Remember my post from yesterday?  I received a response:

Hi Jeff,
I guess I have to hold off for now.  I talked to my husband who wants to do the yard himself and says we have no budget for a project.  Maybe in the future I will be able to contact you again!  Sorry!!!
(Name Withheld)

Looks like I was able to save my own life.  About 2 hours of it, anyway.

I am interested in possibly scheduling an appt. with your company. We have a large lot and have been here for about 4 years and the weeds are overwhelming us. I am not sure if you do natural type projects with little to no chemicals, that is what I am looking for. My husband wants to do it all, but does not have the time. . Wondering if you do free estimates as well.

Thanks!
(Name Withheld)

First I should explain. I am no sales guru. You will not find my face on the cover of a book that teaches readers to earn millions in 7 easy steps. I’m a landscape contractor, just like you (most of you, anyway). Probably with truckloads more web experience than you, but still, we’re cut from the same burlap.

Now, let’s dig into why Blake (Alec Baldwin) in Glengarry, Glen Ross would call this lead “dead wood”:

First, you’ll notice no phone number or address is given in the email. That tells you this prospective client is uncertain enough about whether she even wants to hire someone to do this that she is leaving those details out. You’ll have to jump through a few hoops to get those, apparently.

Next, take a look at the second to last sentence “My husband wants to do it all, but does not have the time.” For those unfamiliar with clientspeak, this is code for “We really don’t know how much this is going to cost, but our budget is small enough that we were going to it ourselves.  We thought we’d contact you to see if you’d charge us much more than what it’d cost for us to do it ourselves.” If you’ve been in business for more than 15 minutes, you know that doing a project for the cost of retail materials is just not possible. The only sense they have for costs of the project is what they priced or estimated themselves, which is often several miles away from what it would cost to have the job done professionally.

Lastly, she’s asking about a free estimate. Not that we don’t do it; we do. But when it’s a specific point of inquiry, it’s one more card stacked on the low budget deck.

The likely outcomes for this project? Either they get it priced, fall back in shock and horror, deciding to do it themselves as they curse the landscaping industry for being so profit-crazy, or they just decide to do nothing. It’s too much work for them, but too much money to have done.

In my return email (hey, I’m a giver) I cut to the quick. If this prospective client can’t provide these pieces of information, then this is more than dead wood. This is dead wood covered in gasoline. I think I’ve got a match around here somewhere…

Hi (Name Withheld)-

Thanks for your note. I’m going to need some information from you:

What it is you want done (are you just looking to have your lawn weed-free?)

What your budget is for the project

Your telephone number

Your address

When you need this project completed

Get back to me with that information and I’ll be able to provide more info for you, as well as potentially setting up an initial visit.

Best regards,

Jeff Pozniak

Sponsored by the Home Depot and Danny Lipford, I’m sure this patio installation will last a good long time.  If by a good long time you mean four weeks.  This is one of the reasons why many contractors have a hard time selling to borderline DIY’ers.  C’mon, Danny.  You know this isn’t the way to build a patio.  Bill Schwab even showed you how a few years ago.  Did you forget?

As you may or may not know, I also run a landscaping company.  That means that during the spring and summer, my schedule is as hectic as yours.  Plus I run this site, which adds a little bit to the things I have to do in a day.  I also have a family, and it always tears me up when I feel like I’m not spending enough time with them.  So if I don’t return your call, lack of time is likely one reason.

And like most of you who own companies and get the sense that your employees think you’re made of money, this site is the same.  Last year I bought my wife a middle-of-the-road digital camera with a good chunk of the funds earned from the site.  This site is not a cash cow.  I’m pretty good at making it look that way though, aren’t I?  So when I get a call like I did from Ray in British Colombia, part of me is thinking “I gotta call this guy back and rack up long distance charges?  No thanks.”

