If you were hoping that all Contractors are the same and that the best price is the best deal, I hate to disappoint you. The truth is every Contractor is different and unique.
It would be so easy if we could choose Contractors based on price, but that price is based more upon how they run their business and less about the quality of their work. Even amongst Contractors who supply equal quality, their prices still vary based on how they run their business.
If a Contractor works alone, all by themselves, and they depend entirely on referrals, they can charge significantly less than a Contractor who has a 10 projects going on simultaneously and needs to pay Managers to manage multiple projects as well as Multiple Craftsmen and Apprentices to work on those projects, not to mention the marketing budget needed to keep that many projects going consistently.
It's also not necessarily true that a Contractor who works all by themselves will produce higher quality results than a larger business. There are many lone Contractors, many of which also operate as Subcontractors for larger businesses, and while they all think they are professional masters of their craft, most of them are mediocre at best, and some of them are downright nightmares.
That said, the same is typically true of the larger businesses who charge the higher prices. The lower the price, odds are, the higher the chance the Contractor will be a nightmare, and the higher the price, odds are, the higher the change the Contractor is a larger company, or attempting to become a larger company.
Lone Contractors are not better than large companies and vice versa. In fact, if anything, larger companies have much more potential to better than Lone Contractors because they have a certain quality a Lone Contractor can't have - consistency.
Why do Contractors ask for so much money up front?
A larger company has developed systems for how it trains its employees and operates in order to maximize efficiency and consistency of results. Depending on how they train their employees and how quickly they chose to expand, they might provide good results, mediocre results or terrible results.
I won't name any companies, but I have noticed that, in general, the higher the price of the larger companies estimates, the higher the chance they will produce terrible results. When it comes to price, rather than the total amount, what you need to discern is does it seem fair given the way they operate.
For that you need to know how they operate and where all that money is going, and for that, they need to be transparent about their costs and profit margins. That's the biggest tell tale sign of an honest contractor is when they break their price down to show you where all the money is going and how much they are actually making off it.
At Harris Home Improvement, we do just that. You can see clearly what our Labor costs will be, what our Material Costs will be, what we are charging for Business Expenses and what my take home Profit is. As we are trying to expand to become a larger company, we are doing it slowly but surely, training one new employee at a time until they achieve Mastery, and only promoting from within.
As a result of this, our prices might be higher than some other bids you might get, and our prices may have to increase over time as we continue to expand. But we will always be focused first and foremost on maintaining Excellent Customer Service and High Quality Craftsmanship.
Are you ready get your project started? Call us now for your Consultation! 860-817-7191