What I Learned From These Bad Landscaping Jobs

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today I'm sharing about real stories, real jobs, real customers and what I learned from them because these jobs went bad. Before we get into today's show though, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Jobber. If you haven't already, check out getjobber.com im andy's a n D E S and try out their software completely free. One of the things that I love about Jobber is that and for any software out there that you must have in this industry is you want to have the same software for the entire customer life cycle. And what I mean by that is everything from quoting and then scheduling the job and then to dispatching the job and then to invoicing the job and then to following up with the person and having emails, conversations and all that down the road and following up, all of that should be done in the same software. You don't want to do it where you're doing estimates in one software, then you're sending the invoices out from a different software and then you're sending the estimates from a different software, or there's like breaks and gaps, or worse yet, you do it all in one. And then the communication element, the emails, the follow up, all of that, the monthly newsletters are sent from a different software. So Jobber allows you to do all those things in sequence on the same software, saving you the time from having to copy and paste moving things across different software platforms. So check it out today. Go to getjabber.com im andes a n D E S and try it out today. Alright, so today I'm going to be sharing with you real people, real jobs, real customers, things that went bad. And I feel like I hope you can learn from these mistakes, that you don't have to go through these things. Some of these are fairly recent in the past year, some of these are four plus years ago that these things happened. But I wanted to share them with you, make sure that you don't have to do the same mistakes that I did. And I think take away from them is what you can do in your business to make sure that you don't have to have these bad experiences. One last thing, if everyone's been asking about these hats, these hats are amazing. They're handcrafted from my cousin, she makes the leather, puts it all on here, handmade. You can get one of these by coming to the conference. But you shouldn't just come here just for the hat. You should come here for the business, how much it's going to change your business and the education you're gonna get when you come, the knowledge, the things that we're talking about. I just truly believe that this is gonna change people's businesses. And so I have put out a guarantee that if you come to this conference, you pay for it. You come. I'm going to refund you your ticket as well as your hotel if you feel like when you leave there was not a ton of value added and completely worth every single penny, every single minute that you came and spent. All right. That's how confident I am. I know companies that are bringing up to like six, seven, eight people. They're bringing their whole management team, their estimator, their office people, all the partners in the business. And so that's a great opportunity to do that. I'll have my operations manager there, I'll have my estimator there. I'll have quite a few of my project managers and team and staff there that they can ask questions. They will be in Q and A. This is a great event. I promise you, you will not regret it. Don't just the one day, the Friday that we're going to be talking about P4P pay for performance and building your personalized tailored system for your business. That alone is going to be worth the money and time of getting to the conference. But there's just so much value, I think that's going to be added to you and your business. We're gonna be planning for 2020, your marketing campaigns, what you need to be spending. All of those things we're talking about. I really look forward to it. Landscape Summit. If you want to sign up, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference or, or just go to the homepage, click conference and sign up today. It's all a write off before the end of the year. Make your purchase and get it written off on your taxes. Okay? So make sure you do that. But today we are talking about some jobs that went bad. So there was one in Ferndale. The name of the customers was Ken and Melody. I remember this like the back of my hand. The reason I remember it like the back of my hand is because it was our first job that was over $30,000. Just like in revenue, like the first one job that was a one time project, $30,000. We had never done big, big projects to that extent. We had never subcontracted none of that. Well, we jump into this job and what you can learn from this job is don't oversell yourself. There's a certain level of sell it and then figure things out. Like, I really like that quality trait about most people and business owners and things. Then there's this other side of it that like, you're getting on some pretty risky territory when you're starting to talk about a $30,000 project on a home that's probably worth three quarters of a million dollars. And so I still remember it was a new construction job. I met with the clients prior to them even breaking ground like six months before and went over the property, went over the layout, did like a sketch design of where everything would go. I gave them several options for pricing, like really professional. They love me a lot. I got along with them really well. I showed them some cheaper, like lots of, lots of communication. I probably went. I had three or four meetings with them before even finalizing the offer. Getting 50% down. I think I got 50% down like three or four months before we actually started the project. Because we require the 50% down prior to scheduling the job. So that was all fine and dandy. The problem was the biggest job prior to that job was a $10,000 job. And under that, probably a $5,000 job. So like we had never done anything to this scale in this project. We had to subcontract the fencing out. So they had cedar plank fencing like slats. And we subbed that out. And so that was the first time again, we never worked with subcontractors before. We had never managed subcontractors before. We didn't know what it was like to have to sell the customer on the markup of a subcontractor. And then there was also a natural boulder wall. We had never built a natural boulder wall ever. Never, ever, ever. I or anyone on the crew, we'd always focus on maintenance. So this is like, right, you know this years ago, but like before we started transitioning and or like accepting larger projects based work, having more skilled laborers, things like that, having equipment and trucks and you know, skid steers, track loaders, excavator operators, like that sort of thing. We didn't have any of that. So we're gonna build this natural retaining wall that is only about 3ft tall, but it is in the very front of the house along the road, right against the sidewalk. It is the focal point of the thing you see when you drive along the road. Like it is the thing that stands out. We had never built one in our entire life.

