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Plant Warranties: Valuable Sales Tool or Hassle?
31 Jul, 2008 By: Brian Albright LDB SolutionsWarranties are a fact of life in many industries—almost every major appliance, computer, car, or power tool comes with some sort of guarantee that if the product fails in the first six months or year, you can get it fixed or replaced.
But should plants come with these types of guarantees? It's become standard practice throughout the landscaping industry to offer a warranty (usually for one year) against plant failure. While some firms consider warranties a competitive requirement, others in the industry have questioned the logic of providing free replacement for plants the installer has little control over once they're in the ground.
If plants in this installation die, who would pay for the replacements? Photo courtesy: B&B Landscaping.
"It gives the customer security, and helps us sell the project," says Mark Babineau, owner and operations manager at B&B Landscaping, a residential design/build firm in Glastonbury, Conn. "We're confident in our bed preparation that we're going to have a small amount of failures compared to a company that just digs holes and shoves plants into the ground."
"There isn't another company in the industry that doesn't offer it," says Tom Morris, operations manager at J. Downend Landscaping, a full-service firm in Crum Lynne, Pa., near Philadelphia. "If you don't offer it, they won't choose you. The big box stores are doing the same thing now."
There are risks in offering these types of guarantees, though. For one, depending on how often customers take advantage of the offer, it could be costly. And if your supplier or nursery doesn't guarantee the plants, you could wind up footing the bill.
These guarantees may also be setting the firm up for customer conflicts. Plants die for a variety of reasons, but owner neglect often tops the list. Customers often over- or under-water a plants, use the wrong fertilizer, or let their pets and children trample the plantings. Should the landscape contractor be on the hook for that damage?
Cynthia Kinman, co-owner of Dublin, Ohio-based Kinman Associates and a principal at the consulting firm Kinman Institute, thinks that the landscaping industry should scrap plant warranties altogether. "We're being asked as an industry to guarantee a live plant that is not even under out watch," Kinman says. "We have no documentation as to what the plant endured before we got it, and we don't control how it's treated once we plant it. If we keep doing these things for free, we're devaluing our services."
What do you think? Should landscape contractors provide plant warranties? Have they become a cost of doing business? Send your plant warranty comments to jgooch@questex.com and we may include them in our coverage of plant warranties in the September issue of Livescapes magazine.
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