Cowboy builders

Love this post from our Epsom franchisee, Steve Williams, who was himself approached by cowboy builder offering to "repair" his roof. Hilarious. I so wish that had happened to me. I'd have had the guy in, let him look around, quietly flicked on the video camera, spent a while discussing the state of the tiles, called my own voicemail to record the conversation just in case the vid camera didn't work, see if he says something which would actually be a criminal offence, take up a good hour or so of his time, see if he'll offer to "repair" our gas boiler, tempt him with a "mislaid" cubic zirconia earring on the floor of the loo, and the then call our good friends at Trading Standards and /or the cops (depending on whether he went for the earring or not).

My grandparents were the victim of such a scam a few years ago. A "passing builder" offered to fix their soffits etc ("in need of urgent repair"). They did all the right things, got a written quote, confirming what was to be done, total amount wasn't huge and maybe the soffits were in need of a lick of paint. But then it all went horribly wrong. "Builders" started deliberately breaking stuff they were supposed to be fixing, price for the "work" went up every few minutes, grandparents realised they were being fleeced, tried to call a halt, brought out the bit of paper on which was written what was supposed to be done (and for what price) and found that the fraudsters had switched the bit of paper.

They had placed it on the kitchen windowsill (I can imagine in now: "There you go, Mr Tolliday, I'll leave that there, that says exactly what we'll be doing, you've nothing to worry about, it's all there in writing") and then, in the confusion, switched it for a blank piece of paper. Scoundrels. People like that aren't cowboy builders, they are just criminals using "building" to perpetrate their particular brand of fraud.

HSE responds on SafeContractor

Jim Neilson of the Health & Safety Executive has responded with a thoughtful and detailed letter regarding our disagreement with National Britannia and our SafeContractor renewal. (see earlier posts)

He broadly agrees with our position, saying that "health and safety should be about practical actions that make a difference, and not paperwork for its own sake."

He advises me that a colleague will raise this issue with National Britannia, and draw their attention to what the HSE considers to be sensible risk management. And they will write to me again advising me of the outcome of those discussions within a month.

Which I think is very good of them, top marks to HSE, zero marks so far to National Britannia.

I note in passing that if you Google "safecontractor renewal", you get my blog at #1 spot, with SafeContractor's own site some way down the search results. And even just Googling "safecontractor" has me at #5 or thereabouts.

Lord McKenzie responds on Health & Safety (sort of)

Lord McKenzie's office has responded to my letter about SafeContractor (see this post here, and also more background here and here), saying:

"Lord McKenzie read your letter and attachments with interest. He was pleased that your experience of working with colleagues on the Workplace Health Connect programme was successful, and wishes you success in the future."

Hmmm. Well, with the greatest of respect to His Lordship, he may well have read my letter (copy here), but clearly didn't get past the third paragraph.

A colleague has suggested that the best way to contact a Minister is via our MP, that way (apparently) you are assured of a more detailed response.

Relaxed handymen

I heard an interesting anecdote yesterday about a chance meeting between one of our handymen and someone working for a competing company (Handy Squad, I think). They were both on their motorbikes, at a set of lights, and chatted briefly while waiting for the lights to change.

According my friend-of-a-friend who heard about this chance interaction, the competitor handyman was most struck by how relaxed our handyman was.

I was very pleased to hear this - while whizzing from one job to the next is naturally not going to be stress-free, we try very hard to take as much stress as we can out of our handyman's day, and keep it in the office. So our office guys (Seamus, Jordan, Chris, James & myself) try and do all the stressing about keeping the schedule together and making sure every customer's job is done on time, leaving our handymen to just focus on doing what they do best: handymanning.

If our guys are stressed out rushing from one job to the next, it can make the job pretty miserable and also makes them much more likely to make a mistake. So it is important to us to try and allow our handymen to be relaxed.

It doesn't work all the time, and it can still be pretty stressful at times, but I am very pleased to hear that it obviously works some of the time.

Yell.com responds

Emma at Yell.com kindly points out in this comment that Yell.com do publish performance stats online. Not sure what position at Yell Emma holds, but intrigued and pleased that Yell are monitoring the blogosphere.

Now I had a good look through yelldirect.com (their advert management site, where you can view ads, billing history, etc.) trying to find performance stats yesterday, before I called them (and before I made my last post), and I couldn't find them. But I can find them now so either Yell has added this functionality in last 24hrs (possible, though unlikely) or I missed it yesterday (oops).

