ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Business Related Discussion about those maintenance gigs

a grand anology Reno

and right now, i just happen to know many who are gold rushing off to other parts of the country for work....

~S~

The thing to remember about gold rushes is the outfitters made a lot more money than the miners.

Greg ... are you trying to continue the analogy - and suspect that the referral service makes more than the tradesmen?

Imagine that ....

That was my point. For some reason tradesmen seem to undervalue their services and businesses are more than happy to go along. My wife is always marking up the bills she gets, giving the trade more money. She says everyone loses if the trade is losing money on the job. The end will be ugly for sure when he finally figures out he busted his ass and didn't make a dime. Part of the problem is most people have only worked on one side of the fence or the other and do not understand what the other side faces.
Commerce only works when everyone along the chain makes a reasonable amount of money.

Greg said....
"Commerce only works when everyone along the chain makes a reasonable amount of money."

I have ti say...Amen!

Key word is reasonable!

Unfortunately the idea of reasonable profit is not what is taught in the negotiations seminars for purchasing agents and project managers. The seminars teach how to bully and play vendors against each other. Reverse auctions are commonly used by large companies to let small and large contracts. It is also common to question every rate and challenge every bill. The people who manage the obtaining of skilled trades to accomplish repairs are rewarded financially for their ability to avoid paying bills, their ability to delay paying bills. It is like a collections company in reverse. It is not by chance that there are so many companies operating in this fashion. This way of doing business is commonly followed by many in the corporate world today. That is why the economy is in such a sad state--The connected chain of buyers who have no money cannot purchase the goods of the sellers.

sounds about right Homer

and now they can deal with my collection agency

i'd rather loose 1/2 to them , than continue running this mobius logic strip i've been subjected to

~S~

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.

Reno,
there's been a number of 'we're going to start making your life easier' emails from FM's PR entity

this has come on the backs of two of their largest customers having problems, 1)blockbuster video's bankrupcy, and 2) Friendly's resturant having some sort of dispute with them

in either case, instead of isolating the vendors from the snafu, they use us as the kicking post

my invoice in collections with them (a march 2010 job) has been subject to thier ongoing #2 dispute.

im(not so)ho (and i've made this perfectly clear to them), if they continue to operate unethically, they can do so without this tradesman

~S~