Had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We literally built it freestanding and then we're trying to backfill it with dirt. It was horrible. It was atrocious. Okay. The soil quality was absolutely horrible. It was all clay. From the dig out of the. They dug out the. The foundation, plopped all this junk, Clay, garbage, gravelly soil, and then we just spread it out. And we expected to put topsoil down like we did. We put topsoil down, but we didn't budget enough. We did not put enough topsoil down. Okay? So these are all the things that are happening. We had never done a big, massive amount of planting yet. This place had a whole bunch of planting. It's all new construction. So usually they want more plants than they actually need, but you gotta provide those. So learning about, like, the fact that when you're doing estimating, you need to know plants and you need to know how you're gonna sell them and how they're gonna look when you actually put them in there instead of just like a circle on a sketch, like that sort of thing. So we learned that the boulder wall was horrible. It was an absolute embarrassment. None of my crew knew how to build them. I kind of left them up to it the first day and said, hey, just stack them. Backfill, stack them. Like, course by course, it looked horrible. Wasn't straight, it was jagged. Some of the rocks could fall out if you just, like, kind of tapped them. It was horrible.

The. The. So the ground, the soil, all that dig out from the. From the foundation was plopped out. We graded it all out. Good drainage, put topsoil on top. But because we weren't expecting all this horrible soil, we had only budget, I think, like, 20 yards of. Of good topsoil when we probably need, like, 40. And so we just did a thin layer of topsoil, and then we put sod down. Well, guess what? It's the middle of July and it got baked out because you got clay with not enough topsoil and you got sod. All the water that went on that lawn either evaporated or went to the clay and just shed off. And so the sod started dying within a few days. The wall was. It was so bad that the contractor from the house, like the guy building the house, started educating us on how to build the wall, like, to make it look flat. Like, making sure the flat face of the rock is going to face out and that there's a slight angle of repose and those sort of things. The simple things about building a wall, well, we just never done it before in our whole life. So that was an embarrassment. It was an absolute embarrassment all the way around. What ended up happening? The lawn, the sod dried out and started dying. Looked horrible. It was patchy everywhere. Some parts where the topsoil was good, it was fine. And then other parts, it started to die.

The fencing.

We marked up the cost of the subcontractor to put the fence in. We did not know how to sell it to the customer. So they weren't happy that they were charging. We were charging an extra thousand dollars. But on the other hand, we had to manage this contractor. We had to tell them which they had installed broken slats in the fence. The door wasn't exactly right. We had to go back and tell them and have them come back out, and they were a week book. The customer wasn't happy because now our subcontractor can't get there and we can't control it because we don't know how to install a fence or fix. Was horrible. That was the worst. So what happened? Okay, so.

