Why being a “transparent” contractor will help your business

When I heard that a friend of mine was having a house built, I asked about his plans and approach. It wasn’t long before he told me about the father-and-son contractor team he chose for the job and the way these guys market themselves.

“When we sat down for the first time to decide if these were the men we’d hire,” my friend explained, “the father handed my wife and I a piece of paper with more than a dozen names on it. The contact information for every one of the clients they’ve built houses for over the last 13 years was on that list. “Contact anyone you like”, the father told us. “These are all the people we’ve ever built for. None are missing. They’re all happy to tell you what it was like working with us.”

In a world where the public is scared of contractors, renovators and anyone involved in the trades, intentional and complete transparency is the ultimate marketing tactic. As long as you’re up to the reality of being transparent, that is.

So how can you make transparency part of your marketing plan? Well, first you need to have nothing to hide. Transparency only works if you’re a contractor who does amazing work, treats clients like royalty and chooses to work with the kind of people that it is possible to please. That’s why step #1 in transparency marketing is one of those simple things that’s not always simple to do. Be great.

While being great is one thing, showing the world you’re great is another. That’s why transparency marketing step# 2 is about diligently building your outreach presence. Once again, it sounds simple but it’s easy to miss. When that next job is begging to get started and you’re knee-deep in the punch list on your current project, it’s easy to neglect getting that all-important testimonial from the project owner. When you’re busy and on the go, it’s easy to forget taking the 20 or 30 final photos to document how great you are. A decent camera is the cheapest and most effective marketing tool you can own, but you’ve got to use it. Photos can easily translate into hundreds of thousands of dollar of new sales in the future.

Be consistently great and equip yourself to show the world. Like many things in life, consistently managing these two steps of transparency marketing are simple but not easy. And the fact that it hardly ever happens is precisely why it works so well.