Entrepreneur of the week - post 3 Hello everyone, I read a lot in the forums about the great difficulty of finding a contractor...

Entrepreneur of the Week - Post 3

Hello everyone,

I read a lot of forums about the great difficulty of finding a good and cheap contractor.

From what I've seen and experienced myself, in the process of finding a contractor we work according to what we were taught in the various courses, and no matter which course, everyone talks about the same thing.

How do I find a contractor? Where? Here's how I located my contractors:

A first way is through the agent, as part of locating the agent, I will search for an agent with a specialty in flips, and when I find such agent, I find out with him which contractors he worked with and whom he recommends, I would search the various forums and more.

In the process of setting up the team before and during the purchase of flip-flop properties, I interviewed a number of contractors, received recommendations, saw their jobs, talked to clients, and even visited properties they were renovating on the ground.

I want to talk about how to choose a contractor compared to getting a job candidate, the process is pretty much the same, and I want to put in the process that I've done hundreds of times throughout my professional life as a project manager and engineer group of high-tech companies.

When choosing a contractor or candidates in general (in any field), you have to know and read between the lines, we recommend that we get from the contractors they recommend they or friends of the contractors or they are really happy with them, no one will recommend that they reject it, then the goal of the contractor is to win At work, be the standout among all the contractors I interview, so we have to take a limited guarantor and try to get the contractor's weak points out of them.

I usually during a call try to jump from the positive parts to the negative areas, for example, I give the recommender something positive that the contractor did and while on a call to look for what the contractor less liked with the contractor, try to find out while talking about estimates that make no sense, such as for a while. demo that shouldn't take more than a week, if yes, to try to understand why?

If you are in the field you can see the differences in the quality of the contractors' finances on the sites where the contractor is currently renovating, pay attention to the small subtleties.

In most cases we go into risk management, we don't really know if the contractor is good, we don't really know if the contractor will meet the deadlines, and most importantly, we're not there to monitor.

I have seen in my life a large number of combinations to perform contractor control.

· Inspection by our real estate agent, he comes once a week or two weeks and mainly looks at the progress and whether the contractor meets the deadlines, can the agent agree with him on the quality of the renovation? Has the contractor started the framing process after the demo is finished and is the floor leveled in the entire apartment? Did the contractor use standard electrical cables? Did the contractor build the air conditioning or heating infrastructure correctly? - If the agent was not a contractor, then not really.

Control of the inspection company, we invite a professional to control the renovation, the idea is nice and can even be effective, the main problem is that we will invite the company for the big things, and again we can miss the small things like framing before the end of the demo and before checking that the floor is Leveled - something small that can cost us a lot of money and delays in construction and the project.

· Control of an interior designer we hired for the project, just like the agent, not a professional, with no experience in construction and who can't really give us a measure of the quality of the renovation.

· A combination of what is written above - the conclusion still remains the same.

I’m not saying that every contractor will run away or do a bad job, but I definitely point out problematic issues in managing our project, our goal of making money in the most efficient and best possible way.

I too had to fire a contractor during the renovation and lost money, but I learned a great lesson.

I want to break a contractor paradigm here, we are not professionals, we cannot really ascertain whether the contractor is good, quality and reliable, even in a very difficult country to find a good renovation contractor.

With Rafi Mizrahi (and this is the place to thank him for the support and help in finding the right man in the right place) I found a project manager with over 10 years of experience in construction and entrepreneurship management, a man with a vast knowledge who knows what quality of work we expect from a contractor, what licenses Need, how to run in front of the municipality and know exactly what the contractor should do and can make a real control over the quality of the renovation.

The project manager becomes a key figure in our renovation process especially at points where there are questions and uncertainties.