Custom Home Builders and Shearer Painting

August 29, 2012

Andy Sewrey: Okay. So when we go to work with a general contractor or bid work with a general contractor, there’s gonna generally be three things that we believe that you guys as a general contractor are going to be interested in. The first of those is going to be quality. You know, your projects tend to have Level 5 drywall finishes, they tend to have high end enamel work, lacquer work, conversion varnish work, site painted cabinetry, you know, you name it. Possibly even some floor finishes, some metal finishes. Anything that you can really dream up, we tend to either be asked to do or work with in the past. On the high end enamel stuff, that’s kind of our bread and butter. I think in this market most people are going to a painted finish rather than a stain anyway, and being able to do that efficiently and accurately is really everything and that’s process driven. And we do a really great job of managing both our own guys as well as working with the site superintendent to make sure that we put ourselves in a position to be able to execute that. A lot of that is just preparing you as the GC for what we need on the job site to do those sorts of things. Same thing goes for enamel work and wall work. There’s just a lot of communication involved there.
All the quality on the job is always the first and foremost priority for us. But really, I mean we could keep talking about that, but we also know that if we’re sitting in front of you already at this point talking about bidding a project you’ve probably already checked out our quality and know that we can knock that out of the park.
So from there the schedules become a huge, huge process. And again, that’s communication and expectations on the front end. That’s us dealing with you directly and finding out what your process is as a builder. Everybody does it differently. Everybody brings their trades through differently. Everybody has a different expectation of when they want the customer to look at the job and sign off on it. We have different expectations on when we think you should actually QC the job; we want to present it to you as what we think is done. And then at the same time if we know that a schedule is getting compressed, we need to know that we can have enough notice from you to be able to bring in enough horsepower to get it done. And that’s one of our strong points, being that we have a big enough machine over here to be able to call in the horses to do it when we need to do it. That’s all based on communication, but… as long as that’s happening we can do it.
And then on the back end we need to make sure that the customer service for you is what you need. Some folks want to be communicated with a ton, some folks wanna know the bullet points and move forward, some guys wanna know the good and the bad, some guys only want to know the bad. And that all just comes from a little bit of time on the front end, assessing what you need, being clear about it, and going from there. Being able to come in at the end of a job and really dial it out, and take care of the – y’know, the finer points. You can call it the nit and pick but we know that’s really the stuff that makes the customer happy in the end. We want to be clear with what they want, we want to be clear with what you want, and we want to be clear we were expected to do. Dial all that stuff down in the end and really bring it to a sharp finish, and get out of the job for everybody involved – clean with a happy customer.

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