Why we exist
Here's something that's been bugging us for a while now. Nobody calls you back anymore.
You call a company for service and you just wait. A contractor promises to come out and give you a quote, and then never shows. Or worse, you get a quote, the job starts, and suddenly you're getting upcharged. That's not an accident. That's the technique. Lowball the price to win the job, then jack it up once you're committed and it's too late to easily walk away.
Basic communication, just doing what you said you'd do, has become rare. And it's not one bad company we ran into. It's everywhere, all the time.
For a while that got us down. If we can't count on people to follow through, and worse, if some of them are playing games with the price on purpose, that's not a small thing. It makes everyday life harder than it needs to be.
But feeling disenchanted isn't a strategy. At some point we asked ourselves a better question. Instead of complaining about it, what are we actually going to do?
The answer turned out to be pretty simple. Say what you're going to do, then do it. Someone calls or texts you, you call them back. The price you quote is the price you honor. Issues come up, because they always do, and you handle them with the customer in mind, not what's easiest for you.
That's the whole idea behind Red Bird Painting. We wanted to put our money where our mouth is and build a company that actually works this way, starting with something as ordinary as painting a house. If we can restore people's faith in good service one job at a time, that's the real win. The paint is just how we do it.
Bill Baren and Steve Gordon, founders of Red Bird Painting