Don’t be the Yo-Yo client when building your custom home

Don’t be the Yo-Yo client.

You might be wondering what a Yo-Yo client is, well let me tell you; the yo-yo client is one of the most frustrating clients to work with when building or renovating their home.

A yo-yo client is the kind of client that changes their mind so often about everything that you begin to think of them as a human yo-yo. When building a custom home or renovating a home you try to give the client as many options as possible, you give them enough options so that it is customized but you do not overload them with too many so they are able to still make a decision. There is no way to give a yo-yo client small enough choices. If there is more than one then they will go back and forth between the two of them until you the contractor and them the homeowners are completely confused.

A yo-yo client is the kind of person that will actually slow a whole job down and cost themselves money by not being able to make a decision. The old adage time is money, that also pertains to the building industry. The longer you have carpenters and tradesmen onsite either changing things or waiting for you to make a decision the longer that you will be paying their salaries.

A yo-yo client is the kind of person who is shocked at the end of the job because things ended up costing more money. In their minds since they were constantly making decisions and when they weren’t making decisions they were under pressure from the builder to make decisions they believe that they did nothing to slow the job down. In reality because the builder had to constantly pressure the client to make decisions they had to work at a slower pace or hold off on certain things altogether until the decisions were made. Because it’s custom a lot of material must be pre-ordered and even though a decision was finally made to keep the job moving the material would take time to arrive grinding the job to a halt.

The best way to avoid becoming a yo-yo client is to do as much research as possible before the construction starts, come up with a really good plan and stick too that plan as closely as you can.

The more things that you can decide on in advance of the pressures of construction the better those decisions will be when the time comes to construct them. There will always be a lot of decisions to make when getting anything built that is custom, a lot of them will be things that you never even thought of until your contractor asked you. These decisions are made easier if they are the only ones that you have to make, if you are going week to week making decisions on your construction project just to keep the job moving then you are wasting your money and your contractors time.

Being short sighted when doing construction always ends up costing you more money than having a well defined plan that you stick too.

Remember fail to plan, you might as well plan to fail.

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.