For those of you gluttons for punishment, I will be on the radio tomorrow morning Saturday June 21st. The show is Home Talk USA hosted by Michael King.

Michael has invited Lee Dodson of the ContractorsSide.com and myself to kick off a little contest.

The spot will air sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 AM Central. To find a local station that carries the show click here.

Tune in to find out more. Call in to the show if you have questions.

Our friends over at www.thecontractorsside.com are doing their best to repair the reputation of contractors nationwide. They have started a grass roots campaign to force an LA Times writer to publish a pro-contractor type article. They are making gain with him but could use your help. Please read the following letter to the editor and then email your feelings to Mr. Lopez.

Here is the original correspondence from Heather Aitken:

Please email the following letter to the editor to the Los Angeles Times (robert.lopez@latimes.com) and then send it on to ten other contractors and so on, so we can let the press know how honest contractors feel.

Thecontractorsside.com

Here is Lee Dodson’s letter to the editor:

Dear Mr. Lopez,

I read with interest your story on unlicensed contractors being busted.

This is of interest to legitimate contractors everywhere, however, I do not see and have not seen one article anywhere, in any publication, that gives favorable mention to the contractors who slug it out every day in a tough business.

Contractors already know that unlicensed contractors hurt the business, but reports of this nature tend to tar all contractors with the same broad brush. In this state, contractors operate under the most stringent rules in the country,

Contractors must not only be licensed, they must carry a bond, must carry workers’ compensation insurance or self insure, and are required to go to mandatory arbitration without recourse to appeal in the case of dispute.

Add to these facts that the codes and regulations, price increase in permits, and heavy zoning restrictions, and the cost to the contractor has skyrocketed in the past few years.

The customer does not know the intricacies of the business of contracting, nor does the customer care. He looks at price, and there is where the cheap guys see an opening, i.e. unlicensed contractors.

The licensing process (testing, evaluating, authorizing) is fairly good, but the process needs streamlining. It can take months to move forward. But after the licensing process is successfully completed, the licensing entity becomes the adversary of the contractor, rather than becoming the ally. The Board becomes solely an advocate for the consumer, leaving little doubt that the contractor bears burden of proof of innocence.

Accusations of malfeasance against the contractor weights in favor of the contractee, and the contractor bears the total burden of expense while the other party simply shows up, the State on his side.

The bonding companies, knowing they own the contractors’ business, can charge maximum fees for a “required product,’ and they do. In my investigations into bonding companies, I have found not one contractor who has received the advertised “preferred rate” for bonds. Bonding companies do an absolutely perfect “bait and switch” maneuver that nearly always results in doubling the original cost of bond.

Workers’ Compensation packages soar in expense as another “required cost of business.” Due to the overwhelming number of fraudulent claims, the snail-like pace of adjudication and settlement, the ineptitude of investigators, the onerous medical proving up, the system is burdened at more than quadruple its capacity, thereby increasing costs to the insured which, in turn, is passed on as increased cost to the end user.

Add to these facts the unending number of stories of “bad contractors” who rip off the clientele, and any story, repeat any story, dealing with the construction trades rises to a tacit indictment of all contractors, unlicensed or duly licensed.

One might ask if the licensed contractor has any recourse but to report unlicensed contractors, and the answer is no. Most contractors are loath to become involved with any authorities over any but the most egregious of violations because it does not serve their interests and because most contractors want to stay off officials’ radar. Anonymity is the best protection.

One might further ask if anything has been done to help small contractors. Again, the answer is no. Legislatures and government bodies have done absolutely nothing, passed no laws, written
no new regulations to help those whom “if you drove on it, if you work in it, or if you live in it, a contractor built it.”

Courts have been no better. In Southern California, according to the L.A. Times, seventy-five per cent of all civil actions involve construction related cases. My research indicates that the contractor may as well stay on his or her current job to make the money he or she will need to pay off the judgment because, from Small Claims to Superior Courts, eighty-five per cent of the time the ruling is for the client.

