Nor does he hesitate to send the crew out on the small jobs that, as a matter of policy, many window replacement contractors are not interested in. “You aren’t going to make any money on them, but chalk it up to advertising,” Hardy says. He is not the first one to discover what patient home improvement contractors already know: Partials often turn into bigger sales. “I can tell you that it works really well,” he says.
Sticking with these basics, Hardy took the company to $4 million in sales without any formal business systems. At that point, things got a bit chaotic, he recalls. Even then he kept it simple. Passing the $10 million mark, Hardy keeps control of the company using two off-the-shelf software packages: the contact management software, Act, templated for Hardy Window Co.’s requirements by a local consulting firm, and the Quick-Books accounting package.
The company that started in Hardy’s garage now occupies a 14,000-square-foot facility in Anaheim, and the handful of jobs done on the side for friends has become more than 150 installations per month.
“He’s had to let go of everything, from selling and installing to ordering and scheduling and dealing with upset customers,” says office manager Jenny Roth. Looking back, Hardy sees the breakthrough for his company’s growth as getting past the idea that he had to do everything himself to get it done right.
“To this day, if I hadn’t had the accident, I guarantee it would probably still be me and my brothers and we would be doing $1 million a year,” Hardy says. —Jay Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Jamestown, R.I.
BIG LEAGUE ADVERTISING It was at one of the first Los Angeles Angels home games of the 2004 season in Anaheim Stadium that Chance Hardy remembers being “wowed” by one particular ad on a new electronic sign that wraps around the stadium’s lower deck.
“It was for Melissas.com,” he says. “It came up about three times during the game and I kept wondering, ‘Who is this Melissas.com?’ I couldn’t wait to get home to the computer to find out.
Melissa’s turned out to be a distributor of exotic fruits and vegetables. When he saw this, Hardy thought, “If this lady can do this, so can we.” He called the stadium sales department, got CertainTeed to co-op the ad, and a week later an Angels crowd saw Hardywindows.com up in lights for the first time.
The advertising is expensive, Hardy says — $50,000 the first year, $70,000 in 2005 for one-half an inning at half the Angels home games — but the company’s owner doesn’t doubt its value.
He can track a number of specific jobs to the sign. The biggest? “We scored a $1 million job in San Diego, all high-end wood product.” He also believes that the ad put him on the radar of a couple of large production home builders he is now talking to about windows. Probably most importantly, it gave the company broad exposure and a measure of instant credibility to be up there, “with the big boys, like The Home Depot, Budweiser, and Coors,” he says.
“It was a very expensive burden for us,” Hardy adds, “but it got our name out there and we were the talk of the town in the window industry when we did it.”