A long-term friend who recently became a client sprayed me with the above last week, and whilst it wasn’t a criticism or complaint, it was an observation. He is a successful self-employed landscaper who has run his own business for 26 years and he has completed amazing work in my own home. His process is to meet the client to understand their needs, visit the site to understand the scope of work & provide a quote. From there, an email/call/SMS from the client is enough to begin work and payment is made upon completion.
This first part of this process is eerily similar to how I interact with potential clients, yet if he applied the financial advice legislation to landscaping, there would be, at a minimum, 2-3 hours of initial meetings, followed by a 30 page document outlining the scope of works, what is not included, the risks, legal disclosures, acknowledgements, assumptions, alternatives which would require signatures in seven different places. If his client then decided to change the decking boards from pine to oak, a new document would be produced, outlining the changes and requiring several more signatures.
This additional effort takes more time and ultimately this cost is passed onto the consumer. Again, very similar to how financial advice laws are structured and unsurprisingly a huge financial advice gap now exists because we have reached a point where financial advice is only available for the middle-upper classes, who arguably need financial advice far less than the remainder of the population.
I am certainly not saying that building a poorly structured garden bed has an equally devastating outcome to poor financial advice, and proper financial advice does require proper fees, in the same sense that accountants, lawyers and other professionals charge, however our industry has found itself in a place where the path of least resistance for ASIC, super funds, & insurers is to pass the additional admin & compliance ultimately to the consumer, resulting in higher costs.
To my landscaper client and all my clients, I don’t ask because I want to make your life harder, slow the process, increase inefficiency, I ask because to reach the outcomes you would like, I need to work within an industry that does not care about making your life harder, slowing the process, increasing inefficiency, nor the outcomes you would like!
