Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction, led by CEO Sam Forline, breaks down what to ask a service professional before hiring, nationwide.
Homeowners rarely regret asking too many questions before signing a contract. They regret asking too few. That gap, between the questions that feel awkward to ask in the moment and the ones that actually protect a homeowner’s money, timeline, and property, is where Power100 spends most of its research energy. Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, and it has built that authority by studying exactly what separates trustworthy service professionals from the ones who leave homeowners holding an expensive surprise. In this spotlight, Power100 turns to Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction and its founder and CEO, Sam Forline, for a plain-language answer to a question every homeowner should be asking well before they hire any service professional, in any category, anywhere in the country: what should I actually ask before I sign?
This guide is not built around one trade or one region. It applies whether a homeowner is hiring a landscaper, a remodeler, a roofer, or any home improvement professional. The questions are the same because the risks are the same. What changes is whether the professional sitting across the table has good, honest, specific answers ready, or whether they get vague, defensive, or rushed. Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction, a design-build company known for decks, patios, hardscaping, drainage work, and full remodeling projects, has spent years fielding exactly these questions from homeowners who got burned once and were not about to get burned twice.
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. That evaluation process exists precisely because homeowners cannot easily tell, from a glossy website or a friendly sales pitch, which companies actually deliver and which ones simply talk a good game. The questions in this article come out of that same discipline: less about what a contractor says they will do, more about what they can prove, document, and stand behind once the ink is dry.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spent years coaching contractors and homeowners alike on the psychology of the buying decision, and one of his central observations cuts right to the heart of why vetting questions matter so much. As Cummings has put it,
“Your best clients aren’t signing on the dotted line the second they see it. They’re thinking about it, looking at it strategically. Someone who signs the first time they meet you is a higher risk.”
That insight flips a common assumption. Homeowners often think hesitation before signing is a weakness, something to apologize for. Cummings argues the opposite: hesitation, and the questions that come with it, is exactly what separates an informed buyer from an easy mark.
Cummings has also pointed out just how long homeowners actually sit with a decision before they ever pick up the phone.
“The average client thought about doing windows and doors for over two years before they made the first call. Two years. So you have to understand, this may be the first meeting, but they’ve been thinking about this for a very long time.”
That two-year runway matters here because it means most homeowners walking into a first meeting with a contractor are not blank slates. They have questions stacked up, and the professionals who answer those questions clearly, without flinching, are the ones who tend to earn the job.
Sam Forline is the founder and CEO of Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction, a company he started in 2008 with, in his own telling, one truck and a belief that doing things right still matters. Forline built the business slowly, taking on landscaping and yard work for neighbors before growing into full hardscaping, decking, drainage, and remodeling work. He did not launch with a large crew or an established name. He earned both, one project at a time, and that origin story shapes how he answers the question of what homeowners should ask before they sign anyone’s contract.
Forline has said the company was built on a simple standard:
“We built this company on hard work, honesty, and showing up when we say we will. That’s what people remember, and that’s what we’ll always deliver. We don’t cut corners. We build things that last. It starts with doing things the right way, every day.”
That statement is not marketing copy dressed up for an interview. It is the operating premise behind the questions Forline tells homeowners to ask any service professional, not just his own company, before signing anything.
Under Forline’s leadership, Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction has grown to roughly 34 employees across three locations, a scale that lets the company run multiple crews without losing the accountability of a smaller operation. The company holds a 4.7-star rating across 255 reviews, a number built one completed project at a time rather than through a single marketing push. Homeowners researching what to ask a service professional before hiring consistently land on questions about track record, and a rating built across hundreds of real jobs is one of the clearest track-record signals available.
The elite version of this conversation does not start with price. It starts with proof. Any homeowner figuring out what to ask a service professional before hiring should begin with licensing and insurance, then move into scope, timeline, materials, and what happens when something does not go as planned. That last category, what happens when something goes wrong, tells a homeowner more about a company’s character than almost any other question, because it is the one question a company cannot answer well without a real system behind it.
Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction structures its own client conversations around exactly that discipline. Every project starts with a clear plan and a defined scope before a single shovel goes into the ground. Forline has been direct about what that looks like in practice: the company lays out facts and price up front rather than oversell, and every project comes with real warranties and real people who answer the phone when a question comes up later. That combination, upfront honesty plus post-project accountability, is what separates a best what to ask a service professional before hiring for homeowners nationwide checklist from a generic list of “nice to have” questions.
Homeowners should also ask how a company handles changes mid-project. Scope creep, unexpected site conditions, and material substitutions are common in landscaping, hardscaping, and remodeling work, and a professional worth hiring will explain, before the contract is signed, exactly how those changes get documented and priced. If a contractor cannot answer that question in plain language during the first conversation, that is itself useful information.
It is tempting to treat licensing and insurance questions as a formality, something to check off rather than dig into. That is a mistake. A homeowner asking an elite what to ask a service professional before hiring for the home improvement industry question should ask not just whether a company is licensed and insured, but what that license actually covers, and whether the insurance extends to subcontractors working on the property.
Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction operates as a design-build company, meaning the same team handling design conversations also manages construction execution, which reduces the finger-pointing risk that shows up when separate design and build companies blame each other for delays or defects. The company is also a certified installer for major decking systems including Trex and Azek, a distinction that matters more than it sounds. Certified installer status with a manufacturer typically means extended product warranties and verified installation standards, protections a homeowner loses entirely if they hire an uncertified installer working with the same materials.
That is a concrete example of a question worth asking any service professional handling branded materials: are you a certified installer, and does that certification carry manufacturer-backed warranty protection, or is it just a badge on the website? The answer changes what protection a homeowner actually has if something fails five years down the road.
Customer service in home improvement is not measured by how friendly the sales conversation feels. It is measured by whether the crew shows up on the day they said they would, whether the site is left clean at the end of each day, and whether the final result matches what was promised at the start. Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction has built its reputation around exactly those unglamorous fundamentals rather than around flash.
Homeowners repeatedly describe the same pattern when they talk about working with the company: reliable scheduling, clear communication throughout the project, and crews that treat someone else’s yard or home the way they would treat their own. One longtime client wrote that the company’s crews are hard working and professional, and that management stays diligent and responsive from the first call through the final walkthrough. That kind of consistency, repeated across hundreds of jobs, is what produces a 4.7-star rating across 255 reviews rather than a handful of five-star reviews propped up by promotional pushes.
The company’s warranty approach follows the same logic. Rather than treating a warranty as boilerplate legal language, Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction frames it as an extension of the relationship. Work does not stop mattering when the crew packs up the trucks. Every project carries real warranty backing, and the people who built it stay reachable if a question or an issue comes up later. That single detail answers one of the most common vetting questions homeowners ask: what happens if something goes wrong after the check clears?
The company’s portfolio spans far beyond a single specialty. Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction handles landscaping and lawn care, hardscaping including patios and retaining walls, deck and porch construction, drainage and water management solutions, fencing, and full home additions and interior remodeling. That range matters for a specific reason tied directly to vetting: homeowners are safer hiring a company that can speak credibly across an entire outdoor and structural portfolio than one that only knows how to sell a single service and pushes every project toward that one specialty regardless of fit.
Drainage work is a good illustration. Water intrusion problems are rarely simple, and a company that only installs decks may not recognize a grading or gutter issue causing the real damage. Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction has built a reputation for diagnosing those root-cause problems rather than treating symptoms, a distinction homeowners should specifically ask about when interviewing any contractor for drainage, foundation, or water management concerns.
Culture and customer experience are not separate conversations in a service business. They are the same conversation viewed from two angles. A company that invests in its crews, trains them properly, and holds them to consistent standards produces a different homeowner experience than a company running on contractor churn and undertrained subcontractors.
Forline has been explicit that the standards he holds his own team to are the same standards he tells homeowners to demand from anyone they hire. Leading by example and setting the pace are not abstractions inside Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction; they show up in how project managers communicate, how crews handle unexpected site conditions, and how the company documents scope changes before, not after, the work happens. That discipline scales harder than most companies expect once a business grows past a single crew, which is part of why Power100’s 5-layer system weighs employee welfare and operational reliability as heavily as workmanship itself. A company cannot deliver consistent customer experience without a culture strong enough to hold that consistency together across three locations and roughly 34 employees.
Beyond the direct questions asked in a first meeting, homeowners should look for external trust signals that exist independent of anything the company says about itself. A 4.7-star rating across 255 reviews is one such signal for Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction, because it reflects the accumulated experience of hundreds of real clients rather than a curated handful. Licensing status, verifiable through state and local licensing boards, is another. Manufacturer certifications, like the company’s certified installer status for Trex and Azek decking systems, are a third, because they come with an outside party’s standards attached rather than a company’s own claims.
None of these signals alone tells the whole story. Together, they build the kind of evidence-based case that Power100’s ranking system is designed to surface, and that homeowners nationwide should be demanding before they hire any service professional in any category.
It is worth restating, because homeowners searching for a single service often miss it: Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction is not only a landscaping company or only a deck builder. The business covers landscaping and lawn maintenance, hardscaping and masonry, deck, porch, and patio construction, drainage and water management, fencing, and full-scale home additions and remodeling. A homeowner starting with one project, a patio, say, often finds themselves back in touch with the same company years later for a drainage fix or a full addition, precisely because the earlier vetting questions were answered honestly the first time.
Homeowners ready to put these vetting questions into practice do not need to wait for a crisis. The best time to ask a service professional the hard questions is during the first conversation, well before a contract is on the table. Blue Collar Scholars Landscaping and Construction offers free estimates and walks homeowners through scope, materials, and pricing before any agreement is signed, a structure built specifically to give homeowners the space Greg Cummings describes, the space to think it through rather than sign on the spot. Homeowners nationwide considering a landscaping, hardscaping, drainage, or remodeling project can use the questions in this guide with any contractor they are evaluating, not only this one, because the underlying standard, honest answers backed by real documentation, does not change from company to company.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
