Gate 1: Face to Face
Picture this: Your renovation project has been incubating for a quite a while. Something triggers a change: becoming empty nesters, having your first child, or winning the lottery! You wonder if it would be easier and less expensive to buy elsewhere. You look around to find a better home, but don’t fall in love with anything, everything is so expensive anyway, and to live further out will mean a long commute. You decide to stay put, and to reach out to promising renovation firms. You ask people you know. You have seen job signs. You search the web. Maybe CG&S is one of the firms you contact. So you call or email us. That’s great; we love getting inquiries from folks like you!
Illustrations by CG&S
One of our sales folks will reply, usually by email, asking for a quiet time to have a 20–30 minute chat over the phone to find out more about your project. We will reply within two business days, because we believe you deserve prompt attention.
Design Vision, Scope, Cost, and Time
The first phone call is a very important one, because we have a lot to learn about each other! We’ll each have lots of questions, and we both need to find out if we connect. For example: CG&S is a full service architect-builder, an all-in-one, ‘soup to nuts’ company. You may love that idea, or you may want more options.
Also, it’s not too early to talk about the foundational elements of any renovation project: design vision, scope, cost, and time. We’ll want to discuss the ‘why’ behind the project, not just the ‘what’. That helps us uncover what’s driving the project, and deepens our understanding. Just like any company, CG&S is not perfect for everyone, so the outcome of the first call varies. We may decide we’re not a good fit for each other, and that’s OK. This can happen for lots of reasons, but it’s usually a disconnect between your cost and/or time expectations and ours. Completely understandable! After all, you don’t do this every day like we do. On the other hand, we may mutually feel that everything matches up, and naturally want to go to the next step: Gate 1. So we set an appointment to meet for a no-cost initial consultation.
Once we've met in person to discuss the project more in depth, either at your home or our office, we have made it through Gate 1: Face to Face. This meeting takes an hour to an hour and a half, and it’s our next opportunity to understand each other. It’s helpful for you to have prepared several things for us: [1] Your Ultimate Wishlist with ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’ written down, the design program. [2] Your property survey and your existing house plans [if they exist], the existing conditions. [3] Your bookmarked design images [from websites like Houzz.com, or from magazines], your design vision.
All decision makers need to present, and we’ll just have a good old time. Maybe you will have drinks and snacks for us! Once we have a deeper level of mutual understanding, we’ll decide what we should do next. If it makes sense to continue the conversation, we’ll go Gate 2: Proposal.
More on that next time!
