It’s all too hard

Recently I had a need to obtain some fence quotes.  I contacted several fencing companies and they each came out to do a quote.  The fence wasn’t anything special, it was just a boundary fence, made of the normal fence palings and posts running between two houses.

There were three issues that made things a little bit more difficult than usual:

1.  The fence was massivley overgrown with trees, creeper plants and bushes along several sections, so much that there was no way to get alongside and measure the fence properly.

2.  A neighbours falling down, rickety old asbestos shed ran along one 10 metre section of the fenceline.

3.  A small asbestos fence was in place for a 14 metre section of the fence at the front of the house.

The first two fencing guys turned up when I wasn’t at the house, I’m sure they had a few mutterings to themselves, but both of them managed to provide a quote back to us.

The third guy turned up when I was at the house so I accompanied him on his inspection of the job.

The fence guy took a look at the front asbestos fence and said ‘we’re not touching that’ – now that’s fair enough, however, he didn’t offer us any options or to have it professionally removed as part of his job, just said ‘we’re not touching that’.  Strike 1.

Next he saw all the trees overgrown on the fence.  ‘We can’t even measure that’ he said, ‘you’ll have to get rid of them’.  Surely he can give me an estimate.  Strike 2.

Then he looked at the shed on the fenceline.  ‘I don’t even know what to do with that’ he said, ‘you’ll have to get them to get rid of it’.  Now getting rid of it would certainly be great, but I didn’t think that the 87 year old lady living there on her own was likely to get rid of it and certainly not within the timeframe in which I had to get this job done.  So I told the fence guy, ‘I’ll certainly try, but you’ll need to assume it will still be here and let me know what you can do with it still there, what can you come up with?’.  ‘Nah, you’ll just have to tell her it has to go, she’ll have to get rid of it’ he replies.  Strike 3, you’re out.

Not surprisingly I’m still waiting on the quote from the third guy whilst my new fence is already up and finished by fence guy number 2.

So, why am I telling you this?

When it comes to renovating houses, property development, property investing and life in general, really, you need to be a problem solver.  There will be many situations along the way where people will stand around and shake their heads but you, well you need to be the person to just find a way, get things done, solve the problem.

When I am looking to work with tradespeople on a renovation or a development I want the ‘can do’ guy (or girl!) on my team.

And I’m not the only one

When I was at a Rookie Developer workshop in Melbourne recently, Troy Harris, professional property developer said the very same thing.  When you choose your builder, you want the ‘can do’ guy not the builder who throws his hands up and his tools down everytime you run into a problem.

Speaking of Troy Harris from Rookie Developer

We’re pretty excited to say that Troy will be a special guest in an upcoming interview on the Everyday Property Investing property investing podcast.  So if you have a question for Troy that you’d like us to ask, just add your comment to this post below or jump over to our Facebook page and write your question there.