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General contractors and remodelers

Cool Customers:
What contractors look for in clients

By Lyn Wilkinson

You’ve been meaning to make the calls for a week. You have prepared names and numbers, a list of questions and a budget. But still, you’re a little nervous about calling a contractor.

I hear this frequently from prospective clients and have felt it myself when calling new subcontractors. What might make me the right customer? Just what is required of me as the party requesting a service? Will I have all the answers for the questions I might get asked? Will my project be big enough to interest them? Will I speak to anyone in person? If not, will they even call back? And if they don’t call back, should I call again?

After 16 years as residential remodelers specializing in major projects, we have a clear picture of the clients we work well with. Starting with the first contact, we are asking questions of prospective clients and evaluating the answers to determine if we are the right choice for each other. Since time is money, we have no desire to waste theirs or ours.

In our first year of business, an attorney friend told us “sometimes the best contract you sign is the one you don’t.” In other words, we should learn to be choosy about our jobs based on our skill set, the company goals and our compatibility with the prospective client. So we don’t take every job that comes along, and we are extra careful about taking the biggest job we’ve never done before. This advice helped us refine the types of jobs and the clients to whom we give priority.

So just what are we looking for in our customers? Most contractors I know use a lead sheet, a rating form completed during the initial client conversation. It’s a list of questions designed to capture the information necessary to determine whether the next step is a site visit by us or a referral to another firm better suited to the client’s needs. Companies will ask similar questions but might be looking for vastly different answers, according to the industry niche they fill. Here are some of the questions we ask:

Contact Information: We always obtain name, phone number and e-mail. And we always ask how a client found us. This helps us analyze our marketing effectiveness and tells us whom to thank if the client was referred to us.

Project Location: We work only in five specific towns and will say “No, thank you,” no matter how tempting the project, if it’s located outside our service area. We also give weight to similar projects located near each other.

Project Description: Each contracting firm contains a unique set of skills and procedures that contribute to the outcome and profitability of the projects it executes.

Our niche is residential remodeling that provides seamless integration of old and new spaces, with an emphasis on design, accessibility and creative finishes. It generally includes a kitchen and bath and may involve multiple areas of the home.

If you need a new front door, a closet or the living room painted, you are another firm’s perfect customer, and we’ll try to provide some direction for your search. But if you are contemplating serious home evolution, we’ll continue to ask questions about the age and type of your home, its current usage, whether you’ve remodeled before and whether you were happy with the results. Do you expect to live-in while we work on your home? We’ll ask about your property plot plan, if you’re using a designer and who besides yourself is part of the decision-making process.

This conversation provides important information for our mutual decision-making and offers valuable clues about your commitment to your proposed project, thereby helping us avoid “tire kickers” – folks gathering free design and construction ideas with no real intent of remodeling, or at least not with a professional team leader. Again, for us both, time is money.

Schedule: Because we can spend a year or more developing and executing projects, most companies have work in various states of readiness at any given time. A major remodeling project can take four to six months to complete once construction begins, so in order to keep the work flowing smoothly, long lead times are common. Yet, even with exemplary planning, scheduling is art as much as science. If you are eager to start quickly, say in less than three months, our firm usually can’t accommodate you. Then again, we might have a hole to fill due to permitting or weather delays and your job could be a perfect fit for the open slot. Time and flexibility are always on your side in schedule negotiations and can improve your results and decrease your stress level.

Budget: Contrary to popular belief, most contractors don’t ask this question in order to make their estimate equal to your amount of available dollars. Actually, we’re much more interested in confirming whether you’ve got a realistic idea of how much your project could cost. Champagne plans on a beer budget are disappointing for everyone; so if your hoped-for remodel and financial bottom line aren’t even close, we’ll let you know up front. Value engineering (helping you get the look you want for a price you can afford) is always possible, especially on finish materials, and is most effective in the early planning stages. Sometimes the work can be broken into phases and performed over several years. But if these aren’t options, it’s best to know now.

At this point we’ll explain the next steps of our company procedure. We will discuss an appointment and explain our fee structures for either a design contract or construction retainer. Our initial site visit is free, but we don’t offer free estimates or design, a fact that sometimes eliminates a prospective client who has come this far. That’s OK. It just means we put different values on our time.

As you might expect, even with an in-depth initial discussion, a detailed lead sheet and a positive on-site visit, some prospective clients ultimately contract with another firm, by our choice or theirs. With customer satisfaction our utmost priority, sometimes the best contract is the one we don’t sign.

Lyn Wilkinson and her husband, Pav, own Wilkinson Design and Construction in Harwich. Lyn is coordinator of the Cape Cod chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry and a member of the Home Remodeling Editorial Advisory Board.

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