Podcast features Quality Built Exteriors owner
When you want an exterior home improvement, how can you be sure you’re selecting a good contractor? Some items on the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer checklist are easy enough to find out—credentials, reviews, insurance, year established—while others can be trickier—the company’s business practices and methods, from the top down.
Those business practices can end up being more important than most other factors in the end, because a company that has the right approach to how they work with you will almost certainly have the other essentials as well. After all, if you truly care about your customers and will go above and beyond to give them the best possible outcome, you’re a business owner who of course would have proper insurance, licensing, experience, and so on… because these are the first step to a successful and customer-centric home improvement company.
Recently, the owner of Quality Built Exteriors, Mike Reedy, was the featured guest for business consultant Nate Lundquist’s podcast “The Minimalist CEO.” In the hourlong episode, Mike was interviewed about how he started and grew Quality Built Exteriors, and the keys to what has made the company so successful. In the compiled clips above, Mike discusses why Quality Built is different from other companies and what makes it more trustworthy and honest, including examples of where other contractors cut corners or take your money for a repair when really there should have been a replacement.
TRANSCRIPT OF PODCAST CLIPS:
MIKE:
[describing his previous business of flipping properties] …but by doing all the apartments, I learned how contractors do it. So a lot of contractors don’t know what they’re talking about.
MIKE:
You sell a door—if I come to repair your door, once a door is warped where the seals are messed up, I’ve never been able to get it right. So if I come over and repair your door, you’re going to pay me a fee. A week later, when you’re having a similar problem and it’s leaking water or leaking air, you’re going to want me to come back out. I’ll have already have charged you, so that’s how contractors, a lot of them, get a bad name. Look, I’m not going to call you, they’re not calling me back anymore. Yeah, because they’ve been over there 3-4 times to repair the door. You don’t repair a door, you replace it. You put a brand-new one in. So repairing something that opens and closes every single day is like a waste of money.
But I learned little tricks like that. I learned to work on 100-year-old houses, I learned about reglazing windows, I ended up working with crews and doing a lot of it myself. So I would hire a crew to do plaster. And I would say look, here’s the deal, I’m going to hire you to teach me how to do plaster. And they would be like, “I’m not gonna teach you, cuz you’re going to take my job.” I said “Well, I’m going to work for free. I’ll bring in all the material, I’ll do all the legwork. You just show me how to run plaster. And I’ll be free to you for a month.” So then if they agreed to it, I would give them the job. Then I would come in and they would teach me how to do swirl and everything. And I did the same thing with electric, plumbing and everything, where I had a good hands-on experience to know how to do all the products myself.
So if I came to you, if I looked to hire somebody, I would ask them how they were going about doing it. If they were a professional then I learned how to tell, because I did the work wondering how long it would take. So if they were giving me a number, and the number was too cheap, then I would know they don’t know what they’re doing and I’m not going to hire them. If the number is too expensive, then I’m going to ask them how they’re doing it and why they’re so expensive, and what I’m willing to pay because I know what the going rates are for this type of work. It’s different if you’re coming from a retail company, if you’re coming from a sub[contractor], or something else. But fixing up all the houses was in order to make me a contractor. But I never wanted to be a contractor. I was an investor. But God had different plans for me.
NATE:
So if you all of a sudden have a bad business experience, where you lose properties or are dealing with problems with the recession… you’re also having an added benefit of noticing when people are wasting a customer’s money. You noticed when you had someone repair a door when they were wasting your money as an investor. And I look at what you’re doing, and as I move into some of the other questions here, you’re in the Quality Built Exteriors business, and you’re doing al these different kinds of work. It seems like you really, you honed your ability to see the right way to do things, the right way to charge for them, and to really educate your customers. If, I think if I did my research correctly, sometimes it’s better to replace something than it is to fix it. Sometimes something just needs to be torn out and something new needs to be put back in, so it’s not all about just making the money and just getting the business. Sometimes it’s about saying, “No, listen, that’s not the right way to do it.” And I think that’s pretty rare. So, is that right?
MIKE:
My system is I only allow certain things. So I have seals for when you go into the house. I only allow them to sell certain products. I won’t sell things based on, “hey we can make a sale. “ So we lose a lot of sales because people, they’re not a good fit. When I say they’re not a good fit, they might want me to do something that I know is not going to last. So I’m not going to do that because that’s going to give me a bad name. I’m telling you YOU shouldn’t do this. So sometimes we’ll go into people’s houses and they’ll want to spend X amount of money, but their goals align with selling in two years. And then what we’ll do is say, instead of spending $60,000, we recommend you spend $15,000, which doesn’t make any sense for us to tell you to do this, and do these things because these are the things that are going to help you sell your house.
So it’s more about having the knowledge on both sides. I learned the contractor side of it, so I’m able to solve the working man’s problem. I’m able to recruit the best people and I know what their issues are and I know what their issues are with companies and with retaining help because I experienced it. I experienced it with me doing the work, and people holding money from me when I needed to pay my bills. So I learned what it’s like to struggle and have somebody play games with your money. So the people that work for me, I don’t play any games with their money. One thing anybody can say about us is, we always pay. You do good work, you get paid—but I only hire the best. So what my goal is and what I learned from it is, you can either focus on the people in the relationship and doing the right thing, or you can make the sale. So making the sale isn’t always the best thing. Being able to be a benefit and offer a product.
Coming to me is like going to your doctor. It means you’re looking for a prescription. Either we have a good fit, or we don’t. Either you’re going to believe what we say and we’re going to give you a prescription we think you should take, and if you believe that makes sense, then we should do business. If it doesn’t make sense, you should go to another doctor and get a different prescription. The difference is, we carry a good enough name and have been in business longer, where you know that we will back up that prescription if it don’t work and give you another one, in a sense, without charging you to have another visit.
But basically that’s the best way I can explain it because people think hiring a contractor is all about negotiating the lowest price. “I was able to beat him down two or three hundred.” The problem when you beat people down in this business is, sometimes they’re desperate and they’re having to cut corners you won’t know about. So there’s a cost of what it costs, and there’s a cost of what someone’s willing to do it for, and sometimes when you end up sacrificing because you have to, doing a certain quality at a certain level of work and hiring a certain amount of guys, then the customers don’t understand that, you know, that’s what it costs. That’s a fair price. So there’s things that aren’t’ a fair price and things that are. But there’s a certain cost to doing business. It’s not how well you can get it, it’s what the product costs, what the overhead costs, what the people cost. SO there’s just a different way that you go about it. But all these different experiences over the years taught me a vast array of knowledge.