Everything is done with the job. The only big scathing thing when we left the job was that the lawn wasn't looking great, but it was kind of like, you know what? We put some more topsoil down, we cut some pieces of sod out. We tried to make it as good as we possibly could. And it was kind of like they were okay. We thought, well, several weeks later, we got this horrible online review. Absolutely horrible. And some of it was true. Most of it actually wasn't. Some of the things that was said, but still, I didn't really care. I kind of accepted blame on this one because I knew I had oversold the job and they loved me so much before the job because I could sell it, but we could not perform the work. And so we ended up going back for like, I think a. A whole day. We took a bunch of topsoil down, ripped out a bunch of the sod, put down new topsoil, installed new sod, replaced some plants, installed some more extra mulch. All of this for free. And just did as much as we possibly could with a crew in a day and just did it all for free. Horrible. We lost money. I lost a lot of sleep. Not sleep. I just, like, it was stressful. That project took several weeks. Now we could probably do that whole project in like three days, but it was horrible. We charged quite a bit for it too. So we didn't like, lose a ton of money from a net net standpoint, but it was really bad for our reputation. The contractor, it was embarrassing. Everyone that walked by. It was embarrassing. So it was pretty bad. Even, like when we rented the excavators and the skid steer, because at that time, we didn't have those, and we. It was so muddy. It had rained so much. Right. At one point, like, literally the week before, it was scorching hot in July. It poured and poured and poured, and so mud, like, all over the main road. Well, guess what? The county comes by and, like, you have an hour to get this cleaned off, or we're going to fine you. And so that was a horrible experience. That was the first one. What did I learn in that? Not to oversell. If I don't know how to perform the work. I'm all about selling and then figuring things out. But know your limitations. Know, you know, don't think that you can go from a $5,000 project and then sell. Go sell someone a $50,000 pool install. Like, you're just going to get in trouble. It's just not gonna lead to a good thing. Even if you're a good salesperson, you can do it. Like, there's lots of projects I could have sold. But after this experience, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna say no, I'm going to save myself. I'm gonna save my bank account, I'm gonna save my crew, and I'm gonna save the customer from a very bad experience. It's better at that point to tell the customer that you don't do a certain thing or you're not the best at a certain skill, part of the business, part of the landscaping field, and just say, we're not the best at that. You can either subcontract that out or I understand if you need to walk away. If you say that, they're going to realize that the things that you do offer and the things that you do bid on, you are committed and you know, and you are trusting your crew and your abilities and that you're going to be the best at it. When you admit that you're not the best at one part of the job, they instinctively trust you more on the parts that you do give bids on. So I learned that the hard way through this job. And so now there. We would have done things differently. We would have said, you know, you need to have this prepped. You need to have, you know, the fence guys can come in after us. We don't need to. We don't need to be the subcontractor for that. And we would have done that way anyways. That was the first one Next one is Chuck. So I just want to make sure you all know that these are real people. So, like Ken and Melody, they are in Ferndale, Washington. Chuck is in Blaine. I don't want to give their last name because I didn't ask them, but Chuck was in Blaine. Chuck was our first artificial turf installation. We basically did it when we first originally estimated it. We thought we were doing it at cost. We'll get to that in a second. But we thought we were doing it at cost because we wanted to learn. And we had told the first five, seven customers we had for artificial turf, like, hey, we're just learning. We're gonna give you this 25% off, which is basically at cost for us, and we will install it. But this is a special deal because we're just getting started. Well, the reason I started doing artificial turf was because I wanted to give opportunity to certain employees, to give them kind of a niche to grow within the company and give them some opportunity to make some more money, which was fine. But the problem is you gotta keep your eye on the goal and the prize, and that is scalability and profitability. For us, at the time, that's what we were thinking about. Right. And so what's not scalable? Trying to get really good at installing artificial turf because it's harder to train people. It's bigger projects, more equipment, bigger, like, everything. Right. And most importantly, the skilled amount of labor. The amount of labor that those people. Your. Your crew needs is far more substantial than trimming a bush or better yet, mowing a lawn or whatever. Like, simpler things that are more scalable and thereby more profitable. So, anyways, that's what I learned from that job, Chuck. We installed a $5,000 putting green. Very small. I think it was like, 200 square feet. Let me think. No, no, no. It was bigger than that. It was like 500 square feet. 50 because I've been 30. It was like 600 square feet. 600 square feet or so. That this putting green was out in the middle of his field. He wanted to use it as a place where his friends could come. They could tee off from their backyard and go into this field where the putting green was at. Sounded great. Okay. The problem was that this field was completely flat, like, dead flat. No drainage whatsoever. Right. Well, we built this thing, and he wanted it to be where if they hit the ball like the golf ball, that it would be able to hit up the field and roll onto the green. Sounds cool. We put three flags out on the green. Things sounded great. The problem is this field is completely flat. And so any drainage that we put. And it was clay, the soil was clay. So what happened is when we did the base prep for this putting green, we dug down six inches, did our base prep for drainage with gravel and sand and wee barrier and all that stuff. We do all of that. But the problem is you got flat clay with the grass. We dug down, built it back up, and then put turf on top. Right? Artificial turf. The problem was now the subgrade, the clay. We basically made a bowl for all the water of this field to sit in. That's basically what we did. Then we filled up the pond that we created with gravel and put turf on top. Well, guess what? Of course, all that water went to that where we had dug out. And because there was nowhere for that water to drain, we didn't put any drains going off 300ft into the ditch. Because it was that big of a field, we didn't do that. And so what happened during the winter, literally, there's puddles over the entire putting green. It was horrible. And he was in Arizona for the winter, and he was getting texts from his friends and pictures of his putting green that was now messed up. And we're getting calls from him, and he's in Arizona, and then we're gonna have to deal with it in spring. It was horrible. And furthermore, the people that I had trained and really wanted to get into artificial turf, they had left the company. It's not their fault. It's my fault for investing so much into this aspect of the business and investing so much into one person and people and training. When.

