How many people ask you to do favors for them?

[Scott]

This happens quite a bit to me and especially since I'm in the military word gets around that I have connections. Now don't get me wrong, I don't have problems hooking up a fellow GI but sometimes I get overwhelmed with hooking "friends up" and they're all possible customers. Not rich ones, but they do have plenty of work.



A pretty cool bud of mine just built a nice 3200sf house and asked if I could get him some plants cheaper than he could buy them at HD. I told him to let me see the list and I'll try what I can. Here the list.


1 30 gal Orange Hamlin
3 30 gal Red Maple
2 30 gal Crape Myrtle Natchez
7 30 gal Crape Myrtle Tuskegee
3 30 gal Live Oak
1 30 gal Drake Elm
4 6x6 Ligustrum
7 3x3 Sago Palm
120 3 gal Loropetalum Rubrum
109 3 gal Indian Hawthorne Dwarf Snow
117 3 gal Azalea George Tabor
33 1 gal Cordgrass
99 1 gal Liropie
111 1 gal Lantana Purple
107 1 gal Agapanthus Blue
130 1 gal Daylily Yangtze
216 1 gal Africian Iris White
106 1 gal Society Garlic
16 1 gal Carolina Jessamine
41 1 gal Asiatic Jasmine
50 3 gal Viburnum Suspensum
2 7 gal Majestic Indian Hawthorne


when I gave the price list to him, he fwd it to his wife (he's now out of the picture and I'm dealing with someone I've never met) and she said that was too much. So here was her revised list.

97 1 gal. White African Iris
78 1 gal. White Indian Hawthorne
71 1 gal. Agapanthas
63 1 gal. Yangtze Day Lilly
40 1 gal. Purple Lantana
44 1 gal. Rubrum Loropetalum
10 1 gal. Pizazz Loropetalum
7 3 gal. Sago Palm
7 7 gal. Tuskegee Crape Myrtle
4 7 gal. Ligustrum (tree form)
3 7 gal. Natchez Crape Myrtle
3 7 gal. Red Maple
3 7 gal. Live Oak

so I sent the list back out to a couple of my distro guys and haven't heard anything for 3 days now. I believe that they think I'm messing with them asking for 1ga loropetalums and 7 gal trees. I went from a $7500 order to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500.
My tree guy won't even answer his nextel when I beep him and now I need a dzn 45/60 gal trees yesterday! At first I asked him for the 30g's, then they wanted to know for 15s, and now they want prices on 7s(didn't call on the 7s) he'll just tell me to go to HD. lol!
I'd like to help them out but hey, you can only do so much.

[GrassMaster]

Friends? It almost never fails...

when I gave the price list to him, he fwd it to his wife (he's now out of the picture and I'm dealing with someone I've never met) and she said that was too much. So here was her revised list.
At first I asked him for the 30g's, then they wanted to know for 15s, and now they want prices on 7s(didn't call on the 7s) he'll just tell me to go to HD. lol!
I'd like to help them out but hey, you can only do so much.

Mr. Scott:

When I first started my business everybody that knew me forgot me. Then as the business grew & I started getting all that neat high dollar stuff, the calls started coming in from my long lost friends.

I had people say hey Dave I saw your guys the other day & that's a killer riding mower you got, I've never seen one like that I bet it cost $5,000 & will cut an acre an hour.

Yeah right, it cost me $10,000 with catcher & it will cut 3 acres an hour. Wow Dave you must be rolling in the money, yeah I was at the bar the other day trying to find my truck keys & threw 5 100 dollar bills on the ground trying to find my keys... LOL Dave you're funny guy!

Hey I hit a steel property stake & some how my rider threw a rod at the same time. I need my grass cut bad because of party tonight. I'm on a 5 acre lot & I might have 3 acres of grass will you help me cut it now & how much you charge me.

I normally get about $120 for a job like that, since you a bud I'll do it for $75, that sounds good Dave does that include weedeating, trimming, edging, trimming bushes and blowing every thing off. Ah naw that's to cut 3 acres of grass only. Gee Dave I thought you said it would take you an hour, yeah that's right $25 an acre is a deal. yeah Dave but we are friends?

Listen Cheap buddy, I'm offering to get you out of a bind & cut 3 acres for $25 an acre. Dave if it was the other way around I would do it for you for free, I said no you wouldn't because your mower has a slung rod.

I'm not driving $45,000 worth of equipment 20 miles over there on a Sunday & fully maintain 3 acres for $75. First there isn't enough time & I thought all you needed was the grass cut because your mower broke.

