How did you come across that? What is it that drove you to tell that first person, no, this probably isn’t going to be the best thing for you to do, even though it cost you business?
Brant: So, yeah, that’s one of the ways that we’ve built a really, really loyal customer base. And I think there’s a couple of things.
One, there’s the integrity. Whether it’s within all of us, that’s the first thing that I’m motivated by, that my team is motivated by, is just to be honest and have integrity in all of our relationships.
On the business side of things, though, I can tell you that I’ve been there and done that. I’ve lost money on deals. And I’ve experienced a lot of those bad decisions. And I’ve had deals that went wrong, and that does happen.
And I’ve seen the other side, where we’ve made a lot, a lot of money on deals, rental properties and flips. I’ve seen both sides of that.
So with our customer base, we know that if we don’t provide honest input and an investor moves forward on a deal, or makes some bad decisions and ends up taking a loss or just not being very profitable, we’re not going to have an opportunity possibly to work with them again, either based off of bad recommendations on our staff or just being silent on a recommendation where we had information.
Either that, or that investor may no longer be in the business. So that’s one thing that we’ve done a lot. And we get a lot of deer-in-the-headlight looks, but with especially newbie investors, where we’re helping them out. We’re coming to do an estimate for a job and we’re telling them absolutely that it’s not a good deal or that the house may need too many repairs, which makes it not a good deal.
And so that’s kind of the reason why. And our business is really built on repeat customers. Because the average contractor, remodeling company, when they do a remodel for their average customer, their typical customer, it’s a one-time service for that customer, most likely, because people don’t renovate their personal homes that often.
But we’ve got customers that we’ve done 20+ remodels in a single year for.
So we’re built on repeat business and the only way to really establish good relationships is to help them truly be successful in their real estate investments. And I can’t tell you how many times, literally hundreds and probably thousands of times, that we’ve told people either to walk away from deals or we just talked them down on they may want to add some things to the project, something that they saw on HGTV. But it just doesn’t make sense in that market.
So we’ll try to analyze what is the customer’s desired outcome, but what’s really, in that target market where that house is located, kind of where’s the sweet spot? What are the minimum things that we do? What are the things that you, we call them must, should and wow.
The things that you must do. There are some things that you probably should, but you can have some leniency on that, whether you do or don’t. And then we throw in a couple of wow factors to the project.
So we kind of help them make those decisions through a business perspective on what’s going to bring them the best return on their investment.
Jack: Yeah, one thing that I know we’ve talked about is clearly we see how you can help people avoid bad deals. Avoid making mistakes that can be very, very costly and even life-changing in their finances.
But on the other side of the coin, you’ve come across that people think is a bad deal because of what I call 25 cent problems. Where they’ve gone and they’ve watched the shows on TV and they walk in a house and decide that they don’t want to buy that house because it has a hole in the sheetrock.
Now, that’s a 25 cent problem, but they think it’s major. How many people do you come across that you actually can help them navigate and say, you know what? That’s not nearly as bad as you’re thinking and this is actually a really good deal. And they’ve ended up getting home runs off of things that they initially may have passed on because they weren’t educated in what the true problem was.
Brant: Yeah. So that happens quite a bit, too. People, just either through fear or really lack of knowledge or experience, they’ll make a small situation so much bigger. And really, unfortunately, I see a lot of people walk away from deals that they could have made really nice size profits on. And our company actually bought quite a few of those deals where we advised the customer, the client, this is a really good deal. We ran all the numbers and plugged everything in and it made sense.
But there’s some obstacle in their mind that they can’t get over to move forward on that deal. And recently, we had a customer who had already purchased a home. Got into the rehab. They had, unfortunately, hired another contractor. And things went bad. Things went sideways.
And the contractor had run off with the money, left them unfinished on the project. And this investor wanted to ditch the project. Take a loss. Because they were just so in a state of shock at that point in time and they were afraid and just, really, you know, she wasn’t thinking straight at that point in time.
