A Tale of Landfare

This weekend I was talking to a neighbor and he started asking me about what happened with Landfare. He was immediately taken aback how how viscerally upset I still am about the entire project. These guys took $200k of my money and never got the job done. Beyond that, I feel lied to,  jerked around, and frankly disrespected. Hell yeah, I am still upset!

When I mentioned I tried so many times to hold them accountable he asked me point blank “What was it you wanted?” Great question!

Accountability and responsibility go hand in hand. In your work, if you are accountable for something and it doesn’t happen or goes horribly wrong, you are up for being fired. That is ultimate accountability. In other industries you may have money back guarantees, return polices, a comped meal…. essentially accountability is where you as the contractor have some skin in the game. With an accountable company, if something goes wrong under their watch, they have some pain.

I am sure Landfare would swear they were accountable. After all, they did keep coming back to do work over and over and over and consistently missing the quality aspect. I am sure fiscally they took a bath on this. At the end of the day however, as the client, none of that is my issue. I never got the result I contracted or paid them for. When I would challenge them to make themselves accountable the response was something akin to “but we told you we’d fix it… trust us!”. Sure, that’s what you said the last several times. How will this time be different? There was no good response and I was made to feel like a I was the one being unreasonable.

“I said so” is not accountability. I know that there were 100 times as a teenager when I told my mom that I was going to take out the trash. Unless I was held accountable and had some skin in the game, do you think I did it? You’d hope a reputable company would not need to be called to the carpet, but as a consumer, what leverage do you have?

Things Landfare could have offered:

• Guarantees that Zach or John would not let a sub leave the site until their work was done acceptably. (Subs and direct employees frequently did a poor job and then it was days or weeks – maybe months –  before you could get anyone back out to complete the work.)
• Offered dates when work would be complete. If the work was not complete by that time, there would be some consequence.
• Offered refunds. There were multiple items that they seemed incapable of completing to a level of satisfaction. Refund my money. I’ll find someone who can produce.
• When a sub didn’t perform, don’t tell me they are too hard to work with and subsequently not go to bat for me.

Instead, I had to hold them accountable. And really, with a contractor who doesn’t want to play ball, my options were limited. I could either cajole or sue. I had no interest in suing as who needs that headache? Cajoling only goes so far and when Landfare decided they had had enough, the responses stopped. They had no skin in the game.

Pro-tip

Contractors are a special breed of company and frequently/usually they are not going to give you any money back. The leverage you have is in the “draw request”. This is where the contractor asks you to pay out for work they have completed. Simply withhold funds until the work is complete.

Landfare had a very bad habit of asking for a draw and then wanting to get the check the next day. They never had a schedule of what the draw was covering. Zach might have mentioned it on a call, but what is said on a phone call won’t help you in court. I am not sure if this was just poor management on their part (panicked to make payroll?) or a ploy to keep the customer feeling pressure to pay and not inspect things thoroughly, but don’t fall for it. Be very clear what the draw is for. If the item that the draw is to pay for is not right, don’t pay. Get in writing from the contractor a description of what the draw request is for. Save yourself the argument later on.

Landfare posted a “Value Statement” on their website on or around August 11, 2017. This is a good thing and hopefully they live their stated values. The good news is they took my advice from earlier this year as I told Zach how without values, they have no source of their work. This was in my last days of trying to kill them with kindness to perform. (Note Zach’s admission of rework on an item that had been outstanding for almost 2 years. Zach openly admitted they had to do tons of rework all the time.) I even provided him a link to the core values at my company as an example.

I just wish Landfare had adopted “Results Matter” as a value. As a client, I hired them for a result, not a relationship. I’m already married. Relationships help sales typically. Results REALLY help relationships. Embrace challenges, but make sure you can execute on them. Accepting a job you don’t have the ability to expertly complete is NOT being honest. (Being honest isn’t not lying. It is also telling the WHOLE truth.)

A selfless person would not be telling the landscape designer to talk the client into accepting the wrong brick so that the contractor doesn’t have to go through the effort of returning it. Yes, we could hear Landfare through the upstairs window that day as they planned how Carol would talk me into accepting the wrong brick and pressed her to adopt the Landfare narrative.

Remain teachable and admit when you are wrong. Be honest. Landfare would have told me much earlier in the project that one of their key people was having substance and work issues and thus their results were suffering. I was apparently the recipient of their poor workmanship as John finally admitted to me over a year into the project. John also said Zach was unwilling to fire this person as there was too much work and they “needed him”. As a result I get to suffer? So much for moving forward with boldness.

Landfare should have pulled them from the job ages ago rather than sending them back repeatedly to make things worse. Instead, Landfare always tried to talk me into salvaging this person’s work rather than scrapping it and starting over. To me this is like a waiter dropping your steak on the floor and trying to convince you rinsing it in the sink is a reasonable remedy.

Value are worthless if they are written on the wall and not lived. Here’s hoping Landfare lives these values and even iterates them to make the better. As they are written now, their core values and explanations more serve themselves, not the customer.

When we purchased this property it came with an in-ground pool. The first summer (2015) we were somewhat skeptical that we would keep the pool and made multiple jokes about turning it into a catfish pond or filling it in and replacing it with tomatoes or a dirt bike track. Low and behold, we found we quite liked the pool and the maintenance was really no big deal. However, we realized it was not quite built to what we would want. The pool descended to a 6 foot depth and we are not tall people nor would there ever be any diving. Plus, the pool only had a single main drain which, in the time  since it was built, is no longer up to code. Code requires two main drains for safety.

