Wrong measurements

[rcreech]

Had an interesting thing happen today.

I submitted a quote on a very nice commercial site and come to find out they said I was 2X the price of my competitior (which I know really well).


I measured the area myself and it was 6.4 acres.

While I was sitting there talking to the man in charge of the maintenance it just popped into my my to ask him if he would care to see what my competitors measurements were as I knew they couldn't charge half of my price.

I also left and went to the courthouse to get the property size. It was 10.5 acres total and after taking off the buildings and parking lots and it was 6.1 acres

My competitor's measurements was 3.8 acres.

So although my measurements were off a little (.3 ac), I was much closer then they were.

They have treated this lawn now for three years....so you would think they would have found this when applying.

My questions are as follows?

Are they not paying attention to how much product they are applying?

Do they know they screwed up and are only applying at half rate?

These are the questions I left with....hopefully my new customer.

Has anyone else had to deal with this before?

This is scary to me!

[CHARLES CUE]

Yea we had some thing like this happen it was a hole housing development in side a golf course they wanted. 3 lawn treatments grub control soil test lime aerated and over seeded. I measured every lot forget how many acres it was and i didn't see there measurements of the other co. The co that got it did it for less than i could have bought the material for. don't know what was up but i didn't get it . didn't think that i would get it but i was shocked at how little they did it for.
Charles Cue

[RigglePLC]

When I was at Tru Green salesmen sometimes undermeasured as a method of reducing the price and thereby meeting their sales quota.

Of course when myself and other technicians went to do the work--well--we were not happy to find we got credit for a lot less square feet against our quota for the day.

[RigglePLC]

Of course at the end of the day we had to fill our a "Production Report". At least that was done years ago--maybe changed now. It often appeared we had applied too many gallons of liquid solution or bags of dry product. We learned to walk faster or to fudge the production reports.

Of course the Branch Manager had to somehow account for the excess product missing at the end of the month.

[kirk anderson]

we have developed a weed and feed to compete with commercial blends..
are you just killing weeds or are you fertilizing also....
There is no way they are putting down what they should, but if you put half your normal fert,normal pre emergent, half the iron, full post emergent, and no insect control you will end up with green grass, but it wont look like a golf course..
they dont want that anyway..
i have found also when others do so many apps so of their apps are just post emergent with nothing else to get a good money making app in