INSTRUCTIONS BELOW.

This article explains the purpose of The Home Improvement Sales Association and the directory for home improvement businesses who operate within ethical guidelines.

Who is the initiative driven by?

This is driven by me, Sian Wood, for the benefit of small to medium companies. While I know quite a lot, after 15 years in the industry, and certainly a bit about all aspects of home improvements, I am currently putting together a voluntary board of people from different aspects of the industry, so that we have a shared knowledge base that will benefit all. See article foot if you are interested in getting involved.

Who is this for?

This is for small to medium businesses who sell home improvements. This is not for tradespeople or builders. The easy way to determine if it’s for you is if there is a large national company that sells your product, using high discount marketing.

What is the purpose?

• To provide a directory of businesses who pledge to abide by ethical guidelines, namely offer; products and services of good quality, a fair pricing strategy with no artificailly inflated prices and ridiculously high discounts and ho high pressure or unethical tactics.
• To protect consumers and raise awareness about the options available and help them them to make informed choices.
• Campaign for better enforcement of trading laws.
• Provide a forum and community for likeminded businesses to share ideas and resources.

This is an association built for the benefit of its members so we are responsive to hearing your ideas and feedback.

How will we maintain standards of listings.

Initially we will check your websites and public feedback for any signs of high discount marketing or pressure selling. Consumers will be encouraged to feedback any behaviour that is detrimental to the reputation and those listings will be removed.

What does it cost?

Now and probably until June, it costs nothing to register your business for at least a year. If we decide to charge after that, it will only be £25 per year. Registration after June will also be £25 per year.

There is a featured listing facility but for now, we will rotate companies weekly.

Who is meeting the costs of this?

I am using my own resources to build and maintain the website, start with the SEO, PR, media releases and other marketing. The focus for the next two weeks is to build the directory so it is ready to launch when we return to normal. The big companies will be mobilising already for a marketing onslaught with massive discounts so the sooner we have people on board the better.

After that, we will be looking for sponsors from within the industry, mostly companies who supply the smaller businesses and benefit from their trade.

Find out More.

The basic website is up with a dummy directory so that you can start to get the picture. Once we have enough entries, we will switch to the active directory and start marketing to consumers. There is a lot of work to be done on the website so it will improve as we go and respond to your feedback and suggestions. Right now the emphasis is on building the directory. www.homeimprovmentsalesassociation.com

This is more than a directory. This is a campaign to challenge the herd mentaility that exists within the home improvement industry.

All we need from you at the moment is to get behind this iniative. We need a lot of ‘Davids to fight the Goliaths’ and without enough support, it will not get off the ground. Please spread the word to others in the industry who you know to be reputable and share our ethos.

Register your business and create your listing. If you have any user guides that we can use, it will help to build our consumer education base more quickly. We will credit you and provide a link to your business.

If you want to get involved either as a sponsor, a voluntary board member, or to help with marketing, please get in touch with me at sian@homeimprovementsalesacademy.com

Click on the blue plus sign on the top right.  +

This will open the listing page.

Title – Use a short title that will quickly catch the viewers eye. For instance, don’t write HISA Bedroom Systems Ltd, just write HISA Bedrooms.  You can put your full company name in the listing.

Select the categories that you want to show. If there are other categories that you would like, let us know and we will add them for you.

Put in your address details then click, find on map.

Phone number, email, website address and social accounts are all self-explanatory. To find your social media account addresses, if you don’t know them,open your page in the social media account and copy and paste what’s after ‘.com/’. If your address was www.facebook.com/homeimprovementsales, you would just put in the part in bold.

Photos. Please landscape photos as this looks neater on the finished page. In other words rectangles that are wider than they are tall.

Write as much as you want in the listing Description. If you’re concerned about spelling and grammar, we’ll edit for you. If you want you can copy and post the wording that you have on your website.

Opening hours and established date – self explanatory.

Tick any features that apply to you. Again, if there are other features that you would like us to add, let us know.

Click Submit and it will show as pending while we check your listing. At this end, we will click publish and send you a link so that you can view your page.

You may repeat this for branches in different locations.

To edit your page, sign in on the same page and you will see your listings. Click the gear icon if you wish to edit or delete your page.

The home improvement industry still has a poor reputation which makes life harder for reputable companies who live under this shadow.

It isn’t just the fake high discount marketing that we object to.

It’s also, but not limited to:

Tha lack of training given to designers/salespeople who are then inflicted on an unsuspecting public.

The ‘throw mud at the wall and hope some of it sticks’ approach to recruitment. This leads to poor retention and a lack of stability for customers who are unlikely to have a point of contact by time their order is installed.

We also object to this type of recruitment because it ruins the lives of unsuspecting salespeople who can go months before they earn any money or realise that the promises made at the interview will not materialise.

One of the national companies recruited 80 new designers in October 2018. Less than 10 of these survived until February 2019 leaving many of the others destitute through Christmas.

Commission only salespeople put their own needs before the customers and will tell lies rather than risk losing an order. Desperate people do desperate things.

Feedback shows that at least 25% of customers are unhappy and this seems to be the accepted norm. It is not and never should be acceptable. Companies must be held accountable.

We know that the big companies are already mobilising for an onslaught of marketing with even more ridiculous discounts. When times are tough, they put even more emphasis on closing hard based on price with fictional discounts. This often means that the customer sacrifices ideals under pressure resulting in dissatisfaction with their order.