He called in, and asked if there was an issue. The first thing our office told him was, “No, everything’s fine.” We didn’t mention to the client that he’s going to be getting new sod for free.
What we did was we just went ahead and installed all new sod in his entire property, re-edged his garden beds, we weeded out his garden beds, we cultivated the soil. For some of his shrubbery, we shaped them within the garden beds, and we installed his new sod, front and backyard across the [slopey] hill and the front yard.
We regraded his whole property so it was even and it was perfect. When we completed the job, we just let him know, we’re donating a portion of that payment that he’s sending us to cancer research. And that’s it. When he found out what happened, he said, “I can’t believe that,” and we said, “Yes, we made a mistake. But when we make mistakes, it’s our mistake, not yours.” He was so wowed. He’s one of those clients, actually, that now donates to Cancer Research Society just because of that.
