Most Contractors Forget to Do This Before Signing Contracts
Hi there, I’m Greg from DYB Coach, also Green Pro Painting out of Greenville, South Carolina.
Today, I wanted to talk to you about signing commercial contracts with new contractors or bidding work for that matter.
When you are qualifying for new contractors, think about people that are buying from your business as well, and what they do to qualify people.
1. Google them
Google them, look them up, spend the time to do a little bit of research if you haven’t heard of them yet.
If they are potentially from out of town, you want to do even more Google research, and look up the company –see what you can find out about them.
2. Read Reviews
And just like any other business, there are always disgruntled people out there that are unreasonable and sometimes it is not possible to reach a medium with them.
So keep that in mind as well when you are looking at reviews from the company.
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Spend some time to read them, and one of the things that I always like to do is check on Glassdoor or any other type of hiring website and see what their employees are writing about their business.
Is there a high turnover, are there a lot of jobs posted, what is the general consensus of review for the people?
Typically when companies take care of their employees and their employees are happy, they are a good company.
It’s most of the time, that’s not every single time, and there are often reviews written.
3. Research the Company
I will tell you a little story about something that happened to our company that forced this policy for our business.
We painted this small, little breakfast type restaurant here in town, went above and beyond for the contractor, and they were contracted to build a second one.
This all happened in a very short span of time, in between 2 months, we finished the one, it’s a pretty small job, maybe 2,000 square feet at the most.
We finished the job, everything was great, the payment was a little slow on the first job and we had a couple of change orders that were signed, and everything was documented, they sent us the payment for this job, and we started the next one.
About mid-way through the next one, and we didn’t get our next payment for the first job, and then we come to find out we weren’t getting our first payment for the second job either.
I started to inquire about it, and the contractor, after having several phone conversations ended up not paying us at all.
And they seemed to be pretty crafty in this endeavor and knew what the limitations of the law were, and knew whether or not they had to pay us, and what that was going to look like.
We got burned and it’s one of the first jobs that this has ever happened to us on, and I learned so much from it, because it forced me to get on to Google, and research this company.
I came to find out that they had changed names 4 or 5 times, just by Googling the owner, the person I had a conversation with, and there were multiple accounts, first-hand accounts of other contractors that were not paid on the job.
It seemed like it had been happening and reoccurring for a very long period of time.
Implement a new policy, where we go in, we research the company, if it’s new, we start to find out a little bit about them.
We may possibly even ask them for a trade reference if they are going to do it to us, why can’t we do it to them?
That’s kind of my philosophy on the subject matter.
Bottom line:
In a quick review, make sure you Google new contractors that you are working with, take the time to do that research on the front end, don’t get burned like we did.
I hope this saved you guys some money; you can do this!
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email; greg@dybcoach.com
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