There’s this unwritten law out there that a contractor must try to impress a homeowner. You know why the law is unwritten? Well, because it is unconstitutional. Why unconstitutional? Well, that’s because ensuring domestic tranquility has little to do with trying to impress other people. You can read about this in the Preamble of the United States Constitution during your lunch break. Thankfully, the Constitution is written down somewhere.
The idea that contractors must try to impress homeowners has become a sluggish part of the home improvement sales process. One can’t help but wonder why contractors don’t charge homeowners a trying to impress you a fee. Or maybe homeowners should ask for a ‘stop trying to impress me’ refund from their contractors.
Hey Contractor, ask yourself this question: how many times have you gotten a homeowner to call you back for another project or to give you a word of mouth reference strictly based on you trying to impress i.e. your trying to impress labor? Let’s be clear about one thing: trying to impress labor is quite different from getting the job done labor. Ask yourself another question: how many times have you gotten complaints from homeowners when you failed to get the basic job done like you promised?
Research from several consumer studies show that homeowners are more likely to talk bad about a contractor that didn’t get the job done than to talk good about a contractor that went above and beyond the call of duty to try to impress on a project. For a specific study that demonstrated this dynamic, you can take a look at the July 2010 Report from the Customer Contact Council. Any contractor with a year or more of experience working with homeowners has probably seen this dynamic play out at some level.
So what can you as a contractor do instead of trying to impress the homeowner? First, just do the basic job the homeowner hired you to do. This solves the homeowner’s immediate problem and makes them feel good about hiring you in the first place. Furthermore, the homeowner will be more loyal to you because they’ll think of you as a professional that gets the job done and not as someone who tries to impress others, necessarily or unnecessarily. Finally, getting the basic job done can ensure domestic tranquility for the homeowner– and that’s a written law of the land that all Americans find impressive.
