I’ve always pretty much been a do-it-yourselfer. On occasion, I’ve hired things done that I just couldn’t do myself such as installing a furnace. Heck, even this website was built by me over the course of an entire winter. I do love it and I’m not sure anyone else could do it the way I wanted to have it done. I did talk to several people about doing it for us, but I just didn’t feel comfortable that they would give me what I wanted and it cost a lot of money. Most of them wouldn’t give me any concepts or layouts to get an idea of what they could do and I just didn’t feel comfortable with the blind faith way of doing things.
A lot of what we do as a company is obviously based on experience. Whether it’s a paver style, a water feature, a certain plant etc. When it comes to design and implementation of our services, it’s the same thing. We always draw a sketch at a first meeting with a client. It’s not to scale and often not pretty, but it gives our clients an idea of where I think it can go. With a common understanding of a basic layout for the landscape, we can move onto the design phase without the worry of having to completely redo something. You will obviously want to know what our plan is for your landscape and why.
This winter we hired some contractors to do some work for us with our renovation. While we did the bulk of the work ourselves, we had to hire some contractors to help with the things we really didn’t know. We used people for the electrical, HVAC, and the drywall finishing. It obviously cost more to have someone do it, but I wanted it done right. We reached out to people as I’m sure most of you do when you’re looking to have work done, because referrals from friends and family mean that they’ve done all the hard work for you right? All four of them did at least enough to make me happy and one, the drywall finisher, was almost perfect. As a side note, my wife tells me that no one will ever make me 100% happy, so apparently on the Peter Katke scale, he was perfect.
I’m telling you all of this because I learned something from our experiences this winter. I learned what it feels like to be on the other side of our service in a lot of ways. From the very beginning when trying to hire someone you trust without knowing them. Working with them to plan out what you want them to do. Trusting them to give you what you are paying a lot of money to have them do. And even giving them a good amount of money as a deposit, not even knowing whether you will see it or them again. Not to mention the longevity and small details that make a project maintain it’s appeal and value to us.
The cool thing about it was that I saw us in them in a lot of ways, both good and bad. I also thing back to what we’ve always done and the importance that we place on our job review process which covers the finer details and allows us to double and triple-check our quality before we say the job is done.
Now I’ve been on the other side.
