The Ninja-demo warriors lasted one more day before we fired them in a blaze of glory.

The final straw was when we tried pulling them off all demo and gave them the task of prepping and texturing the one bedroom that didn’t need anything but texture and paint. (We wanted to create a single “clean room” in the house that Tyler and I could use as an office if we needed to log on to a laptop or make a couple calls in relative peace.)

To this day I have no idea what had gotten into my head, to make me think the Ninjas were capable of completing a “finish-related” task.

Oh… they applied the texture alright. Over the top of all the door and window casing, baseboard trim, switch cover plates, light fixtures… and in some places rather than use a texture gun it appeared they’d used a bucket… maybe a shovel.

I still shake my head.

Nevertheless, Tyler and I had an agreed-upon hiring strategy and, despite the Ninja experience, we weren’t about to be shaken from it. The basic philosophy was this:

We’d post job ads on Craigslist and stack up the applicants. (If you’ve tried it lately, you’ll know that it takes about an hour or two to get upwards of 20 responses for even a menial job.)

We’d then single out the most sincere 20% of the responses and phone them for “interrogation”:

• Did they have a builder’s vocabulary?
• Did they have tools?
• Did they have a set of wheels?
• Did they have a felony record?

If they passed that phase of filtering, we’d explain our terms: “There’s no profit in this work. It’s a wage, period. We’re happy to look at a bid for a certain project, but we want to be perfectly clear: We’re NOT paying profit.”  

We never had a single word of debate or resistance to our terms. Guys were generally stoked to have a crack at some work, and that’s what we were counting on.

But the want of work did NOT, somewhat to our surprise, result in any sort of universal, heightened work ethic. If we hired 12 to 16 different guys for anything from general labor to painting to basic carpentry, we ultimately fired more than half of them for:

• failing to show up even remotely on time (or at all) after the 1st day;
• stopping work multiple times per hour to smoke and “rest”;
• doing an unacceptably low quality of work;
• calling in “sick” more than once in a 3-day period.

I might sound like I’m exagerating, and I don’t think this has anything to do with Craigslist as a temp agency. You can — and we did —  also score total winners off Craigs’.

The riff-raff is just a reality of the trades. I came to real estate from the trades (via home inspection), and I’ve watched countless guys over the years stagger away nearly in shock at how hard a full — a FULL — day on a jobsite can be.

That said, we did get some great guys — and we almost always had good luck hiring full-blown contractors after competing 3 bids against each other.

NOTE: I can’t overstate how critical it is to get bids from different contractors. Here are some examples of real numbers we got:

• 1 roof bid for $7500… another for $4300.
• 1 sheetrock bid for $5500… another for $1100.
• 1 painting bid for $3000… another for $1000.
• 1 furnace bid for $2200… another for $1280.
• And it went on and on like that.

But on our flip, we were driving HARD bargains with our hired help and our suppliers… there were no two ways about it.

So yes, we’d end up with some riff-raff that we’d have to fire and perhaps un-do and re-do their work now and again. We accepted that, as frustrating as it was at times.

All the riff-raff labor in Bellingham, though, wouldn’t cost us as much money as a key decision we were about to make. And the most painful part is that, blinded by the flurry of bigshot fast flips for fat profit, neither of us saw it coming. At all…

To be continued…