When the Grass Dies: What Broken Sprinklers and Smart Home Glitches Taught Me About Scaling with Integrity
I didn’t expect dead grass to become a metaphor for broken business systems—but here we are.
Over the past few months, we’ve found ourselves in a slow-moving customer service nightmare. A major telecom company began laying fiber optic cable in our neighborhood. We didn’t choose the project or the contractor, and we had no control over how it was done. But what we did get was a broken sprinkler line—one they never acknowledged, let alone repaired.
We did our best. For months, we hand-watered the yard in the scorching Phoenix sun, trying to keep the grass alive. It became an extra chore—time-consuming, inconvenient, and thankless. There’s no reimbursement coming. No apology. Just sunburned shoulders and a front lawn that’s now dead anyway.
Eventually, the subcontractor declared bankruptcy. We were told to redirect inquiries to the telecom company’s generic support email. Meanwhile, the HOA has concerns, and we’re now hiring landscapers to tear everything out—because, ironically, starting over is easier than fixing what went wrong.
Then came the cherry on top: an email from our smart home security provider—recently acquired by a larger company—letting us know they’re discontinuing a key monitoring feature. For continued support? $9.99/month. Prefer the DIY option? Good luck navigating an overly complicated app and trying to reconnect everything to Wi-Fi settings that seem to have a mind of their own. (Fun fact: it took us hours to troubleshoot the initial setup, and we’re only partway through the whole process.)
I’m sharing this not as a rant, but as a reminder of what matters—and what’s at stake when people put their trust in us.
Because as frustrating as all of this has been, it’s also clarified something: this is the kind of experience our clients are trying to avoid. Not just the inconvenience, but the feeling of being left to figure it all out alone.
That’s the part that stuck with me. The quiet erosion of trust. The realization that no matter how carefully we chose our partners, we were suddenly doing work we didn’t sign up for—becoming service techs, negotiators, and project managers just to stay afloat.
“People don’t just hire us for advice... They hire us for peace of mind.”
For those of us in the coaching world—especially when we’re scaling—this is the moment where we get to make a different choice. Where we get to say: we see what’s happening out there, and we’re building something better.
Because people don’t just hire us for advice or insight; they hire us to make things easier. More human. More dependable. They hire us for peace of mind.
And as we scale, it’s tempting to believe automation can replace relationships—but it can’t. Not fully. Not meaningfully. Automation should support your relationships, not distance you from them.
That’s why we’re so committed to building systems that keep our promises. Support that doesn’t disappear after onboarding. Processes that hold up, even under pressure.
Because we’ve been on the other side—and we know how much it matters.
