Was the Customer PISSED or Trying to get FREEBIE's

i've made a couple videos on how contractors scam customers i haven't made a video yet on how customers scam contractors i've been a contractor for 30 plus years and i've seen my fair share of customers that intentionally and purposefully try to scam us contractors while we're out on a job and in fact after 30 years of running multiple crews you can start to see certain patterns in customers and we've developed certain techniques inside of our business that help protect us from letting those scams get too far out of control but in today's video we're gonna go talk about that exact scenario and how it just recently happened to us again last year and we didn't catch it quite in time this time [Music] now one of the things i learned pretty early on in my business was that collecting from a customer that is happy is a heck of a lot easier than collecting from a customer that's having issues with your work but also pretty early on in my business i realized that some customers will leverage that knowledge to negotiate a contractor down on the work that they're doing they'll either try to get freebies on the job while the contractor is working or at the end of the project try to get a discount on the overall price of the job now the key to keeping that from happening is to not let your problems all happen at the end it's the the key is to have all of your problems happen in the middle of your job but i think we're getting a little bit ahead of the story so let's run out to the alex's job site we actually meet up with alex i forgot to mention that to solve a lot of our problems and to keep customers happy all the way through their job which is what every contractor really wants we use what's called the 20 minute rule but before we get into the 20 minute rule let's go out and see what actually happened on alex's job site if you look on your left that's a leaf plot did you miss it well let's back it up and check it out because it's really cool it's just designed to push leaves and debris off from the public streets at least i think it's cool all right guys next we're going to meet alex he's one of our project foreman in fact uh he's pretty much uh runs our jobs from start to finish and he's out working right now on a small paver patio and some stuff like oh you got some steps you're working on too so i was just telling these guys you pretty much take over you run our projects from start to finish and last year uh tim was actually on a project so tim and i we always come out to every single one of the jobs and at least visit them and but last year tim actually worked side by each with you on the project and the project that we were working on was a massive retaining wall wasn't it i mean we were we were talking 10 feet tall double tiers but the tiers weren't even normal tiers they actually tied back into the retaining there's a little planter box off the front of the wall that sort of outside 90 then inside 90 and then the wall went straight across and wrapped all the way back in so it was a complicated design we had engineering done on it we had permitting done on it we had inspections done on it multiple inspections done on it and i was just telling these guys about the 20-minute rule that we have and that has helped us stay out of problems yeah you want to tell them what the 20-minute rule is that we use around here yeah that's you spend 20 minutes with the customer and you talk with them and you you basically want to make them your friend you know you want to you don't want to just be a worker in your yard you want to be a friend that comes by and helps them with their projects you know you want to take the weight of the job off from their shoulders put it on your shoulders and let them know that they're in good hands the short version of the story is is when i realized that it's really tough for your grandma to fire you it's real you know if you actually try to view your customers as someone that's important in your life and treat them like that genuinely you're going to have a great relationship and that happens when you spend 20 minutes a day just communicating with the customer so what happened with your job so uh i mean at first it started off you know they had a busy schedule you know so they weren't really always around but they would come back for lunch and uh you know i would know they were back for lunch and they would let their dog out and i'd go and try to knock on the door to get some input on what we got going on i like to bring them into the backyard hey how's this looking do you want us to change anything while we still have the time to change it and unfortunately they would almost kind of avoid us in the whole situation and uh it got to the point where we went home one day and we had built a great portion of the wall and uh or they had texted tim and told them that hey you know there's some chips in the block on the lower courses i don't really like the way that it looks i mean nothing structural about the block itself was compromised it was basically just the aesthetics of it which 90 of the walls we put in have minor chips in there i mean it's concrete block and it tends to get chips you know so um it was unfortunate that she had texted him and told him hey you know there's some chips in the lower courses you know i kind of want you guys to pull those out and replace them well you know it would have been nice if we could have caught her at lunch time and said hey you know i want to come back and take a look check out our progress and see how we're doing but uh never could get a hold of her you know right right it was one of those deals and and we're changing the names and everything about it so this could be a male could be a female we're just calling it he she so you're gonna you're gonna hear us say he's gonna say she we're gonna say they we're not gonna put throw our customer under the bus yeah but what we're trying to do is familiarize other contractors with some of the ways that customers can make a job a lot more difficult and one of the one of the things that we do is on the daily the 20-minute rule is every day try to get the customer to spend up to 20 minutes of time just talking about your project talking about how their job went at their work whatever happened it doesn't make a difference just communicate and connect with the customer and that lets us get familiar with the customers expectations right because like what you see in your mind and what i see in my mind may not be what the customer sees in their mind i'm to tell you right now my wife and i can't even she she can't visualize anything my wife can't visualize i gotta draw everything out for and when i started to realize people can't automatically visualize things like creative people like you and i can visualize it really helps if we take the time to sit down