The Job That Still Lives in My Head

By Court Lundberg · September 2, 2026

Have you ever known that you were the worst contractor that a client has ever experienced?

I have. I had a client from four years ago that still lives rent-free in my head because I know that I had to have been the worst contractor that he ever experienced.

We did not address the root cause

He’d just had a sewer back up, and a gentleman that had only worked for me for two months went into this man’s house and sold him $18,000 worth of work to fix the sewer line outside and a bunch of other work. Which, for the scope of work that we were doing and the permits that we needed to pull, was a really fair price.

We got all the work done, and the customer was super happy, especially because he was going to be hosting a wedding the next month in his backyard and he needed to have no problems.

Then, two weeks later, he gives me a call… devastated because his sewer is backing up again.

So, doing what any good leader does, I went out personally to figure out why we would get a warranty call on this. I put my camera down the line and realized instantly that we did not address the root cause of his issue.

The inside of his cast iron pipe had the texture of Freddy Krueger’s face. It was completely trashed and jagged and was acting like sandpaper catching all the waste and toilet paper. The root cause of his issue was that all of the pipes inside of his house needed to be completely replaced. And we didn’t even talk to him about it.

To make the matter even worse, between our first visit and me standing there in his living room, he had just paid somebody to put down brand new flooring all throughout his basement. And all of it would need to come up.

You are not going to pay another dollar

So what do you do in a situation like that? The client got what they paid for. Everything we said we were going to do in his original invoice, we did.

But what they thought that they were receiving was a solution to their problems.

That’s ultimately what we sold, which was a solution to his problems, and we did not deliver.

So I had to look at him and ask, “When is this wedding happening?”

He said three weeks from that day, and I said, “Okay, I’m not going to lie to you. I really messed up on this one… and I’m really sorry. You’re not going to pay another dollar, but all of your new flooring that you just put down, I’m going to have to rip up. For the next two weeks, I am going to be down here jackhammering up your entire floor and replacing all the pipes under your home, pouring new concrete and then I will pay to put new flooring down.”

We also had other clients and jobs that needed to keep happening so that we could pay the bills. I would go over and do other plumbing calls in the morning, and then head over to his home in the afternoon and work late into the night, busting up concrete, hauling it away, and laying new pipe. I worked nonstop on that job.

And as the hole that I was digging in the basement got bigger and bigger, you could see the look on the customer’s eyes getting wider and wider, worried it wouldn’t be done on time.

The new scope of work was an easy $20,000 more. And then I spent another $10,000 to get new flooring put in. I was financially stretched thin. I was physically stretched thin. I was mentally and emotionally stressed thin, and I remember wondering if I really wanted to be a business owner… because this sucked.

And honestly, that wasn’t even the most stressful part. The most stressful part was that the plumber who made the original mistake had a lot of influence in my company at the time. He had recruited most of my company at the time, and when I confronted him about this job and about how he improperly diagnosed it, he took no accountability. I had to let him go, which ultimately led to more people walking out of my company, but it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t deal with another headache like this, and I couldn’t deal with another customer experience like this.

Four years later

When all of the work was done, I went and got it all approved by the customer personally. He said, “OK, how much do I owe you?” I said, “Respectfully, this isn’t your problem. As a small business, you pay us for professional service, and if we don’t deliver that, that’s not on you to pay more.”

There’s probably not a month that goes by that I don’t think about this customer. Even though we did everything right, I hadn’t heard from him and figured that even if we do everything right, sometimes it’s not enough to overcome the initial miscommunication.

So I was stoked when he called and said, “Hey, I’m doing some major renovations on my house again, and I would love for you guys to come over and do the work.”

That was four years later. Being a Rare Breed means that you do what is right, even when it’s hard. You do what is right because it is the right thing to do, and I’m grateful that that has snowballed into the incredible customers that we have today.

That is why the workmanship warranty is written the way it is. If we sold you a solution and we missed, that is on us. We come back.

FAQ

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