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Who turns up

Before you let anybody in

Somebody is coming out. Do you know who?

Five ways people end up with a contractor at the door, crossed with the four kinds of person who actually turn up. What each route costs you, and the four questions that settle it in about ninety seconds.

Read this first

Three things that apply to every answer below

The four questions, and you can ask all of them on the telephone
Whose licence is the work carried out under? Who will be invoicing me? Is the person coming employed by that company? And who warrants the labour, for how long? None of those is rude, all of them have a one-sentence answer, and a firm that will not answer them has answered them.
Check the licence on the state board’s public register yourself
It is free, it takes about two minutes, and it tells you whether the licence is current, what classification it holds and whether the bond is in place. It is also the single thing most householders never do. Do it before the visit rather than after the quote, because afterwards you will be deciding under pressure.
None of the routes below is automatically bad
Subcontracting is normal and frequently fine. Franchises contain excellent operators. What is not fine is not being told, because it changes who you would chase if something went wrong, and you should find that out now rather than in a year.

Two questions

Work out who you are dealing with

Pick how you found them and pick who turned up. Every answer below is on this page whether you pick anything or not — the picker only narrows it down.

If you cannot tell, that is the finding — and it takes ninety seconds to fix

Not knowing who is standing in your house is common and it is not your fault; the trade is arranged so that it is hard to tell. Ask the four questions, at the door, before anything starts. Whose licence is this work under. Who will invoice me. Are you employed by them. Who warrants the labour and for how long. What the answers change: if the licence belongs to a different company from the one invoicing you, your contract and your recourse are with the invoicing company and the licence is somebody else’s — that is worth understanding before, not after. If the person cannot say who warrants the labour, then nobody does. And what to do if you are uncomfortable: you are allowed to say you have changed your mind and you would like to reschedule. You do not owe anybody a diagnosis, a deposit or an explanation, and a firm that reacts badly to being asked has told you everything you needed.

Two minutes, free.

An advert tells you what a firm wants you to know. The public register tells you whether the licence is current, what it covers and whether the bond is in place. It is the only free, independent check available to a householder and almost nobody uses it.

What an advert does and does not tell you

What is easy to buy: the top of a search page, a five-star average, a photograph of a van, and a phone number that rings a call centre rather than a workshop. None of those is evidence of anything and all of them are available to any firm with a budget.

One practical note on reviews. A firm with hundreds of perfect reviews and no detail in any of them is worth less scrutiny of the reviews and more of the licence. Conversely, a handful of specific reviews that mention a person by name is a much better signal than a large average.

Find out what that site actually sold. It sold your details, to several firms at once.

Quote-comparison and lead-generation sites are advertising businesses, not directories. They take your enquiry and sell it, frequently to three or four contractors simultaneously, which is why your phone rings for a week. That cost is real and it ends up in the prices you are quoted.

What a lead site changes about the quotes you get

The contractor paid for your name. That cost has to come back somewhere, and it comes back in the price or in a shorter, more pressured visit. It also means the firms on the platform are the firms willing to pay for leads, which is a filter but not a quality one.

Speed is rewarded over accuracy. When four firms are racing for the same enquiry, the incentive is to quote fast and to quote a headline. It is the opposite of the incentive you want, which is somebody taking an hour to measure your house.

What to do if you have already used one: nothing dramatic. And when the calls start, you are allowed to ask to be removed from the list rather than explaining yourself to each firm in turn.

Nobody good is looking for work door to door in the middle of a heatwave.

That is not snobbery about a sales method. It is arithmetic: a competent firm in this trade is busy when the weather is extreme, which is exactly when door-knocking happens. Take the card, say you will think about it, close the door, and do the checks in your own time.

What to do, and what to be careful of

Do not agree to an inspection on the spot. A free inspection offered at the door has one purpose and it is not diagnosis.
Do not let anybody into an attic, a crawl space or a plant room on the strength of a doorstep conversation. Whatever is found up there cannot be checked by you afterwards.
Take the card and check the licence. If the firm is real and good, it will still be real and good tomorrow.
Be particularly careful of anybody claiming to be in the area anyway, offering a discount that ends today, or saying they have noticed something about your equipment from the street. All three are scripts.
If you have already signed something at your door, there are cancellation rights in California for contracts signed in the home, they are short, and they run from the day you signed. Read the paperwork the same evening rather than the following week.

Uniforms, branded vehicles and printed paperwork prove nothing and are inexpensive.

