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Trials & Tribulations - The drama of running a business and of life. It's not as easy as it looks. Running a business is full of drama. Customers, employees, money, family, time. You name it, it's a problem. Share with us your drama and how you handled it.

Best call from a customer ever!


Trials & Tribulations - The drama of running a business and of life.

It's not as easy as it looks. Running a business is full of drama. Customers, employees, money, family, time. You name it, it's a problem. Share with us your drama and how you handled it.
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  #1  
Old 06-20-2012, 06:59 PM
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Default Best call from a customer ever!

So I have a client who wanted to try and mow her own lawn this year. She'd do it every other week so i'd be mowing bi-weekly insted of weekly as usual. I get a call from her saying "good news i mowed the lawn, bad news is something happened to my tractor and i drove it through the garage door", "do you think you can take apart a garage door?", "its stuck in there and now I can't get my car out of the garage".

Me: "wow thats terrible, id love to help but i'm out of town" haha (mind you, this was at 9pm on a saturday night as i'm doing a engine swap on my walk behind).

Needless to say i'm mowing every week again hahaha.

This was hands down the best call I ever got from a customer. I almost s**t my pants.
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Old 06-20-2012, 10:21 PM
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Lawn care business tips
looks like you'll be mowing full time now

So what ever happened with you and fixing the garage door? Did you take this as a side job for some extra cash, or just pass?
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Old 06-20-2012, 10:33 PM
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Awesome.

MY best call was my PITA cut it shorter next time so it lasts two weeks guy telling me he wants to cut it himself this season - and he is.

Except one week when he didn't feel like it and called me - I was "too busy" to help.
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Old 06-20-2012, 10:51 PM
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You know, it's something I would have normally helped her with but I was worried about something (like the door) falling on the car. I don't know the first thing about garage door repair. I was also in the middle of a pain in the arse engine swap on my walk behind so i really didn't have the time to go help and needed to get this mower up and back to live again.

Definitly funny story though.

Hedge, yeah you gotta love those "I'm gonna do it myself" people. They seem surprised when you charge them three times the cost cause the lawn is a foot tall now cause they decided not to do it themselves.

I had one customer that must of thought i was an on-call lawn guy. She would text me. "can you come mow now". I simply replied, "i'm out of town for the weekend, wish i had known you wanted your lawn mowed, i was just around the corner yesterday" "i'll be by next thursday when im back in your area". This is after repeated weeks of me telling her when i'd be there and her calling me 2 days after the fact to ask if i could come mow.

Needless to say i dropped her cause she was annoying. I got texts at 1am once from her for mowing. Just retarded. Would also forget to leave payment so i'd have to come back and get it, wasting even more gas. Peace to that.
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Old 06-20-2012, 10:56 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lopes Lawn Care View Post
I had one customer that must of thought i was an on-call lawn guy. She would text me. "can you come mow now". I simply replied, "i'm out of town for the weekend, wish i had known you wanted your lawn mowed, i was just around the corner yesterday" "i'll be by next thursday when im back in your area". This is after repeated weeks of me telling her when i'd be there and her calling me 2 days after the fact to ask if i could come mow.

Needless to say i dropped her cause she was annoying. I got texts at 1am once from her for mowing. Just retarded. Would also forget to leave payment so i'd have to come back and get it, wasting even more gas. Peace to that.
I had a on call customer like this last year. I had him at the beginning of this year till I dropped him. Same story, he would call a day or two after I was in his neighborhood. He would wait till grass was 5-6" high. Then would act like I needed to be there asap. It just doesnt work like that buddy. Theres a schedule for a damn reason.
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Old 06-20-2012, 11:32 PM
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Yeah seriously, you give them a good price for a reason. Like they are right next to another job. Having to go back and forth makes it not worth it.
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Old 06-21-2012, 11:41 AM
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LOL where is the picture of that! HAHHAHA

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Old 06-21-2012, 04:41 PM
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hahaha Yeah I was gonna take a picture the next time I came to mow but the lady was home and I didn't want to add to the humility. She ended up having to remove the lower part of the door. So it was just a half door when i got there. hahaha good times.
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