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> ... repeat clients operate more on the basis of service, knowing that the cheapest guy is not always the best value. There is a limit to how much the other professions can charge. You might be the best dentist, doctor, lawyer in the state but if you charge twice as much as anybody else, people will consider that in their decision to hire you. If their fees were regulated to be the same, the level of service would be the only consideration, but do we really want that?
I didn't say the Government needed to mandate the fee. I'm simply advocating that we, as a profession, stop stabbing one another in the back, and focus on client satisfaction and service. Instead, we seem focused on precisely what corners we can legally cut to provide a minimally effective product to a typically unsuspecting consumer. That business model follows the "Big Three" automakers who spent over a decade attempting to compete with lower wage competition from abroad. In the end, they never managed to build a product as inexpensively as their competition, and the consumer ended up with the impression that their product was a piece of junk because of all the shortcuts that had were taken to make it.
We've all seen what the "cheapest local surveyor's" product looks like. We all look at it and cringe. We all look at the price that it was done for and think "there's no way I could do it for that". Yet, if "that guy" worked at a fee structure similar to what the reputable guys charge, he might not have to cut all the corners he is cutting, and he might stop harming the public. In the process, we might have the opportunity to interact with the general public more and help them recognize the value of our product and services. All too often, we complete the map, toss it in an overnight envelope, send it off to the client with a letter of transmittal that says "Call me if you have any questions".
How much more repeat work do you think you would get, if you had the budget to meet with the client and the client's attorney, with the final map spread out on a conference room table where you could point out your areas of concern, and spend some time answering any questions the client had? Instead, our profession and the public's opinion of us is presently driven by the guy who can manage to complete 5-6 lot surveys a day at $195 each, and fax them to the clients in the morning. When he shows all the lot dimensions as "Plat & Measured", he leaves the public wondering why they needed a survey if all the lot dimensions measured exactly the same as plat.
How do we turn our profession around from one that is driven by rock bottom (too good to be true) prices on inferior products, into one that is driven by providing top notch service at fees we can all afford to properly complete the work using?
Or, should we simply continue with the present business model until we're all out of a job, because the public's perception of us is that we don't provide them anything they couldn't get off the county's GIS map for free?
