Radical discounting is business suicide

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Can remodeling contractors survive a strategy of radical discounting?

— Kitchen and bath designer, California

The short answer is no. If you slash prices deeply to generate business, you may see success in the short-term, winning contracts from bargain-hunting homeowners. In the long run, though, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Radical discounting is a topic that stirs strong emotions among established remodelers. I contacted several around the country, and they said it is business suicide for all but extremely large companies, and eventually those giants, too. As design/build remodeler Iris Harrell of Harrell Remodeling in Mountain View, Calif., put it, the only way to survive radical discounting is to stop doing it. Now.

Say you cut prices by 20 percent or more, which is one general definition of radical discounting. You've fried your profit and probably a good share of your overhead coverage. Even if the low prices draw new business, your company has only so much sales and production capacity. You'll never be able to make up the lost revenue through increased volume.

Radical discounting carries another danger as well. It devalues your company. And once you start down that road, it's hard to turn back. Jesse Morado is a remodeling pro who now runs a residential remodeling consulting firm, Renovation Coach, in Atlanta. He warns that repositioning yourself as a low-price company moves you into the market niche of bottom-dollar companies. It's a whole different world where buyers fixate on price negotiation and don't think about the workmanship, customer service and reliability. You will have to cut corners to save money — perhaps reducing the number of workers on the job, providing less frequent production oversight, scheduling fewer dumpster pickups, doing less painstaking site protection, and so on. All this raises the risk that you will make more errors, fall behind, disappoint your clients and sow the seeds of negative PR. That's a deadly price to pay.

Moderate price reduction is a different matter. Many remodelers are tightening their operations to lower their estimates a few percentage points. The difference is that they are calculating the price cuts around careful cost cutting that protects the quality of their remodeling product and safeguards their profit margin.

Morado says that by doing a line-by-line analysis of projects completed in the last year you may be able to identify a 25 percent savings without altering your margin. Look at the schedule: Is there waste? Can you shave off some labor hours? Could you save money, without hurting quality and control, by subbing out some aspects of production? And so on.

Over the past five years, Dave Bryan has systematically cut costs within Blackdog Builders in Salem, N.H. Today it costs $1 million less to run the $5 million-volume operation.

At Atlanta's Small Carpenters at Large, Danny Feig-Sandoval is doing a company-wide cost analysis now. He's looking not only for savings within the company; he's asking suppliers and subcontractors to pass along savings. He's also shopping other high-quality trades, which he figures may uncover better prices and keep him more attuned to competitive rates.

Belt-tightening may enable you to reduce your bids somewhat, but they are likely to be higher than the prices quoted by low-ball companies. So be it. You also can offer multiple options, including modest, economical designs, along with more full-bodied plans. For example, says Harrell, you could base estimates on grade A or good-quality-but-less-expensive grade B cabinets, depending on the homeowners' priorities and budget.