It’s So Easy To Be Better

Jayne and I have been in the process of getting some landscaping work done to our garden following our home renovations.

As you can imagine when doing an extension on your home, there’s always damage done to the surrounding gardens, and there’s always a need to repair and improve the gardens as a result of the building works and redesigns.

Here's a list of the landscaping works that we are needing to be getting done, that we are working through slowly [in some order but also in no particular order]:

• Rebuild of an old stone wall
• Levelling of back lawn [north] and installation of water feature
• Replace paving at rear of house
• New lawn turf at rear of house
• Garden redesign on north-east, east, south and west of house.
• Driveway entrance into newly erected garage
• Driveway reconstruction from front gate to garage [significant length]
• Rebuilding three small stone walls along driveway

Here’s what has happened so far:

So far we’ve dealt with a number of tradespeople and landscapers who have offered a variety of services to us across a number of these areas.

Here are our requirements that we ask of each trade:

• When can you start?
• How much will it cost me?
• Can you do it to the standard we expect and the design we have given you?

Primarily, here’s what we’ve been dished up:

• Here’s my price/quote/estimate. But it means nothing, because the way I work is I will charge you by the day or hour, and so any resemblance to the quote being accurate will be purely accidental.? This is the most common abuse of trust I see. It is also the most horrendous abuse of trust I have ever seen. I have seen this a number of times, from a variety of tradespeople. Basically, when this happens, the trade person is milking the homeowner. The trade person believes that they can take as long as they [the trade person] want to stretch the job out.
• At the other end of the spectrum is the thorough tradie who itemises everything that he says the job will be, and he knows his delivery times. He delivers completely, and very close to the time frame that he says he will. There are no surprises. These tradies are a pleasure to do business with.
• And then, there are the above and beyond guys. These guys turn up to do a job, and if they see something else they can help with, they offer to do it as well. The guys who did our driveway entrance to the newly built garage were great at this… these guys had some available time, so they offered to shovel and barrow some mulch into some hard-to-get-to areas around the garage that totally lifted the appearance of that section of the garden. They also used their digger to dismantle three older poorly formed stone walls in preparation for the new replacement walls, freeing up some time for the stonemason to basically get started as soon as he’s able to. Nothing was ever an issue for these guys. They were a breath of fresh air to deal with.
• Not like the stonemason who came and rebuilt the first old stone wall. That guy seemed to go out of his way to booby trap things in the reconstruction, so that we’d have to get him back to do more work. He was easily discovered to be padding his bills and he certainly wasn’t up to the skills that he said he could perform… sadly for Jayne and I some of the work he did for us less than twelve months ago is needing to be remedied immediately….
• We trusted his word, but his word was lies.

In life and in business…

In life and in business, everybody remembers the shysters who rip you off, who try to rip you off, or who lie and deny their way through life and life’s events.

These con artists run from one client to the next, never building long term customers or lifelong advocates for their services… Eventually, while ever they keep doing things this way, they cannot outrun the bushfires that are following them.

Sadly, because they prey a lot on the wealthy and the well to do, their victims are hesitant to speak up because the public have very little sympathy for stories about the wealthy being ripped off.

The wealthy are a very easy target because of this.

As I used to say to my patients, and as I used to say to my dentist friends:

“No matter how bad things are going in the economy, nobody out there ever gives a rat’s or cares if a dentist has been hard done by…”

And I mean NOBODY!

Sometimes you just have to wear it.

But as a business owner, and as a customer, there are some things that you can do…

I remember a dentist friend of mine telling me that every time he received a speeding ticket, the price of dentistry at his practice rose for all of his patients who were members of the police force.

This is NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF MOTION IN PHYSICS.

Recently one of the tradespeople we had engaged with a price estimation sent us an email with two weeks’ notice that his hourly rate was going to rise to $82.00 per hour.

There was no mention as to what the hourly rate was currently… we needed to go back and research a current invoice to see that MID JOB he was gifting himself a SEVENTEEN PERCENT pay rise!

I don’t know anywhere else where that sort of behaviour in business is acceptable behaviour.

But this tradie seemed to believe that this was going to be OK.

As a dentist, you certainly can’t do that in the middle of a crown preparation appointment!

Looks to me that this tradesman is gifting himself an immediate vacation….

In the words of Bill Foster [played by Michael Douglas] in the movie “Falling Down”:

“I’m just standing up for my rights as a consumer.”

As a homeowner, I’m just standing up for my rights as a consumer.

*****

Dr. David Moffet BDS FPFA CSP is a certified CX Experience coach. David works with his wife Jayne Bandy to help SME businesses improve their Customer Service Systems to create memorable World Class experiences for their valued clients and customers. Click here to find out how David and Jayne can help your business

https://ultimatecxexperience.info/about-us/