Here’s one way to take down a tree. Not sure OSHA would approve, though.

This time of year we’re usually morning-’till-midnight with meetings, drawings and proposals, trying to fill up our season with profitable landscaping work as quickly as possible.  This year is no different, as I have about a dozen proposals and designs I’m trying to finish, and many of them I’m pretty excited about.

But along with the really cool (and profitable) projects, we also get some calls for real dogs.  I just got off the phone with one.  She tells me her yard is lumpy and bumpy and she wants some dirt brought in to “smooth it out,” then have it reseeded.  Oh yeah, and she doesn’t want dirt in the front yard.  Just the back.

It just screams “there’s no money to found here,” doesn’t it?  Waste of time, right?

While that may be, on some of these I’ll still stop out to have a look at the property and create a bid, though for something like this, I won’t schedule an appointment - this will be done on my time, whenever I’m in the area.  I won’t break up a productive work day for something this small.

Once I’ve had a look at what needs to be done, I’ll write up my bid.  But for a project of this size to be worth it for us (and worth the headaches that always seem to crop up on these cheap lawn repairs, like damaging an irrigation line, getting a callback because a small section of seed didn’t come in, etc), I’m going to bid the project high.  Very high.  I hate these little projects and their potential for problems, so if we’re going to do the work, I want us to be compensated for it.

And while the temptation may be high to just ignore the promise to visit the site and provide a bid, you never know.  Every other contractor she calls might do the same thing, and yours will be the only bid she gets.  You might just be in for some easy money.

If you found this blog but have never really perused our whole site, please be sure to check out our landscaping forums.  9 out of 10 contractors think they’re the most professional forums on the web.  (That tenth contractor?  He’s an unlicensed lowballer anyway.)

I don’t know if it’s because I run a landscaping company or because I run this site, but I swear that almost daily I get unsolicited email from China.  The emails are usually asking me to either buy their decorative or structural stone, or to buy diamond blades.  Tonight it was diamond blades.

I’m no linguist, but if I were trying to sell to say, the Chinese, I’d have someone whose first language was Chinese translate my stuff.  Otherwise, my message might come off like this one did (my commentary follows in red):

Dear Sir   - They started out right.

Today we found you are deal with cutting tools.  - Is “deal” some hip Mandarin way of saying “super-fly” or “your kung fu is the best?”  Like - ‘Today we found out that when it comes to cutting tools, you rock the hardest.’

Would you like to order some cutting blades now ? - Is this like the kids asking “are we there yet?”  Uh, how ‘about now?  Now?

1.Good quality

2. Excellent after-sales service - From China?  Really?

3. Favorable price

4. Bottom price - If I have to choose between “favorable” and “bottom,” bottom sounds cheaper, doesn’t it?  I’d like door #4, Monte.

Our company, Talent Diamond Tools Co. Ltd, is a leading manufacturer of various types of diamond tools in china, you may refer to our website: ***(I’d rather not give them any more airplay)***

We are looking forward to being of further service.

Yours sincerely,

Nancy Yang - How much you wanna bet her name isn’t really Nancy?

As I walked into the shop on Monday morning this week, I looked at our operating table (equipment repair table) and saw this:

It is on, my little furry adversaries.

I’ve been working in the landscaping industry for over 20 years, and I start each new season thinking I’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to our field. There was the in ground pool that heaved about 24″ over the first winter, sending the pavers we’d installed around it down into oblivion. The co-worker that was struck by lightning while working on a truck. The retaining wall blocks with vice grips sticking out of their middle. Me riding at highway speeds on a partially enclosed trailer back to the shop, ducking under a wheelbarrow to hide from the wind, so I could light up a cigarette for the trip. (Thankfully, the days of trailer riding and cigarettes are behind me.)

But every year I get to something that I’ve never seen before, proving that I still haven’t seen it all. This year was no different. One of the first things we wanted to get done this year was to repair a patio we’d built about 20 months ago. It had settled unnaturally, and in a location that puzzled me; at the furthest point away from the house.

The client had contacted me last summer about the issue, and when I’d visited the site then, it looked like about 80 square feet of this paver patio was sliding off a cliff. In a flat yard. There was a jagged fault line across the patio, with all the pavers on one side of that line badly settled and those on the other side, just fine. And the gap in seams along that fault line was big. I could stick the tip of my index finger between the pavers where they diverged.

The house and landscaping were a decade old when we got there, so unsettled fill was ruled out as a cause. And now, roughly 10 months after the client first contacted us about the problem, I was pretty sure the problem was going to look even worse, and possibly involve a larger portion of the patio.

But apparently, our patios are magic. When we arrived and walked to the backyard to begin the repair, the patio was healed! Immediately my heart sank, as I thought our client had either grown impatient with us and did the repairs themselves, or worse, hired someone else to do them. When they stepped outside to greet us, I immediately asked: “Did you guys do some work on the patio?” The client smiled “We didn’t. Yeah, it kinda looks like it fixed itself, doesn’t it.”

Sure enough, if had. I only wish I’d have taken photos when the patio was at it’s worst, so I could show you the difference. But this picture, taken today, should be proof enough. Pretty hard to find the crevasse, isn’t it? Just a few days ago I told a homeowner in our landscaping forums that I know of no pavement that doesn’t degrade in time - and what I’d originally typed and later edited was that I knew of no pavement that improved in time. Yet here I was this morning, standing before a paver patio that had done just that.

