About
Two gangs,
one job each.
We started in 2012 doing repairs on other firms’ drives. You learn a great deal about how a job is built by being paid to dig up the ones that failed.
What failed was almost never the blocks. It was the depth, the edge or the water, in roughly that order, and all three are decisions made in the first two days while the customer is looking at colour samples.
So we run two gangs, one job each at a time, and we write the excavation depth and the sub-base thickness on every quote. It makes us more expensive than the van that turned up yesterday offering to do it Friday, and we lose work over it every week. The alternative is being the firm somebody else gets paid to dig up.
We do not offer a lifetime guarantee. Nobody in this trade can honour one, everybody prints it, and a promise that cannot be kept is worth less than a depth written on a piece of paper.
They dug a hole in the old drive on the first visit, showed us the clay, and told us the price had to include another 50mm and a membrane. The two cheaper quotes had not looked.
Told us straight that what we wanted needed planning permission and helped us redesign it so it did not. Nobody else had even raised it.
Came back a week after finishing to brush more sand into the joints, then again a month later. I had not asked, and I had not been told it was coming.