Questions to Ask Before Hiring

Questions about crews and consistency

Crew consistency is the single strongest predictor of whether service quality holds. A crew that returns to the same property learns its layout, irrigation quirks, access constraints, and priority zones. A rotating crew relearns nothing and repeats the same mistakes.

• Will the same crew service our property every visit, or does it vary?
• How long has the crew that would be assigned to us worked for you?
• What happens when a crew member is out, and who covers?
• How are crews trained on a new property before their first visit?

Questions about accountability

These questions reveal how the relationship will function when something goes wrong, which is when it matters. Vague answers here reliably predict difficulty later.

• Who is my single point of contact, and what is their direct number?
• What is your committed response time to an issue I report?
• What documentation will I receive, in what format, and how often?
• What happens if a service standard is missed, and is that in the contract?
• How do you handle extra work, and what approval do you require first?

Questions about fit

Not every provider is right for every property, and a provider willing to say so is generally more reliable than one that accepts everything.

• Do you work with residential clients, or commercial only?
• Do you service other properties near ours, and how does that affect scheduling?
• What property types do most of your commercial clients fall into?
• Can you give me two commercial references for properties similar to mine?
• Is there anything about our property that makes it difficult for you to serve well?

Questions about the money

Price questions are the easiest to ask and the least useful, because every contractor is ready for them. The useful versions are about what sits behind the number.

The visit count is the first one, and it is the one most often left unanswered until you ask directly. After that, the line between contract work and billable work, which is where most invoice disputes begin.

The third is about increases. Every contract will rise at some point. A contractor who has thought about it will tell you what drives it and roughly when. One who says it never happens is either new or not being straight with you.

Questions about what happens when it goes wrong

Every landscape relationship has a bad month. The difference between contractors is not whether it happens but what happens next.

These questions are uncomfortable to ask and very informative to hear answered. A contractor with a real process will answer quickly. One without will describe how it rarely happens.

The questions a good contractor asks you

This runs both ways. What a contractor asks during a site walk tells you as much as what they answer.

A serious bidder wants to know what is going wrong now, who complains, when the property is busiest, how you want to be contacted, and what happened with the last contractor. Those questions come from having done this before.

A bidder who asks only about square footage and access is pricing a mowing route, not proposing a program. That may be all you need. It is worth knowing which one you are buying.

Checking the answers instead of trusting them

Most of these answers can be verified in about twenty minutes, and almost nobody does it.

Ask for a certificate of insurance rather than an assurance of coverage. Ask for a real monthly report with the property name removed rather than a description of reporting. Ask for a reference at a property like yours rather than a list of happy clients.

None of this is adversarial. A good contractor expects it and has the documents ready. The ones who cannot produce them are telling you something useful, quickly and at no cost to you.