Mike Andes shows a landscaping crew handling a mid-job change when a client asks for a 3-foot bark-mulch flower bed. The crew calculated 14 cubic yards of bark and 12 hours of labor on the spot. Fast communication and field estimates prevent disputes and keep clients happy.
Hey everyone, it's Mike at Landscape Business Course. But today I'm actually out on a job site from one of our crews and I want to kind of show at a point about work, change orders, just a quick video on what to do when you're at a big landscaping job and the client all of a sudden wants something different or they expected something more, what to do, how to sell them on the upsell without them getting mad about you, not just including it. So what happened? I'm going to walk you through this job and talk to you about what we did or what we were supposed to do. And then now what we've done. So I'm gonna flip this around. So this is a property out in the county. And basically this all used to be a whole bunch of brush all in here. And so you can see they pushed the brush back with the track loader and they've cut a lot of ivy off these trees and now we're installing all this new soil here. We used the track loaded, take all these, you can see roots and all this sort of thing growing, useless line. You can see they've taken it down now, but you can see they've pushed all the debris and ivy and brush back into the forest. And now they're over here on the side and you can see the track loader they are operating.
They are spreading now the topsoil. And so this was the plan is basically we were going to come in here, we were going to prep this whole place for a lawn and see the line up here that they're cutting up. This ivy to the ivy was going all the way into here. They tore it all out, pushed all the debris back into the forest and now are installing the topsoil. So this is the plan from the get go. And then yesterday all of a sudden the client decided that they wanted to have this three foot flower bed along the entire perimeter of the entire lawn. So I'll show you over here what they've started to do and are gonna have to do this for the rest of the day. They wanted this three foot bed of bark mulch installed around the entire perimeter. It's gonna come here, it's gonna go all the way down there and then all the way across the property line. And when that's all fine and good like, but they expected it to be done for the same price and they were convinced that it was included in the estimate. And even what happened is at the estimate, when they talked to the estimator, they had actually mentioned the bark mulch but they ended up deciding not to do it. Well, all of a sudden, when the crews on, on the job site, they expect it to be done. And they were threatening to say, they were saying, basically, if it's not installed, we're gonna have someone else do it and we're gonna take it off the final bill for this job. And it's not in the. It was there. It wasn't even mentioned the estimate. It was completely just like out of the blue. So what we did, and this is what I'd recommend you do on those sort of situations, number one, act really, really fast. The sooner you can resolve the issue and get like, just work the client through it, the better. So what we did is right away, the office contacted the project manager who was on site and said, hey, how much mulch is it going to take and how many hours is it going to take? So immediately they were like, hey, it's going to take 12 yards or no, 14 yards of medium bark, and it's gonna take 12 hours to install all of that. Because they already have the machine here. It's not super complicated. And so what they did is immediately they contacted back to the client who had already called in a rage and talked to one of the office assistants. And so they were just like just out of their tree, super mad, all of that. But what we did is as soon as we possibly could, we called them back. We had an estimate in hand. So it was 12 hours of labor, 14 yards of medium bark to be installed, and said, hey, look, we were sorry for a misunderstanding. We thought for sure you didn't want that. And they didn't. They had said no previously. But immediately reacting to the situation and secondarily having a system in place where your project managers and even your employees, based upon just budgeted hours and the materials, you can give a very accurate estimate. So within a few minutes, the office contacted the MEC and upsold them on another on installing all of this edging or the flower bed edge all the way around and including that 14 yards of mulch and the 12 hours of budget time. What you can learn from this is, number one, the budgeted hours and materials can be a really simple way of creating estimates. And if you train your guys out in the field, they can actually make those pretty accurate for you because they're pretty. They usually know how long about it's going to take and they know about how much you yardage it's going to take of materials. So make it really simple for your estimate is really, really key. Quick communication really, really key to dissolve and to kind of take down that, you know, really, really kind of hostile customer that's threatening or just completely out of their tree. Just to resolve that issue quickly and efficiently. That's one way to do it. So hopefully that helps someone today walk you around the property one more time.
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