March 15, 2005 - Contacting a Contractor

It’s harder than getting a front row seat at the Bowl. It’s more difficult than getting your kids into Junior Lifeguards.  It’s even harder than winning Edhat’s Wednesday Where Is It contest. By far, the hardest thing to accomplish in Santa Barbara is to get a contractor to remodel your house.

You say your house is worth a million bucks? That and a quarter will get you 10 minutes of dryer time at the Laundromat.  Your contractor owns a house worth two million, he only works on houses worth five million, and he is booked up until Y3K.  Well, at least that’s the stereotype.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com tried to get hold of some contractors. We wanted to see how many of them would answer the phone if we called them and, on the flip side, how many of them would be unreachable.  So, without blue prints, red lines, or green building supplies, we opened up the yellow pages to ‘general contractor’ and started dialing.

It was a battle of man versus machine. Would John Henry answer the phone? Or, would it be the steam powered digging machine?

The calling went on for most of the morning. When we got a person on the other end of the line we would feign a wrong number.

“Sorry,” we would say.

Sometimes the person on the other end would hang up without a word, but usually there was at least an “OK”.  At Dale Construction, they told us, “Nice talking to ya!”

We did feel a little sorry for the person answering the phone at Dream Maker Construction.  “It’s a beautiful day at Dream Maker Bath and Kitchen!” was her answering salutation.  We were unable to determine, however, whether she was just an extremely perky person, or whether it was another example of brand marketing gone awry.

The machine messages were not very exciting. “Call back later” seemed to imply that if you left a message it wouldn’t be returned.  “Try our cell phone number” seemed promising.  Because we couldn’t resist, we left a couple of messages on answering machines just to see if we would get any calls back.

At the end of our calling extravaganza we found 47% of our calls were answered by a live person, 6.4% were disconnected lines (“we’re sorry, you have reached a number that is no longer in service”), 3% busy, 3% no answer, and 40.6% answered by an answering machine.

It has only been a day, but only one of the messages we left was returned. The winner in the Return-the-Message Derby was Eggers Construction.  They called back within the hour … we’ll definitely call them for a bid when we build the Edhat World Headquarters.

Although our phone calls were not answered by a live person 53% of the time, the contest yesterday was to guess the percent of calls that ended up in voice mail (40.6%). SilverBug and ConsultBK were the closest contestants, each with a guess of 41%.  The Edhat dog was called into action to decide who would win the 2005 Santa Barbara Axxess Book. Two tennis balls were thrown simultaneously into the back yard.  Although she tried to get them both in her mouth, in the end she returned with the orange one, signifying SilverBug as the winner.  Like some of the messages we left on voicemail, we are still waiting for the other ball to be returned.

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