This anti-contractor attitude has evolved from a belief that contractors make a killing on every last project. The reality is that most small contractors work to a less than twenty percent markup that is rarely achievable. Most small contractors do well to reach a ten per cent profitability, if that.

Across the nation, the situation is remarkably the same. Since I launched my website:
http://thecontractorsside.com, I have heard from thousands of contractors the same series of complaints about identical issues, but the one foremost complaint is the use of official bodies and rules to either reduce payment, or to not pay at all.

Why is this complaint so common? The easy answer is that there are a lot of cheaters out there, but it could well be that cheating has become institutionalized as a product of unbalanced regulation on a business which may be the only business in our country that remains unable to be outsourced.

I heard recently from a contractor who boasted he had never been stiffed on a payment in
his twenty-five years of plying his trade. I thanked him for his call and asked if he might
have any advice to contractors who had not been as lucky. He rattled off a few well-known
practices and said if a contractor followed the rules, he would be paid. I thanked the man
and sat down to write my constituents his wisdom.

Yesterday, the same contractor called with the news that while he had played by the rules, done his due diligence, he had just yesterday been stiffed for $8000.00. He was still stunned by the event. Needless to say, he registered on the website ten minutes later.

What can be done to improve the lot of the small business contractor who has next to no power with officialdom or media?

Because the small contractors have no true advocacy aside from small publications and loosely organized trade associations, they have limited access to redress, and few speak on their behalf.
Their sole recourse is to become educated as to their market, and that means sharing information. There are business seminars and coaching institutions which can help in the “business” of the business, but these entities focus on individual practice rather than a group effort towards commercial overview. Again, the contractor is isolated, insulated from information essential to the conduct of informed practice, i.e. good customer, iffy customer, bad customer up to and including suppliers, officials, banking institutions, architects, and engineers.

No one shows any intention of taking the contractors’ side, therefore, the contractor must take his or her own side in the work of improving the business, and this means in the area of policing not only unlicensed contractors, but also in the area of policing every area of
contractor-societal interconnect, including self- and client-education.

If contractors initiate the improvements, the effect can be far-reaching and effective, but they must take action to preserve the small business venue.

If the small contractor opts out, the results for the economy can be disastrous. Prices for construction will soar when the only bidders are large companies who perforce control the market.

It is said that this country runs on small business. It employs more people than major corporations, provides more peripheral and entry level jobs, is more responsive to market pressures, is more highly creative is problem solution, and is truly the backbone of the nation.

The contracting business needs some good news and good press.

http://thecontractorsside.com is the only resource for this kind of information and the only established advocate for the contractor. If you want to know what’s happening in the construction business where it really matters and where to take action, this is the place.

I am cc’ing this message to my constituents so they can sign onto it in agreement and
send it to you so the thousands of diligent, honest contractors can finally get some credit
where it is due.

Respectfully,

Lee w. Dodson

Attention AOL emailers:

AOL is de-listing YOU from my newsletter AUTOMATICALLY!

This morning I noticed that a HUGE amount of new readers had de-listed after receiving one newsletter. It put me in panic mode. What did I write that hacked off everyone so badly?

I was getting ready to email each of these new subscribers individually to find out what I had done and then noticed 95% of the de-listed emails were AOL accounts.

I dug around a little more and discovered AOL has unsubscribed EVERY AOL newsletter reader. How nice of them to take care of their customers that way. Automatically taking them off of a mailing list for something they double-opted in for.

I pay for and use an email delivery service to avoid this very problem. It’s not like the newsletters are filled with SPAM warning signs. This service warns me before I que up the newsletter whether I’ve written it in a way that will alarm the SPAM filters.

Hopefully, that service will get this AOL problem resolved and will re-subscribe everyone that was automatically unsubscribed. They will probably succeed getting back on AOL’s approved list but I’m not very hopeful they will let me re-activate the subscribers AOL unsubscribed.

