Almost anybody can get into the trades right now. Almost nobody is checking whether the person they hired has ever finished a job like theirs.
Rick Haggerty has spent 25 years in home improvement, running companies that cover civil engineering, land survey, building material supply, residential remodelling and custom closets. Asked what is going wrong in his industry and how to fix it, he did not blame customers or the economy. He said homeowners are not doing their homework, and then he told them exactly what homework to do.
“there’s a lot of remodelers out there, and I don’t think people are doing a very good job of checking references and really diving into the experience that the remodeler has. So I would encourage people to check references, look at other work. and not necessarily get sucked into a cheap price.”
— Rick Haggerty, on Unscripted Home Improvement
Starting is easy. Finishing is the job.
This is the sentence to keep in mind when a quote comes in surprisingly low:
“It’s really easy to start a job. It’s very difficult to finish it within the expectations, the timeframe, and the budget that the customer wants it done in.”
— Rick Haggerty
A cheap price is not a discount on the same work. It is usually a different set of assumptions about scope, materials or schedule that you will discover in week three.
The four checks he recommends
- Check references, and actually call them. Not the list on the website — a real conversation. His instruction: “even call someone and say, talk to me about how these people work.”
- Read the Google reviews, all of them, including the middling ones.
- Look at photographs of finished work, ideally work that resembles yours.
- Take the bid apart. This is the one most people are too polite to do.
Asking what the numbers mean is not rude
“I encourage everyone to go and check, to look, to read, to talk, to really dig into a bid. Explain to me what these numbers mean. And some people get offended by that. We don’t. We want to break it out. We want to tell them exactly what they’re getting for the money they’re spending.”
— Rick Haggerty
Read that again, because it is a diagnostic. A contractor who is annoyed that you asked for a line-by-line explanation has told you something useful about how the rest of the project will go. One who welcomes it has told you something equally useful.
And if the cheapest bid survives that examination, take it. His words: “And if it is the cheapest, great, right? Great. You win. It’s a win-win, right? But first, you know, get in, dig in.”
Why he takes it personally
“you’re letting people into your home. It’s an intimate setting, right? When you talk about us redoing a closet, I mean, we’re in the intimate part of people’s lives. You want to be able to trust them. You want to know that they do good work and you want to know that they can finish.”
— Rick Haggerty
The same is true of anyone working on your heating, your plumbing or your crawl space. These are people in your house, often when you are not there, touching systems you cannot easily inspect afterwards.
What a good company does before you notice
Rick’s internal standard is the flip side of the same coin, and it is a fair thing to ask a contractor about directly:
“we train our people to see problems before the customers do. And then we want to fix them before the punch list is created by the customer or the homeowner.”
— Rick Haggerty
Ask how they handle a problem they find that you have not found yet. The answer tells you whether you are hiring a company that manages a job or one that reacts to complaints.
One more thing worth knowing
He is also clear that a no today is not a no forever, and that a company worth hiring keeps the door open: “we don’t win every job. We’d like to, but we don’t. You know, and when someone tells us no, that doesn’t necessarily mean no forever. Just means no right now.”
Take your time. Get three real bids, understand all three, and pick the people you would be comfortable having in the house for a week.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcript of the episode, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More conversations with contractors and small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.