Lake Management in Nashville and Williamson County: Ask to See Their Success Stories
Anyone who lives in the Volunteer state these days and hasn’t noticed that our capital has become an “it” city that people from all over the country are moving to, is probably living in a cave. If you live within an hour or less of Nashville, you probably paid a premium for your piece of ground; you probably want the very best for it. You probably also have a lot of people vying to sell you their services, whether it be landscaping your yard, catering your events, or managing your private lake or pond. But how can you separate the contenders from the pretenders, those who really have the expertise you expect from the ones who just claim to?
Word of mouth is often touted as the most reliable method for finding the people who are the best at what they do, regardless of field. You may be nodding your head in agreement, saying, “Yep, that’s the only way to do it...” Because word of mouth has never failed you, right? As soon as you read that last sentence, it probably took you all of five seconds to recall a time someone came highly recommended and ended up being a disaster, or simply not delivering at the level you had hoped. Probably at least half of all the calls we get every year about ponds that won’t hold water start out with, “He’s a local guy, came highly recommended, said he had built a bunch of ponds...”
Word of mouth sometimes can lead you to the best person; but it has a built-in fatal flaw. It’s influenced by personality, and personality can cover up big flaws, like incompetence, or deceptive business practices. One of our competitors that works on a lot of ponds and lakes for famous folk in this area has multiple times tried to steal large stocking jobs from us by offering to stock the pond or lake at cost - which seems fine and just savvy business until you do a little delving into the law and discover that it’s a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust act, a federal law since 1890 that prohibits, among other things, selling goods at cost to create a monopoly or restrain competition. I didn’t know this the first time my competitor tried this on me, so they got away with it; a few years later they tried the same thing, but at that point I had learned about the Sherman Act while studying for the real estate license I briefly had (because it took so long to make a living at this business because of shady competitors), so I told the pond owner that said competitor wouldn’t be stocking his pond at the price they had quoted him because I would sue said competitor. They didn’t get the job, but they did cause me to make almost no money on the job. Said competitors have been operating as a business decades longer than we have, though, so they’re more likely to be known by word of mouth. And over and over again, they under-deliver, but they keep getting jobs because they’re well-known, and because their chief biologist, who has far less experience than I do, is a fast talker and is good at telling people what they want to hear to get their money, even if he knows that what he has promised isn’t what he’s going to deliver.
But if you can’t tell just by their advertising claims or their reputation whether they really can do what they say they can, how can you choose the best person to create your dream fishery? It’s simple: just ask to see their success stories.
We have a whole section on our website about private ponds and lakes where we have developed fisheries on a level our competitors never do. But we don’t expect you just to take our word for it: we regularly send references, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, of landowners we have developed these fisheries for, to prospective new customers so they can learn firsthand just how much of a difference we made for those customers’ ponds and lakes. We have a TV fishing show that airs on the Pursuit Channel for the sole purpose of providing video proof of the kind of fishing we create. One of our competitors regularly sells landowners on the idea of a female-only largemouth bass pond, because it’s easier to have a bigger average size for the bass if all of the bass are the ones genetically predisposed to get the biggest (female largemouth get bigger than the males). There’s only one small problem with this management method: it makes the bass impossible to catch. That’s not my perception - that comes directly from multiple landowners who have called me wanting help with their female-only largemouth pond. I don’t even have to ask them what the problem is - I’m able to guess before they tell me, because it’s always the same: they never catch anything when they fish because the bass won’t bite. When fish are at a very low density, they have minimal competition for food, and it makes them less aggressive. This happens even with bluegill, as I mentioned in a previous blog post; I have seen it multiple times, and unlike my competitors, I don’t keep repeating the same mistake so I never had to learn the hard way with largemouth. So our TV show is based simply on the premise of demonstrating that we’re not creating fisheries with no big fish, or a few big fish you’ll never catch: we’re creating fisheries where trophy fish are regularly caught by hook-and-line angling. We have never filmed for more than six hours at a time for a given episode, and most episodes are filmed in four hours or less. Just on episodes that have aired on Pursuit, we have caught bluegill up to a pound-and-a-half and Florida bass up to seven pounds four ounces. Two years ago, in one four-hour shoot, we caught a five-pound-ten-ounce and a six-pound-nine ounce largemouth, and lost two others in the six- to eight-pound range (both bass jumped and were captured on video, so we have proof); last year, we made an entire episode, five total hours of fishing, that is wall-to-wall bluegill being caught, no air time whatsoever of just a cast without a fish, or a leaf blowing across the pond, non-stop action for twenty-two minutes, and every single bluegill caught weighed 1.05 pounds or more, including four that went from 22.4 to 24 ounces each. In five hours of fishing, on a two-acre pond.
If you expand our range of proof to include photos, we have photos of Florida bass up to thirteen pounds and bluegill up to two pounds fourteen ounces that have been caught from ponds and lakes we manage. One 1.5-acre pond in middle Tennessee that we have filmed on several times has produced a ten-pound-two-ounce largemouth, and that two-pound-fourteen-ounce bluegill I referenced - the same 1.5-acre pond. Try to find any other lake and pond management company in America that has produced bass and bluegill that big, caught by anglers and not electrofishing, out of the same pond that small - there isn’t one. And it didn’t happen by accident; we do everything differently from our competitors, and it’s the only reason we were able to get results like that on a pond that small.
10 lbs. 2 oz.
2 lbs. 14 oz. - from the same pond as the 10-lb. bass above
13-lb. Florida bass
And we can get results that good on your lake or pond - but only if you give us the chance. Give that smooth talker who’s taking your money some time to work on his character, and we’ll start working on giving you the caliber fishery he promised you when he first started wasting your time.
