Platforms charge a fee, but in the end, this may be the one thing they do well in most cases. Protect payments.
In the future for domestic transactions, just add a little clause like "If valid payment is not made by due date, provider can send client a 3 day notice to cure. if the balance is not paid, Client stipulates to default judgement for the purpose of collections."
Now I'm sure that is not legally phrased correctly, but someone could make it a better. Idea is, Client, if they have not disputed invoice and not paid, admit to a default and you are immediately off to a judgement and collection.
Screening clients is tough. And sooner or later, this happens.
Oh, one guy I know always inserted code in his work so that he could turn his code off is someone did not pay. And then showed a screen with a payment message. Nice.
The construction business is one of the few where contractors are asked to provide a price to build something they really have no idea what its going to cost. They have an "estimate" but so many things are unknown.
Compare that to auto manufacturing. Ford knows exactly what an F150 costs. They can then price for known profit within a range.
Manufacturing millions of roughly the same thing is a lot different than constructing millions of roughly one offs.
Site prep has unknown unknowns, as each site is different. Maybe there's an unexpected geologic condition, maybe the utilities won't connect without a fight, maybe the jurisdiction issues a building moratorium at the last minute. Most construction jobs won't get guaranteed pricing on materials, so any delay can change those prices, and then the client may prefer to change materials and then you may need different labor, etc.
Remodelling is full of even more unknown unknowns. Residential construction doesn't tend to have as-built drawings, and the design drawings, if available, may not have much connection to the structure as built. When you open up the walls and find surprises, that's going to increase costs.
Construction quotes are generally for no delay, no suprises, no changes. Good quotes will also include estimates in case of likely surprises, and how delay costs will be allocated and change costs and procedures.
There are actually a lot of start ups in the space. Most are related to support services such as electronic plans, job bidding sites, inspection apps, timesheets, material logs and so on. You don't build with technology, but there are lots of bits and pieces to the business process whether a large or small job.
I take exception to the slack comments. It seems a tool that is very heavily used by developers and the tech industry, which of course is massive, but in Google Workplace, their chat does an adequate job for lots of inter company comms.
The most exciting thing I have seen in the last few weeks is getting emails related to comments in a google doc related to notes users post and either tag or ask questions. I love the ability right in the email to respond, in context, to what the users want to know.
I have to believe this will evolve and become more commonly used in email, which somewhat reminds me of the old Google Wave, of which i was a fan. They were onto something.
Properly focused, email is a very very powerful tool. Thanks for the post.
In the future for domestic transactions, just add a little clause like "If valid payment is not made by due date, provider can send client a 3 day notice to cure. if the balance is not paid, Client stipulates to default judgement for the purpose of collections."
Now I'm sure that is not legally phrased correctly, but someone could make it a better. Idea is, Client, if they have not disputed invoice and not paid, admit to a default and you are immediately off to a judgement and collection.
Screening clients is tough. And sooner or later, this happens.
Oh, one guy I know always inserted code in his work so that he could turn his code off is someone did not pay. And then showed a screen with a payment message. Nice.