Landscape, Construction Management Disaster turns Into a Mud/ LandSlide

This job started out simply enough, but turned into one hot mess pretty quickly when the customer started to make changes on the project during the job that weren't in the original scope of work. What we're going to be talking about today are change orders, messy jobs, and what you as contractors and what you as customers should expect and look out for. So, let's analyze today's job. Was the epitome of easy. Outside of this customer's back door, he just had this nasty wavy slope going down. No flat yard space. All we had to do was import maybe 3-400 cubic yards of soil, create a gentle pitch off from his back door to be able to shed water down, and to maximize his flat yard space, we were then going to have a different change in the angle. And at this point right here, this was going to change to a 20° slope. This 20° slope is a maintainable surface. You can mow it. You can easily establish vegetation. It's no big deal. We literally had the project done. I like the slope. So, you created a basically would you consider this a two to one, Tim? Almost. Still working on scrounging some some more dirt. Just good black soil. You've got You don't have it perfectly flat up here because we need water to run off. Of course. But, it looks good. I don't see where you need a whole lot more dirt. So, John, how many ton do you think a quad axle hauls? 18, depending depending on on the frame style. And how are you going to relate that to a joke about your wife? She can't go down a 9-ton road, NEITHER CAN THEY. THERE WAS ALWAYS a joke about your ex-wife in there somewhere. And the customer makes a change. He wanted the backyard space to be virtually flat, which would stiffen up this 20° slope to a 40° slope. Now, you can establish vegetation on a 40° slope, but it's a much bigger challenge. This job has changed considerably since we've started it. At the customer's request, the grades that we had coming up like this have now been extended out and brought to a more vertical drop. The reason we don't recommend doing that, you can't maintain it. It's going to be difficult to maintain Think vegetation will grow on that slope? It'd be tough. This is what he wanted. I know. Not what we were originally planning on doing. No, I can't I had it all graded out. Yeah, you had it done at one point, didn't you? Yeah, to where I felt comfortable. Yeah. Get past that. You telling me that this morning? Yeah. What happened was 9 months after this project was done, the customer failed to establish vegetation successfully on this 40° slope. 9 in of rain in three separate days created a mudslide for this customer. At this 40° pitch, this 9 in rainstorm started to peel this slope like an onion. And when it did that, it brought it all down into two neighbors' backyards. The customer called me up. He confronted me on this project. He then said, "How come you let me do this?" I want to back this up. At that point, when I had completed the job and graded it the way that I felt comfortable with, he not only insisted that it be changed, but he actually was considering canceling the entire project after it was already done if I didn't make the changes as he requested. Canceling the entire project is code for not only was he not going to pay us, he was going to ask us to remove all of the soil and undo all of the work we had already accomplished on his job unless we made the changes as he had outlined. I reminded this customer that I had told him that this was not in the original design, had concerns with this entire redesign. It didn't make a difference at that point. I had a mad customer, a mudslide on my hands, and I had a reputation to uphold. So, I went out with an excavator and a skid loader and for 3 days I worked on rebuilding his bank for $0. I wasn't about to hang this customer out to dry. Even though this wasn't my design, this wasn't my idea, and this isn't what I wanted to originally install, if we got another 9-in rainfall, there was nothing to keep that slope from turning back into a mudslide. So, changes had to be made. To make the customer's design even feasibly work, we needed to install a very creative drainage system. What we're putting in are chimney drains. Vertical drains that go into the bank. They're going to collect the water and funnel it out through. Think of it like a modified geopier. So, this allows the water as it to catch and drain out. Now, we're putting these in. One there, another one there, another one there, another one there. And the fifth one is actually already installed right there. The toe of the hill, we're putting in 4-ft boulders. Yoc is standing next to him. He's in front of him actually a little bit. Those I'd say are probably What do What do Tim? Those are 3 and 1/2, 4-ft? Yeah, roughly. Somewhere along there. That's more That's actually less um for drainage and more just structurally to to allow us to alter the pitch of this hill so that we can get a a slighter angle, easier maintenance for the customer. And we installed a horizontal drainage system behind those boulder retaining walls, so as the water was coming through the hill, it would hit that drainage system and give it an outlet. But, here's the problem. The customer had maxed out their budget on the initial design of this project. So, now I have a design that is already proven to fail. So, what do you do? Well, I proposed to this customer that I'll make the changes necessary to hopefully stabilize this bank at cost, which means the customer pays the same rates that I am. The problem is we lost 2 weeks out of the busiest part of our seasons to do a redesign on a project that we should have never agreed to do in the first place. I want to hear from you guys. What is your story with change orders? This one was a landscaping mess that turned that just kept getting worse by the minute. You know, I'd love to say, and customers, sometimes you need to rely on the on the experience of the contractor you're working with, whether the change order you want is in your best benefit or not. But, the problem is a lot of times the contractors don't think of the change orders in the customer's best interest. They think of the change order in their own best interest. And that's where there gets to be a real conflict. And when I say that, what I mean is a lot of times a contractor will look at a change order, and they'll go, "Well, am I going to make money off from it, or do I have something better to do somewhere else?" And that's the wrong thing to do, because this is something that's going to impact that customer forever. So, I can't in all all consciousness say on this video that you guys should solely rely on the contractor's opinion because a lot of times the contractor's opinion is not in the customer's best interest, but a lot of times the customers what they want isn't in their own best interest. It's actually counterintuitive. It's going to turn what could be a successful project into a hot mess. But, there's like this tipping point where it's all It's got to be a teamwork approach. The customer's got to believe in the contractor, and the contractor's got to have the customer's best interests in mind, even if that's saying no to the customer. Hopefully, you won't have a hot mess like And customers, don't make freaking change orders that you don't know anything about.