Back when I was a plucky project manager working on high end homes in Vancouver, I noticed a recurring trend in my industry: Homeowners couldn’t find anyone to take care of those ‘small projects’. You know the ones, the honey-do list jobs, the handyman tasks, the door repair, that little painting job. These things bug the hell out of homeowners that don’t have the time or the tools to take care of this work themselves.

Here’s what I see happen most of the time: The owner of the home calls their builder, asks if they can do it or if they know anyone that can. Post any warranty expiry of course.

And they get an: Uhhh, we don’t have the time or the manpower for that.

So why do they call their builder before simply Googling ‘local handyman’, or ‘painter near me’? Seems like a better choice right? Because homeowners have an established relationship with that organization and they TRUST the team.

Home services are all about trust.

When you have work done on your home, the tradespeople you choose people will be amongst your family and belongings and precious family heirlooms. They’re trusted to lock up after they’re done, turn the lights off and make sure the home is safe and secure before leaving. It takes a lot of time to build the trust necessary to let someone do that, let alone an organization.

Here’s the main reason why builders don’t want to take on your small jobs: They don’t have the resources and they can’t make the margins they need. They haven’t built a system where these projects are simple to execute with predictable outcomes. If there’s no system, there’s no process, and there’s no results.

We didn’t find a magic cure to this problem, but what we did is realize our clients trusted us and needed their small projects completed. So we took action. Once we started helping our clients with there small problems as well as their big ones, we started to build the systems necessary to make it happen predictably and profitably. We offer this service to our clients because they need it and because it helps us become a better company.

There’s a gap in the market for this type of work and we’re hoping to fill it and encourage other contractors to do the same. One point of contact for every construction project in your home. It’s possible and our clients love it.