Be Careful Who You Work For: Contracts Don't Mean Much Anymore!

Earlier this week we received an email from one of our dealers, and it was one that we definitely didn't see coming!  This particular dealer, who I'll call John for simplicity, had called us a month or so ago to tell us one of his customers was launching a lawsuit against him--because his Sierra Stone had cracked!

Now, I should make you aware that John has used or at least based his contracts on the standard contract we use in our office.  In the warranty section of that contract it clearly states that there is no warranty either expressed or implied against cracking because we can't control the movement of the substrate.  If my memory serves me correctly, in this particular circumstance the Sierra Stone was applied over existing cracked concrete near a body of water that was known to hit the concrete fairly hard when high winds occurred.  I'm also fairly confident that John made the customer aware that it was extremely likely that the Sierra Stone would crack under those conditions.  However, the customer insisted and they did the work anyway.


As expected, the Sierra Stone cracked in the same way the customer's concrete had, but--with little or no regard for the limitations of warranty stipulated in his contract--the customer launched a lawsuit for damages.  In the email we received earlier this week, John told us that it appears the courts are going to rule against him and he is going to have to pay to have the Sierra Stone removed and replaced!  As I said before, this is all in spite of the fact that the contract very clearly states we do not warranty cracking due to substrate movement and the customer's verbal consent to that aspect of the contract!!


Due to the severity of the lawsuit John now faces, and the fact that it appears to defy any form of common sense, I want to pass along a bit of advice to all of our dealers:  choose your jobs carefully.  I know that--to some extent--we can't be too picky about the applications we choose, but we need to balance that with a willingness to walk away from potential headaches.  At some point every one of us has done a job that we knew would be a headache from the moment we pulled up to the house.  Sometimes those jobs come out OK, but sometimes they end up costing more than we can handle.  For some of the jobs we can keep the Rubber Stone in mind because of its increased flexibility and compressibility; but even Rubber Stone can't go over everything.