Clients react in two ways when they see us complete their retrofit in only one day: they are either happy we got out of their hair so quickly or they feel cheated.

We are very fast at our work.  We have been doing nothing but this for 24 years and employ every imaginable tool and type of hardware available.  One specialized drill can cost $2,000.  This work is also very hard on even the best of tools and must be replaced often.  Materials are also an expense, and we need to pay our people very well. Skilled intelligent people who are willing to crawl under houses all day is a rare combination. They will go work somewhere else unless they are treated well.

An effective retrofit is only as good as the training of the person doing the work.  We have seen people spend $20,000 and get nothing because the people doing the work did not understand what they were doing. There are companies that are cheaper than we are, sometimes much cheaper, but I don’t think you will find any that are better. Rarely do building inspectors or contractors have a good understanding of the subject.

I train everyone personally. I must pay them for training and create materials for their classes which takes a lot of time.  Thorough training along with a high degree of intelligence is critical because each house is unique.  Unusual framing patterns and sloppy initial construction require technicians who understand what they are doing if something unusual comes up.  Most contractors simply don’t do anything if it is something beyond the ordinary.  We always make it right, no matter what we find.

Sometimes things go well and better than predicted and sometimes we spend 3 times longer than we had hoped.  For us it is a matter of doing it right, no matter what happens. Protecting people’s greatest investment, safety, and even their lives deserve as much.  We don’t even let someone work unsupervised unless they have been with us a year or so.  There simply is too much to know.

Here are some of our other expenses:

  • Obviously construction time.
  • Drawing plans and submitting the permit application
  • Constant following up with the building departments because they are known to lose applications.
  • The initial inspection and creating a proposal (altogether this can take upto 4 hours) and we only get 1 out of 3 bids.
  • If you are part of a government program such as the EBB, working with a very onerous bureucratic system that requires 3 times as much administrative work as we would otherwise do.
  • Creating educational videos and webpages
  • Maintaining the owner’s engineering expertise by hiring structural engineers for continuous training.
  • Inspections with building departments.  They give us 4 hour arrival windows so someone must take off half a day to meet them on 2 separate occaasions.

And of course, there are all the other expenses associated with running a business, i.e., training for employees required by the government in the safe handling of lead based paint, worker’s comp insurance, liability insurance, depreciation of equipment and vehicles, rent of a commercial building, salaries for staff, accounting, gas and vehicle upkeep, medical insurance, year-end bonuses to keep skilled people working for us, advertising, hours and hours spent on writing proposals that don’t go anywhere, corporation tax preparation, etc.  Seems like the list never ends. It might seem like a lot but our profit margin on average is only 15%.  I wish it were more.

So if you think “Gee, I sure did pay a lot for them to be here for such a short time” please realize there is a lot more time than meets the eye.