Nevertheless, the reporting tool is very rudimentary: it can only show one month at a time, and says it updates around the 10th of the following month (though today is the 6th and I can now see Feb data; yesterday when I phoned Feb data was not available, I had to make do with Jan). So it certainly isn't real time, as Emma claims, but is enough to check if the cost-effectiveness of each ad is roughly equivalent to Google, or (as in our case) 10x less cost-effective.

I still don't understand why it is so expensive. I can't believe that any rational competitor would really think it sensible to pay over £7 / click, so does Yell just hope to hoodwink a new advertiser each year? Clearly no-one who has seen their own performance data is going to renew at that cost per click. And any sensible advertiser next year (these Sponsored Listing ads are a new thing) will ask to see how many impressions / clicks a particular category generated the year before, and once they see that data, presumably won't book it?

Yell.com still don't seem to have grasped the fundamental difference between a printed directory and online advertising. With a printed directory, you have to charge a one-off annual fee, as the directory is only printed once a year. There is no good argument for charging an on-line advertiser a one-off annual fee, you will end up undercharging some advertisers and overcharging others (vs what they would be prepared to pay in an efficient market). And given the astronomical cost-per-click of our ad I rather suspect that more people are being "over-charged" (i.e. paying more than would once they know the real value) than "under-charged".

I've just found that they now offer a pay-per-click model, but only for national searches, why don't they just make the whole thing pay-for-performance (either pay-per-click, or given that some people will just call the phone number on the listing and not click through to the website, pay-per-impression)?

Maybe they will. Only way to survive in the long term, in my (loosely informed) opinion. But it shouldn't be about surviving, it should be about prospering. Yell has huge brand awareness and a massive database of local businesses, it should be making more of this inheritance, I rather feel they are slowly squandering it.

How long can Yell.com survive?

We run a couple of "Local Sponsored Listings" on Yell.com. In order to find out how they are doing (i.e number of impressions and clicks) we have to telephone Yell and ask them. How ridiculous is that? (Although even providing performance data is a major step forward for Yell, they didn't even used to do that a year or so ago). Surely any web-based advertiser should be putting that on a website to be retrieved by customers on demand.

The performance of those listings is predictably dire, costing roughly TEN TIMES what we pay for a click on Google Adwords. Why is it so expensive? Presumably because Yell has to fund a call-centre of people reading out performance statistics over the telephone; plus pay an army of over-zealous but usually ill-informed salespeople. Google has neither of those functions, plus is quietly building up a database of local businesses so it can (presumably) go head-to-head with Yell on local classified advertising. Once Google get themselves ready, I'd give Yell.com 12-24 months to survive. You read it here first.

Scheduling our handymen efficiently

We've put quite a bit of effort over the last few weeks into tweaking our scheduling practices to try and reduce the time spent travelling between jobs (even our London handymen, on motorbikes, still can't actually teleport between appointments, so there is some downtime).

One of our longest serving handymen, Don, said to me at our Christmas party that he didn't think that his average travel distance between jobs had reduced at all in the four years or so he had worked for us. This surprised me, as we now have about three times as many handymen in London as we did when Don first joined, so we should be able to keep each handyman in a tighter area.

At the time, I briefly considered actually measuring the average actual distance between every job we had ever done, but quickly dismissed this as computationally too complex.

Then I had a flash of inspiration late yesterday afternoon and figured out a way we could get the right data out of our system to do a full analysis of inter-job distance. So I built this monster spreadsheet, incorporating (for the first time since I did GCSE maths) Pythagoras' theorem.

Spreadsheet turned out to be such a monster that, for first time since working as a financial analyst at OC&C, I had to switch Excel to manual recalc (only really hardcore spreadsheet nerds like me ever need to do that). And then when I hit F9 to calculate everything, my PC sat whirring away for 2 full hours before telling me:

Our average inter-job distance has dropped by 9% since 2004 (first year we have good quality data available), from 4.6km to 4.2km.

I think it could be much lower: there are some handymen, in some months, for whom we have managed to keep inter-job distance below 3.0km, a further 30% below our recent average.

Anyway, now we have the tool in place to monitor this we can work on keeping that distance down further (and it only needed 2hours to churn through every job since mid-2004, some tens of thousands of data points; manages to figure out the distances for a few days at a time in just a few seconds).

Holy Grail is to keep every handyman on the same street all day (happens sometimes!). I have heard that there is a chap in Chelsea who washes cars on Tregunter Road, and makes his entire living out of that one street. Everyone uses him, and by the time he has worked his way to the end of the street, it is time to start again at the beginning. Not sure if this is true, perhaps any readers who are fortunate enough to live on Tregunter Road could confirm / refute?