EC MANIFESTO

1. People are not Cattle
From day one, Everycontractor.com has upheld its firm belief that people should be treated as human beings and not potential business transactions. Unfortunately, in the contracting industry, it is not uncommon for people to become leads and for leads to be aggregated and sold on a cost-per basis. From day one, Everycontractor.com has believed in the importance of building and maintaining a strong relationship between the homeowner and the contractor, and that cannot be accomplished by selling leads. It is accomplished through trust, and by:

• Assisting homeowners with their remodeling projects from start to finish
• Communicating with the contractors to make sure they are engaged
• Never putting a dollar amount on a lead
• Never selling homeowner information to anyone

Through hard work and years of research, Everycontractor.com has proven that a consumer will continue using our services because we always put the interests of the homeowner first. The industry standard has been to create and sell a homeowner lead at any cost, but Everycontractor.com takes a different, more personal approach, which is why our consumers not only come away having had a great experience, but they also come back time and time again.


2. These Rules are NOT Meant to be Broken
We’re all for bending the rules and thinking outside of the box. But when it comes to our code of conduct, there is no room for interpretation, no possibility of doing things differently.

With over 50,000 customers in the Everycontractor.com network, it is critical that each contractor does his or her part to fulfill our partnership requirements. The Everycontractor.com system was devised to satisfy homeowner needs while protecting the interests of both parties. By making contractors accountable to our Terms and Conditions, we are able to shield our homeowners through an abiding and legal commitment.

The Terms and Conditions are easy to follow and ultimately provide a proven path towards contractor profitability and success and customer satisfaction.

The contractor's Terms and Conditions are as follows:

Rule No. 1: Complete your company profile at www.everycontractor.com within seven days of the sign up date for your program.

Rule No. 2: Make sure your profile is completed, accurate, updated and APPROVED at least once every 90 days from the last completion date.

Rule No. 3: Accept or reject all leads from your online account and make an attempt to contact customers within 24 calendar hours of them being assigned to you.

Rule No. 4: Complete the initial feedback form on your control panel in its entirety on all jobs within two weeks of a job lead being assigned to your account and complete the final feedback portion when job is completed or when lead can no longer be worked.

Rule No. 5: In order to track the quality of the leads we are sending you, it will be required that you upload your bid for every job lead that you bid.

Rule No. 6: Upload the following information within 14 days: A minimum of five (5) digital photos of existing work you have completed, references of past customers and any applicable licensing, insurance and bonding information.


3. If it Barks like a Duck…
We may enjoy the occasional mixed metaphor, but what we can’t tolerate at Everycontractor.com is mixed messages. Especially when it has to do with our hard-earned reputation for providing excellent service to our customers.

As a pioneer in the contractor matching business, Everycontractor.com has always been ahead of its time. This can be both of benefit and a burden. We believe in hard work, determination, professionalism, and integrity and we expect the same from our contractors. Unfortunately, we don’t always get it.

The Internet today is a vast resource of information but can also be a place where consumers and other interested parties can be easily misled. Anonymous parties and competitors routinely post biased and patently untrue information about companies, and we, too have fallen victim to this practice. Thankfully, the negative postings we have come across about us do not represent the truth, or the vast majority of our customers’ experience; they are largely a reflection of a few disgruntled contractors’ vindictiveness in light of their inability to follow the Terms and Conditions laid out in our contract.

Everycontractor.com takes all complaints very seriously. Is Everycontrator.com perfect? No. Is every contractor? Certainly not. Some of them walk and talk like a duck, and when that happens, customer beware. That’s when we put a little bite behind our bark, to demand improvement, or seek termination of our relationship. That is our promise to our customers: service that puts their needs first.


4. Remember What Mom Taught You
No matter what business you’re in, you’re not likely to go far without some of the lessons of your childhood firmly in place. Play nice in the sandbox. Don’t lie, cheat, or steal. Look at me when I’m talking to you.

That last one is especially important because it is a harbinger of the good communication skills that are imperative in business. At Everycontractor.com, we believe in building lifelong relationships, and those relationships are steeped in good communication. They are also a reflection of our values—values that were undoubtedly cemented in us as small children.

Everycontractor.com provides a unique service because it's 100% free for all people who submit a project request through our network. Our goal is to treat each request as though the remodeling project was our own. And, to do so with customer service that goes beyond the norm, especially in today’s outsourced world.

We believe poor customer service is simply unacceptable. It all goes back to those childhood lessons. “Treat people the way you want to be treated” is not just something your Mom told you in elementary school. It is the basis for the way we live.


5. Building Rome in a Day
A great idea is a gem, but it is in the execution of that idea that great things come to life. This is the genesis of how Everycontractor.com operates every day. Ideas and execution. We built Everycontractor.com out of our mission to provide a matching system for qualified contractors and those seeking quality home improvement services, and we are proud and pleased to be realizing our goals.

But that doesn’t mean we are satisfied. And we hope we never are. We believe if you stop yearning for more, you stop growing, and if you stop growing, you stop learning. After more than 11 years in business, we know that nothing good happens overnight, and we know that we are still evolving. Building Everycontractor.com has been an ongoing process—a labor of love if you will—and it will continue to be.

We continue to enjoy the process of building this company and reaching out to both contractors seeking a way to connect with homeowners, and homeowners in search of quality contractors. We will continue to accommodate every one of our 50,000 contractors—and more as our growth dictates, taking steps to ensure that they succeed in the Everycontractor.com network by: notifying them in a variety of ways when a job referral comes into our network and using our “Get Matched” process that allows us to easily match our homeowner job requests with local, relevant, and professional contractors.


6. A Match Made in Heaven
The contractor industry is notorious for its accountability–or rather its lack thereof. We said it, and we’ll say it again. We don’t feel like we have to hide from this—or any—truth. In fact, it was an integral part of our goal when we began Everycontractor.com, and remains a goal today, to dispel the myth that EVERY contractor is undependable, untrustworthy, or unprofessional. There are bad apples in every industry, and, unfortunately, one really can spoil the bunch.

The ideal contractor does exist. He or she is honest, punctual, responsible, and, most of all, genuinely interested in what the homeowner hopes to accomplish. We work with some of them, and we hope that as we move forward together, we will continue to see our contractor partners strive for a level of professionalism that hasn’t always been representative of our industry.

The truth is, we all have to work extra hard to set ourselves apart from the poor reputation that often permeates the contractor industry and to establish and maintain those Terms and Conditions we expect our contractors to live up to. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because, at the end of the day, we don’t just want to make a match between our contractors and our clients. We also want to make a match between our industry and professional, dependable service. We didn’t set out to change our industry—just the way we operate within it. But we have to say, we wouldn’t object to being labeled a shining example of how to do the contracting industry right.