The dispatch chooses the contractor, not you. Ask who is coming and under whose licence.

Under a home warranty or an insurance dispatch, a third party selects and pays the contractor. That is not automatically bad and it does change the relationship: the contractor’s customer is the dispatching company, and their cost is capped by an agreement you have not seen.

What to ask the dispatcher, before the visit

Who pays them, and is there a cap on the job? It changes what gets recommended more than anything else on this page.
Who warrants the work — the contractor or the warranty company? The answer decides who you chase.
And can you get a copy of the contractor’s own report? Frequently yes, and frequently nobody asks.

Where an independent opinion helps: after the visit, not instead of it. Knowing what is actually wrong with your own equipment — measured, written down — puts you in a completely different position in a disagreement about what the agreement covers. That is work we are happy to do, and it does not interfere with their process.

The best starting point on this page. Ask one extra question.

A neighbour’s recommendation is worth more than every other route here combined, because it is the only one with no money behind it. The extra question is simply: was it the same person who quoted and who did the work? It sorts a small firm from a large one instantly, and it is the thing that decides whether your experience will be like theirs.

Getting the most out of a recommendation

Three questions beyond the obvious. How long ago was it? Firms change hands, grow and are acquired, and a recommendation from four years ago may be about a company that no longer exists in the same form. Was it the same kind of job? Somebody excellent at a repair is not necessarily the right firm for a full replacement, and vice versa. And did anything go wrong afterwards, and what happened then? That last one is the useful one: every firm gets a job wrong occasionally and what separates them is what happens next.

Then do the licence check anyway. It takes two minutes, it is not a slight on your neighbour, and it occasionally surprises people.

The owner or a named employee

The simplest arrangement and the one with the fewest places for responsibility to fall through. One licence, one invoice, one person to ring, and the person who quoted is usually the person who did it.

All three are ordinary questions and all three should get immediate answers.

The genuine limitation of a small firm, and we will name our own: capacity. In the worst week of the summer a two-van outfit cannot be everywhere, and a firm that pretends otherwise is about to disappoint somebody. What you should get instead is an honest answer on the telephone about when we can actually be there, and a straight recommendation to ring somebody else if that is not soon enough.

A subcontractor

Extremely common, frequently completely fine, and the arrangement people understand least. A subcontractor is a separate business doing the work under the main contractor’s agreement with you.

What matters is only this: your contract is with the company that quoted and is invoicing you, and your recourse is with them. Who they send is their business, provided the work is under a valid licence and you were told. A main contractor cannot subcontract away responsibility for the result.

What to be careful of: being asked to pay the subcontractor directly, which quietly moves your contract; nobody being able to say which licence the work is under; and a warranty offered by one party for work performed by another. All three are worth stopping over.

And the test question: ask the main contractor, before the job, whether they subcontract this kind of work. A straight yes is a perfectly good answer. A vague one is the problem.

A franchise of a bigger brand

A franchise is an independent local business trading under a national name. The brand sets standards, marketing and sometimes pricing structures; the licence, the employees and the liability are local.

What that means in practice: the quality is the local operator’s, not the brand’s, and it varies enormously between territories of the same name. A good experience with the brand in another town tells you very little about this one.

What is genuinely better: scale. More vans, longer hours, and a structure behind them if something goes badly wrong. On a large replacement that is worth something real.

What to watch: pricing structures set centrally, which is where flat-rate books and membership plans come from, and a strong incentive toward replacement over repair. Neither is dishonest and both change what you will be offered. Ask for the repair option explicitly and in writing.

You genuinely cannot tell

Read the note above — that is the substance, and the four questions are the whole answer.

One thing worth adding. If you are being told several different things about who the company is — one name on the van, another on the paperwork, a third on the card — that is not necessarily fraud and it is very often a lead-generation arrangement or a trading name. But it means the four questions matter more rather than less, and you should have the answers in writing before any money changes hands.

And do not let embarrassment stop you asking. Nobody legitimate in this trade is offended by being asked whose licence they work under. We are asked about once a month and we like it, because the households who ask are the ones who understand what they are buying.

Where this page stops

We will tell you who is coming when you book, what the visit costs before we set out, and what we measured afterwards on a sheet that is yours. We do not buy leads, we do not knock on doors, and the person who quotes your job is the person who does it.

We will not tell you that any other route on this page is automatically bad, because it is not true. We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice about a contract you have signed.

(707) 360-1741 Book a visit