Lake Construction: Avoid Consultants Who Play Contractor

Sometimes I wonder if I make too many blog posts that are negative in tone toward competitors. Then I am reminded of the apostle Paul, and the dozens or hundreds of times he spends a goodly portion of one of his letters warning the Christians in Rome or Galatia to look out for people who are not what they pretend to be, people who really don’t have their best interest at heart. Unfortunately, many companies working in the lake and pond management space no more have your best interest at heart than does the chairman of a pharmaceutical company.

Here’s a scenario for you: imagine you needed open heart surgery, and you saw an ad from someone claiming to be an expert in open heart surgery, extolling you to choose him to be the one to save your life. So you call the phone number in the ad, and he lives 800 miles and two states away...And he’s not a doctor, has never so much as dissected a cat, could not operate on you without committing a felony. So out of curiosity or annoyance, you listen to his pitch anyway, and he tells you that he knows more than all of the heart surgeons in your area and you should hire him to coach them how to do the cutting in your chest.

What would you think of such a person? Would you have anything other than utter contempt for him? Because there’s the equivalent right now on a website devoted to pond management.

There’s a guy who is a pond consultant in Nebraska who is telling pond owners in Tennessee they should hire him to consult on the construction of their pond. He doesn’t have a contractor’s license, has never run a bulldozer, doesn’t own any heavy equipment, couldn’t build his own pond...But somehow he knows more than someone who has had a contractor’s license for eleven years and has built hundreds of ponds in three states. This person also is not a degreed fisheries biologist, but is telling landowners he’s the one they should hire to build their pond...When someone who is a degreed fisheries biologist, and has a contractor’s license and three dozers and three excavators and two compactors and an off-road dump truck and his own professional equipment operators and eleven years of experience, is located right here in Tennessee and knows a thousand times more about digging ponds than the guy in Nebraska...because he’s actually done it. Hundreds of times.

Why would someone in Nebraska who doesn’t have a contractor’s license or any heavy equipment or any experience building ponds be trying to get jobs in pond construction in Tennessee? Because he cares more about money than what’s best for you, the landowner.

Just one notch above the Nebraska guy are the guys who are based in this region, who do fish stocking and don’t have a contractor’s license or heavy equipment, and rather than do the right thing and send you to someone who both knows fish and heavy excavation, want to connect you with an excavation company that knows nothing about fish so they’re not helping a competitor (moi). Would you want your heart surgery performed by someone who was great with a scalpel but wasn’t completely clear on the difference between a gall bladder and a kidney? Would you want someone who was a great expert in anatomy and physiology but had never held a scalpel to cut open your chest?

That’s how much sense it makes to hire someone who can’t dig the pond himself, to coach someone who doesn’t know anything about fish to dig it.

I am the only general contractor anywhere in the southeast licensed for heavy excavation, who is also a degreed fisheries biologist. If you just want a hole in the ground and don’t particularly care whether or not it holds water, or whether fish can thrive in it, any general excavation company will do; if you want a lake or pond that will have the potential to become a fishery better than most anglers have ever experienced, call us.