A Lesson in Cutting Corners

Over-pinching pennies and cutting corners now can come back to bite you later.

Now that the snow has finally melted here in southern Wisconsin, I'm starting to get a good look at the lawn damage caused by city snow plows over the course of this past winter. But what I'm finding is that the damage, at least in my lawn, has been minimal. The issue, however, is the obscene amount of sand and gravel blanketing it.

My local city's public works department, in an effort to save money, pretty much never put down rock salt this winter. Rather, they would plow the top 80% of the snow cover, let the other 20% get packed down a bit, and then dump a ton of sand on it. They did this over and over and over again.

I'm sure they'd saved considerable money by preserving their stockpile of rock salt, if they even had one. But now they're going to spend a considerable amount of money on spring sweeping. Homeowners are going to pay for it to, but the city doesn't care about that.

This reminds me of an article we did a couple of years ago when lawn maintenance contractors were being pressed to slash prices. In order to accommodate their clients' requests, many contractors began cutting corners.

Read this article for some ideas on how to "value engineer" the services you provide so you can: 1) cut costs, but 2) still give the client what he or she wants and needs.

Now bring on some warmer weather!!

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