DreamMaker® Bath and Kitchen’s superior systems help franchisees attract repeat remodeling business

Quality work like this bathroom renovation can lead to a lot of repeat remodeling business for franchisees.

For almost any home renovator, the key to long-term success is repeat remodeling business. Often, this repeat business is a significant percentage of the work done in a given year. DreamMaker® Bath and Kitchen’s systems encompass the full range of interior remodeling projects, which, coupled with our Code of Values™, enable our franchisees to win repeat business and grow revenue. That, along with the DreamMaker® marketing systems, have helped dozens of remodelers earn glowing customer reviews.

One such remodeler is franchisee Bill Wolf, who has a DreamMaker® showroom location in the greater Grand Rapids, MI, area. Wolf has several clients who have come back to him and his team time and time again.

You’ve had a pretty impressive track record of people coming back for more and more work.

We do, yeah. Some of our clients have done like seven or nine jobs, something like that. There have been quite a few of them.

How did it go from the first job and then lead to the next job and so on?

Obviously, they had money and they had a house or maybe another house. Maybe it was two different houses along the way sometimes. One guy did business with me when I was at another remodeling company. He called me back when I started my own DreamMaker location. He had a cottage that we did a couple little projects on. Then he had a house in town where we did a bathroom remodel. We eventually did about seven projects with him on two different houses, a cottage and then another house in town here.

What types of jobs were they?

We had a huge kitchen project and we did two basement projects. We added a beautiful sunroom. We added a lot of shelving for his den. We did windows. We did a fireplace. It just kept going. Now he wants to do another project! He wants to do a master bathroom.

Obviously, he’s happy with your work.

We work hard and do a good job.

How do you keep in touch with your clients between jobs?

We send out a quarterly newsletter. I think either they read it or at least they see it coming. When they come across it, they remember that they did work with us before. Also, we try to be friends with people when we do the project. It’s more than just a job, in a sense.

So, you work at building relationships rather than just being a worker at the job.

Exactly. We know about their children, their pets, stuff like that.

Some of this work it sounds like it falls outside of the normal kitchen and bath scenario that DreamMaker does.

As a DreamMaker franchisee, we have incorporated full-service remodeling into our work. The business model is great in that it allows for that kind of flexibility, if you want it.

So, you were you doing full-service remodeling before you became a DreamMaker Bath and Kitchen franchisee. What prompted you to transition your existing business into a DreamMaker?

Well, we were working on a lot of different projects. We evaluated where we wanted to go as a small remodeling company. We thought we needed to do more kitchens and bathrooms. We enjoyed them. We did a good job. We made pretty good money. We thought we needed to get stronger in those areas. Then just a few weeks later, we got a call from DreamMaker wanting to start a franchise here in the area. I didn’t just hang up after a call like that, after that conclusion we had made. They talked us through the whole thing, and we liked the people at DreamMaker.

Once again, it was about relationships.

Yeah, and the basic goals were important. If you build up a franchise, hopefully you’ll have a business to sell and a building to sell, and if you make money along the way and then you have something to sell at the end, that’s a double bonus for retirement. That was one of my goals. We bought a building four years after we started with DreamMaker, and we put a showroom in here.

DreamMaker® Bath and Kitchen franchisees Jayne and Bill Wolf of Grand Rapids, MI

Do you offer any sort of incentives for your clients to come back and do more work with you again?

Once in while we send out a coupon saying that we’ll give $500 off of their next project over $10,000, or something like that. That gets some of our past clients to call us up. Also, a thank-you gift is terrific.

A thank-you gift? What does that usually look like?

It can vary. We go in cycles. Sometimes, we get them one of those gift baskets with crackers and cheese and different things like that. We’ve done some of those. Sometimes, when we’re in the middle of a project, people want something else that wasn’t part of the original project, and we just make it a gift. Like this one lady wanted a cutting board that matched her countertop. So we just cut it out of the leftover granite and gave it to her as a gift. It was just something that she expressed along the way, and we remembered and made it a gift at the end.

Does being a DreamMaker Bath and Kitchen franchisee lend itself to getting more repeat remodeling business than if you were not?

I think when you’re a DreamMaker franchisee, you communicate integrity. You have a logo. You have a name. You have a base. You communicate that you’re a larger company, that you’re more stable and people can do business with you and know that if they need warranty work done in two years, we’ll be around for that. I think that’s important to a lot of people. Then there’s our Code of Values that we live by. It makes a big difference.

Ready to learn more?

For in-depth details about DreamMaker® Bath and Kitchen and the strong potential for repeat remodeling business, download our free franchise report and start a conversation with us. You also can learn more by visiting our research pages.