What do you understand by a good contractor? Probably good quality and low prices. When we started this business a few years ago we used a motto that we still stand for: ‘Quality at fair prices’. In every aspect of our business we have these two things in mind. In order to achieve this, we rely on a few things:
- Experience. Needles to say, the more experienced the team is, the faster and better the project is. This is particularly true in the construction industry, where it takes years to become really skilled at something. Furthermore, we specialised in those things that we do best.
- Technology. This is a big one and we use it in every aspect of our business. More specifically:
- Tools. If there’s a tool that help us do a good job, we’ll purchase it. Labour costs in our business are our highest expenses and almost any tool helps us lower these costs in the long term.
- Software. It might seem that software is not important to a business like ours, but it’s very important. We avoid over/under estimating by using custom made databases and estimating spreadsheets, most of our accounting is automatic, we order most of our products in a semi-automatic way and so on.
- Listening to your feedback. No matter how efficient we can get, it’s customers like you that dictate how we run our business. There are sometimes little things that we had never considered, but our customers considered important and we’ve implemented them in our business model.
A funny example where your feedback improved our service: we had a customer, a Scottish Gas engineer, that told us that he works a lot in people’s homes and found out that customers really like when he takes off his shoes; when we actually used his feedback, we were amazed how many people complimented us at the end of the jobs that we had took off the shoes. It wasn’t the price or the completed work that seemed the most important to them, but the taking off of our shoes.