Who would’ve thought a review could go a long way!

Have you ever written a bad review of a company and posted it online? If not, would you if the service or product you received was unacceptable?

This person shares how they wrote a bad review for a bad company and got recognized by Google for it!

Let’s read the whole story.

Landscaper Survey

About three years ago, my wife and I bought our house.

We realized at the time that most of the house maintenance was poorly maintained (renters used to live in the house before us).

One of the larger projects that needed to be done was a full driveway replacement, as the original driveway hadn’t been refinished or maintained in almost 30 years.

They wanted to reconstruct their driveway…

Knowing that we would need to replace the driveway, my wife and I started planning ahead for the eventual project. We decided at the time that we would also like to expand our driveway.

We are one of only three houses in my neighborhood to not have a three car garage. So we decided that we would expand our driveway out so that we could at least have a third stall, even if it was outside of our garage.

In order to expand the driveway, we had to get three bids out, bid one was for the driveway people themselves, one was to our underground sprinklers maintenance as the expansion would move our existing lines, and finally, due to our land not being 100% flat, the final bid was to a landscaper to build a retaining wall in order to create a flat enough spot to expand our driveway.

This is where it gets tricky…

Due to the various companies working on this project, it meant that we had to make sure all three companies could work within the same timelines.

The sprinklers were simple enough and not really an issue. The driveway people were great and gave us over a month of wiggle room to make everything work.

The problem came from the landscaping company, we made them intimately aware of our timelines and explained the scope of the work, and they assured us multiple times that the deadlines would work.

We had the landscapers scheduled for the first week after the driveway was ripped up, however the landscapers never showed up.

We called and rescheduled for the next week, and again the landscapers didn’t show up.

They were not expecting this!

This happened twice more before it was literally the day before the driveway people were due back to finish the driveway and the landscaping still was not done.

The landscapers finally showed up and I talked to them before I left for work that day, gave them my cell phone and some gatorades before I left and told them if there were any issues to please call me immediately.

Got home from work to find 0 progress done on the project. Turns out the second I had left, the landscapers packed up and went to another job.

I actually called the owner and messed with his team.

UH OH!

I have never been so mad about something.

The project manager called me back and assured me that they wanted the driveway done first and the landscaping would follow and that he personally would fix anything that was messed up as a result.

Fine. The driveway was poured and the results were to be expected, pretty brutal.

About a week later the landscapers finally built their wall and the then added some finishing crap to the driveway, it looked terrible, especially for a brand new driveway.

They then sent me my bill for the completed job.

I immediately wrote back with pictures and explained that I was not paying for this job until it didn’t look like crap and that I expected the landscapers to fix the mess they made.

He knew he had to do something about it!

Well I got ignored, at this point they had started ignoring most of my communications. Until that is, about 3 months passed and the landscaper realized I was serious about not paying for their shoddy work.

They reached out to me to figure out what was going on, which is when they finally looked at my email about the terrible work and my refusal to pay.

By this point in time, it was Christmas and everything around me was frozen.

The landscaper lamented not having a chance to fix their shoddy work before months had passed and I lamented them ignoring my communications about the project being subpar in the first place.

We discussed some ways to “fix” their mess and settled on one that would at least make things look nicer, but would reduce my driveway width by about a foot, a solution I didn’t like, but would at least mostly fix my issues.

They did a horrible job!

I left for work one day and came home to my driveway “fixed”. No note, no communications, they just came in and did it one day when they had time. Again, not exactly how I would have wanted it, but it was okay.

My wife and I went back and forth before ultimately deciding to just pay everything, swear off the landscaper forever and move on. The whole project had taken over six months and we were just done with it all.

We paid the bill and moved on.

This is where it gets interesting…

About five months later, just before spring/summer was set to start, the landscaper started spamming my inbox with requests for reviews, this is right when most project biddings go out, so they were looking to boost their online visibility and to get projects for the next year.

I ignored the first 10 or so emails that came through before deciding, maybe I can actually write them a review. And I did.

I wrote the exact experience I had with them, highlighted the lack of communication, the unprofessionalism, the frequent missed deadlines, and I even included pictures!

Within a week I received a Google reward because my review had over a thousand views.

He knew this was his chance to shine!

The owner actually called me after another week and asked what he could do to make things right, which I told him that we were almost a year from the original project, without a time machine, there wasn’t much we could do.

All in all the project was kind of a failure, we expanded the driveway, but now it is a very tight squeeze and so people rarely use the third slot.

The cherry on top!

I now mostly just get mad when I see the retaining wall.

I did get a ton of Google rewards for my review and I hope it saved a ton of people the headache I went through with the landscaper.

I was content with letting them go over me and just moving on with a lesson learned, but they were persistent with their email campaign.

Maybe don’t ask people you messed with to write you reviews?

GEEZ! That must have been exhausting to deal with!

How can a company be so bad at the job they do?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user knows this guy did everyone a huge favor by writing that review.

This user wishes these guys had just hired someone else.

This user shares their experience which is similar to this one.

This user thinks the owner probably wasn’t aware of the ordeal.

This user also wants to leave a bad review for their landscaper.

Don’t ask for a review if your work isn’t very good!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.