Ilene Rachford had her kitchen and dining room in Clayton, Ohio, remodeled with lots of windows to get a better view of the river that runs behind her house.
And though seeing the water and trees and watching the birds and animals feeds her soul, the remodeling job itself was never properly completed.
“The fellow we hired to do the work had all kinds of wonderful ideas, but his follow-through wasn’t very good,” Rachford said. “He bailed on us without finishing everything he was supposed to do.”
That’s why Dave Witt recently was on Rachford’s roof. Witt, who bills himself as “FIXITGUY, Dayton’s Best Handyman,” was replacing a range hood outlet that the remodeler apparently botched.
Witt, who has worked for Rachford several times, also replaced a few plumbing pipes and did some other odd jobs around the house.
A generation ago, most handymen were retired guys who used to be builders or plumbers. They made extra money by doing minor repairs for friends and the friends of friends.
“If the dad was handy at one house, the wife would send him across the street to the house that didn’t have a handy dad,” Witt said.
Now the handyman trade is becoming a lucrative business with full-time professionals such as Witt and national companies competing for a fast-growing market.
“I try to work five days a week, about six hours a day,” Witt said. “I’m a single father, and I schedule myself so I can spend time with my son. But if I wanted to, I could work all day seven days a week. There are more than enough jobs available.”
Witt and representatives of two corporate handyman services–the Home Service Store and Case Handyman Services–all said the demand for handyman services is booming.
They said several factors contribute to that, including consumer frustrations over finding contractors willing to handle small jobs.
In the current thriving economy, people with plumbing, electrical, carpentry and similar skills have all the work they can handle. They can sneer at jobs promising to pay $200 when jobs worth $5,000 are plentiful.
But perhaps the most important factor in the growing demand for handymen is the prevalence of households without men. Witt said single female homeowners, divorced women and widows make up about 60 percent of his clientele.
Many of the rest are professional people who might be able to do odd jobs such as replacing broken light fixtures, but who don’t have the time.
Another category is retirees.
“A lot of the work they could do, but they just don’t want to do it,” said Eric Eggers, president of the local Case Handyman Services franchise. “They could get on a ladder and clean the leaves out of their gutters, but they say, ‘Why take the chance of falling off a ladder?’ They’d rather be out somewhere playing golf and enjoying their leisure time.”
Eggers is president of Remodeling Designs Inc. of Washington Township, and last year his company bought a franchise from the national company Case Handyman Services.
“We started the handyman business because so many of our clients through Remodeling Designs would ask us to do small jobs that weren’t related to the remodeling we were doing,” Eggers said.
“We tried to run a handyman division within Remodeling Designs four years ago, but it failed,” Eggers said. “We were trying to use the same crews we used for remodeling to do handyman work. Now we’ve got a separate company and people who do nothing but handle small jobs.”
Eggers said the company will gross about $650,000 in its first year handling jobs that generally ranged from $500 to $2,500.
Now he said Case Handyman Services needs to expand. “Whether you have two employees or six, the overhead is nearly the same. But with six, your revenues are higher.
“Right now we’re trying to develop client trust. Our guys show up in uniform in a company-owned vehicle, and our customers know exactly who they’re dealing with. We think that’s valuable to people, and they’re going to keep calling us back.”
Sam’s Club and True Value Hardware stores entered the Dayton, Ohio, handyman market in March with a Washington Township-based outlet of the Home Service Store.
Dan Howard, who managed the Builder’s Square store in Trotwood, Ohio, before it closed, is district manager for the Home Service Store local operation.
“We’re like a AAA for the home-improvement industry,” Howard said. “You call us and tell us what you want, and we’ll set you up with the people to get it done.”
The Home Service Store basically is a consortium of local contractors who work under the store’s direction. Howard said the company has about 50 contractors who can do anything up to building a house, but most of the jobs are small.
Howard said the company had to interview 450 contractors to find the 50 who became part of the consortium. “We had to know if they really could do the work, plus we checked them out for criminal background,” he said. “We had to be able to guarantee these guys before we sent them into people’s houses.”
The way the Home Service Store works is that people call the company’s tollfree number, log onto its Web site or contact the company through Sam’s Club or True Value hardware stores.
The company gets a job description and dispatches a worker to bid on the job.
The customer pays the Home Service Store when the job is completed satisfactorily, and the Store pays the contractor.
Witt of Dayton said he’s been doing small jobs since he was about 12. He delivered the Dayton Daily News and used his contacts with newspaper subscribers to drum up such jobs as raking leaves.
Witt later became a heating and air-conditioning technician, but he drifted into full-time handyman work in part because the heating business was becoming too stressful and too cutthroat.
He sets his own schedules and offers a handyman-for-a-day service for $350.
“Now every day is different,” he said. “In the spring, I do a lot of ceiling fans. This year I did four playground sets. People buy what they think is playground equipment and what gets delivered is a pile of lumber, and they don’t know what to do with it.
“I run into a lot of situations where people start a project and find out they’re in way over their heads. This work is a lot of fun, and I get to help people out.”
