How Financing Can Help Your Firm, and Your Clients

Are you in the finance business? As kitchen and bath dealers, you probably don’t consider yourself to be in that business. However, whether we like it or not, we in this industry are, in fact, in the finance business. Think about it: we have deposits for the projects we sell, and we need to collect money at different stages of the projects we do. But, obviously, the most important thing is that we must collect the final bill when it’s due. As with our company, I’m sure you sometimes have a difficult time collecting money owed to you for a variety of reasons. That, in itself, puts us in the finance business.

An Offer They Can’t Refuse
Let’s take this another step forward. Does your company offer clients financing? If not, why? Maybe you think it’s too much work, or maybe you think it’s too hard to get the proper information. Maybe you’ve never considered it as part of what you should be offering your customers.

For years the remodeling industry has been in the finance business. The siding and windows companies use this for selling their products. The pool industry uses this for selling pools. And certainly the automobile industry has used financing as a major source for selling automobiles for as long as I can remember. So why do we as kitchen and bath companies not offer this service to our customers? I believe the reason is a lack of understanding about the true benefits of offering this opportunity to our clients.

Going back a few years I recall a few projects that I felt certain I had sold, only to find that they made the purchase from another company because they took care of the whole package, including the financing.

Once I had a customer who told me they were going to buy from me, but he now needed to go to his bank to arrange for the financing. He needed all of the plans, the agreement, and all of the documentation for the bank to put the loan together. So we gave him everything that he told me he needed.

After a few weeks had passed, I called my customer. He told me that he went to his banker with all of the information. The banker examined everything, but thought that the price was pretty high. He asked my client if he had any other bids. My client told him my firm came as a strong referral, and that he was very happy with everything my firm had done. But then the banker told him that he knew of a kitchen firm that with which the bank worked all of the time. The banker suggested that just for his own benefit he should talk to this company, and at least get a bid on the plans that he had so he can decide if there is any difference.

To make a long story short my client – or who I thought was my client – received a bid that was less than my firm’s bid. He did not see any difference, and since the banker said he would get the loan easier if he worked with the company with which the bank had a relationship, he went with the other kitchen company. Since that time I have never given all of my information to a customer to take somewhere else without paying me first for the information. I lost that job not because I did anything wrong, but because the banker told the client to get a bid from his contact.

Another time, after we’d finished a very nice kitchen, the salesperson asked me to go out on the final with him. He had told me the customer was complaining about everything, and when we arrived to the job site, the first thing I saw was yellow self stick dots all over the cabinets. The customer proceeded to show me what he considered defects in the wood.

After about five minutes of looking at all the dots, I determined that something else was happening. I asked the customer to tell me what the real problem was since there was nothing wrong with the cabinets, or with anything else he’d brought to our attention. He finally said that they had run out of money. We worked out a repayment plan with interest to pay off the final deposit. It took about six months, but they paid it all. Had we financed this project, this would not have been a problem for him or us.