Five Reasons Why We’ve Never Used
Subcontractors And Never Will

After Decades Of Watching Subs Work –
This Decision Was A No-Brainer

It’s a sad fact that among Kansas City remodeling contractors, the most difficult thing to find is an actual employee. While employees are easy enough to find in their offices – those who have offices – their work crews are almost exclusively made of subcontractors.

At Jericho Home Improvements, however, you’ll never find a single subcontractor on any worksite. Before we even opened our doors, we resolved to use only full employees as our installers.

Here are five reasons we refuse to use subcontractors on our clients’ projects.

1) T-R-U-S-T

There are certain realities you must face during a major kitchen or bath remodel.

• First, a quality remodel can take anywhere from a week to a few months to complete.
• Second, you can’t always be home to supervise the strangers in your house.
• Last, you have no way of vetting these strangers.

If we used subcontractors, we’d be in the same boat. We’d have a general sense of the main guy’s background, but we’d know next to nothing about his workers.

And after decades of working in the remodeling industry, we’ve seen the quality of the people who work for subcontractors range from people with excellent character to people on a work-release program – with some more likely to head back to prison than successfully hammer a nail.

We know how difficult it can be for homeowners to trust strangers in their homes, so we refuse to take chances with the people we send to install their remodeling project. And the best way to ensure that only people of integrity represent our name is to hire them directly – and only after an extensive background check.

2) Inconsistent Quality

Subcontractors have varying degrees of experience and widely varying ideas of what is or is not acceptable on the job. Some might obsess over the tiniest details, and others seem to close their eyes every time they place a tile or cut a board.

Then there’s the high-quality subcontractor working under a penny-pinching general contractor who can’t afford the materials or the time to produce work that would live up to their standards.

And when your company is based on producing top-notch craftsmanship at every stage of a project, rolling the dice on a subcontractor isn’t an acceptable risk.

3) Low-Reliability

Reliability is essential to keeping a tight schedule and finishing a bath or kitchen remodeling project on time. With subcontractors, reliability can become an issue. We aren’t saying they’re lazy (though some are), but rather that their schedules are just as full as ours, and what’s a priority to us may not be a priority to them.

So, when some other project pulls them away from your kitchen or bath, your project suddenly suffers significant delays as the absence of one subcontractor creates a domino effect for the rest.

But when everyone working on your remodeling project is a direct employee backed by a whole team of support people, everyone is focused on the same goal. No sudden disappearances and no confusion.

Just a relentless march toward making your dream come true.

4) No Teamwork

When you have multiple subcontractors working on a project, it’s more likely that they’ll compete with one another than work as a team. And in a situation where each step relies on the completion of the last before it can begin, this can result in chaos.

The rivalry between electricians, plumbers, and the other construction fields is famous in this industry and is based on their failure to work together. Sometimes it’s as simple as different standards for workspace cleanliness, and sometimes it’s as dire as destroying the structural integrity of earlier work.

And if something goes wrong, the finger-pointing can get out of control. The only certainty is that the problem won’t be resolved quickly.

Our approach eliminates these problems.

Everyone is held to the same standard.

Everyone is responsible for the results.

We approach each bath or kitchen remodeling project as a team from the moment you first call to the day the project is completed.

5) We Demand Excellence – Always

At Jericho Home Improvements, we understand that perfection is an unattainable goal – but excellence comes pretty close.

We expect excellence from our installers at every step of every project. That includes how they act in your home, do their jobs, and interact with fellow installers.

Excellence doesn’t always mean mistake-free, but we do expect errors to be caught and corrected rather than covered up with something shiny.

We ask for excellence – and we get it. ALWAYS.

Partly because we constantly double-check our work but mostly because we know our employees because each one was hand-picked from 100s of other applicants.

That knowledge, that certainty of consistently striving for the best possible outcome, just can’t be had when you use subcontractors – even those with tremendous talent.

Let Us Do The Worrying For You

If you have a bath or kitchen remodel in mind for your Kansas City area home and want it done by a dedicated team of professionals, contact us at Jericho Home Improvements for a free quote.