Mike Andes lost a $20,000 job to a competitor charging $24,000 because they had a professional website, visible trucks, strong reviews, and sent a personalized video estimate. He built Home Service Web Design to help contractors master these three levers and attract customers willing to pay more for a trustworthy brand.
I asked him like, "Hey, just give me some feedback here." He said, "Well, to be honest with you, Mike, we actually paid $24,000 for the job." And I was like, "What in the world?" It was a $20,000 job. I offered $15,000 to just get the job on the schedule, and they paid $24,000 for the job. I said, "Oh, wow, that's amazing." And I said, "We were $15,000. You paid $24,000. Can you explain to me why you paid so much more?" especially knowing that I would do my absolute best to make sure the job was done well. And you're not far from where we live. And he said, well, we went with the other company because of a couple of things. Number one, their website looked really solid. We drive by there and see their trucks all the time. We also saw a lot of their online reviews. And when they sent the estimate to us, they accompanied the estimate with a video. And it was just a video of the estimator saying, we look forward to doing business with us. And they kind of walked us through a couple of the points. In the project that were a little bit gray when we had walked the property with them. And so that day I determined not happening again. If someone else is making $9,000 of straight profit on top of the jobs that I'm bidding, I'm doing something wrong. And so I still remember because going into our slow season, I remember I am going to take this offseason and learn everything I possibly can about websites, reviews, and videos because those are the three things they mentioned. And so I spent months looking at search engine optimization, web design, how to get traffic to convert better, conversion rate optimization, speed of loading the stinking site, like all these little things. And that actually then started Home Service Web Design, where now we've built over 1,000 websites. I started thinking about like, how can we make sure that I don't lose customers that are not price sensitive and are just sensitive to the value that my brand provides and the reliability that I'm actually going to get the job done correctly? Because They had like a $1.5 million house. The $9,000 that they gave to my competitor to do the work was a great deal for them, knowing without a shadow of a doubt the work was going to get done on time, on budget, and it was going to be something they could be proud of and they wouldn't have to go in and do the work again. And I couldn't say the same thing about myself.
