Problem en suite

This en suite ended up looking great….

Introduction 

I’ve been fitting bathrooms for a long time now.

Here’s me 7 years ago (younger & fatter in the face apparently)

Since then, I’ve personally fit hundreds.

(You can probably tell if you’ve been on the website for any length of time!)

As a result I get A LOT of requests to fit bathrooms, from all over the UK.

I have trialled hundreds of tradesmen to try and fulfil this demand.

(In other words I have been in your shoes looking for great tradesmen more times than you could imagine.)

The Problem

I struggled to find tradesmen that were truly excellent at their job

I waited in for people that never showed up and kept me waiting when I had other stuff to do.

I waited in for people to get back to me when they said they would (and they never did)

I cleared up after tradesmen who had left the place in a complete mess at the end of the day because they just didn’t know the difference between a site & a home.

I remedied others peoples shoddy work (more on that later!)

I went through the small claims court to reclaim money owed to me.

In building my current team I have hired and trialled probably hundreds of different local tradesmen across many different disciplines over the past decade and I can honestly say that I’ve been genuinely impressed by the skill and attitude of only a few.

Early last year I had a good team but in trying to meet demand I hired extra staff too quickly.

I didn’t focus on training enough.

I didn’t adequately communicate the values that we now live & breathe.

I thought that the professionals I’d hired were good enough to do the job to the standards I expected.

I was wrong…

This particular job

Space for new en suite installation – 2018

This en suite installation was one of the occasions when the new staff I had hired were simply out of their depth, and as a result I had to step in and remedy much of their work which was OK, but not great.

(And certainly not the standard that I aspire to.)

Personally this was very disappointing and frustrating for me, as I’m sure it was for my customer.

However, my customers were amazing and I promised I would sort things out.

So, back on the tools I went!

A week or so later and everything was sorted.

Now it looks pretty good:

Lessons learned

Nobody’s perfect.

And scaling a business that is heavily dependent on tradesmen is very very very difficult without rock solid systems & processes.

Here, I expanded too quickly and placed too much faith in my fitters.

As a result I made a few changes to the business.

Now all fitters have checklists & procedures to follow at every turn.

We have standards documents that demonstrate how and why things must be done a certain way.

(You can read an overview of a few of them here.)

I also have a more robust hiring policy designed to weed out problematic fitters earlier in the process.

What about you?

I can’t even imagine trying to hire good bathroom fitters as a homeowner, without the wealth of installation experience behind you to help make that decision…

Still…..

Thats why you can hire me and my team with confidence:

I’ve been through it all before and I stand behind all of my work.

I always have done, and I always will.

That’s why the company still has such a strong reputation locally, despite these growing pains that few business owners talk about publicly…

Thanks for reading, now to feed this guy!

Chris