Shawn Knoch knew what he was in for when he started All Phase Remodeling, in Sherwood, Ore., two years ago. The slowdown was “starting to rear its ugly head in the builder market,” he recalls. But with 20 years experience behind him, Shawn and his wife, Kim, went ahead and founded their company after spending a year “looking at what was going on.” So far, no regrets. “We’ve had very little downtime,” he says.
Fortune smiled on All Phase Remodeling last August, when the company signed a contract for a whole-house remodel, a job that lasted into February. So, even though the phone in Sherwood wasn’t ringing, as it wasn’t ringing in many other remodeling company offices, Knoch had plenty to do.
What has taken him aback is the plethora of companies suddenly offering full-service remodeling. Knoch was recently startled to see a van for a local flooring company repainted to indicate that, in addition to flooring, the company now also offers remodeling. And builders were jumping into the market, too. So Knoch weighed in with a post on his blog:
Let’s face it, the economy is pretty grim right now. For the first time in awhile, we are in a recession, and the construction industry started feeling the pain early last year. New home building has slowed tremendously. This has prompted many new home builders and specialty contractors to jump into the remodeling game. But can non-remodelers really be good remodeling contractors?
Knoch then went on to list five reasons why remodeling a home is different from building one and to explain that what a remodeling contractor does is different from what specialty remodelers might do. Soon the phone was ringing. “It stirred things up,” he says.
Some calls came from other contractors. Some came from homeowners, including one who had hired a contractor just entering the remodeling market and who had had to pull that contractor off the job, and another from a homeowner who had hired a cabinetmaker to remodel the basement, with less than satisfactory results. “We were called in to clean that up,” Knoch says. “I’m patching drywall as we speak.”
Knoch says that he’s expecting All Phase Remodeling's sales this year to be in line with those of 2008 -- not up, but not down. “There’s work out there and people spending money,” he says. "[Being a small company] can help us weather the storm. We’re going to be looking really good on the other side of it.”