Part-Time=Half-Assed
The perils of part-time consultants
By Walter Jowers
A while back, a woman gave me her business card. It was one of those fancy bi-fold jobs, with a Corinthian column cap inked onto the front and a list of the woman’s professional services listed inside. The credentials were: Historic Preservation Consultant, Period Interior Decoration, Color Consultant, Furniture Restoration, Art Restoration, Photographic Restoration.
I passed the card along to my friend Jim, who’s a real enough architectural historian. He took one look at the card and said, “I know this woman. This woman’s unemployed.”
I bring this up because I want y’all to know: The surest way to screw up your house—or to screw up anything, for that matter—is to put some ne’er-do-well, backslid, too-drunk-for-carnival-work lost soul of a part-timer on the job. I’m amazed that I have to explain this. But for some reason, a lot of people think they’re getting a bargain when they hire a part-timer. They think they don’t have to pay for overhead.
If the guys who work on your house drive up in Lexuses, or they put your job on hold so they can fly off to ski Aspen, you might want to consider hiring folks with less overhead. Most of the time, though, contractor overhead is this simple: First, it’s taxes, along with bookkeepers and accountants to tell you how much tax you owe. Just this part consumes somewhere between one-third and one-half of the gross receipts. After that, overhead is continuing education, tools, and insurance.
So when you hire a part-timer to avoid paying overhead, you’re most likely hiring a tax-dodging reprobate who doesn’t keep himself educated, doesn’t have the right tools for the job, and can’t offer any more than a lame, “Gawrsh, I’m sorry,” if he screws up and burns your house down.
And that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is, you’re encouraging the guy. It’s the cheap-ass-homeowner equivalent of helping Ted Bundy with his jumper cables. You satisfy his immediate needs and enable him to move on and harm others.
Just last week, I saw two houses that had the mark of the part-timer all over ’em. The first house had every electrical problem that I’d ever seen, read about, or imagined. The cherry on this sundae was that the owners had just had the house “inspected” by one of my part-time, cut-rate competitors (who also builds and sells houses), who told ’em everything was just ducky. Clearly, these homeowners were jackleg junkies, sailing through a sea of legitimate businessfolk, searching for the one man who could not possibly do the job right.
At the second house, the new gas furnace had been jammed into a tiny closet, with no combustion air vents or access to the service panels. The hot-water heater installation was screwed up in a number of ways. These weren’t just little mistakes—this was dangerous stuff. I couldn’t find out who had done the bogus work, but I did find out it was all done by one guy.
And then there was my annual softball-uniform screw-up. For years, the hardworking volunteers at my Little League hired the same part-timer to do the silkscreen work on the League uniforms. Every year, the uniforms showed up late, or the sizes were wrong, or the shirts didn’t match.
This year, the screener guy apparently did the work with no screens. There were no shadings of color, only areas that were painted and areas that were not. One team’s sponsor had a logo that included a globe, with latitude and longitude lines on it. The logo came out as a solid wad-o-paint, a fist-sized designated-sweating-and-chafing area. The shirts for my daughter’s team, the Heaters, lost the subtle shading on the baseball that surrounded the “H.” The ball turned out looking like a “C” in front of the team name. So, all season long, people called my girls the Cheaters.
So y’all stop hiring part-timers, OK? Hire real companies to work for you. I say we ought to give the legit businessfolk some credit for having the good sense and get-up to keep their bills paid and their doors open. And you’ll be showing mercy on the pitiful part-timers. They’ll have to go legit sooner or later. Do them and the rest of us a favor: point them toward sooner.
Visit Walter Jowers’ Web site at http://www.nashscene.com/~housesense/, or you can e-mail him at walter.jowers@nashville.com.
So y’all stop hiring part-timers, OK? Hire real companies to work for you. I say we ought to give the legit businessfolk some credit for having the good sense and get-up to keep their bills paid and their doors open. And you’ll be showing mercy on the pitiful part-timers. They’ll have to go legit sooner or later. Do them and the rest of us a favor: point them toward sooner.
Visit Walter Jowers’ Web site at http://www.nashscene.com/~housesense/, or you can e-mail him at walter.jowers@nashville.com.
