It’s a story as old as the trade. We’re sure you know it as well as we do; we’re sure you’ve lived it.
You’re called in for emergency repairs on a bathroom – something’s burst, or just leaked for far too long, and trouble’s set in – and when you get there it’s even worse than the portrait they painted of it in a panic.
You assess the situation, make things good – or as good as they can be right now – and you break the news. This bathroom is on its last legs. There’s enough damage to one or more – usually more – of the fixtures and fittings that a few replacement parts isn’t going to work.
Cheaper and better, you tell them, to rip it out and install a new one. Sure, the room will be out of commission a while, but honestly? It should be anyway. Sometimes a rebuild and a replacement is a better idea from the ground up.
Well, what does the customer do then? Usually they’ll ask you how much it’ll cost, and a fair amount of the time you’ll end up being the contractor or the firm that works out the pricing and buys the materials and does the installation.
Coming to someone’s aid in an emergency isn’t just a feeling of satisfaction in a job well done and a callout fee; it’s the best word of mouth you can get. Not only will people come back to the plumber who rescued them the next time they have an issue, but they’ll recommend you to anyone else asking for good names on the phone or on Facebook.
But there’s a second side to all this which is often – and unwisely – overlooked. After you make the save, when you’re doing the rebuild, you have two options open to you.
You can fit a classic baseline bathroom – good but undecorative – or you can pick out something a little bit different from our selection. Maybe you could browse our Clearance section for something striking and special, and then you could fit a bathroom which doubles as something else.
As an advert.
Whenever you make an installation on that scope, it stands as a testament to what you can do. That typical, classic bathroom is just as much a record of your ability – but it can easily be overlooked; to people outside the trade, it’s just another bathroom. Nothing special. But when something looks different from the norm, but still good, that grabs the attention, and people ask who did it.
One of the reasons we stock such a wide range is so that people can put together bathrooms that stand out from the crowd. There’s nothing that says the people doing that have to be homeowners – and sometimes, putting something like this together can be your calling card.