Bully clients
Yes, bully clients do exist. They hire you to maintain their landscape and then they proceed to micro-manage you on site. Weekly! And it drives me mad because good clients pay their bills on time AND allow you to educate them as you go. It’s a win win situation with good clients.
Random strata owner bullies just ruin your day. Let me illustrate with a recent example.
Take it out
It was another hot summer day and there wasn’t much to do aside from bedwork. Personally, I don’t like to stress my landscape plants by pruning them in temperatures close to 30 degrees Celsius.
And there he was, another busybody with a coffee mug in his hand. After some small talk he proceeded to tell me that his neighbor was elderly and didn’t care about her back yard. So, take out the ground cover plants.
Now, eager to please landscapers would just get to it and I almost did. But I stopped myself when I realized the stupidity of his random directions.
First, consider the ageism. The owner’s age isn’t relevant. Why are we pulling out plants so randomly? Second, the groundcover in question was Oxallis which is often confused with clover.
In this corner it was doing its job, covering a shady spot, blocking weeds and showing nice white flowers. Hardly a candidate for removal.
Resist much
So I ignored the man’s suggestion and moved on. What happens if you pull a perfectly good shade groundcover plant? I guarantee you, eventually you’ll be back to weed the empty space which will just add to your work load. Unnecessarily.
This is where you educate your clients, assuming they’re open to it. Here this wasn’t the case. I’m treated as a hired gun, to obey as directed. Except I didn’t. I refuse to pull random stunts on site.
If you can, always aim to educate your clients.
