The most common question we get asked by customers is, “what day will you come dig our pool?” and the most disappointed faces we see are when we answer, “we won’t know until about a week before the crew will arrive.” We get it. You’ve paid your deposit and the only thing standing between you and that first glorious dip in your new pool is getting it in the ground. So why can’t we give our customers an exact dig date when they sign their contract? This article is our answer.
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Weather is the enemy of scheduling
The main reason we don’t like to give exact dates if we’re weeks or months out from your pool dig is because of the weather. If we were to promise to know what Mother Nature has in store, we’d be kidding ourselves—and you’d be disappointed when we called to say your dig date has been postponed.
A late or rainy spring puts our whole season behind, which definitely impacts our customers who purchase their pool the previous year or early in the current year, and has a trickledown effect (no pun intended) for other customers as well.
For example, if the ground stays frozen into April, we won’t be digging pools until late in the month or early in May. If we have a particularly rainy stretch of weather in the spring, the locations where we take the excavated soil could be under water, so they won’t let our dump trucks in. Or the wet dirt could put our trucks over the half-load limit regulations of rural roads in the spring.
Regardless of the specific reason, to avoid disappointing our customers we don’t promise a dig date until we’ve got a weather forecast we can count on.
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Equipment sometimes breaks down
Our excavation crew is a reliable bunch, but the equipment sometimes lets us down. If an excavator breaks, it causes a domino effect that could put your dig date off by a couple of days.
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Expect the unexpected
It doesn’t happen often, but we sometimes encounter surprises once we start digging. An enormous rock, an unacceptably high water table or other unanticipated challenges in a dig that’s ahead of yours will postpone your dig as well—not by much, but by enough that if we’ve given you an exact dig date, we’ll have to call and say “sorry, we won’t be there.”
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Setting ourselves up for success
We actually pride ourselves on being exact with our dates. In 2019, for example, we only missed two dig dates, and that’s because we avoided making scheduling promises until the week before the dig. So while we completely understand why it’s frustrating to have to wait until a week before the dig to get confirmation of your dig date, it actually protects you from scheduling changes. We don’t pretend we can control Mother Nature or unexpected challenges on other jobs. The result is when we give you a date, you can feel confident we’ll be there.
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