GuildQuality

This year, over 100 leading remodelers vied for Remodeling Magazine’s Big50 Service Excellence Award. The Big50 Service Excellence Awards recognize those Big50 Remodelers who deliver exceptional customer service, and this year there was an exciting twist, the award was open to the current as well as past Big50 classes!

To identify the winners, GuildQuality surveyed each candidate’s most recent 50 customers, or for high volume candidates we surveyed a random 50 clients from their 2011 customer list.

Through email, mail, and telephone surveying, clients shared with us their ratings and comments about construction quality, communication, problem resolution, and a host of other aspects of the remodeling experience, as well as the likelihood that they will recommend their remodeler to a friend or family member.

Congratulations to the following 8 remodelers who demonstrate an extraordinary commitment to their customers, and were named this year’s Big50 Service Excellence Award Winners:

Thorson Restoration & Construction (Bridgewater, MA)

Hughes Kitchens and Bath (Canton, OH)

The Brothers That Just Do Gutters (Billings, NY)

All Pro Builders (Fullerton, CA)

Henderer Design + Build (Corvallis, OR)

Construction Ahead (Atlanta, GA)

DreamMaker Bath and Kitchen of Springfield (Springfield, IL)

DiFabion Remodeling (Indian Trail, NC)

The GuildQuality team embarked on a day-long zip lining adventure at Historic Banning Mills, located on Snake Creek in Carroll County, Georgia. Take a look at our slideshow to see how brave we are. Our team bonded and brainstormed across 1,000 foot-long zip lines, 200 feet in the air!

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Nearly 200 home builders, remodelers, developers and contractors throughout North America were recognized as 2012 Guildmaster Award recipients. Congratulations to all of our wonderful winners!

These companies verified that they had provided GuildQuality with a complete and unabridged customer list, received responses from the significant majority of their customers, and achieved a recommendation rate of greater than 90%.

View our complete list of 2012 Guildmaster winners here.

Curious what GuildQuality’s World Headquarters is like? I came into the office this Saturday morning to get some work done, and instead took a handful of pictures. To see notes and comments, view the set here in Flickr.

Congratulations North Georgia Replacement Windows on your consumer choice award! (And thanks for the GuildQuality shoutout!)

John Powell, of Duracraft of Georgia, passed away last week. Godspeed, John.

Congratulations to Structures Building Company, winner of GuildQuality’s All the Pretty Houses poll! Structures earned 30% of the votes cast for this exterior project:

As the voter’s choice, Structures Building Company will receive a copy of Coming Home, a new book featuring the work of Jim Strickland and his colleagues at Historical Concepts, written by Susan Sully.

You can see the entire results and all the entries here.

Thank you to the over 360 voters who participated. We randomly selected one voter to receive a second copy of Coming Home. If you haven’t heard from us, I’m sorry to report that you didn’t win a copy. But don’t give up yet: If that randomly selected voter doesn’t respond by the end of the day tomorrow, we’ll draw a second name!

Keep an eye out for an expanded blog feature on Structures Building Company and their winning entry very soon.

The Remodeling Leadership Conference (May 10 and 11 in Baltimore) is among my favorite remodeling industry events. Not only does the team at Remodeling line up some exceptional speakers (this year’s theme is “managing a maturing business in a maturing market”), but the quality of the people in attendance is top-notch. This event attracts those who are pushing the remodeling profession forward — both the thought leaders and its leading entrepreneurs.

As in prior years, we’ll be there to announce the 2012 Big50 Service Excellence Award Winners.

I hope to see you there! Click here to register for the event.

We’re hiring LAMP developers to help us build the next version of GuildQuality. While we have a bias toward folks in either Atlanta or Boulder, this position is open to exceptional people anywhere in the United States. Check out those links to read the complete job posting and apply.

P.S. Here’s some background on GuildQuality’s culture.

