Company Age vs. Company Experience
San Diego is loaded with contractors—hundreds, maybe even thousands—with more and more going into business every day. Some legal, some, not so much. And with you the homeowner beginning your search for the right company, one thing is almost definitely going to be for certain—nearly every contractor you come across is going to try to sound experienced and professional.
Marketing can be misleading, as we all know. Vendors bait us with catchy ads and switch it on us after we’ve been reeled into their stores. We as smart consumers learn to watch out for this form of advertising, so the next time we’ll be more-the-wiser. The construction industry, though perhaps more challenging for contractors, has its own form of misleading marketing tactics. The most popular being the word “experience” used to represent “age” in company ads and slogans.
The fact is that most San Diego contractors are new to the industry. And an even sadder fact is that most of those companies will be out of business in the first few years. These companies cannot state that they’ve been in business for any period of time yet they still need to sound credible. So how do they do it? By claiming to have “experience.”
“Experience” is probably the most commonly used word in contractor marketing. Pay attention the next time you’re looking through contractor ads. The reason is simple enough, and that is that “Experience” can really mean whatever a company owner wants it to be. It can be Fred the owner’s 10 years working under one contractor, plus Dave’s 12 years of working with a different contractor, etc.
A company that claims to have over 30 years experience could very well be the company’s owner going out of business twice in the first 29 years, only to return with his third home remodeling company. Unfortunately there’s no law against this and it happens more often than you’d think. The point being, when a company claims to have “experience” it’s really not saying that much. 45 years “experience” will never be the same as 45 years “in business.”