Well Dave you ain't much of a friend are you, Na cheap buddy I'm still your friend, I offered to give you a good deal & you didn't even invite me to the Party. Oh let me ask you something can I borrow your boat, Oh Dave that's a $20,000 boat I can't let you borrow it... See what I mean but you want me to come over with $45,000 in equipment & work, it will take me 2 hours.

>>>I would never of asked to borrow the boat for real, I was just testing him<<<

LOL, Dave you said it would take you an hour to cut it, yeah cheapskate buddy & it will take at least another hour drive & load time. It's Sunday after lunch & I'm doing you a favor.

Look Dave I really need it done, look I'll come & get the truck & do it my self. I said not quite, Dave you not very friendly are you? I don't loan my equipment to anybody. Dave just forget it, OK, Buddy let me know how the party turns out! Click.

Then I had I think 3 people over the years just show up at house with trailer wanting to borrow equipment and I had at least 5 call me wanting me to cut grass & none wanted to pay me.

Friends & Family don't mix with business, I got to the point where I would go cut it & not say a word & neither did anybody else say anything to me after I cut it.

Good thing I wasn't a house painter, house builder or roofer? I'd really been in trouble then!

A true friend would never had asked me that to start with. People kill me the way they think you owe them stuff because your friends. Think about it, it started out all he wanted was his grass cut & see how it escalated?

[Seascape]

Scott good post. I dont feel so stupid now. Im glad im not the only one that crap happens to. Ive been in the exact situation,,,,, like to the T.

I dont have very many friends. Maybe none or close to it. I do however have 100s of aquaintences. Thats what my business has costed me. Nobody just stops by anymore,, or just calls to see if i want to go fishing,,, nothing like that anymore. And its all a direct result of a situation you just described.

Thing is it doesnt matter how you handle it. These days i blow them off somehow. "ya know anymore Home Depot sells the stuff almost cheaper than i can get it" ,,,,,,,,,,, than the typical 5 minutes of hee humm BS wiggling out on both sides of the conversation,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, followed by 3 months you dont hear from them again ,,, than you see them out and about and they act like you were high school buddies from 20 yrs ago.

But the collateral damage to my business contacts is really hard to repair.I have the same situation with 20 ton of 2" wall rock going on now. Bad part is i started some stuff on this site with a particular rock last year,,,, and now i need another load of it and my calls arent getting returned and when i catch him i get " thurs or fri of next week" . Next week will be week 4. I was just talking with my wife about this situation,,,,,,,, i have about $20k worth of interest in this job so i have to go up monday and try to get it resolved in person. Not exactly a good way to start the week.

[New Look]

Great thread and I have been through this with our landscaping maintenance business ~ our power washing business and concrete business. The concrete is a little bit better to wiggle out of because of the cost but people do actually think you "owe" them something because your friends. Well, it doesn't work that way. You sign a contract with me and you pay....period.

[ECS]

I have one friend who asked me to plow his driveway. I told him he could not afford me. He asked me how much it would be and I told him $35 and he told me nevermind. Few weeks later he asked me about the lawn and I told him again he could not afford me. The other day he asked me how much it would be and I told him $70 and he said he would do it himself. He also asked me if he could borrow my trimmer and I told him no because my stuff cost too much. When he found out how much it was, he asked if I would do it once a month for him. I told him yes, but he buys the beer and I will be very thirsty when I am done. It will take me all of 10 maybe 15 min a month to do.

[Scaper-S2k]

I don't do work for friends, I try and refer them to one of my head foremen. "I'm pretty busy, but David may want to take it on."

BUT, we do a lot of commercial work. I get a lot of the people I deal with want some type of work done at their home. Not sure how much I like that, but it's tough saying no when we are doing a large contract for them. Billing on those can get a little odd too.

[TRANSMAN]

You guys got it easy !!! MILE or more WARNING

This happens quite a bit to me and especially since I'm in the military word gets around that I have connections. Now don't get me wrong, I don't have problems hooking up a fellow GI but sometimes I get overwhelmed with hooking "friends up" and they're all possible customers. Not rich ones, but they do have plenty of work.



A pretty cool bud of mine just built a nice 3200sf house and asked if I could get him some plants cheaper than he could buy them at HD. I told him to let me see the list and I'll try what I can. Here the list.


1 30 gal Orange Hamlin
3 30 gal Red Maple
2 30 gal Crape Myrtle Natchez
7 30 gal Crape Myrtle Tuskegee
3 30 gal Live Oak
1 30 gal Drake Elm
4 6x6 Ligustrum
7 3x3 Sago Palm
120 3 gal Loropetalum Rubrum
109 3 gal Indian Hawthorne Dwarf Snow
117 3 gal Azalea George Tabor
33 1 gal Cordgrass
99 1 gal Liropie
111 1 gal Lantana Purple
107 1 gal Agapanthus Blue
130 1 gal Daylily Yangtze
216 1 gal Africian Iris White
106 1 gal Society Garlic
16 1 gal Carolina Jessamine
41 1 gal Asiatic Jasmine
50 3 gal Viburnum Suspensum
2 7 gal Majestic Indian Hawthorne


when I gave the price list to him, he fwd it to his wife (he's now out of the picture and I'm dealing with someone I've never met) and she said that was too much. So here was her revised list.