with them and you actually called me while this job was going on and you're like i can't get this guy to even come and answer the door i see him in there you seen him burning out of the garage a few times as i was walking around the house there they were going down the road i almost wheel spinning out of there you know so trying to get away from you trying to avoid it yeah because i mean anytime i get a second hey how's this look like for example this customer here she just peeked out the door to take us to take a peek and i i said hey you want to come take a look at this real quick and tell me what you think about this how's it looking and she gave me your input she says it looks great and you know if she would have came on said oh you know what i'm not very fond of this or this you know then i can quickly change it because i'm still in the phase of being able to change it so i mean even if it's a second or a minute i'll still grab them as if as often as i can you know but this customer no the problem was that this customer then only had an issue after we had almost eight foot of wall entirely built yeah engineered geo grid compacted terraces on top of it oh yeah and then we get the phone call yeah hey i don't i don't like i don't and and they work like alex says we're gonna actually take you out and show you what these chips look like on a different wall because they are how did i don't know i forgot how versalock puts it they are within spec yeah they are within their spec it doesn't compromise the structural integrity of the wall in any way by having those chips in there it's just mostly the aesthetics and i believe tim and a guy from versailles because versalock's great day i mean they helped us out so much i seen him in there in their parking lot testing stuff out like a patching you know to try to get the best most matching color they could possibly find you know and uh then tim and a guy from burst lock actually came out there and judged a bunch of them yeah jim and uh they called again and said hey there's a few more patches or a few more chips i want you to come out here and patch it i mean these chips are so minuscule i mean it was so communication what we have found to be the most effective deterrent to having a problem on the job is to communicate on a day-to-day basis so when we're on a big hardscaping job like this every single day we connect with that customer check with them make sure that everything meets their standards and that what we're building matches up with their vision it's the only way we can do it to make sure that when we get to the end of a job all we got to do is put our hand out so they can put a check in it first and then shake it right afterwards yeah yep yep all right well i'll let you keep going thanks alex i appreciate the input on that one so if we actually go through this wall and just take a closer look at this wall things like this on our walls they get removed and replaced it was not things like that that were the issue it were things right here do you see this manufactured seam right there you see this part right there that chip right here is another chip just one block down and these corners do tend to chip off over time and um when they're stacking them on the pallets or you're picking them up and moving them around before they get put into their final resting place just that movement can create these microchips again these are not structural these are pure aesthetic but that's what we got called out on but the problem was it wasn't at the top of the wall like it is here it was eight foot down on the bottom terrace with another wall being supported by it and it was uh it was a two foot up on an a on a 10 foot tall wall so it made it a lot bigger challenge that it actually needed to be if it would have been addressed to us right away because we would have just removed those blocks and sent them to the side and just take in the extra time to make sure that the wall had zero micro defects in it so we're actually stopping by blane site right now just because i wanted to show you one of the walls that we actually built what they look like i i'm crossing my fingers hoping this look turns out good but blaine was telling me a story that uh there's another kind of scam that happened what happened with this i don't know the full story but when we came here the old wall was already taken out so there was just a hole in the ground but the other contractor started the job and then just just left them just left them high and dry so we came and built this one last year and then i liked it so we got two more that we're working on plus they added a patio in the back in the back all right so i'm gonna hey will you hold this i'm gonna hop just hop down here real quick what i'm looking for is on a job that alex and tim let did last year um the customer was having real issues with some of the uh with some of the details of the block so this is the first time i've seen this this is a wall that blaine built last year so as we look at this this is one of our projects let's zoom in this see these little micro chips look look here's another one kind of look down i'm not seeing it here that was what we were up against last year last year but the wall was 10 feet tall and then the customer came out and we tried trying try to pick a corner and my experiences customers that do that sometimes have a very valid reason but other times it's a negotiating tool thank you sir all right well good enough and that's our video for today wanted to take you through let you see what we were up against on a project on what uh you know good customers bad customers valid issues some things that may not be so valid but customers use as negotiating tools and now i want to hear your customer story because i bet you guys got some doozies and i love them doozy so lay it on me let me hear your story in the comments down below hit that subscribe button and i've got more stories of scams more stories of jobs uh i've been doing this for 30 years running five crews this is how i make my living i'm i don't do anything but this so i haven't done it my entire life got lots of lots of stuff i'd love to share with you guys if you guys want to hear it let me know god bless go get me guys we'll catch you on another one a little sneak peek this is going up north because of a no sem scam but we're gonna get this loaded up and head north so that's coming down the pipeline you guys the no cm scam is coming next god bless go get em you guys if you like heavy equipment running well it's not that heavy but old janky equipment running we got an old janky i do we got if you like heavy equipment yeah you like old jakey equipment it's like a glove yeah as long as you don't mind a glove that rattles and shakes and bangs and jars your teeth out at the end of the day god bless go get it you guys will catch on another one