I saw an excellent example this past weekend of how so many contractors lose customers and therefore lose future jobs.
I talked to a friend of mine this weekend.
She owns a pizza restaurant.
She said they were moving into a new restaurant and that during the remodel process, she had specified a special type of air handling system.
The contractor that was in charge of putting in the air handling system installed a basic system instead of the one she needed.
When she said something to him, he did not change it.
So, she waited until the job was almost done and showed the general contractor what the problem was along with documentation that she had specified the special one up front.
The result was that the contractor had to change the system.
However, she is planning on opening another location soon and she will not be using that contractor again.
She also will never refer him to anyone else and will probably recommend to her friends that they not use him.
This will cost him even more money.
Let's look at what would have happened if he would have changed the system as soon as she pointed out that it was incorrect.
He would have been out the cost of redoing the job.
But, he was out that anyway, so he probably didn't make any money on this job either way.
However, if he would have quickly and politely acknowledged his mistake as soon as she pointed it out to him, she would probably been very pleased with him.
I've found that people usually aren't upset just because you make a mistake, if you are willing to correct your mistake right away.
The other thing that would have happened is that more than likely he would have gotten the job to her next location as well as being referred by her to others.
So, he would have more than made up any loss he suffered by correcting his mistake.
That is why it is so important that we treat every job as an opportunity to gain or keep a customer, especially in this economy.
A small example of this happened to me today.
I had a lady call me to look at a small job for her.
She was frustrated because she was having trouble getting anyone to come and look at such a small job.
These are probably the same guys that are saying that there isn't much work out there.
She did say that she had more work, but she wanted to see how this was done, before she committed to having more work done.
I will go for this small job because I bet she will need my services again and I bet she has friends that will need my services sometime.
You see once I get a customer, odds are that they will be my customer for life and I will make a lot of money from them.