Hard Hat City – The Ultimate Contractor Network

We just want to say that we love our friends at HardHatCity.  Everything and everyone are now getting social, even contractors.  We have seen some forums out there for contractors but nothing like HardHatCity has to offer.  Contractors, this interview is for you so listen up:

1. What is HardHatCity?
HardHatCity is an online community where members of the construction industry can create free, customized profiles (web pages), find each other, network, and get projects and work done. The site is designed for everyone in the industry—homeowners and other consumers, contractors and tradespeople, architects and other professional service providers, suppliers, and employers looking for new hires.

2. What made you decide to come up with this type of service and website?
We’ve been contracting for over ten years, so we’ve seen the good and bad of it, and our goal with HardHatCity is to fix the bad. We want to give contractors, tradespeople, and other service providers in the industry an easy and dependable way to market themselves and find clients, projects, and jobs. As contractors, we’ve learned how paid leads can often fall through or become outdated, and this kind of setback results in frustration, not to mention wasted time and money. So part of our motivation in creating HardHatCity was to offer a new solution for aligning professionals with projects. To this end, we also want to provide consumers with a go-to resource for finding qualified professionals who get work done right.  

Also, you’ll see that HardHatCity doesn’t offer customer testimonials or reviews, and that’s because we believe in providing a well-rounded picture of a professional’s background, workmanship, and reputation—and who knows if those reviews are really founded, or reliable? And it was important to us to keep our core services— like building a profile, searching for people, posting projects and jobs—free, because we want the site to be accessible to as many people as possible.  

3. Who is your service for and what do they benefit from it?
HardHatCity is for anyone and everyone that has an interest in anything and everything having to do with construction! From the biggest commercial construction company to the home improvement do-it-yourselfer, HardHatCity is a valuable resource. Searchable profiles, projects, and job listings, and tons of forums and blogs allow any and all users to develop an industry presence and easily connect and build relationships with each other. Suppliers can grow their customer base, tradespeople can search for local projects to work on, industry employers can post job opportunities, homeowners can post home improvement projects they need help on… the benefits of HardHatCity’s networking capabilities are really limitless.

Specific ways that all members can make use of HardHatCity can be found at:   http://www.hardhatcity.com/what

4. I like the fact that you have the “license and certified” badges on your profiles. Does every contractor member have to be licensed?    
We expect and encourage ALL contractors to maintain appropriate licensing, registration, bonding, and the minimum insurance required by their individual state and local business jurisdictions, but it is not a requirement in order to have a profile on HardHatCity. We do, however, offer Verification and Certification services, which give our members seeking new business or employment a way to stand out from the competition. While we expect consumers to complete their own due diligence prior to hiring contractors, our Verification and Certification services add value to consumer searches by giving them a filter, allowing them to search for HardHatCity members who hold these badges. The consumer then has assurance, knowing that when they see the Certified and Verified badges on a HardHatCity member’s profile, those members meet the minimum professional requirements set forth by their jurisdiction and/or that they have passed a criminal background and identity check.  

5. Customers are the bread and butter to businesses but there are always some you cannot please.  Have you ever had to deal with a difficult customer? 
We LOVE our customers! However, all aspects of building and remodeling can be stressful for the customer due to the disruption in their living spaces, the investment involved, and the major changes taking place around them, and we make every effort to educate and prepare them for these. But as with any business, or really any type of human interaction, some relationships can be challenging. Yes, we have had our share of difficult customers that regardless of what we do, they will not be satisfied. Contracting is an interesting mix of providing both a service and a product, combined with a business relationship that spans the length of the project, sometimes for several months or more. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure that there is good chemistry with the customer from the onset. No doubt, in this industry, there is immeasurable value in interviewing and researching and getting to know your customers so that you can make an educated decision about accepting their project. No job is ever worth it if the customer is perpetually displeased!

6. If someone wants to sign up for your service, how do they go about it?
HardHatCity is FREE and easy to join; it only takes a few minutes to get started. Just go to www.hardhatcity.com and click Join, and follow the step-by-step instructions to create a basic profile. From there, you can start enhancing your profile, or get right to searching for people or work, posting a job opportunity or home improvement project, joining the forums, and checking out everything that HardHatCity has to offer.

7. Give us all of your contact information and where people can find you.

HardHatCity
1800 Oak Park Blvd.
Pleasant Hill, CA 94523
Tel: 925.933.6002

 info@hardhatcity.com
http://www.hardhatcity.com
twitter.com/hardhatcity

 Scott Trenery, CEO
http://www.hardhatcity.com/profile/scott.trenery

 Danielle Humbard, Executive VP
http://www.hardhatcity.com/profile/danielle.humbard

They will be joining us on the show July 10th so tune in!

One Response to “Hard Hat City – The Ultimate Contractor Network”

Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments

1. Grant Young says:

   June 25, 2010 at 2:50 am

   Wow, thank you for mentioning this site. I will definitely be signing up for it from what I just read here on the blog. Thanks guys!