There IS a purpose to this story, read on..

I recently had work done on a weekend home we have (thanks again Ike!). The work was to repair/renovate the house because of the hurricane damage. I spent months talking to contractors about our options, code requirements, restrictions, etc. It took months because I got different answers from different people and I had to try to figure out who was right (or, as it turned out, who was closer to right). I won’t go into the details of how I picked the contractor, that’s for another post.

This post starts after I picked the contractor and we began the work process. What I discovered real early on is…. the contractor never wrote anything down and he apparently relied on his memory.

Or as he said a million times “no problem, we’ve done that a million times.” Well, I have decided that he’s done it “a million times” because it wasn’t done right the 1st time, 2nd time or sometimes 3rd time.

I’m sure this guy had a decent profit calculated into the estimates he gave me but I’m just as sure he didn’t have the “do overs” in the estimate. I just hope he wasn’t planning on using the profits to pay down his small business loans because I doubt there was much profit left at the end of the job.

It doesn’t need to be anything tricky for this guy to get organized. It could be as simple as using a service the I use Vitalist. They have free service that is easy to use but you actually need to write something down, I guess that could be an issue for my guy.

What did this guy miss or redo because he never wrote anything down and relied on his memory:

1. He had to hang 2 large doors twice because he hung them to open in instead of out.
2. He had to move 6 electrical switches 2 times each because he put them in the wrong place.
3. He had to send his clean up crew 3 times because he had debris in different places and didn’t specify to the clean up crew the locations.
4. He had to have doors delivered twice because he ordered a single door where a double-door was supposed to go.
5. He had to remove a light that was installed in the wrong location.
6. He lost an “add-on” sale because he didn’t write down that I wanted a separate quote for a section of fence to be replaced. I asked him twice for the quote, when he finally got back to me with the quote I had decided to hire someone else.

That’s 6 things that I know about, I’m sure there were others I didn’t notice. By my calculation the above items cost this guy (excluding what he could have made on the fence portion) at least 8% of the total price of the job. That’s 8% that would have gone to the bottom-line, but is now gone forever.

Wow, think about it. This guy could have increased his profit by 8% of sales without doing anything else except writing it down and doing it the way it was supposed to be done, the first time.

And a side benefit? He wouldn’t have a blog post written about him or have a customer who would be afraid to recommend him to others who might need his services.

So there is your 2010 New Year’s Resolution for small business owners… Write it down, even if you’ve done it a million times!