A few years ago she noticed that the storage shed attached to her mobile home was leaking from the roof. She called a popular mobile home maintenance company for a quote to fix this 8x8’ metal roof. They told her it would be a difficult and expensive repair and quoted her over $6000 and she gave them the OK. After they finished and she wrote the check she called me and told me she felt she had been taken advantage of.
I drove down to take a look at the paperwork and the work done. She said two men had shown up and taken a little more than 2 hours to replace the roof. I looked at the materials list and saw two 4x8 sheets of roofing material. I called a distributor in the area and he quoted a cost of about $100 sheet retail.So calculating out the cost of materials and a 100% markup I came up with about $500. Then I added labor of 4 hours for each man at $60.00 an hour times 8 hours and came up with about $500 in labor for a total job price of $1000. To be generous I added in $500 for the owner’s time in coming out and estimating the job. What I couldn’t figure out was how a job that should not have cost more than $1500 turned out to be $6000. I called the owner and explained the situation. His response was, “your mother signed the estimate.” I told him that I was also a licensed contractor and that I understood she had signed the estimate and paid him but I did not believe that he had been fair with her. All he said was, “She signed the contract, if she doesn’t know that’s too bad for her. We do jobs like that all the time.”
It was hard for me to imagine that someone intended to take advantage of someone like my Mom and actually built their business model upon doing so.
Businesses will only be as good as the people working for them. It seems that many people have the attitude that it’s OK if you can get away with it. These people choose to take advantage of others who trust them. But as the saying goes, what goes around comes around and I’m quite happy to tell others about my experiences with their business and others like theirs. This costs these companies greatly.As good quality business people we need to have the highest of standards. As employers we need to make sure that our employees reflect these standards. You are responsible for imparting these principles to the people that represent you. As the economy worsens, you may be put in the position of lying or stealing and you have to choose who you are going to be.