Disparity of Construction Contractor Presence on the Web

When my partner, Brett Vernon, and I began the conceptualization of jobtrio.com, we were spurned by a vacuum both of us had experienced first hand: Why is it so hard to find contractors on the Internet. With only a couple clicks you can find every restaurant in town, every doctor, or every car dealership, but where are all the construction contractors? Below is a collection of other interesting facts we have stumbled upon which have encouraged jobtrio.com along the way:

• Consumers are searching. A 2008 Yahoo study found that 59% of homeowners use the Internet to help them choose the right contractor for their projects.


• Contractors are absent. In a study conducted by jobtrio.com team members, a random sample of 100 contractors was selected from a database of all 250K+ licensed contractors in the state of California. A Google search was performed using the business name for each of these 100 contractors. Of these 100, only 9 contractors appeared in the first 2 pages (top 20) results on Google. Of course, I realize that 100 is not a very large sample size, but it is certainly enough of a sample to indicate a disparity.


• Just having a company website doesn't cut it. We have found that about 15-20% of contracting companies with more than 5 employees have a company website. A website is a great way to spread information about your product and services, but who is going to your website? Chances are, unless you have employed search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) firms, the majority of people landing on your site are either existing clients or someone who heard about your site through some other media outlet (newspaper, radio, word-of-mouth). In other words, your website may be doing very little to generate new business for your organization.


• "You come to me" is on the out. In the late '90s there was a wave of web-based companies that featured "you come to me" business models, meaning, a consumer specifies their general desires for a product or service, and a handful of providers then bid to get the consumer's business. As the web and its users have evolved, this old-school approach has proven to have little staying power. For one reason, the "bidders" began to setup automated response systems or other tactics which are intended to lure-in unsuspecting consumers. Also, consumers have grown much more savvy, and wish to be in the driver's seat, with all decision-making tools placed right at their fingertips via the Internet.

These above mentioned discoveries have been integral in shaping the jobtrio.com product. Here is how we responded:

• jobtrio.com is built around a database already containing the business name and contact information for 250K+ California contractors. The information was hiding out there on the web, we just assemble it all in one place.


• jobtrio.com is absolutely free for consumers to use.


• we have employed top-notch SEM and SEO firms to assure that jobtrio.com listing come up with high rankings in Google and Yahoo searches


• We set our Enhanced Profile pricing as low as we possibly could. In order to benefit the consumer and contractor, we are aiming for volume, volume, volume.

As always, I would love to hear any feedback on this blog!

Have a great day,

Josh
President of jobtrio.com
Profiles and Review of California Contractors


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jobtrio.com - One Of Our Press Releases

Brett Vernon comes from a family rich in construction experience. His dad, brother, and uncles are all successful home builders. Though Brett, a 27 year old business school graduate and former Navy SEAL, had his own short run at contracting, being a natural problem solver he came away with a concept for a product that could alleviate some of the pain contractors and their customers face.

“As a general contractor, I continually ran into the same issue when I would start a project: there’s no simple way to research and select the best sub-contractors for a job. I soon realized that across the board, from home owners to construction project managers, everyone was experiencing the same problem.”

The Internet is the perfect tool to help businesses reach their client base, but most contractors are stuck in dark ages and can’t even be found on the Web. With only 5% of construction contractors having websites, the Internet is a largely untouched territory for the nation’s 2nd largest industry. What Vernon envisioned was a low-cost way for contractors to get a meaningful Web presence and a free way for consumers to select the best contractors to perform their construction project. He enlisted the help of systems engineer and childhood friend Josh Groves to assist in building the Web application that has become jobtrio.com, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.

“The Internet has a handful of sites which attempt to match construction contractors with customers, but they all seem to be taking a mid-‘90s approach to the challenge, trying to dictate the flow of information to the consumer and using market price-setting,” says Groves, who studied physics at Columbia University before working in home automation system development. “Our goal was to take a Web 2.0 approach. Low entry cost, democratization, and fee-flowing, user-generated content were crucial forces driving the jobtrio.com site design.”

In simple terms, jobtrio.com is an easily searchable directory of all licensed contractors in California, with some of those contractors paying $20 a month to create an in-depth profile of their company. What truly makes jobtrio.com special, though, are features like honest user reviews, a site optimized for browsing, and the level playing field among the contractors. Jobtrio.com is attempting to do for construction company websites what Myspace.com and Facebook.com did for personal homepages. While removing the barriers to entry and fostering an online community, Vernon and Groves simultaneously create a very useful tool for the public’s benefit.

“We are trying to present all the means for making the right decision when choosing a contractor,” says Vernon. “We really just want to bring clarity to contracting - clarity that benefits the contractor and the consumer.”

The creators of jobtrio.com know that it may not be easy to convince a largely word-of-mouth industry to convert to the marketing methods of the Internet, but, more and more, people demand to have free access to information about products and services before they buy. We are well within the age of the informed consumer, which is clearly demonstrated by the popularity of websites like Amazon.com and Yelp.com. Jobtrio.com has presented the construction industry with a long overdue, low-risk channel to get 21^st Century advertising exposure. For that sake of all home owners, let’s hope that contractors embrace all that jobtrio.com has to offer.

Josh Groves
President
jobtrio.com
Profiles and reviews of California contractors.
“Let’s get to work!”