Dealing with local kitchen remodelers, whether contractors or the trades, is an unpredictable business.Some homeowners think that online-based ¡°contractor matching¡± services such as Servicemagic will give them all the comfort they need.

What homeowners don¡¯t know is that most of these services are lead generators. Contractors pay upwards of $60 to buy home improvement ¡°leads¡±; i.e., your contact information. Screening is minimal, and is limited only to the biggest, baddest, scariest issues (licensing, bonding, criminal records, etc.). Once you¡¯ve cleared the fact that the contractor is not wanted by the F.B.I., how can you know if a certain kitchen remodeler is any good or not?

By dealing with a franchise perhaps? We spoke with Kitchen Tune-Up¡¯s Director of Marketing, Beth M. Schmitz, about Kitchen Tune-Up and how their franchise system helps homeowners remodel their kitchens with a relative sense of security and consistency.

What Kitchen Tune-Up Does

Kitchen Tune-Up¡¯s headquarters are based in Aberdeen, SD, with roughly 125 individual franchise owners spread out across the U.S. President Dave Haglund started out with a cabinet dealership in 1975, and then began franchising in 1988.Kitchen Tune-Up did not expand beyond cabinets immediately. For awhile, the company concentrated on cabinet wood reconditioning, before branching off into areas such as cabinet redooring, custom cabinetry, cabinet refacing, and even bathroom remodeling.

The Trustpoints System

Kitchen Tune-Up likes to stick to the basics. Through experience, they learned that customers were very much concerned about clean-up at the end of the day.Clean-up can be a contentious issue between independent remodelers and customers. Often, clean-up and pick-up mean more work for the remodeler on the following day. The most time-efficient thing for a remodeler would be to leave everything ¡°as is¡± at the end of the day.

But you cannot do this in a customer¡¯s house, so Kitchen Tune-Up has made clean-up one of their eight TrustPoints that ensure consistency and security for the homeowner.

Franchisee Training

We asked Ms. Schmitz how Kitchen Tune-Up balances the need to recruit new franchisees with the need to develop existing owners. She told us that every January, owners get together in some hopefully warm place for a three-day ¡°reunion,¡± as they call it.¡±We do have intensive technical training,¡± says Schmitz, ¡°but mostly we try to concentrate on helping owners develop their business¡­and on how to be a good owner.¡±

The winter reunions are also a time for owners to meet, greet, and exchange information about kitchen renovation techniques and trends.