If you are an AOL emailer and would like to receive the newsletter, get either a Gmail account (google mail) or a Yahoo Mail account and re-sign up. I have accounts on both and the newsletters arrive without hitch.

AOL’s Big Brother move is very disappointing as a large percentage of the newsletter members signed up under AOL email addresses and can’t receive the newsletters.

2-24-09 Update

I’ve got to hand it to AOL and Aweber. Yesterday, their customer support groups really took the bull by the horns and got to the bottom of the problem. It’s a valuable lesson for all who use the internet to market their business.

One single link, a friend’s, that I always included at the end of the newsletter has been blackballed by AOL.

(Honestly, I suspect it has something to do with a legal war my friend is in the middle of. The other party has done some amazingly unethical things to stop my friend’s lawsuit from moving forwards. Getting AOL to blacklist his site wouldn’t even be in the top 10 of the tricks they’ve pulled.)

Anyway, if Aweber lives up to it’s word, it will be re-instating all of the AOL members it took it upon itself to de-list. I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to so far. Now it’s up to them.

This gives me an opportunity to remind you that when you don’t investigate an apparent problem, such as a sudden increase or decrease in crew production, you’re bound to be missing a serious problem that may have a very simple solution.

Okay, I get the message.

A handful of newsletter subscribers have emailed me to voice their complaints about the number of emails I’ve sent lately.

So, to protect my relationship with the subscribers I am going to stop sending out questions from readers to the email list. And almost all other non-newsletter emails, too.

Many, many more have responded how much they liked that type of dialog but we have this blog as an option for getting the questions out so use the blog we will.

If you have a question you’d like to get feedback from everyone on, email it to me (ron@filthyrichcontractor.com).  I will post the question on the blog for everyone to read.

An associate called me this morning to let me know that the blog was set to require registration before being allowed to post a comment. Mark told me I could change the setting so, after some hunting around in the admin side, I found the setting.

You may now post comments without joining up.

Have at it!

After many months of waiting, the blog is finally going live. Hurray!!!

For those of you who’ve been receiving the newsletter – thank you for your support.

I’ve been humbled by the super positive feedback you’ve sent in and the microscopic number of people who have stopped the newsletter. Apparently, the newsletter has been a hit.

Our blog, and I do mean OUR, is to serve a completely separate purpose.

The newsletter’s goal is to spread actionable solutions for common contractor business problems. It is also meant to inspire contractors to build real businesses and give them the confidence they need to step out of their comfort zone.

The goal of this FRC blog is to stimulate a conversation between you, me, and the rest of the readership.

It will be the place to post questions from readers who would like to hear everyone else’s opinion and advice. It will be the place where I throw out things for you to think about. It will be the place to tip each other off to new trends and developments you need to be staying on top of and taking advantage of. It will be the place where guest writers will share their thoughts and advice with you.

It will be the place where I ask your guidance on:

• Future newsletter and report topics.
• Content for books, videos, seminars, etc.
• Additional service offerings

We will have surveys and share the results. We will share great jokes. We will share great successes and tragic failures.

The one thing readers won’t be doing is dogging on each other. Not gonna be allowed.

I am the moderator of this blog. Dog me and my advice all you want. I’m a big boy, can take the criticism, and am here to serve you.

But, one contractor dogging another contractor will not be tolerated. Treat each other with respect.

I encourage you to bookmark this page so that you don’t have to go through the home page to get here.

We will (or do) have a sign-up list for the blog that is separate from the newsletters. That way I can notify you about new blog posts. We may already have this feature, I’m kind of like Alice in Wonderland with this blog. It isn’t helping any that Kelly Olcott and I are recovering from a night hanging with paving contractors at their annual show.

Love to hear your feedback on the newsletters and get your opinions on what we should do with this blog.

Leave a reply and introduce yourself so everyone can get to know each other.

Good luck with your business and have a great day.

Ron