Deck Building Reviews

I am Tim's partner. Tim came up building decks, I came up framing houses, and we joined forces eight years ago before working alone wore us both out. My end is estimates and customers. Tim's end is the deck. Tim can build one that will outlive the house and he cannot explain one to save his life. A customer asks why composite costs what it costs and Tim starts in on hidden fasteners like that settles it. For years we lost those folks. They smiled, took the number, and went and found a man cheaper and better at talking. A woman from the next town over told me at her kitchen counter, with Tim standing there, that she had already decided before she called. She had spent an evening on the website Launchbarr built us, looking at finished decks on houses like hers, not a catalog, and she said the price still made her gulp but at least she could see where it went. Railing. Footings. The stairs her dad needs to get down to his yard. We built it in July, and she sent us a picture of her dad out there in a chair like a king. Tim still cannot explain a deck. He does not have to open with it anymore. Last week I heard him tell a new customer, go look at the pictures first, then I will talk. From Tim, that is a personality change.

I quote from a notebook in the truck and the notebook is winning. Pages stick, numbers smear, and by the time I called somebody back they had talked to two other builders. June says I run a deck company out of a glove box and she is only half joking. The booking Launchbarr put on the website changed my end of it. People send photos and rough sizes, and it is all there when I get home. June says the glove box is retired.

I never asked for reviews. Felt like begging, and my old man raised me to let the work talk. Problem is the work talks to one street and then shuts up. Launchbarr asks for me, after the job, when people are standing on the thing drinking coffee on it. A man two towns over said he called because three reviews in a row mentioned we left the yard cleaner than the last crew who worked there. That stung a little, we are carpenters, not maids. Then it did not sting. Spring filled up without me knocking a dollar off to fill it. My old man came to see a finished one in May and said, huh, they do talk after all. I let him have the last word. It was almost a compliment.

Every spring my phone fills up with people who have been saving pictures since Thanksgiving. They want the whole thing, the big beams, the outdoor kitchen, and then they hear the number and go quiet. I used to take that personal. I would sharpen the pencil, cut my own throat a little, and spend June mad at a job I bid myself. The social posts Launchbarr started doing for us showed our real finished decks around town, not somebody else's work from a brochure. A couple across town said they kept seeing the deck we built for their neighbors and finally called, already knowing roughly what honest costs. We talked about their yard, not about defending the price for an hour. Built it in June, and they had a graduation party on it with thirty people and a mariachi band the guitarist set up right where the old steps were. I asked the husband how it held up with the whole crowd dancing. He said, Sam, it did not even creak. I will take that review over a paragraph on the internet.

I build decks with my hands in the hole digging footings half the day, and a ringing phone in my pocket was just weather to me. Folks would call, get nothing, and call the next name. Launchbarr put a voice on our line that answers day and night and talks like a person who works here. A lady told me at the measure that the girl on the phone asked better questions about her yard than I do. I said give her time, she is learning from the best. Walter, she said, she already passed you.

My husband Hank has poured footings in February mud with a phone ringing in his coat and let it ring, because a man cannot hold a level, a shovel, and a conversation at the same time, and Hank picks the level every time. Spring is our whole year lining up at the door, and for years the door was a phone nobody answered. The change I noticed first was small. Hank came home in March and said a woman whose call he missed while the inspector was standing in the yard had a design visit booked anyway, because the missed call got a text back right away, asking for photos of the yard and what she was dreaming about. By the time Hank called her back she was half sold. She signed for a composite build that made her husband sit down when he saw the material line, but she had already seen our finished decks and knew the number was a real number. We built it in May. She had her sister's birthday dinner on it in June. Hank told the inspector last month that his phone works better broken than it ever did whole, because now somebody answers it who is not holding a shovel. The inspector wrote that down nowhere, but I am writing it here.

My partner Sal runs the crews and I run the front end, which used to mean my cell phone melting down every March. Now the messages that come through the website get handled as they land. The system asks for photos, rough size, wood or composite, when they want it done, and books the design visit with all of it attached. A man told me last week he picked us because he did the whole thing from his couch at ten at night without talking to a human. Sal said, that is the best kind of customer, the one who shows up pre talked.

I own this company and I was the lost and found for every message we ever got. Texts on my phone, emails at midnight, notes through the website, all different piles. Launchbarr put it all in one place. Now I see the whole conversation on one screen. My daughter asked if I feel less important. Less buried, is what I feel.

Dad started this company and still thinks asking for a review is asking for a favor, so for thirty years nobody asked. Launchbarr asks for us, right after the last board goes down and the customer is standing out there with a cold drink admiring it. A man left one saying the crew chief explained the breaker board in his pattern like it was a feature, because it is one. Three of his neighbors have called since. Dad reads every review out loud at the shop like the morning news. He pretends he does not care. He cares at volume.

I will answer a good review all day long, it was the hard ones I used to leave sitting. A woman wrote that the gaps in her boards were sloppy work, and I knew those boards were wet lumber doing what wet lumber does, shrinking as it dries, but knowing it in my head and saying it right in public are two different skills. Launchbarr answers our reviews now, in our voice, plain and patient, and that answer explained the gaps, said when they would settle, and told her to call us if a single board misbehaved. She updated the review herself in the spring, said the company explained it and stood behind it. I did write that answer myself, about forty times, in my head, at two in the morning. It counts when the customer reads it.

