When you are hiring a landscape company, what do you base your decision on? How they present themselves? How professional they look? Their references? Their portfolio? How prompt they were when arriving for their appointment? The price? Unfortunately, in my experience, the biggest determining factor a majority of people base their decision on is price alone. When asked, most people will tell you it’s a combination of all of the above, but in most circumstances, this just isn’t true. I see it often. There are plenty of companies out there that are busy as heck yet aren’t very professional, are hard to understand, don’t show up when they are supposed to etc, etc, etc…Worse, they are hard to find when things start falling apart. Maybe, the problem is consumers have a hard time comparing apples to apples. Believe me when I tell you, there are a lot of poorly laid out landscapes out there. There are also a lot of landscapes that aren’t great but aren’t pathetic either. Some look fine after installation but start falling apart not too long after the check gets cashed. The reason for this post is because I’d like for you to look beyond price. Today one of our clients called at 9:30am. She was in a jam. Her dog sitter got into an accident and wasn’t able to let the dog out. She called upon us last minute to help her out. It was never a question of yes or no but whether we could get to her house in time. You see, we were working in Litchfield County and she lives in Fairfield, an hour and fifteen minutes away. The dog was good for a couple of hours. I personally dropped everything, got in the truck and drove two and a half hours round trip to Fairfield for a five minute task. We do this because we are very grateful for our clients and will do just about anything to help them out. For a lot of our clients, we are their trusted adviser. We watch out for their best interest. This story brings me back to the original question, why do you hire a certain landscape company? At Designing Eden, we will never be the largest and we will never be the cheapest. We always strive to be the best though. Part of being the best is being a trusted adviser to our clients. We don’t always tell our clients what they want to hear but we tell them our opinion, good or bad. We have a lot of experiences beyond horticulture and landscape design. While on the property I walked the perimeter of the house. Our client had some type of small animal, possibly a baby squirrel, get into the house. My point is that I will guarantee you, you will not get this service, a mostly free service, when you base your decision on price alone. When contractors are working on razor sharp margins, repair work and customer service deeds just aren’t possible. Do you want someone you can count on for the long haul, someone who will look out for your best interest? Can you count on the companies you’re hiring or are you just looking to get a project complete and deal the the outcome, whatever that may be?
