Tompkins Lawn Care vs. Company X

When comparing service businesses, it’s nearly impossible to compare apples to apples. While retail goods are the exact same from one vendor to another, a “service business” is as unique and as ever changing as the owner and its staff. Aside from work ethics and experience, are the raw materials used by each company and their ability to manipulate application rates. Cost is the driving force with many consumers and the lawn care industry has learned how best to manipulate people. As a result, many get a watered-down service that ignores the basic principles of nature. Chemical quick fixes will be the reaction to a never-ending cycle of misdirected effort of weed control and disease management.

Low costs always come with a sacrifice. Some are realized at the time and others take a while to be noticed but the result is always the same, you get what you pay for. The buying power of large retailers may equate to lower prices, but a mobile service business is not a retailer and the only way to lower prices is to cut something out. Most people would contest paying full price for a pizza missing two slices, but it happens in lawn care all the time. While you may notice 20% of your pizza missing, you wouldn’t notice 20% of the fertilizer withheld from an application. In fact, most don’t realize anything until over time, the turfgrass fades out. The declining turfgrass requires more and more chemicals for weed control due to decline and lack of competition but company X will be proud to say they kill weeds each time, so you better keep the service going. Often, people continue being duped for multiple seasons before they realize they would have been better spending nothing at all than choosing the cheapest service. This plays out repeatedly and when the customer learns their lesson and cancels, the same company will move on to another with a price too good to be true, a discount, a promotion, anything to get them under contract. I’ve witnessed this throughout my career and it’s only getting worse as the American middle class must do more with less.

Rather than competing with the companies racing to the bottom, we prefer a different path. We learned a long time ago that Mother Nature cannot be bargained with. If you want to change things, you need to put in the work and you need to be consistent. That said, it simply costs more to correct problems than to hide problems. Our customers understand these concepts, many after experiencing their version of “company X”.