Should you do Freebies for customers? Part 2.

really Geez, that’s a sad story that Rob tells in his column, Should you do Freebies for customers? Part 1.

Contractor wants to be a nice guy on a kitchen reno, offers to throw in an hour of tile-setting in the foyer for free – and it ends up costing him a whack of money.

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

I’ve always disliked that nasty, negative saying.

It reminds me of people who have signs on the walls of their offices that read: “A lack of planning on your part is not an automatic emergency on mine.”

Nice. You know you’re dealing with someone with a bad attitude, as soon as you see that sign. You know the person with that sign posted will never have your back. It’s a sign of bitterness, fatigue and cynicism.

Anyway, back to Rob’s contractor being punished for his niceness. What really went wrong?

It’s not the freebie. It’s that that the freebie was offered compulsively with no planning. And this is the how too many contractors fail Sales 101. They just blurt stuff out.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with offering to “throw in” a short time-span freebie for a really great customer with a large project. But it can’t be thrown in casually. It has to be planned. It has to be treated with the same diligence you put into your paid work.

All that the contractor needed to do in this case was to use his head. Why were the existing floor tiles missing? Who took them out? Why were the new ones sitting right there, yet not installed? Could it be that there was something wrong with the sub floor? Is this something only Stephen Hawking could have figured out? Seriously?

The generosity is not the problem. The generosity is going to keep this contractor busy with projects for the rest of his career – if he is smart about deploying it.

Yes, you can give a few hours away. Don’t turn into Ebeneezer Scrooge just because you’re too lazy to investigate the onsite conditions of small favours you should still be doing.