If a customer is looking for the lowest bid, that’s his own business. There is a minimum of quality and services we have to provide to client with a fair price that lets the contractor work comfy because many thing could pop up while we progressing in the project and we have to be covered.
The lower you pay up front, the higher you will pay when things gone wrong to fix it. Its a choice and risk taking.
Remind the client that the cheapest price means the least quality of work, 99.9% of the time.
The saying goes: you can always get it taken care of for less but at what price on quality?
Educate the owner as much as possible on advantages and drawbacks of the applicable options. Don’t lower your standards in order to win a bid.
We have found showing pictures of the repairs we have made on work performed by other contractors not up to par. We do not name them, but use the pictures as examples of the lack craftsmanship. We provide a list of jobs currently working on and invite them to stop in to see what we are doing (with permission of homeowner). Pay attention to detail the owners speak on, when doing you walk through. Being specific about those details in the bid, usually helps. Only ever offer the Best Solution, keeps down the confusion, and will set you apart.
Short answer: You don’t deal with them.
It’s important that you remember that the job must cover your cost and the industry’s markup price. Check your local market prices of equal jobs, then put your bid in. Your price is your price. You must feel good about your price; it helps maintain your quality work.
You get what you pay for, pretty much plain and simple. Are there contractors out there trying to mark their product way up, just to maximize their profits, of course, but the homeowner should be able to feel these guys out. We at Shamrock don’t play estimate games with customers, because we know that we use the best materials, we have the best most experienced crews, and we have project managers keeping a close eye on every project. All our customers have been very satisfied, and we want to keep it that way long into the future. So people who look for the lowest bid, please know they are going to make up that money somewhere in your project, either by cutting material quality, cutting warranty issues, or cutting their experience with the customer. So homeowners be very careful.
Well, we begin by actively listening to customers on the front end to better understand their strategies within a project, and then, to the extent possible, we try to accommodate. Every project can proceed on a variety of cost levels. If a client is looking to save money, we’re very honest about the materials and processes we’ll use to reduce cost. As long as they understand what we’re doing, and as long as it’s within code and legal practice, we have no problem trying to accommodate the cost conscious.
We are straight forward with the clients when it comes to discussing cost. Clients that are only concerned with obtaining the lowest possible bid will almost always suffer as a result of that decision. Not only will the work be poor quality the experience will be equally as awful. We strongly advise potential clients against taking any estimates that are considerably lower than the others but sometimes there is not much you can do to deter them.
