Sharon Rainey
Home Equity Builders
Great Falls, Va. Sharon Rainey lives in fear of a phone call — one in which she has to tell a client that she’s not going to finish their job on schedule.
“I never want to make that call,” says Rainey, vice president of Home Equity Builders. And she almost never does, because of a simple method: she pads. Specifically, she pads the time she would normally allot for her company’s handyman division. If a handyman job typically takes two hours, she gives it a half day. A job that should take three days gets four days on the schedule.
As it happens, her two handymen usually finish their jobs early, a fact that helps her keep the company humming in either of two ways.
One, if a larger remodeling job is behind schedule, Rainey can reassign a handyman to get it back on track. Two, if her handymen aren’t needed for a remodeling job, Rainey quickly e-mails clients and leads a message about the handymen’s talents and availability — first come, first served. “Inevitably I get five more jobs without spending any money,” she says. “It gets our name out in front of clients.”
Rainey’s e-mail blasts can also mitigate weather-related scheduling problems. During a recent week of heavy summer rains, she sent an e-mail saying, “This rain is wreaking havoc on my schedule! I have plenty of outdoor work for Jared and Pat, but until the rain subsides, I need some indoor projects for them. If you have any interior work you need done early next week, please e-mail me your list of tasks!”
Key to Rainey’s strategy is having multi-talented handymen. “Some companies think a handyman is a good cash leveler,” she says “so they may try to put carpenters out there who don’t do plumbing. That’s when you can get into trouble. You need a true handyman who can do a little of everything.” —Alice Bumgarner is a free-lance writer based in Durham, N.C.