Green Jay Landscaping

We met with Jay several times to discuss building a retaining wall across my severely sloping backyard. They charged $250 for the initial consultation which was in line with what other landscapers charged. Jay has many years of experience in the field, something that he highlights frequently through numerous stories of past projects. During the consultation, we were upfront about our budget (around $50k) and showed him estimates we had received from other landscapers that came in well under that ($25k - $30k). While we figured Green Jay Landscaping would cost more, their years of experience persuaded us to pay them $2400 to work up a site plan proposal (just a proposal, no drawings for the village planning boards or building department). What they delivered weeks later was a poster board with some printouts of plants. Jay told us how many people (engineers, architects, etc) were working on our project and how he's consulted with the building department in order to figure out what could be done. While all this sounded very comprehensive and impressive, at the end of the day we only had the start of a landscaping plan (basically the plants they would use) and nothing more. A few more weeks of pestering Jay for a proposal and a cost estimate to build the wall, I receive a text from him stating that it would cost $140k to build our wall which is almost triple our budget and 4x the amount of other estimates (in all fairness, Jay was proposing something much larger and grander than what other landscapers had proposed). Still, this estimate was delivered via a text with no explanation. After expressing my dissatisfaction, Jay did return to give a fuller explanation in person and to propose a much more scaled down project. What Jay proposed did sound more reasonable but he wanted another $800 to develop the proposal for this scaled down project (he explained that we had used up our $2400 due to the number of hours they spent consulting engineers and others for our original project). While I believe Jay tried to develop a proposal for a project that in the end would make us exceptionally happy, he failed to deliver anything of value for the $2650 total we spent. Given Jay's extensive experience, I would have expected him to tell us fairly quickly what would be possible within our budget. In other words, Jay should not have needed to spend $2400 consulting engineers and others to figure out that the original idea for the location of the retaining wall was not within our $50k budget.