Scott’s Services & Co

To say this has been a bad experience is quite an understatement. Scott Inman, the owner, has grossly failed to deliver per our contract.
1) He committed to a 7 day time frame to complete our project (a simple residential landscaping job on a ¼ acre flat lot in the city of Napa). Four weeks have now elapsed and significant amount of work (at least ½) remains incomplete including the entire backyard. His «excuse» is that he has been «surprised» by large roots in our yard despite the fact that we live in a mature part of Napa in the center of the city and there are quite obviously two large mature trees in our front yard and three large mature trees in our backyard. And large trees in all the surrounding neighbor’s yards.
2) He purported to have a professional landscaping service yet has required constant supervision of his ‘team’ — that changes daily based on who is available to work at the halfway house (he pays them half of what the day laborers at Home Depot earn) and the work product reflects it. (This info was provided by the workers themselves who are actually pretty good guys but they lack the knowledge and experience needed and unfortunately I had to be the one to supervise as their boss was rarely around and even when he was present, was a pathetic supervisor and manager.
3) Despite him boasting about his communications being one of his strong points, he doesn’t answer phone calls or texts and frankly ignores us or lies through his teeth. He remains vague and without significant prodding noncommittal in order to avoid being held accountable.
4) He has repeatedly performed work in an incorrect timeline which has resulted in an inferior work product and a much longer time frame
a) he instructed his workers to drill plant holes before leveling the area and clearing it of debris
b) he had his guys dig trenches to place the landscaping boards to form beds before tilling the soil and making the ground even resulting in a variety of problems, time consuming double tasks etc
5) His workers installed the drip system in the front yard today. But he never got out of his vehicle to test the system which was purported to be complete. The moment my husband came home and turned on the system, he immediately discovered pipes bursting, and quite a number of plants had not had an emitter installed yet.
6) Yesterday we completed the drip irrigation system in the back yard (thanks to a new group that we hired) so we were able to test the entire irrigation system for the first time discovering two geysers! Scott had created two gashing holes in his irrigation pipes for the lawn… He never even bothered to test his own work.
7) Header boards for our planting beds were laid significantly off of our rectangular lot and were buried too deep in many locations. For instance at one end of our yard the bed is 9′ wide and at the other end it narrows to only 4′ wide. These header boards to be removed and replaced in new trenches by our replacement team that we hired.
Shall I continue? This man, SCOTT INMAN, dba Scott’s Services & Co. is GROSSLY incompetent and unethical. He appears to be utilizing the deposits of one job to obtain and initiate a new job. He hires completely untrained and unskilled workers and provides little supervision and whatever supervision he does provide is way out of whack with what actually needs to be done and how at half the rate of the Home Depot day laborers. My advice! Run! I quite frankly consider this to be theft as he was paid a hefty deposit for (labor and all materials) that is far from having been earned, and whatever work was done is substantially incorrect and needing corrective action.