Fencing Reviews

Lou is my brother and my partner in this company. He builds the fence. I am the one who has to sell it, mostly because Lou will measure a yard, give you a number once, and start walking back to the truck the minute you want to argue about what your brother in law could do it for. So the phone was my problem, not his. And the worst calls were not angry people. They were polite men who wanted Lou out for a free measure, every post and panel written down nice and neat, so they could build it themselves off his numbers on a Saturday. The estimate thing on our website changed who shows up at that point. People punch in the yard, the style they want, pictures of the slope and where the gate swings, and they put a small deposit down before either of us drives out there. The free material list crowd mostly quit calling, and I do not miss them even a little. The people who book now are serious before we ever leave the shop. Lou came in last month grinning, which is not his normal face, and said a customer told him the website answered half his questions before Lou opened his mouth. I said good, it talks nicer than you do anyway. He did not argue with that.

I keep everything in my head and that is the problem right there. I will measure a yard on a Tuesday, mean to get the price over that night, and then it is Friday and the paper is still clipped to my visor with two other yards under it. By the time I called, half of them had somebody else coming Monday. My wife said I was not losing jobs on price, I was losing them in my truck. She was right and I knew it, which is why it stung. The follow ups from Launchbarr started catching the ones I let sit. A man two towns over got a message about his chain link bid three days after I measured it, while I was setting posts on another job, and he replied yes before I ever picked up the phone. I did not even remember his name till I saw the address. That has happened enough times now that I quit pretending I will get to every bid at night. I build fence all day. The bids do not live in my visor anymore. My wife says I am easier to live with in the evenings. She would know.

I used to think people talking across fences was my advertising. Then the bigger outfits started running ads around town and my calls slowed down, even though my fences were the ones standing after the spring winds. I am not a picture taking man. We would finish a cedar job, close the gate, drive off, and nobody but that street ever saw it. Now our jobs get posted as we do them. A lady said her sister two streets over saw our fence going up and sent her the post. We did three yards on that block.

My wife Nora owns this company and runs it. I help on the big installs and stay out of her way, which she will tell you is my best skill. People here have been burned on fence deposits, including by a man with our last name who is no relation to us, so Nora starts most jobs two strikes down. Folks would shake on a price at their kitchen table, then go quiet when it was time to put the deposit down. Handing a check to a stranger feels like a gamble. I get it. The payment link is what fixed that part. Nora sends the estimate, they tap it, the deposit lands, and her phone buzzes before she has backed out of their street. One older man told her it made us seem like a real outfit. We were always a real outfit. She just does not have to spend three visits proving it anymore.

I have built fence for twenty six years and I still answer the phone like a man being interrupted, because I usually am. Hands full of concrete dust, post halfway in the hole, and it rings. My boy says I growl my own company name. He is not wrong. Spring is our mad season. Everybody wants a yard fenced before the cookouts start, and this spring the calls I missed started getting answered by a voice from Launchbarr. Customers talk to her like she sits in our office. She asks about the dog, the gate, whether the HOA has to bless it first. A lady on a review wrote that the girl who answered was patient as a saint and got her on the schedule while I was still mixing concrete. That girl is not on my payroll, but I am not about to correct her. I finish more fence in a day when I am not climbing out of a hole to catch a call, and I am in a better mood at supper. I told my boy the phone can growl at somebody else now. I have posts to set.

My brother Leon runs the crews and I run everything with a screen on it, which in our family means I am the co owner who answers for the schedule. Leon can set a plumb post in rock. He cannot return a phone call to save his life. The missed call text back fixed the worst of it. A man calls while we are both on a job, nobody picks up, and he gets a text from us before he has locked his phone. Not a robot blast, a real start to a conversation. Half the time he has sent us his address and what he wants by the time I call back. Leon asked me last week why folks quit saying we were hard to reach. I told him the phone learned manners even if he never did.

My husband builds the fence. I am Rosa, I run the estimates, the money, and the part where a homeowner has to tell somebody what she actually wants, which is a dog that cannot get out and a gate her mother can open. People would message our website at ten at night, after walking their yard with a flashlight, and by morning they had called two other companies. I used to wake up to dead questions. Now the messages get answered when they come in. The Launchbarr setup asks what kind of fence, how big the yard is, whether there is an old one to tear out, and it books the measure right there. I wake up to appointments with notes instead of questions with no name on them. A woman across town told me she picked us because we were the only ones who answered like we wanted the job. We did want it. We just used to answer it eight hours late, over coffee, apologizing.

