Why Interior Designers don’t refer their subcontractors to you. 

It’s not you! 

I’m going to level with you on this. I know it baffles friends and neighbors that we don’t have appropriate referrals for their finished home repairs and projects. But most interior designers won’t and can’t refer you to their stable of craftspeople and subcontractors. It’s not because we’re jerks, or don’t love you or our craftspeople. We love you!  It’s just not a fit and would cause misery on all sides.

Here are 3 reasons why.

1. Many to the trade subs just don’t want to work directly with clients

Remodel specialists, designers, architects, and a design/build construction professionals make planning documents, wall elevations, specifications lists and deliver those in a fairly standard way to contractors. Many materials and fixtures are specified, purchased and supplied to the contractor and others are ordered by the contractor in order to keep the warranty and chain of ownership tidy. Some generals do not want to, and will not try to build from a photo- they have learned that their interpretation of the photo and the client’s expectations of the photo don’t always match. Just like you wouldn’t walk into a restaurant and order “a sandwich”, it doesn’t work to tell a contractor that you want “a kitchen remodel” and get an accurate bid and timeline. They need to know what kind!

You know how each industry has lingo? You may not have the correct vocabulary and you may be saying you want ++++++++ when what you are showing in the photo is &&&&&&& and if the contractor provides ++++++++ you will be mad and confused as to why it’s not what’s in the photo. That’s just one example of how I’ve seen it go wrong.

The subcontractors that have built their business serving General Contractors, developers, designers and other trade professionals rely on these skills and common industry best practices. They usually have their teams working with a buffer between them and the clients (the designer, the GC, etc) in order to perform quickly and have a successfully installed job that is profitable for them at the end. Remove the buffer makes it carry more risk.

Often because the tradespeople we work with work mainly on jobsites, they aren’t accustomed to arriving at a particular time, they will not usually have to think of keeping a gate closed for your dogs, they listen to music while they work if they want. Because there are no dogs on my job sites, nor people working in the other room, there is no ringing of the doorbell, they just arrive after their pickups and start work because the General Contractor has opened the job. It’s very different.

2. Money and time

Because on new builds and major remodels (or even in a major interior design scope) the selected General Contractor (or your designer) is scheduling every minute, and they have years of experience at that and a deep understanding of the contractor critical path, they know which order things need to go in and schedule accordingly. 

Subs lose money when they plan to show up to a site that is not ready for them with a full crew ready to go and are called off by a homeowner trying to run their own project. Or when their guys damage a finished home in some way. Or when you are furious because you assumed they would be there at 8 and it’s 9:30 and they are not there or the guys left sawdust or tile scraps around at the end of the day.

Some subs who do work mainly for GC’s offer direct to client occasionally and add 20% to their typical bids in order to accommodate for mix ups and frustrations like this. 

3. 
You make our life good! We love our friends and neighbors and don’t want to cause irritation- that’s terrible! 

Our contractor relationships make our work and life good, too!

Key to our success. If we refer these subs a client and something goes wrong in the relationship, and we lose the subcontractor… that’s real bad. 

If you have a bad experience with a subcontractor we love or if you just you don’t like it or them…. or even if they just bid, and they add that 20% and it makes their price seems weird, well then we’ve helped no one and everyone we care about is miserable and unhappy. And your story about the person we’ve referred reflects poorly on us. 

Nah. 

We’ll spare you all that. I have a few key relationships with contractors that are not new build and renovation specialists but go direct to client. 

I’ll send you them all day long, they know how to do a great job with no middle man. 

No harm in asking Interior Designers or General Contractors you know if we have a referral, just know we may not have someone appropriate, and need to save you the headache of referring the wrong team. Because we love you!