Quickbooks, I have a beef with you.

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I know my ancient Quickbooks Basic 2005 is out of date; so much so that you’ve decided to stop providing payroll updates.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.

Things were moving along too easily.  We had our initial meeting, where the client had provided copies of two different (self-made) designs for a patio he wanted built.  You know how sometimes you just click right away with clients and other times you clunk?  This was a bit of a clunk.

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:

Is it just me, or does Service Magic have the broke senior demographic nailed?  Of all the leads I’ve received from them in ‘08, more than half were a mistake (wanted asphalt, wanted poured concrete, wanted indoor electrical work, etc), and of the rest, only one had a budget of over $1,000.

That’s pretty magical.

The business, that is.  I knew 2007 was rough on a lot of my local competitors and suppliers, but because we seemed to be clicking right along with plenty of work (those of you who know me well know why that is), I never paid much attention.  The last few days have been an eye opener that’s made me feel both happy and more than a little unsettled.

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.

Did you know that 18 gauge nails shot from an air nailer, after breaking free from their intended target, can ricochet off human flesh?

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

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.