Business Articles - Trade Tips - From David Lupberger

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Home improvement and remodeling can bring out the best and worst in people. There are several reasons for this. Interestingly enough, a major concern homeowners have does not have to do with the quality of your work. It is an important part of every project, but there is another factor that plagues the contractor-homeowner relationship. What is it? It's Fear. Homeowners are scared.

Two things are present for every homeowner when they undertake a home improvement project:

1. Their home is usually their biggest investment.
2. Their home is a reflection of who they are.

Most people have more money in their homes than anything else, so a lot is at stake. In addition, because their home is a reflection of who they are, they also have a huge emotional investment. With this large emotional and financial investment, homeowners are afraid to put this investment at risk, and they are afraid of home improvement projects for the following five reasons:

•Crooks— Homeowners are afraid of being ripped off by unscrupulous contractors, and they hear stories about this all the time. They hear them on the television, they're in the newspaper, and they're on radio� some unscrupulous contractor who ripped off some innocent homeowner.

•Money— Homeowners do not understand the real cost of remodeling and home improvement, and they are terrified of hidden costs that will come up when they least expect it.

•Disappointment— When lots of time and money have been spent on designing a project, homeowners are terrified that upon walking into the project after it has been started, they are going to look around the new room and say, "This is not what I want." Homeowners have a difficult time conceptualizing what a new space is going to look like based on a set of plans lying in front of them.

•Disruption— Home improvement can be a highly disruptive process. Homeowners can be without a kitchen or a bathroom for weeks or longer. This situation disrupts every routine in every household that goes through in an extended home improvement project.

•Loss of Control— All of the fears listed above lead to a sense of a loss of control. Homeowners can feel they lose control of their own home. They can generally feel out of control, leaving them in a vulnerable condition. With fears like these, homeowners can delay their decision to complete projects for an extended time.

Number of Jobs Test
With this in mind, flip perspectives here and look at it from your point of view, as a service professional. When you, as a professional contractor, go through the client's door, do you really understand how much fear homeowners have concerning your process? Let's take a test. Answer the following two questions:

1. How many jobs have you done in the last 10 years? Most contractors have done hundreds of projects in the last 10 years.
2. How many jobs do you do in the course of a year? Many will do 30 to 40 projects in a year, and sometimes more.

Desensitized
When you've worked more than 200 jobs in the last 10 years, and up to 40 jobs a year, you can become desensitized to what people are going through as they are about to open up their homes to the home improvement project they want completed. At seminars where I speak, I like to ask remodeling contractors in the audience if they have remodeled their own home.

Next, I ask them if they put it off. You'd be surprised by the answers. Professional remodelers are no different from the average homeowners they deal with. They postpone the process for as long as possible. When I ask them what the process was like for them, they describe the same fears as many homeowners. It is a highly invasive and disruptive process, and one that is not always under control because of all of the different people going in and out of their homes.

Empathy
So what's the solution? It's empathy. When you let homeowners know that you are aware of their fears, that you empathize with them, it forms a bond that is not present in most other business transactions. When you are a professional contractor who acknowledges that homeowners have real fears about this process, you begin to build a very successful home improvement business. Why? Because when you are working in someone's home, you need to understand that you are not only selling a product or service, you're also selling an experience. You must manage that experience as well as the project. Let me make this idea a little clearer.

It's Not the Product—It's the Process
If you ask 10 different people about complaints they had about a home improvement project, you'll discover in about 90 percent of the cases that the complaints were not about the product. In almost 90 percent of the complaints that I've dealt with, the homeowner's complaints were about the process. They were about expectations that were not met. It was about timetables that were not kept. It was usually about something that did not happen, information that was not shared, and the homeowner being left in a process he or she did not understand, and did not know what would happen next.

Knowing your trade is not enough. We must manage homeowner expectations. We can deliver the project, but lose a homeowner's trust by not managing this sometimes difficult and invasive process. Homeowners need to understand this process. Your success in home improvement will result from your ability to have empathy with your clients, and to convey that you truly understand what they are going through. You need to understand that homeowners can feel quite vulnerable during this process. They do not know who to trust, where to begin, or even what to do. Many homeowners are overwhelmed just by the decision of who to work with. One of your primary responsibilities is to effectively guide homeowners through this process.

To do this, you need to build trust from your first meeting with your customers, and continue to build on that trust in each meeting you have with them. This is the topic of Part 3, Building Trust.