GuildQuality

Last week, Remodeling published an opinion piece by Michael Anschel, a Minneapolis-based remodeler. In it Michael predicts that remodelers (and I would add home builders as well) are facing a new kind of competition. These companies are “run by people who understand business and like efficiency and standards.” These are people who…

…hire the right people; they will manage direct expenses and overhead; they will maximize profits. They will take our slow and lumbering process of estimating and find ways to automate, systematize, and improve the accuracy through constant feedback and constant improvement mechanisms.

With regard to competition, I think he is absolutely correct.

He also makes a statement about the virtues of heightened regulation. I disagree with him on that point, both in the comments of his post and in a prior post on our blog. I am interested to hear what you have to say, so please chime in.

There is great support from within the remodeling, home building, and real estate industries for greater regulation — particularly as it relates to licensing, permitting, and inspections. Many true professionals are justifiably irate about the typical level of quality within the profession, and, as aggrieved people have done since the dawn of government, they are appealing to the state to make things better. More regulation, they argue, will ensure that inexperienced or unprincipled businesspeople will have greater difficulty entering the profession, and customers will therefore be more likely to have a great experience.

I share these people’s concern about the disease (poor quality), but I believe their proposed strategy for health (regulation) will do more harm than good. I have a different solution, and what follows is my attempt to refute the doctrine of regulation, and introduce an alternative strategy that creates more choice for consumers, expands an ecosystem of healthy competition, and creates an environment where poor performers will fail at greater rates while superior companies will find it easier to thrive. (more…)

After an extended period of neglect, I spent the morning connecting GuildQuality’s blog and twitter account to our Facebook fan page, so make your way over to FB and become a fan of GQ.

We recently had the pleasure of spending about 45 minutes with three remodeling leaders as they talked about how their businesses deliver a superior customer experience and how their focus on quality manifests itself in their company culture, systems, and processes.

We recorded the conversation and it is now available on NARI’s website.  Click here to listen.

Special thanks to Bruce Case (Case Design/Remodeling of Bethesda, MD), Todd Jackson (Jackson Design and Remodeling of San Diego, CA), and Greg Harth (Harth Builders of Spring House, PA), for being generous with their time and insights.

As different as their businesses are, all three of these great leaders share a passion for quality, and work diligently to elevate the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance in our lives.

Jim Cory’s article on web marketing describes what a number of forward-thinking remodelers (and their consultants) are doing to get the word out about their businesses. Using technology (and GuildQuality) to articulate your quality to prospective clients is just one of several great suggestions. From the article (Page 3):

What carries far greater weight are views gathered through an independent third-party survey company, such as GuildQuality, which surveys clients and links its feedback results from your site to its company site. Click on any one of 10 subject headings on Eberle Remodeling‘s website, for instance, and a link on the left side of the screen says,  “Click here to view our customer satisfaction ratings”, and steers you to the company’s GuildQuality page, which incorporates responses from 72 clients and gives the remodeler a “100% Recommended” rating.

Last month, Professional Remodeler described how Weidmann Remodeling was doing the same thing. Many of our members use their customer report to give people an understanding of what their company is all about from the eyes of past customers. As mentioned last week, I suspect this emerging best practice is one of the contributors to our significant climb in consumer traffic.

Other strategies/initiatives/best practices/resources described in the Remodeling article: search engine optimization, site re-design, google analytics, and client logins.

And don’t stop at the end of the article. There’s a great coda from Remodeling’s Senior Editor Leah Thayer about social networks, in which she answers the question, “What remodeler has the luxury of doing anything as goofy as ‘tweeting’ in an economy like this?”