The last reason why you may not receive a return call is the gravity of the call.  If you’re like Ray (sorry to pick on you, Ray), leaving a message with nothing more than your first name, phone number and that you’re trying to find some information on one of my sites,  I’m probably going to decide that you need to learn to use the search feature better, or maybe even Google or Yahoo, and then I’ll delete your message.  And remind myself of reasons one and two above.  If you told me your company was going to suffer a terrible fate if I didn’t call back, or even better, if you left a message asking about advertising on our site and who to make the check out to, then you’d probably get a call back right away.

But other than those scenarios, I’m really just too damn busy.  I hope you’ll understand.

You made me look bad in front of my employees the other day.

I know my ancient Quickbooks Basic 2005 is out of date; so much so that you’ve decided to stop providing payroll updates.  I mean 3-4 years?  That’s just geriatric.  Right?

But I’m skeptical - I don’t think you’re not providing updated payroll subscriptions because it’s too difficult to do it, but because you want to refresh your revenue stream, and the best way to do that is to force people to pay several hundred dollars for both software and payroll subscription upgrades.  But you couldn’t leave well enough alone with that, could you?  You had to guarantee you could roll those customers over - force them in a single-file line at gunpoint from the old versions to the new, more expensive versions.

And you did that by using tactics only seen in use by inkjet printer companies like Hewlett-Packard, who set expiring chips into their ink cartridges, so that even if you just opened a cartridge, if it’s beyond it’s “use by” date, the printer will not accept the cartridge, making it unusable.  Your spin on that concept is to have the software cease to withhold federal and state taxes from employees beyond a certain date.  There are no warnings that taxes are being improperly withheld (or in this case, not withheld), it’s just this silent practical joke that when discovered, totally screws with the 941’s I have to file, and potentially causes tax problems, both for me and my employees.

So I look like an idiot to my people because your software couldn’t just use the older data it had been using in the weeks prior.

Well let me tell you something, mister.  I heard from my accountant that Microsoft is putting together an accounting package based on the most stable and frequently used database language out there:  MySQL  - the same one that this blog uses, and the forum of this site, too.  And you know the folks at Microsoft - their pretty ruthless.  I’d expect them to dump product on the market just to get people (like me, maybe?) to try it.  And if we like it, we might just blog about it.  And others might jump on board.

‘Cause I have to tell you - having fancier graphics in the 2008 version, which seems to multiply threefold the time the software needs to load things process entries, is totally not worth it.

So you’d better clean up yer act, buddy.  Or when this new competitor launches, I’ll be there waving my hand saying “pick me!” when they’re looking for some businesses to try it out.

But even so, after I’d emailed the price for the designs, I got a call back with an indication that we were tentatively a go.  Just send over the paperwork and contract terms.  Cool.

Then I get the email.  The bullet points were as follows:

That’s pretty magical.

I drove to one of my main perennial suppliers to pick up a few shade-loving vines, and as I pulled into the drive, I noticed that all of the hoop houses were down.  As I got out and looked around, there were literally thousands of 4″ and 1 gallon pots strewn everywhere, filled with soil and previously alive perennials, now just baking in the sun, having not received water in who knows how long.   If there was an Old West perennial ghost town, this was it.

I got back in my truck and visited another supplier who had what I needed, but also knew some of the back story; the owner was now working as the lead retail guy for a new, very small retail branch of an only slightly larger landscape construction firm.  Along with that news, they also told me of a large outfit in a neighboring town that had gone belly-up over the winter.

It jarred me a little, and I couldn’t tell you the route I took back to the job site, because I was trying to tabulate all the casualties our local landscaping industry has suffered.  So far:

1 of the largest companies in the area laid off 5 crews.
2 of my smaller competitors went out of business.
1 perennial supplier went out of business.
1 big competitor went out of business.

This is all in a market of maybe 150,000 people.  I guess I’m feeling pretty fortunate that we have enough work in the pipeline to potentially justify one new hire.  But knowing how hard the economy is hitting our industry, I shouldn’t enjoy that feeling for too long.

Before today, I didn’t either. Pretty damn interesting. And surprisingly, not all that painful.