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 21st 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!”