That person leaves, we're at a massive vulnerability. So that happened. You know, that employee left that we had kind of made the artificial turf manager, went down to an actual artificial turf company and like, several hours away and worked for them. Great, Fantastic. For him. It's not his fault. It's my fault for even thinking that I'm going to be vulnerable to have one person know everything about a certain part of my business. So if that person leaves, I am now susceptible to mad customers and everything else. Okay, so what happens?

I get called back to this job site. Long story short. Cause there's like a lot of back and forth with the office. He is super mad. He's threatening to say all these bad things about us and all this. He's pretty connected in the community. Really, really nice guy when you actually meet him in person, though. And so I go there, try to figure out, okay, maybe we can do a drain around it, like a curtain Drain, get it out to the ditches, something like that. And we're trying to strategize. And of course, I'm knowing this is all coming out of our pocket because literally, we charge 5,800, and it cost us like 6,500 to install it originally. And now we're like, back to overtime, right? Like, everything that is coming out of our pocket now. So I'm like, okay, it'll cost like two grand, probably, to put the curtain drain in. But still, in my mind, I'm like, I don't think this is gonna work. I don't think this is gonna. Like, we're gonna have to drain this whole field in these curtain drains because the water's gotta go somewhere. And the amount of. So, long story short, I decided out of my personal paid out of my own pocket to write this guy a check for his 5,800 and just be like, hey, here's your paycheck, or here's all your money back. I'm sorry it didn't work out. And that's what I did. Actually. What happened is we were talking about trying to. How to rectify it, and I told him that we'd get back with him and when we can come and put this drain in and try to build up the sub, like the sand underneath the putting green surface and all these other things. And then I literally, five minutes away, I drove away already. And I come back, I'm like, look, man, I don't think that's gonna really work in long term. I think I should just give you the money back. And he's like, I would accept that. And so I wrote him a check, gave it. And that hurt, like, horrible. Like, I hate giving money back. I've never done that my whole life. But what to learn from that. Do not go into. Like, you should not diversify before. Really, really specialization of a service. Like, I would. I've said this before. I'd much rather have a business that has $500,000 in annual revenue, but all they do is just mowing. I would much rather have that company over a company that does 1.5 million, but does landscaping, hardscaping, waterfalls, irrigation, fertilization, trimming bushes, fall cleanups, gutter cleanouts, pressure wash, like all of this other stuff. I'd much rather have the company that does one or two services, but they're really scalable, really simple, easy to train your people, consistent profit margins. And with all that profitability, scalability, low labor barrier in terms of skilled labor. With all of that comes predictability and the fact that you don't have to write out checks to your customers because you do bad work. When you start trying to branch off in order to grow and create new services, just in order to grow, that's when you start falling apart. That's why businesses are doing 2, 3, 4, $5 million in revenue. And they go out of business. They look successful. They look like they're doing great. Yeah, they did, but they were in 30 different types of services, which, guess what? Doing a water feature is a completely different business than mowing lawns. Like, it's a completely different company. Yeah, you might be called the same company name under your landscaping umbrella, but they're completely different businesses. It's like the guy out painting outside is somehow expected to be a really good. Installing windows at the house. Oh, it's the same house. No, no, it's like a different business. And so for people in the landscaping industry, it's easy for us to be like, oh, well, if we can paint, we can install windows, I. E. If we can install irrigation, we can also do tree work. Like, it's completely different businesses. And so to think that you're gonna grow your business by diversification of services is an absolute fallacy in this industry. It's absolutely what takes many, many of those in this industry down and makes them fail is that it's like, oh, if I'm gonna grow my business, I need to add services. And then, oh, my customers are always asking for us to do leaf cleanup. I better get like a big leaf vac and a dump truck. And then I, oh, my goodness, I'm requests for tree work. I should get a tree chipper. And then that would be great for the winter. But you know what? I need to get a plow for the winter too, because we're gonna do plowing and, oh, salting too, because so I'll go to salter with another truck. Like, it just gets really, really bad. From a balance sheet perspective to.