I own the company and I still go out on measures because I do not trust anybody else to find the property pins. Our problem was never the work. Our problem was a customer could reach us five different ways and I only ever checked two of them. Calls in one place, texts in my personal phone, Facebook messages my nephew set up and never told me about. A man waited nine days on a message about a pool fence while his grandkids were coming to visit. I found it the day before they arrived. Now every call, text, message, and email sits in one spot and I work down the list like a sane person. He got his fence, late apology and all, and he sent his neighbor to us anyway. I check one screen with my coffee and nothing hides from me anymore.

I am the son, which means I dug holes for my dad for six summers before he let me touch the good saw. Asking for reviews was nobody's job. We would finish a yard, Dad would shake a hand, and that was the end of it. Now the ask goes out on its own after the last gate check. The reviews mention the dogs by name. Dad reads them at the kitchen table like box scores. He still will not ask anybody himself, so it is a good thing he does not have to.

I am Frank, no relation to anybody, I just build fence in the desert where the ground fights you for every hole. I never answered reviews. A man takes time to write that his gate latch is already rusting, I am supposed to type something polite back with these thumbs? Launchbarr answers them now, in words that sound like a person from my office wrote them, thanking folks and owning the little stuff. A customer told me at a measure that she chose us because we answered the one bad review like grown men instead of arguing. I did not write a word of it. I just fixed the latch, which is the part I am good at.

I am not family and I am not on a crew. I dispatch for this outfit, which means I am the voice between a homeowner with a blown down fence and three crews who all think their job is the only job. Our Google listing used to say we did decks. We have never built a deck in our lives. Somebody set it up wrong years ago and the calls matched it: wrong work, wrong towns, and the right calls going to whoever had their listing straight. Launchbarr cleaned it up. Right services, real photos of our gates and our crews, every kind of fence we actually build listed plain. The calls changed within the season. A man across town told me he found us on the map, saw a photo of a fence two streets from his house, and figured we must be the local ones. We are. We just finally look it on a phone screen, which is where everybody shops now.

Half the town had my number under a company I sold in 2019, and the other half found a listing with my partner's phone on it. A man said he called me three times. He had. Just not me. Launchbarr straightened the name, address, and number everywhere. Now when a customer looks me up, there is one me. Novel idea, took me sixty years.

My wife June owns the company outright, papers and all, and I am the husband who gets handed the jobs nobody else wants, mostly digging near sprinkler lines. June is good at this business. What she is not good at is taking pictures. Our old website had one photo of a fence that was not even ours, some stock picture with mountains behind it. Louisiana does not have mountains. The new site is our work. Our cedar, our gates, my ugly truck in the background of one shot because June said leave it, it proves we were really there. A customer across the river told June she hired us off one photo of a fence on a slope like hers. June just nodded like that happens every day now. It kind of does.

Horse country teaches you that a fence is not a fence. A backyard privacy fence in town and four board out on a farm are different animals, different customers, different searches. My website used to say fencing, one word, one page, good luck. Launchbarr built pages for the kinds of work we actually do and the towns we actually do it in. Board fence for farm country has its own page. Vinyl privacy in town has its own. The calls started matching the pages. A lady called about a pool fence two towns over and said the page answered her code questions before I could. I still measure every yard myself. I just quit driving to the wrong kind of yard an hour away because a search engine guessed.

I am the daughter and the office, which in a fence company means I know where every job is and whose dog is loose in which yard. People used to call to book a measure, get my voicemail during an install, and wander off. Now they book themselves on the calendar and I just see it filled in. A man booked a Saturday measure at midnight because his HOA letter gave him thirty days. I did not take the call and I did not lose the job. Both of those used to be impossible at the same time.

