Charity Begins In Homes While reality TV is one area where remodelers are cast in a positive light, there is far too much negative press, due to a relative handful of unscrupulous contractors. Homeowners might follow up a viewing of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition with the local news, where they see an elderly lady who was bilked out of several thousand dollars by a contractor who got full payment up front and left before finishing her roof. They might read, as homeowners in Orlando, Fla., recently did, a long series of articles about shoddy construction practices. They might go online and find a consumer advocacy Web site cautioning them to get three bids for every job and to never make a large initial down payment.
These types of exposés can make things hard on the vast majority of remodelers, who take honest pay for honest work and pour a lot of effort into customer service. But when a contractor does his job, completing the project on time and on budget, it’s not newsworthy; it’s dog-bites-man stuff. The media has a long-established policy of reporting mainly bad news. So homeowners embarking on their first-ever remodeling project may come into the process with a certain skepticism, particularly if the only other information they have has come from friends or neighbors who’ve had bad experiences.
As a countermeasure, savvy remodelers with the means to do so jump at the chance to provide a little positive PR to the industry.
Mat Vivona Jr., of Father & Son Construction, in Troy, Mich., is something of a “go-to” guy in his area when it comes to charitable work. Partly because of his relationship with a former newscaster who is now the company’s television spokesman, Vivona has done several projects with the local Detroit media, including installing a heating system for a poor, elderly woman and helping restore a home that had been broken into and vandalized with racial and ethnic slurs scrawled across the walls.
A great deal of Vivona’s willingness to take on such charitable ventures is pure philanthropy. “I believe that part of being a professional is that you have to give back whenever it’s feasible,” Vivona says. “If someone calls you and it wouldn’t take all that much, you have a certain duty to perform community service.
“It’s a great feeling, too,” Vivona continues, “knowing you’ve made a difference for someone who is down on their luck.”
But while giving back is his main motivation, Vivona certainly doesn’t mind the side effect of bolstering the public image of the remodeling industry. “It builds a good rapport with the media — who are all too quick to jump on a negative story,” he says.
That’s especially true in Vivona’s area. Troy is about 15 minutes outside of Detroit, one of the nation’s largest media markets, and where, according to Vivona, the local television stations have concentrated on profiling dishonest home improvement companies. One station recently began running a weekly contractor “Hall of Shame” segment on its news broadcasts. “Every Tuesday night, there was a report about a remodeler doing a horrible job,” Vivona says.
The situation in Detroit is probably as bad as it gets, and it certainly wasn’t helped by an incident a few years ago when, according to Vivona, a prominent weatherman at one of the local stations lost a lot of money on an addition that never happened.
Still, while the amount of coverage varies from market to market, it’s inarguable that the majority of media coverage about remodelers is negative. So even if the media in your area isn’t terribly aggressive in seeking out and exposing shoddy builders, it pays to do what you can.
Chris Shurian is another remodeler who, like Vivona, does charitable work mainly to give back but doesn’t mind the positive press he receives as a result. His company, Classic Construction Services, in Provo, Utah, is heavily involved in philanthropic endeavors, many in conjunction with Shurian’s peers and colleagues. “Our home builder’s association spends a lot of time and a lot of energy improving our image in this area,” he says. Those efforts include the annual Cougar House — a house built by the HBA with donated labor and materials that is subsequently sold, with all proceeds going to an athletic scholarship fund to local Brigham Young University — and a “Subcontractors for Santa” program, in which the HBA identifies homes that need help or fixing up. It’s usually small stuff, maybe installing a new front door or a furnace, but it’s far-reaching: Shurian says local builders and remodelers worked on about 50 homes this year.