Offer free landscape designs?

[Steve]

Do you offer free landscape design? Is it a good idea or a bad one?

In this article Jenny Hardgrave talks about the frustrations of offering free designs and then having a potential customer ask you questions for hours.

Word of mouth plants seeds of good yard care (http://www.ajc.com/monday/content/epaper/editions/monday/living_446943b71413b1b91080.html) - For Hardgrave, the requests include free design advice **- indoors as well as out.

"One of the most frustrating things is to go to a home and they keep you for two hours asking your opinion on things like place-setting colors and place mats," Hardgrave says. "It gets sticky. You want to be fair and reasonable and not lose the client, but time is money, too."

[tiedeman]

I personally think that it's a very bad idea. I have been caught too many times with my pants down in the past of where I offered free designs, and the customer took those designs and either 1) did the work themselves or 2) had another company do it.

[Steve]

It seems like it can be used as a marketing tool when times get rough. But normally it doesn't seem to be something that one would choose to do.

There seems to be too much opportunity for problems.