Should You Have Residential Customers Sign Contracts Before You Start Working for Them?
Signing a contract can help resolve payment issues and give you more authority to take legal action in the case of non-payment. A good contract will also have liability clauses that protect your business from various litigious claims. A contract can also provide parameters for the scope of work that you will be doing. Overall contracts are important but they do come with drawbacks.
Customers Can be Hesitant to Sign Contracts
I have found within my pressure washing business, that residential customers are put off by the idea of signing a contract before the service. When the average person thinks of pressure washing within the context of house washing, they think of some guy up on a ladder shooting super high-pressure water at their delicate home. You know that house washing is often the safest of all the pressure washing services offered but the customer doesn’t see it that way. By requesting them to sign a contract beforehand, you are re-introducing the perceived danger of pressure washing. If the customer was at all hesitant about pressure washing services, demanding they sign a contract before you begin work is a surefire way to raise eyebrows and lose bids.
In-person Contract Signing
Having residential pressure washing customers sign a contract in person before work can begin will inconvenience probably 75% of all of your potential customers in a major way.
Your options are limited to:
The customer signs the contract during your onsite estimate
You drive to the customer to have them sign the contract in the days/weeks leading up to the service appointment date
The customer signs the contract when you show up to do the pressure washing
None of these options are convenient. For option 1, a significant percentage of homeowners are getting multiple estimates and even if they are planning to book with you they want to wait for other estimates to come in. Even if you can give them an estimate quickly, they will still likely want to talk with their partner before committing to any services.
For option 2, do you really want to be driving around and coordinating with homeowners on when they will be home to sign a contract?
For option 3, you will find many people are at work and nobody is home during regular business hours.
Overall, trying to get customers to physically sign a contract can be much more of a hassle and time waste than you might initially assume.
E-Signatures for Contract Signing
The problem with e-signatures is that many homeowners aren’t computer-savvy. The 73 year old retired couple isn’t jumping on a computer and signing a contract via e-signature. They have probably never used an online signature service before and they probably haven’t opened up their email and looked at their inbox in weeks. Of the remaining homeowners who were computer literate, I found myself spending unnecessary time reminding them to sign the contract via e-signature. The whole process of using e-signature was a waste of time that provided little upside.
Adds Another Friction Point Between Them and the Sale
Ultimately, having the customer sign a contract is just one more hurdle between them signing up for a pressure washing service and them choosing a competitor at a similar price point who does not require a contract to be signed before services. In business, you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to hire you and pay for services.
Conclusion
For residential pressure washing jobs, having the customer sign a contract beforehand is normally not worth it. Unless you are taking on a large residential job, omitting a contract from residential jobs will save you quite a lot of time in tracking down signatures. Yes, you will occasionally have a residential customer not pay you. If you have been in business for a while then this is inevitable. In a case where there is non-payment from a customer and you have a contract in place, are you really going to hire a lawyer and go after someone for $500? Overall, you are more likely to lose money in lawyer fees pursuing legal action. Learn how to identify red flags in leads so that you can avoid these people.
If you and your employees are conducting business safely using proper procedures and the correct chemicals for the job then you can avoid virtually every litigious problem that might arise. While taking the ‘before’ pictures for your social media content, it is also a good time to get pictures of any obvious damage on the house in order to protect yourself from liabilities.
Contracts seem to be most useful when a customer disputes that certain things on their property were not cleaned, you can then show them the contract which outlines exactly what was quoted to get cleaned. Once again, the problem of a person not understanding the full scope of the work you were hired to do is your fault as a business owner. Before you close a sale, you need to clearly set the expectations.