I have a lot of trees on my property, and nearly 20 years ago we found a great tree company that took care of pruning and repairs after wind disasters. The owner was just great. We referred them to our neighbors, and they used them as well. A couple years ago it was time for some work, and we contracted with them again. The owner was away, and he would be away for awhile. I won't go into the details, but it was a disaster. We gave them repeated opportunities to correct the problems, but it all ended with the work not being done and a mutual decision of the manager and me not to talk to each other ever again.
I spelled out exactly what happened on Yelp, just giving the facts in the situation without any real embellishment or opinions about quality.
A couple weeks later, the owner was back in town. He apologized. He said he had checked with his employees and found that the facts in the case as I had reported on Yelp were indeed the facts in the case. Apparently the manager did not see any problem with his truly unprofessional decisions. The owner did. He fired the manager and the other crew member who had been the origin of the problem. He came out and took care of the problem for himself.
If you are not going to run a small business yourself, you need to make darn sure you can trust the person you leave in charge.
