It's hard not to have tunnel vision when you can only see one face of a situation.
We've spoken before about slow-pays and other bad customer habits. I recently told my current 'big industry' employer: you want the 'best price,' stop jerking the vendors around. So far they haven't got the point, being fixated on the 'they need us more than we need them' viewpoint. OK, fine - that's why you get to pay 3x what little ol' me paid as a contractor.
Lest we get off point, though .... one of the claimed advantages of these referral services is that THEY handle the collections, and take the risk. That's the claim; as responses to this thread show, that's not the way things really work out.
Instead, you take a larger risk for a smaller slice of the pie.
There IS a role for these folks. When my parents had their basement flood, the insurance agent pointed them to one of these- and we got the sorts of contractors we needed promptly. I thing my mother made no more than three phone calls. Cheap? Not on your life! (The old maxim about there being three types of work -good, fast, and cheap... and you only get to choose two- proved true).
In essence, these outfits really are nothing but a variation on the 'general contractor' theme. The customer calls them, and they send you their pet subs. It's just a marketing twist. The customer thinks 'I called Mr. Super,' rather than 'I picked a GC at random from the book.'
THERE may lie a lesson for us and our own marketing efforts.
