The last step on a residential job at Quality Fence is a walk. When the crew finishes, the customer goes down the new fence line with the foreman. If the customer is happy, the bill gets paid. Until then, no money has changed hands.
Kelly Cline, who owns the company with her husband, says residential customers pay no deposit and nothing at all until the job is complete. “We will build the entire fence before we accept a dime,” she says, “and then the day we finish, that’s when the customer walks the fence with our foreman. And as long as the customer’s happy, that’s when they pay.”
One homeowner who had an odd-shaped, sloping yard fenced in 2024 described that ending. The crew worked two full days, then one of its members walked the family through a final inspection before anything was settled.
Cline traces the rule to how she grew up. “I’m a contractor’s daughter, so I’ve always heard stories growing up about subcontractors taking deposits and not showing up and leaving people high and dry,” she says. “So that’s not a business model we ever wanted to subscribe to.”
She has a practical objection too. A fence crew does not get to pick the days it can dig. “You never can tell with weather,” she says. “We could take somebody’s deposit and then have rain or snow or something that’s going to prevent us from coming to do the job. Well, then they’re mad because we’ve cashed their check and we haven’t done anything. So we’ve never wanted to do that.”
Her husband started building fence in 1999. The two of them established the company in 2005, Cline says, and have grown it from “two men in a truck” to eight men and a full-time office employee. They work out of Lansing, Kansas, and cover the Kansas City metro, going about an hour out from their base.
There are two crews, and between them they take on small residential projects and much bigger ones. The company has fenced a couple of local baseball complexes. Its business listing says it does not subcontract installations and backs them with a five-year warranty on labor and materials.
The men who build the fences do not wait on the walk-through to be paid. “They get paid an hourly rate,” Cline says, “so they get paid no matter what.”