We’re hiring a Web Designer to be the steward of GuildQuality’s online aesthetic. Our ideal candidate would be reconstructed from the DNA of Leonardo da Vinci and Edward Tufte.

What you’d be working on: We’re developing the next version of our application, and want to beef up the team with some super talented people. We’re looking for a development-oriented designer to complement our design-oriented development team. If you’re interested in helping us build new stuff, you will have a lot of fun at GuildQuality.

In addition to helping us build the next GuildQuality, our web designer will care for, scrutinize, maintain, and enhance all of GuildQuality’s public-facing stuff. That includes our website, email notifications, and survey design, as well as the marketing features that we provide our members. That means you’d be doing everything from designing and building campaign landing pages, to analyzing conversion rates of our free trial signup traffic and making informed design improvements, to noodling with the formatting of our ratings, to agonizing over how to make our members’ performance summaries as accessible and compelling as possible.

To learn more about the opportunity and apply, check out the job posting.

P.S. Here’s some background on GuildQuality’s culture.

Congratulations to Guildmembers, Airoom Architects & Builders and Sun Design Remodeling Specialists, Inc., both were honored at the National Association of the Remodeling Industry’s (NARI) Evening of Excellence.

The Evening of Excellence celebrates NARI’s Contractor of the Year (CotY) Award winners. Contractors from seven regions nationwide vie for the awards on an annual basis. All projects submitted for judging were an improvement or an addition to an existing structure. Twenty-five national CotY winners were named at this year’s ceremony; among them, Airoom Architects & Builders and Sun Design Remodeling Specialists, Inc.

Airoom Architects & Builders was awarded in the “Residential Kitchen Over $120,000″ category and Sun Design Remodeling Specialists, Inc. was awarded in the “Residential Addition $100,000 to $250,000″ category.

For the complete list of national CotY award winners for 2012, click here.

We just launched a new GQ Poll, and you can now vote for your favorite house from among ten great pictures we gleaned from our members’ portfolios. The poll closes at the end of April.

The winning company and one random voter will receive a copy of Coming Home, a new book featuring the work of Jim Strickland and his colleagues at Historical Concepts, written by Susan Sully.

Click here to vote for your favorite house.

P.S. You can add beautiful pictures of your work to your own member profile page by way of the Marketing Admin section of your account.

The good folks at MarketSharp produced this excellent, short video showing off their GuildQuality import/export feature:

A great many of our Guildmembers use this feature to help them stay current with their surveying. If you’re a MarketSharp user and not yet using it, check it out. If you’re not familiar with MarketSharp, you can learn more about them here.

From their website:

MarketSharp is a contact and business process management software solution that will cost-effectively increase your remodeling business’ performance by lowering lead costs, increasing closing ratios, and improving overall office efficiency!

MarketSharp empowers you and your team with advanced functionality in lead generation and marketing; searching and filtering for instant data retrieval; lead, customer and job tracking; production and service management; and reporting and data analysis. Bottom line: It is the ‘All-In-One’ WEB-BASED Software, specifically developed for REMODELERS, guaranteed to get you more leads, track all your contact/job data, manage production and service and increase office efficiencies, plus report on your performance.

If you want to maximize the effectiveness of ‘every interaction’ within your company – whether it’s admin, marketing, sales, production or service… Look to MarketSharp!

Congratulations to Guildmember C&L Ward from Davison, Michigan.
The company is celebrating 40 years in business!

“Wall Street indices predicted nine out of the last five recessions!” – Paul A. Samuelson

(A wordle of every comment provided in the survey)

This report contains a summary of the feedback received from our members in the Q4 2011 Market Predictions Survey conducted from March 22 to March 29. This survey is a continuation of the survey we began in October 2008. In this and prior surveys, GuildQuality requested feedback from the owners and operators among our hundreds of home builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers that use our service. In each of the surveys, more than 100 people have provided feedback. 164 of our builders, remodelers, developers, and home services contractors responded to the 1st quarter survey.

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