97 1 gal. White African Iris
78 1 gal. White Indian Hawthorne
71 1 gal. Agapanthas
63 1 gal. Yangtze Day Lilly
40 1 gal. Purple Lantana
44 1 gal. Rubrum Loropetalum
10 1 gal. Pizazz Loropetalum
7 3 gal. Sago Palm
7 7 gal. Tuskegee Crape Myrtle
4 7 gal. Ligustrum (tree form)
3 7 gal. Natchez Crape Myrtle
3 7 gal. Red Maple
3 7 gal. Live Oak

so I sent the list back out to a couple of my distro guys and haven't heard anything for 3 days now. I believe that they think I'm messing with them asking for 1ga loropetalums and 7 gal trees. I went from a $7500 order to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500.
My tree guy won't even answer his nextel when I beep him and now I need a dzn 45/60 gal trees yesterday! At first I asked him for the 30g's, then they wanted to know for 15s, and now they want prices on 7s(didn't call on the 7s) he'll just tell me to go to HD. lol!
I'd like to help them out but hey, you can only do so much.

If i was in your situation , i would have just told my friends from day one (that you pay more then what they can buy it from H.Depot for)...

You should see how many friends you have when you have a building with 4 lifts sitting in it.. Everyone wants to stop by after work and just take a quick peek under their cars , and trucks , and" it will only take 5 minutes" (of coarse according to them)...

Then my tools are all over the floor , the air compressors are whirling away , wheels are off , and headers being installed because i`ll be hanging around till 10:00 pm "wont i"?? ...

When the bolts wont go back in , as easy as they zapped out (which always seems to happen ) , tranny has to be called for help , otherwise the vehicle cant get off my damn lift , and i get suckered into doing a job for zip , and their drinking my beer which will be replaced on pay day...

Then i have the people who just need a pound of freon thrown in the air conditioning system to get them till payday , because there makeup gets globed up in the hot summer sun and their skirts get wet from sweating in their hot cars..

I`m talking about the lady friends with that particular excuse , but the guys also pull the same scam of (i`ll pay you to do the real fix on payday ) , "but that never comes" for some reason , and every month more refrigerant gets pumped into a leaky system and if lucky i get some cheap beer...

Engines ordered , radiators , air conditioning compressors , you name it , i ordered it , and for some reason i didn't get paid ...

I could write a book on the crap i`v lived with , but it doesn't compare to how fast family will screw you and treat you like crap....

After changing the schedule of my life for 5 years , and taking care of my grandparents who i loved dearly , because all my aunts and uncles said

we didn't move to Florida to take care of old people, [ meaning mom and pop]" their parents"

In the end after being the one who took care of them I had no say in their final days on this earth. The aunt , the daughter who didn't have time , and "didn't move to Florida to take care of old people" had the final say after contributing nothing for years...

Because i loved my Grandfather " my buddy" who had diabetes , i was the only one who could take him to rehab every morning at 6:00 am for whirlpool therapy because he used to get sores on his ankle because the blood flow was partially blocked....

If it was up to everyone else who lived within a half mile of him / "my aunts" they would have let him have his feet , and legs amputated 10 yrs before he died... He only got buried with all his parts because of me and walked into the hospital where my aunt finally sent him to die ...

I took Gramps on 3 different occasions where he got these ankle sores , and each time after 4-6 months of therapy they healed up nice , and gramps was good to go..

Then he got 1 more little infection ,and sore on his foot and my aunt jumps in and wants to take over .. Out of respect for my grandmother who thought my aunts choice was correct of putting him in a hospital he ends up in the crap hole and they overdosed him on blood thinners by accident...

The day before he was bled out like a animal i sat on the hospital bed and gramps was thanking me because i set up plans to have the whirlpool rehab started again that always worked , he would have been out of the place the next day and he couldn't wait to leave... My aunt was burning mad , crap saying crap how i`m butting in and i should keep my mouth shut...

Because of this hospital blunder ,[because he never should have been there to begin with] and the overdose of kumoden , he ends up in a semi coma of sorts , which he was going in and out of , and i could see when he was awake he was scared , but wanted to fight and live... He never gave up on anything and was always a fighter...