As part of the initial statement of work (SoW) we were adding a cover to the pool. Landfare also has a sister company called Blu Pools. (See elsewhere where I’ll talk about the entire John Spayde empire.) Being early in the project and not knowing what I would know later, I asked for a SoW addition to level the bottom of the pool to roughly 3 feet 6 inches and add a second main drain for safety.

Blu Pools had what I thought was a lead partner, (owner?) that was leading the project. We’ll call him Doug. He was presented to me as a industry veteran and I believe a partner in Blu Pools. (Note, Doug has since left the company and I cannot find evidence as to why. He’s selling real estate now so far as I can tell.)  However, Doug was not in charge of pool bottom project. This was up to Josh. Doug did oversee some of the pool’s plumbing needs and electrical needs. Doug’s work was generally quite good.

Let’s take a quick look at how a vermiculite and Portland cement (sometimes called pool crete) pool bottom SHOULD be poured. Notice how they are doing one continuous pour with troweling the entire way to ensure a smooth bottom. What did Landfare do? First, they under purchased the pool crete and had to do 3 pours as they had to keep running back to the store for more bags. It’s ~$40 a bag. I assume having a few extra bags on hand was not not something someone wanted to pay for…. or they were bad at estimating.

What this resulted in was terrible seams and unevenness in the floor as with no singular pour there were seems. Then, they didn’t tool the seams well. How did they remedy this issue? An angle grinder of course! In 6 or so hours on a Saturday, Josh took a 4″ angle grinder and eye balled smoothing out the pool floor. He didn’t use a large concrete floor grinder which are sometimes used for these types of tasks. This resulted in a pool floor  that was terribly uneven and very apparent to people in the pool. (I found out toes are surprisingly sensitive.) One would think a good final screed of a very thin coat of pool crete would be another method. Nope. So the pool bottom is a mess. As is a theme in my blog, guess who inspected the pool floor before putting in the liner to make sure it was done properly? No one! Or if they did inspect it, they didn’t care to fix it or had low standards.

Insult to injury… one morning I am talking with Zach about the pool project. I was told, oh, Doug is too nit picky and overly agonizes on making sure the pool bottom is perfectly smooth. It sounds like they should have let Doug do the work even if his inconvenient demands for attention to detail were a buzz kill.

All of this happened early in 2016. We wanted to get some use out of the pool that summer and not have to wait to have the bottom done yet again. I mention this to John and he tells me how bad he feels about it and he’ll make it right. He feels so bad about it in fact that he tells me he’ll put it in writing. He’ll get me a physical document. I say, that’s not necessary, an email should suffice. John claims he is a man of his word. Great. I am thinking at least this will get dealt with in time. However, the email never comes.

My trust in Landfare was destroyed at this point. There were enough cracks in their facade that I was consistently making sure they followed through and did their work. I followed up with John. Another week or two went by. I followed up again. I talked to Zach and asked whatever happened to this email John had promised. Zach says he himself followed up with John and couldn’t understand why he was taking so long. I email John on day 33 (June 20, 2017) to follow up. No response. Their work is consistently obviously poor at this point and to not have even a response from John puts me on high alert. I can’t trust a thing he says as an email is an extremely basic 10 minute task. 48 days later I am FINALLY able to get a response. John didn’t say he was busy and would get back to me. John didn’t say anything for 48 days. This is the entirety of his response.

Hi {BubbaDuck}, this email is to reiterate my full intention sometime in the fall of 2017 to remove the existing liner of your swimming pool and grind the existing vermiculite to create a more uniform level while minimizing the amount of existing “bumps” that are below the existing liner on the floor of the pool. The existing liner will then be reinstalled after these adjustments have been made. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Zach Miller will be in touch with you regarding the scheduling of this adjustment which will be at no cost to you. Sincerely, John Spayde Landfare Ltd.

One would think he was writing a 50 page treatise on molecular biology in outer space to take this long to even acknowledge me let alone respond with what he promised. Nope. Four sentences. Not only that, we’re back to grinding which worked so spectacularly well the first time. I have no expectation that they would use a large grinder as we see here which would work similarly to a floor sander giving a uniform surface. Maybe they would, but I was not willing to take the chance. I asked them to pay for another contractor of my choice or refund my money so I could find someone to fix the issue rather than Landfare. Based on Landfare’s track record, I was not about to let them to apply their loose standards and poor quality control on another attempt. I just needed the pool bottom fixed. To this request John Spayde said, I quote, “You’re crazy {BubbaDuck}”. I never heard from him again.

Professionalism 1 star

All in all, so far as I can tell, Zach dismissed Doug as being too much of a perfectionist and I got a crappy pool floor. No one inspected the work or if they did, they have very low standards or didn’t feel like remedying. John didn’t follow through on his commitments with a client who has been up front about their frustration and disappointment in Landfare’s work. Then when John does follow up, it is cursory at best and not timely at all. To me, Landfare’s behavior indicates they don’t care about their customers or the quality of their work.

Once I have the liner dropped this coming summer, I hope to post photos with some straight edges and bubble levels.