A low quote is not the same work for less money. It is a different set of assumptions, and you will meet them in week three.
Rick Haggerty has 25 years in home improvement across several companies, and his warning to homeowners is specific about the trap:
“I would encourage people to check references, look at other work. and not necessarily get sucked into a cheap price. Because I think that’s pretty easy to do today. It’s really easy to start a job. It’s very difficult to finish it within the expectations, the timeframe, and the budget that the customer wants it done in.”
— Rick Haggerty, on Unscripted Home Improvement
Note what he is not saying. He is not saying pay more. He is saying that price on its own carries almost no information, and that people treat it as though it carries all of it.
What a real bid should tell you
The fix is not comparing three totals. It is making all three explain themselves:
“really dig into a bid. Explain to me what these numbers mean. And some people get offended by that. We don’t. We want to break it out. We want to tell them exactly what they’re getting for the money they’re spending.”
— Rick Haggerty
On a driveway or any paving job the line items are where the difference actually lives:
- Preparation. What is being excavated, how deep, and what happens to the material that comes out.
- Base. Depth and type of the stone under the surface. This is the single most common place a low bid saves money and the single most common reason a drive fails early.
- Thickness. Compacted, not loose. Ask which number is being quoted.
- Drainage and grade. Where the water is meant to go.
- Edges and transitions. How it meets the road, the garage and the ground either side.
- Who does the work. Own crew or subcontracted, and who carries the insurance.
Two bids that differ by thirty percent usually differ on two of those lines. Once they are itemised, the comparison stops being about trust and starts being about specifications. And if the cheapest one still wins on paper, Rick says take it: “And if it is the cheapest, great, right? Great. You win. It’s a win-win.”
The other side of the same problem
Paul Pape coaches creatives and small business owners through Gamify Business, and he has the seller’s view of what an underpriced quote communicates:
“if you underprice yourself, you’re seen as valueless. And if you price yourself adequately or a little bit high, that hurt on your customers actually makes you more valuable.”
— Paul Pape, Gamify Business, on Unscripted Small Business
The buyer’s instinct is right more often than it feels. A number well under the others is a signal that somebody has either misunderstood the job or intends to make the margin back somewhere you have not looked yet.
Check the references, then check the work
Rick’s pre-hire list is short and nobody does all of it:
“I would encourage people to check references, to read Google reviews, to look at pictures of existing work and work that they’ve done. and even call someone and say, talk to me about how these people work.”
— Rick Haggerty
A phone call to a previous customer is fifteen minutes and it is the most reliable data you will get. Ask how the company handled the thing that went wrong — not whether something went wrong, because something always does.
The standard worth holding a contractor to
“we train our people to see problems before the customers do. And then we want to fix them before the punch list is created by the customer or the homeowner.”
— Rick Haggerty
That is the difference between a company that manages a job and one that responds to complaints, and you can find out which you are dealing with before any money changes hands. Ask how they tell you about a problem you have not spotted yet.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More conversations with contractors and small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.