Lake Management Nashville: The Importance of Integrity Part 4 - Beware Local Companies that Aren’t Local

We have made several blog posts recently on the topic of integrity. There’s a reason for this: all of the competitors that outrank us for lake management searches in this area are long on greed and short on integrity. They’re also more skilled in deception than they are fisheries science, and we thought you might like to know.

If you were looking for a surgeon, and found an advertisement online from a surgeon who claimed to be local, but then you called his office and discovered said office was in a neighboring state, what would you think of that doctor? And yet one of our competitors claims in their online marketing to be local to Nashville, but they are based in Alabama. They don’t even have an office location listed for this state.

But maybe they’re great people and are just fudging a little on where they’re based to help drive traffic to their website, right? Wrong. That same company has offered to stock two different landowners’ private lakes, a nine-acre and a ten-acre lake, at cost, just to keep another competitor (yours truly) from getting the job. It’s a violation of federal anti-trust law. The first time they did it they got away with it, because we were new as a business and happened to not know what they were doing was illegal; the second time they tried it, we threatened to sue them, and they didn’t get the job.

Another competitor of ours advertises that they’re local when they’re in fact located two states away. They do have an “office” here: it’s a sprawling space of under 2,000 square feet in an industrial park. They don’t keep fish there, or most anything that will be used on your pond - that stuff is all two states away. They just have the tiny little storefront here so they can outrank, on Google, providers that actually are local (yours truly again).

Another of our competitors doesn’t even list an office in Tennessee, though they did briefly, for a few years. Their website lists over twenty states that they service, broken down by region and what office serves that region; and Tennessee isn’t even mentioned as being covered by any office. They list one person as being assigned to this state - and he’s a business consultant, i.e. not a biologist. But they were strategic, and had an office briefly in Nashville because they knew Google would reward them and tell you they’re closer to you than we are. We have nine employees working in this state, all of them living in middle Tennessee; we have a 52-acre fish farm with 27 ponds, eight pieces of heavy equipment for building and repairing ponds, five boats up to eighteen feet long and four tons in weight, multiple heavy-duty industrial water pumps, three one-ton trucks; they have a business consultant. Who do you think will do a better job on your Nashville lake?