For over 20 years, Leader Builders has been hired by families wanting to take a fresh look at their homes. We help by providing expertise in designing and building home additions, adapting existing spaces to new uses, re-purposing of dysfunctional spaces into new rooms, and updating various home areas to modern living standards, including adding quality finishes. We also build new homes from the ground up.
Chances are you have met people that swear by Leader Builders, use our company for all of their home construction projects, and recommend us to all of their family and friends.
We earn that trust and enthusiasm by recognizing what the client's major concerns are during the stage of shopping for a builder, and also during the design and construction process. By identifying their causes and working diligently throughout the process we eliminate them. Here are some typical concerns and how we address them:
- Shopping for a builder has been a horror in the past:
We try to make our initial meeting "short and sweet". We give you as much information as possible and let you decide how to proceed. We discuss the scope of the project and costs with emphasis on having all parts of the cost equation accounted for, to avoid future surprises. We let you control the duration of meetings and the direction of the conversation. We will not attempt to hard sell you. We will also not sell you something that you don't need.
- Paying too much and/or cost overruns:
You deserve to get a fair price. At Leader Builders we concentrate on giving you the information you need to establish how much your “build cost” will be when your project had been completed. In today’s highly competitive economic environment, many builders try to attract clients with an unrealistically low “initial cost,” or the so-called “bid,” and then use an “upsell” technique to raise the price and make a profit. Or worse yet, they are tempted to use unqualified, often uninsured help in order to reduce labor costs. At Leader Builders we believe in presenting the client with a reasonable cost that will remain consistent throughout the course of the project. We are able to achieve this goal through excellent planning, superior organization, and using smart approaches when it comes to labor and building materials.
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Who will perform the actual work?
Our workers are experienced and efficient. In addition, it is Leader policy to promote and reward our employees who exhibit, in addition to professional expertise, personality traits that made them well-suited to working directly with clients in residential construction. We recognize and nurture superior skills in client relations alongside technical aptitude. The result is a work force who will not only perform wonderfully, but also will treat your property with respect, be friendly, be willing to cooperate and be safety-minded. We use an elite group of well-paid and well-trained workers, who consistently produce a better ratio of quality results per dollar than unskilled workers paid minimal rates. As a bonus, they create fewer future service calls. We have been able to retain intelligent field personnel at Leader Builders for many years. If you have a chance to look at some of our client letters, you will notice the same names appearing again and again.
- Time delays:
At Leader we always plan upfront, and we are so confident things will go as planned that we typically put project completion dates in our contract, adding monetary penalties in your favor for the rare delays that occur. Our underlying process makes on-time completion a simple goal. At the beginning of a project, we plan, plan and plan, and also prepare a construction schedule chart for each multitrade project, and if requested we will provide a printout to the client so they can track the project's progress. Another of our helpful documents is the Client Selection Worksheets, including items that need to be either decided on or purchased by the owner, with the deadlines on decision, ordering and delivery times. Once set in motion, with time built in for bad weather, timely completion is assured.
- Making uninformed decisions:
Since clients typically do not have the same level of experience in design and construction and we do, we feel that it is our obligation to give guidance and help avoiding costly mistakes. We spend time and effort to deeply understand the intent of the project from the client's point of view, and we carry it through until completion. If alternative possibilities arise during the project planning we present them, discuss the benefits of each one, and make a recommendation.
- Costly misunderstandings:
Another way we avoid mistakes is to keep project communications in writing. After a meeting, your project manager puts the decisions discussed into a document and asks for your approval. Nothing is built until the decisions are final.
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Understanding how our company works:
We actually encourage you to visit our management offices to meet the people who are going to be managing production of your future project, dispatching installers, ordering materials, and ensuring it's on schedule. It is extremely important to be able to meet the people you are going to work with for months.
- Being able to contact us if you really need to:
In our office, we have actual human beings answering the phones, so our clients can get the information they need quickly and efficiently. This is particularly important if, at some point during the project, the home owner has a concern. In such a situation getting reliable information quickly makes a difference between major frustration and profound relief. We don't think it's acceptable for our clients to be forced to leave multiple messages for a builder missing in action, if you're worried about your home and time may be of the essence.
- Making sure that your builder has a solid grasp of your project:
At Leader we assign each client a Project Manager, who will be their contact point for discussing details, doing day-to-day planning and ensuring quality. All of the management personnel have field construction backgrounds and long years of experience. They know job quality and organization inside-and-out. With that primer, combined with Leader Builders training, field procedure manuals and continuous education of our project managers as well as our field personnel, the result is a "building machine" of great knowledge and efficiency. We concentrate on anticipating your needs and providing information to you in a timely fashion. Where many builders have weekly sales meetings, at Leader we conduct production meetings, where case studies are shared, procedures introduced and systems planned. The extra benefit is that this approach actually saves money to both builder and the client.
There are several simple things most people want their builder to do: produce quality work, communicate well, keep costs reasonable and respect their property. By being on top of several basic areas, we keep our customers satisfied and willing to hire us again, and to recommend us to their friends and family.