My aunt comes over to my grandmothers house while I'm talking about how i want to handle getting gramps back up ,and auntie starts telling my grandmother he`s so old that the best thing to do is to pull the plug , and let him die ,because her personal doctor looked in on gramps and says he had a week heart which he didn't...

I start explaining to her that i want to give him a week to see if he will totally regain consciousness , and she tells me i have nothing to say about it because after all her kids aren't butting in...

Her kids didn't do anything for my grandparents period , never mind drive him to doctors , therapy , everything that kept him going for the past decade and she knew the comparison was ridiculous and a slap in my face.

Now besides the feeling of wanting to jump across the table and snap her neck like a twig i calm down , and explain i didn't waste all the years taking him , and getting his legs fixed over and over again for her to snuff his life out in the pull of a plug , plus i told her if she hadn't stuck him in the hospital where he , and i didn't want him to go in the 1st place we wouldn't be having the discussion to begin with...

So anyway my aunt claims to not remember the fact that i gave up the past few years driving my grandfather / buddy to all his doctors , and to therapy while she sat her fat azz down at the pool every day because she didn't move to Florida to take care of old people...

She had a very selective memory and didn't want to acknowledge i did things that she refused to do because she wanted to sit by a pool and B.S with the other condo owning fatazzes that did nothing but gossip about each other behind each ones back... Anyway i kinda told it to her that way , and her jaw dropped on to the table where i should have pulled it out , but i didn't...

Then my granny gets upset , starts crying , and leaves it up to my aunt because she believes her horse shiet as if she was a neurologist and just cant handle what this is doing to the family...

So the next day they pull the plug , because its the humane way to get rid of him , and with his bad heart he`ll go peacefully...

He lingers for 1 month with no support ,the 1st week his heart pumps fine , blood oxygen saturation 99 percent, but no food, no water , just loaded him with Demerol so he couldn't wake up , then his organs fail , and urine starts seeping from his skin...

My aunt wasn't their but 2 times the day they pulled the plug , because she cant deal with this stuff , and me and my mother are their watching him every day for a month as he goes in the most horrible way i could have imagined my best friend going...

When my brother was 12 he was hit by a car , in a coma for 3 weeks , and the doctors said he would have been a vegetable... Obviously they were wrong because my mother didn't pull the plug , and now he`s married living a normal life with 4 kids... My grandfather was not even in a total coma , squeezed my hand when i would talk to him until his organs completely shut down , and i know well i`m pretty positive that i could have had another 5-10 years with him if it were not for my "lazy ,had to but her head where it didn't belong aunt"....

My grandfathers sister who is 2 yrs older then he was is still living down in palm beach F.L and my aunt falls all over her taking care of her because my "great aunt" ,/ her aunt has bank accounts with 7 million bucks sitting in them..

Little does she / auntie know my mom is in charge of there aunts estate , so although she thinks she will get the entire 7 mill plus stocks , bonds and the condo, my mother insisted to her aunt that she still keep the money where it gets split between the 3 sisters...My great aunt wanted to cut her from the will because i told her how my aunt basically killed her brother / my buddy , grandpa ....

Personally if it were me i would have left the sister who was to busy to take care of her parents out of any will and trust if i had a say in it...

The only people i trust nowadays is my wife, mother, brothers, sister , and father...

Extended family( on that side anyway) are creepy money hungry , lazy people i cant believe I'm even in the same gene pool with... Sometimes i think about my aunt and i wonder how i can be related to such a lazy , money hungry , lying , sick in the head selfish piece of trash...

Ahhhh , i always wanted to blow that out.... TRANNY......

Friends or friend wanna bees i can excuse for taking advantage or screwing me , but family there just shouldn't be a excuse for turning their backs and lying and kiniving like her and her family does,
.
I really hope there is a hell just so she / my aunt , burns in it and i cant think of anyone else i feel that way about !!!!

[PremierLawnscapes]

man this is all so familiar its scary. I have so many stories like this its sickening, including my retired mom asking me to cut in, and mulch her friends beds for free since she occasionally watched her dog. However in a moment of weakness and devotion to my mom, i did clear a sidewalk of snow for one of her recently widowed friends for free, and she in turn gave me 3 neighbors lawn contracts on referals. It isnt all bad

[Brian@Greenleaflawn]

Tell the friends to hire someone else. I will only do work for parents, and brother for free, because I know that they will appreciate it. Friends always want something done for free or a good price, and it usually means that I end up screwed. They never even offer to pay for gas in my truck or equipment. Don't get me wrong I would love to do stuff for friends but unfortunatly it usually ends up leaving me sitting there thinking why do I do this for them, when they always seem busy when I ask for a favor. It's amazing how often certain people call me for stuff now that I have all this equipment.