You’re probably familiar with the contractor triangle. It’s a triangle with price on one side, speed on the other side, and quality on the third.
Typically, contractors will point to it and say you can pick two because they can’t deliver all three. If you want speed and quality, it will be expensive. If you want low cost and high quality, it will take a long time. The combinations vary.
In this article, we’re going to explore why this entire frame of thinking is flawed, outdated, and should be updated with the contractor tetrahedron.
Maybe you are a contractor customer and you’ve seen this triangle and you think, how could it be any different than this? It’s like a mathematical equation; it’s like physics. If you want it fast and good, it’s going to be expensive. Isn’t that a given, like the speed of light or the acceleration of gravity?
We’re going to answer that question, but first, we need to have a clear definition of what exactly we are discussing.
Let’s look at the cost of a project. Is there a standard or fixed price of what a project should cost? If I contact 10 renovation companies and send them a set of plans for a kitchen including demolition and installation of new cabinetry and appliances, how would you expect the quotes to compare? Would you think they would all fit into a tight range of ±10% of the total cost?
Would you believe me if I say that the most expensive quote is likely to come in five to ten times the cost of the cheapest quote?
So what is going on here? What you’ll see if we go and talk to the contractors is that the cheapest contractor is called Joe and this is probably his first or second kitchen project. He added up the prices of all the materials he thinks will be required for the job, some estimates for any sub trades that will be required that he got from his buddies in the trade, and a comfortable hourly rate so he can pay himself for what he expects the duration of the project to be.
Now let’s look at the highest quote. This one comes from a well-established brand-name company. They have done this type of work many, many times. They have an in-house team capable of performing all the work. They’ve calculated all the materials, all the labor, enough charges to cover their overhead, their insurance, their vehicles, their gas, the coffee for the coffee machine at the office where the project managers work, as well as a buffer for unexpected surprises and profit so that the company can continue to reinvest in itself and prosper.
So let’s put a pin in that example for now and move on to the next definition of speed.
Does this mean the time it takes from when a contractor is contacted until the time they leave the customer’s home and don’t need to return anymore? What if the customer says they don’t want to start the job for another three months? Is that a component of the time it takes for completion? Or maybe it’s only taking into consideration the hours that are spent by contractors inside the client’s home. That would mean that the duration of the whole project could be six months, but only 57 hours were spent in the home performing work.
Looking at the third element, which is quality, we find that once again it’s a nebulous term that’s not clearly defined. Does quality mean that all of the trim in the house is going to be solid wood? Does it mean that the designer wallpaper costs $100 per square foot? Or maybe quality means that the back sides of the cabinets, which nobody is going to see because they’re against the wall, were also finished with just as much care as the fronts.
So once we start to break them down, we can see that these three terms are general and quite undefined. At the end of the day, they are all subjective terms and it depends on who is interpreting the cost or the time required or the quality of a job.
What I have learned is to always start with the customer and work backwards. The person whose subjective opinion on the services that they’re receiving actually matters is the customer, not the contractor.
A contractor may have an idea of what they perceive as quality, but one of the customers that they show up to serve might have an entirely different expectation of what constitutes quality work.
So how do we get more specific than this nebulous contractor triangle?
That’s where I come in with the tetrahedron. I got this idea from the fire tetrahedron, which all firefighters are taught, which are the four components of fire: Fuel, oxygen, heat, and an uninhibited chemical chain reaction. It’s guaranteed that if you have all those four together in the right proportions, you’re going to have a fire.
And that’s what’s so important – the right proportion. Not enough oxygen and the fire doesn’t burn. Too much heat and you’re looking at plasma, not fire.
The tetrahedron I propose functions in the same way. With the right proportion of value, speed, quality, and service, we can develop a product that customers are immensely satisfied with.
You might be thinking, “Why did you add service in there, Nick?” If a customer can have their needs for quality, speed, or price met, isn’t that all that is required? Are they going to be happy and leave you a five-star review if you can do that? The answer is no, and let me tell you a story I heard from a contractor that explains this.
The contractor was called into someone’s home who had just completed a renovation. The work was beautiful, it had been done well, the budget wasn’t the problem, the timeline was fine. But the experience the customer had was so negative that he could not continue to live in the same home. Every aspect of the renovated space was a reminder of the challenges and frustrations of having the actual work done.
This is why service must be added to this triangle, making it a tetrahedron. You could do everything right on price, quality, and time and still have an unsatisfied customer.
I won’t get into it in this article, but you should look up Alex Hormozi’s definition of value. It states that dream outcome multiplied by perceived likelihood of achievement, divided by timely delay, multiplied by effort and sacrifice equals value.
So the value doesn’t come from the sticker amount on the pile of materials. It comes from the perception a customer has that they are going to get what they want, that it’s achievable, that it’s not going to take too long, and that it’s not going to require effort and sacrifice on their part. This gives us a lot more freedom beyond commodity prices of lumber to provide value for the customer.
If you sell a customer a job and say OK, we can start in three months, and then you call them a week later and say, you know what, we can start the job in six weeks, they are going to be ecstatic. You could also tell the same customer you can start four weeks from today, then call them a week later and tell them that you can start the job in six weeks. Which version of that customer is going to be happier? They’re both getting exactly the same result on the same timeline, but you can be certain one of them is going to be happier than the other right from the get-go.
What it comes down to in providing the best service is knowing what the customers need and then matching our product or our offer to the customers’ needs.
You can see the same in a really good realtor. They don’t just try to get the best price for a home. They listen to their customers and try to meet their unique needs. The customer might specifically need a longer closing date because of some other circumstance and they’re willing to pay to accommodate that.
A contractor should incorporate the same flexibility by listening and asking the right questions of the customer to find out what their pain points are. Maybe they are desperate to have their new kitchen installed before Christmas time because their in-laws are coming from Australia to visit. Maybe in this situation, they are in a position where budget isn’t really the concern. Offering to save them money by extending the project finish date until February isn’t doing them any good.
Until you’ve listened and understood their whole situation and asked questions to uncover information that they might not even know is relevant to the service that you’re going to offer, you’re not able to make a good offer.
So let’s take an example and say you’ve got a customer with specific needs around price, timeline, quality, and service. It’s a stay-at-home couple and they have important meetings every day at 9:00 AM, so you can’t be disturbing or making lots of noise during that time. Maybe they told you about a particular budget and the project should be done in the next 5 weeks.
You could come back to them with a plan to do the work, not coming in until 10:00, providing a level of quality that fits within their budget as well as their timeline.
But maybe if you had listened more deeply, you would have heard the couple mention that quality was most important to them and the deadline wasn’t set in stone. By having a deeper conversation about this, you can let them know that they would probably be more satisfied paying for higher quality finishes, extending their timeline so that your crew can just work half days, and spending a little more than their budget so that they are very happy with the finished product as they planned to stay in the home for a longer time.
Asking better questions, having a deeper conversation, and putting other options on the table in this example is going to result in happier customers. They might not have explicitly asked you for that in the beginning, but because you were listening and you took all of their needs into consideration, they’re going to feel like they were heard and treated specially, and that’s where you’re going to get your five-star review and lots of referrals from these customers.
So for your next construction job, keep in mind the contractor’s tetrahedron. Remember that the terms that make it up are specific to what the customer wants. Have the conversations and ask the questions until you find out what they want and what they don’t want or what their pain points are.