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About 2 years ago, I put together an article along these same basic lines. It dealt with avoiding weak landscape contracts.
One suggestion, was making sure the contract stated a minimum experience involved with the property.
Certainly companies need to train new people, so that can't be excluded.
But a contract should insist that a person with a certain number of years experience - say 2, 5, whatever - is required to be on the property at least once per month inspecting the quality.
Right now, most contracts I'm aware of, for homeowners at least, have the landscape maintenance controlling to many loopholes for quality.
If the maintenance company workers don't have a degree of education, how can they tell if a disease is starting? How can they tell if there is fertilizer burn from an accidental overdose the previous week?
How do they know what to put pre-emergent herbicides on, since the labels list reams of plant names?
So nothing wrong with new workers mowing and raking, but there is no professional service at all if new workers are the only ones showing up for the next 8 weeks.
You really need someone with no less than 2 years experience on-site once a month minimum, but once per week at best. And they need education or certification to match anything they lay their hands on. If they are going to apply pre-emergents, they have to be able to walk the property and Identify for your satisfaction, probably 80% or more of what you have, provided its not an exotic collection.
That's what 95% or more of homeowners don't do, and they get raked over the coals on that one for quality.
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