I am Earl, I am sixty one, and I run this company off a flip phone mentality in a smartphone world, my daughter's words. Mountain ground means half my measures are on a slope you could roll down, and folks no show on estimates like it is a hobby. I would drive forty minutes up a hollow, wait on a porch, and drive back with nothing but a story. The reminders changed my driving life. Customers get a message before the measure, and one when I am on my way, and they are standing in the yard when I pull in now, coffee in hand half the time. The on my way part matters up here because a man who knows you are coming does not leave for the hardware store. My last no show was in March and I remember it because it surprised me. My daughter says the system babysits my schedule. I say fine, somebody should, it was never going to be me, and she can save her babysitting for the grandkids.

My brother and I split it clean: he runs the yard and the material, I run the estimates. My sin was speed. I would measure a yard, do the math in the truck, and then carry the number around for two days like a rock in my pocket. Now the estimate goes out from the driveway, by text, while the homeowner is still standing in the grass picturing the gate. A man told me he signed before his wife got home because the number was already on his phone arguing for itself. The rock is out of my pocket.

My husband Doyle builds a beautiful fence and a terrible first impression on paper. He measures, he quotes fair, and then the estimate sits. Not because he does not care. Because the next yard is calling and the next hole needs digging, and a man can only chase so many pieces of paper. I used to be the follow up department, calling people at night from our kitchen, hearing the same sentence: oh, we went with somebody else, they called back first. That sentence will sour your supper. Those estimates follow themselves up now, polite and steady, until the person answers one way or the other. A man answered a follow up three weeks after Doyle measured his yard and said he had been waiting on a tax refund and thought we had forgotten him. We had. The system had not. Doyle built his fence in May and the man told his brother we were the only company that ever called back. Doyle said, well, we did, it just was not always us doing the calling. Close enough for Doyle.

Down here a fence company lives two lives: the regular work, and the week after a storm when half the fences in town are laying in the street. Trust is the whole game, because everybody has a story about a deposit that drove off and never came back. I collect deposits by payment link before I order a stick of material. The customer taps, pays by card, gets a receipt with my company name on it, and I get to work. A lady told me the link was why she chose us over a cheaper bid. She said a man asking for cash in her driveway felt like the stories. A receipt feels like a company. I still shake hands. The money just travels safer than it used to.

I am the foreman, not the owner, so I will tell you the part the owner will not. Fences fail at the gate and at the money, in that order. We started offering a care plan, a yearly check, tighten, rehang, stain touch up, billed monthly like a subscription the office set up through Launchbarr. My callbacks dropped because we catch a sagging gate in month eight instead of year two when it is a fight. The customers like paying a little at a time. I like not rehanging gates for free in the August sun. Everybody wins except the sagging gates.

I hate paperwork with my whole chest. Contracts lived in my truck, then in a pile, then in a story I told the customer about what we agreed. A lady asked me once if I even had a contract and I had to go dig in the glove box like a teenager with a registration. Now she signs it on her phone in her driveway before I leave the measure. I watched a man sign a fence contract holding a baby and a bag of groceries. If he can do it, nobody has an excuse, including me.

I dispatch and do the books for two crews, and for years the whole company lived in a spiral notebook that rode on the dash of truck two. If truck two was out, the company was out. I have retyped that sentence in my head every winter. Now every lead and every job sits on one board I can see from my desk. Who measured, who owes a deposit, whose locates are called in, whose gate hardware is on back order. A customer called asking about her start date and I answered her in one breath instead of promising to find the notebook. The notebook is in a drawer now. It had a good run. I do not miss it and neither does truck two.

I bought into this company four years ago. My partner Gus builds the best fence in the county and follows up like a man allergic to money. Bids would go out and die quiet, and Gus would shrug and say if they wanted it they would call. They never called. They bought from the man who called them. I am the partner who watches the board, so the task reminders are built for a man like me. The system tells me who needs a nudge and when: the estimate from Tuesday, the lady waiting on her HOA letter. I work the list with my morning coffee and nothing rots in a pile anymore. Gus told a customer last month that our office runs like a real company now. Gus, we are the office. That is the nicest thing he has ever said about us, and I am counting it.

I am not a poster. I do not take the pictures, I do not write the words, I build the fence and I go home. My daughter set it up so finished jobs get posted for us, pictures the crew snaps before we load the trailer. A couple in the next town over stopped me at the gas station, at the pump, and said they had been watching our fences go up all spring on their phones. Theirs was already booked by then. Watching is the word that stuck with me. People watch a fence company like a show now, I guess. Fine. Ours is a good show.