It only took a few minutes for my inner Fox Mulder to be challenged by my inner Dana Skulley, hypothesizing that the patio was not reallt magic, but that somewhere beneath our base prep lays a volume of earth that is retaining water and moving materials around with the freeze/thaw cycles or wet/dry cycles. The client also hypothesized that the root mass of a nearby Ash tree might be causing the problem. But I’ve never seen tree roots make pavers move down and then later, back up.

Then again, there may still be a lot of things I’ve never seen before.

The following are actual emails between me and a prospective customer over the last week. All personally identifiable information has been removed.

We live in city name and are planning on having built in our back yard a patio with built-in grill and fire pit.

Could you consult for us over here and do an estimate?

Thanks,

*name*

The city where they live is about an hour or more from our office, which for our market is quite a ways away. My reply:

Thanks for your note and your interest. I want to make sure I understand your request - are you looking for a design and estimate to construct the project, or for us to consult on the construction of the project?

Assuming it’s the former, we’d be happy to. Ordinarily, for more local projects we’ll sometimes do a design on spec, but because of the distance (and subsequent time) involved, we’d need to request a design fee. For something of this nature, we’d charge $500 for the design - and should you hire us to build that design, that $500 would be credited toward the installation.

If that sounds reasonable to you, either reply to this email and include your phone number and address, or give me a call at phone number.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To which he replied:

Thanks for the quick reply.

We can understand and do agree with your need to be reimbursed for your time, travel, and knowledge. However, $500 seems like a lot to us for your services. We have no reason to believe that you would not produce a good design and do excellent work. However, we all have different tastes and what if our tastes didn’t match your design?

We’d might risk $250 for your help initially. Could you do it for that?

I went on to explain in more detail than I should have about why the cost was what it was, that a project of this type is likely going to start at $10,000 and go north from there, and that no, I couldn’t do the consult/design for that much. Haven’t heard from him since.

If that client was suffering sticker shock over a $500 design fee that he’d get credit on if he hired us, he certainly wasn’t going to be ready to drop $10,000 or more on the actual project - which is why I gave that ballpark price in the first place. All told it probably saved me 10+ hours in driving, meetings and table time.

Times are tight right now, without a doubt. But it still doesn’t mean chasing down every single lead is a good idea. Some fish are just too scrawny to try to catch.

Check the forums for some discussions about prequalifying clients and pricing landscape design work.

Running a landscaping business today can be a high-wire act.  With the economy looking grim, the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warning of an economic “contraction” over the next several months and new housing starts in the toilet compared to last year (which wasn’t a great year, either), we have a tough road ahead of us this season.

And with the coming of age of customer review sites like Insider Pages, Judy’s Book, Angie’s List and even Yahoo, you have to treat even the dead wood leads with kid gloves for fear they might write a bad review about your company and cost you valuable business.  Every little edge you can give yourself over your competition counts.

Here’s something I tried last year that worked really well, and killed two customer service birds with one stone.  I don’t know what size and type of business you own, but for my business, I don’t have clerical staff to answer the phones and schedule appointments when I’m not in the office.  And during the season, I can’t answer some of my calls.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t answer a lot of my calls.  I rely on voicemail to serve as my first or sometimes second point of contact with prospective clients.  I try to make my message as clear and cheerful as I can, but more importantly, I promise a call back within 24 hours.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It isn’t always.  Like that day when the skidsteer breaks down on a job site, one of your employees calls in sick forcing you to do more grunt work than you’d planned that day, and then a supplier isn’t ready with the materials they said they’d have ready, forcing you to source them somewhere else.  Today.  Because the project is half done and waiting for this one piece before it can move forward.

What if on that day, a big client called at 7:30am and heard your 24 hour turnaround promise.  You didn’t hear his message until 10pm that night.  If you happen to get engaged with something the next morning and forget, you’ve already lost some credibility with that client, and your odds of closing the sale have probably dropped by 10%.

Last season I found myself unusually on-edge about client calls because of that promise, but because of it I turned around most phone calls within a few hours of receiving them.  Even the ones we received on Saturdays and Sundays.  By making that promise I was putting our reputation and financial success on the line, and I wasn’t about to throw that away before I even spoke with the client.  And an unintended side benefit was that it set an expectation for our prospective clients; if we met that expectation by returning their call timely, we’d already taken one small step in assuring that client that their business was safe with us.

This can work for larger companies, too.  Have all those people whose jobs include client contact to make a promise to their customers about when they’ll hear back from them, whether it be about a repair issue, new business, etc.

And then keep that promise.

If you live in the part of the United States or Canada where there’s snow, right around now the snow’s just about melted, and soon you’ll be breaking ground on your first projects of the 2008 season. Today I was cleaning my office, getting the desk down to bare wood, because I know in a few weeks my world will be thrown helter-skelter, and if I don’t start with a clean desk in April, by July I’ll need to rent a mini-excavator just to find the top of the desk again.

I was also outside cleaning my truck. My ‘93 Chevy Work Truck. We had a little sun today, and I swear that truck is like a dog in those rays, soaking up every last bit of light that shines it’s way. It was at least 10 degrees warmer inside the cab when I climbed in to give it a good wash. Inside, washing the dash and floor I felt like I was hanging out with an old friend, a friend you don’t even need to talk with you’ve known each other for so long. You just know what the other one’s thinking:

Getting ready for another season, eh Jeff?

Yup. Hafta get you cleaned up to make a good impression on our clients. You know what they say about first impressions.

That reminds me. You might want to have the driver side exhaust manifold checked. I think I’m getting a little noisy. Don’t want me belching my way up a client’s driveway.

True enough. You think you’ve got another season in you?

Sure. You?

Absolutely. Let’s go make some money.

Good luck this season. Go out and make some money.