Internet advertisers stealing from tree service owners

[Old-Feller]

As a tree service owner operator, I am appalled at how places such as Home Advisor, 1-800 contractor, Prch.com, and other internet companies are taking jobs from potential customers then selling them back to the tree service owner...Home Advisor has gained a monopoly on the tree service market ...then there's places like Monster Tree that is seeking franchises to people who have more money than they know what to do with...
Tree work is a occupation that is slowly learned and when operating a tree service, you should earn your wah into the field...it is life threatening work and these newbies that are cutting throats on estimates will get theirs...keep on using dull saws, cause you can't sharpen one, keep on hiring just anyone, and watch what happens to your company..readon I say this is because I'm witnessing it..

You don't have to buy it from them?

 

[rarefish383]

I retired from a 4 generation business. I was lucky that we already had a client base. There used to be two uninsured brothers from VA, that came over into MD. If they saw a tree company talking to a customer, one would wait till you left, nock on the door, and say they would under cut any written bid by at least 10%. The next day the other would come by and say he would do the same. We lost a lot of work to them. We were licensed and insured, good equipment, top climbers and ground crews. One day a customer called livid. Those fly by night guys caught his wife and she gave them the job. It was a big dead Oak they had built the deck around. They put a rope in the top, notched the tree and dropped it, right across the deck crushing it. Then told the customer there was no other way. Of course they didn't have insurance, and part of their scheme was to get the discounted price, they had to pay half up front in cash. Low ballers have always been around. Companies that Sell work for you have been around for 50 years. We were in the Washington DC, MD area. The high end clients we catered to wouldn't trust those kind of services, knowing they worked with low end companies that couldn't get their own work. But, those two guys from Culpepper could talk a sweet line and got some of our work.

 

[blades]

same xxxx goes on in the snow plowing biz, and plenty of other kinds of biz as well. i checked into one of those for the plow biz. leads they came back with were mostly co or people that i already new that had a tendancey to not pay or extremely slow. Or the expectations of service were outlandish. one i remember was a hotel chain- frickin nightmare. Then of course you had to be totally insuried and they were paying about $.20 on the Dollar to you.