A revenue, like, cash flow perspective, it's horrible. Buying all equipment, trying to diversify your labor force to figure out who does what, then dependency on certain individuals that you have to now overpay to keep them around, because if they left, you would be vulnerable. Like I was with artificial turf. So what I learned from that, again, don't diversify your services in order to grow. If you want to really focus on making your business better.

You should really focus on making it more profitable, efficient, and systems oriented. Don't focus on how do I get more services. That's easy. That's the easiest way to grow. It's the lazy way to grow, in my opinion. You just add more services, of course you're going to get more revenue. Last year we cut out almost half of our services. If I wrote all our services down, we cut out almost half of them and that's like half of our revenue. But guess what? The next year we still made the same amount of revenue. We didn't grow very much, but we made the same amount of revenue. And guess what? It's way more profitable. We cut out all the artificial turf, the tree services. What else? We cut out delivery of material, pickup of materials. We cut out all of that stuff, get really focused on the things we're good at, be really profitable, really systems oriented around those things. Last customer was in Lyndon Washington. This gentleman's name was Mark. Great guy. It was again, same issue. We were trying to diversify into irrigation. We don't do irrigation, by the way. That was another thing we cut out. But this was a point where we were just adding irrigation in and my goodness, we messed that job up. It also was a lack because we had a really skilled employee that joined as a new employee, but he was very skilled and project manager had less.

Experience in landscaping than this new employee. Well, the new employee comes along and basically changes a part of the design.

I. E. One more block on this wall. Well, this wall was like 150ft and it was a terrace of the entire lawn. So by raising that block, that wall six inches higher, we had to include six more inches of topsoil on several thousand square feet of lawn. Well, guess what? Because we had to add that much topsoil. Then what happened is when the rain came, it compressed a little bit and started getting puddles and everything. And I had to go back and put more soil. It was horrible. The hydro seeders that we had contracted to come in, they said they told the customer that the lawn would be in within a week. It was like six weeks later and barely sprouted. So we had to like go back, tear a bunch of stuff out, put in sod instead of hydro seed. It was horrible. What did we learn from that? Number one, project managers rule the day on jobs. I don't care who's there, how much experience they have. If they are the project manager, they, they are the ruler. They will stick by what the estimator gave them in their project notes. They don't need to order more materials or what they think is better or whatever. If there's going to be changes to that estimate there's going to be work change orders, there's going to be price increases. The customer needs to be notified, the office needs to be notified. I don't care who tells you anything otherwise. We learned that and we also learned that irrigation is not our forte and that we're not about to spend a bunch of time and effort trying to figure it out. So we cut it out. No more irrigation for us. So those are some of the jobs. I could probably list one or two more that were really bad that I can remember. A lot of them are on projects because again, projects are so cool and amazing. Everyone tries to get into landscaping and hardscaping, but guess what? When you have a bad M.O. that goes bad, you might, you know, lose a couple hundred bucks trying to fix the lawn or whatever. Guess what? When you have a project that goes bad, you're out tens of thousands of dollars very easily, by the way. And it takes a lot of time. With more effort, more equipment, it just, you know, a world of hurt. So those are just a couple of the ones I wanted to share today. If you like this, let me know in the comments below. I have a few more I could share that are not fun to talk about. But anyways, I hope that everyone joins us for Landscape Summit. It's only like four. No, not even four. It's like three weeks away. We're going to Christmas, going to New Year, you're gonna be home. You're probably listening to some of these videos this time. You're now kind of like not doing a lot of work. I promise you coming this conference will change your business, guaranteed. I'll pay you back for the 299. I'll pay you back for your hotel. You're staying there at the Holiday Inn. It's very, very reasonable. We don't stay in like some five star hotel. This is about learning your business. We spent a solid eight hours a day, nine hours plus Q&A in a seminar room. This is not like fun activities and just hee hawing. We focus on business and we grind for three days. I leave that conference completely drained out of my mind because I put like my heart and soul into those three days to make it worth your time. I promise you I won't let you down. I'd love to see you at Landscape Summit. Join the day landscapebusinesscourse.com I'll see you next time. Be great because nothing else pays.