I run the office, which mostly means I am the voice of this company to anyone who calls before ten. Everybody assumes the winter is dead for decks, but February is when the smart money books spring, and our Google listing used to be a sad little thing with a photo of the owner's truck. Launchbarr cleaned it up, real photos of finished decks, every service we actually do listed plain. The calls in February changed. People were finding us on the map and saying, I did not know you did covered decks. We did. We just never told the internet.

I am seventy and I have kept the same phone number since my boy was in diapers, when a customer told me she almost skipped us because a listing had a number that rings a parts counter two counties away. Launchbarr matched our name, address, and number everywhere. Now the phone rings here. I still let the girl answer. She is politer before coffee.

Priya is my wife and she owns this company, estimates in pencil she keeps behind her ear, and builds a ledger joint the young guys come watch. For years our website was a page the color of old lettuce with a photo of a deck we did not build, in a state we do not live in. Launchbarr rebuilt it with nothing but our own work, footings, railing close ups, the covered porch she is proudest of. A customer told her, I picked you off the pictures, the deck behind the brick house is my house if it had manners. Priya has started taking photos on purpose now. That has never happened in the history of her.

I got tired of the same phone call. Somebody finds us, asks if we do resurfacing, or a roof over the deck, or just a set of safe stairs for an old daddy, and I would think, we have done three of those this year, why does nobody know. Launchbarr put a page on our site for every kind of work we do, with our photos and plain words about each. A lady called about stairs for her father and opened with, your page said you build them wide with a rail on both sides. I did not have to sell. I had to schedule.

Sal and I are partners, he builds, I sell, and February was my annual punishment. Every homeowner who wants a July deck wakes up in February, and I used to run that calendar out of a notebook while driving. Launchbarr put our booking on the website where people pick their own slot. I watched the spring calendar fill from my couch. A builder two towns over asked how many office staff I hired. I told him none, I just stopped being the calendar. A couple booked a Saturday measure before Easter, sent pictures of a yard under snow, and wrote, we know it looks like nothing, it is going to be everything. We built it in June. I do not miss the notebook. Sal says I was a bad calendar anyway, always promising two men one truck. The calendar does not love anybody, which turns out to be fairer.

I used to lose estimates to my own forgetting. A man takes a day off work to meet me, and I am two counties away wrestling a ledger into brick. Launchbarr sends the reminders and a text when I am truly headed their way. People are home. One fellow said, you are the first contractor who told me he was coming and then came.

My husband Leo measures decks all day and writes estimates all night, or he did. He would sit at our table with a legal pad while his supper went cold, and half the time the people had signed with somebody faster by the time his pretty handwritten number got scanned and sent. Now Launchbarr sends the estimate out the same evening, by text, clean enough to read on a phone. A woman signed ours from her porch while Leo was still driving home. She told me the quick one felt like the serious one. Leo's legal pad does grocery lists now.

I keep every estimate I ever wrote in a milk crate in the shop, and my son says that crate is where money goes to be sad. People get their three bids, hear what composite really costs, and go quiet while they think. I used to think quiet meant no. Quiet mostly means not yet, and I had no system for the not yets. Launchbarr follows up on the estimates I send, a few spaced messages, easy tone, standing invitation, no begging. Last fall a couple who went silent in April answered in September, having saved over the summer, and signed for October, the last build before the weather turned. My son has counted the other crates since. Plural. This spring another quiet bid answered, a man whose daughter's wedding moved to his backyard, where the deck was suddenly not a want anymore. We built it with six weeks to spare, and I danced exactly one dance on it at delivery, which my knees filed a formal complaint about. I do not sharpen my pencil anymore when a bid goes quiet. I let the quiet ones cook.

I run a crew, I do not do the money end, but I have stood in a yard in April with a special order of composite sitting on a pallet that nobody had paid a dime toward, because the office had nothing but a handshake. That does not happen anymore. The deposit link goes out with the signed estimate and the material does not get ordered until it is paid. Last month a lady paid her deposit from her phone while I was still measuring her stairs. The boss asked how the crews like the new way. Tell him the pallets like it fine.

Half my work now is not new decks at all, it is caring for the ones already out there. A deck needs washing, sealing, boards checked, and nobody remembers on their own, so I started offering a standing care plan, twice a year, billed in small monthly amounts people do not have to think about. Launchbarr runs the billing, sends the reminders, and puts the visit on the calendar without me touching any of it. One of my first customers told her neighbor the deck just takes care of itself now, like a lawn service for the back of the house. I did not correct her. My spring route is full of decks I already know, owned by people who already trust me, and that book of names is worth more than my truck. When I slow down someday, that is the thing I will sell.

I am the daughter, so I do the papers Dad hates. Contracts used to ride around in his truck until the ink faded. Now the customer signs on their phone the day they say yes, and I see it from the office before he is home. A man signed ours from a combine. Dad says a signature from a combine counts double.

My system for thirty years was a notebook for leads, a different notebook for jobs, and whatever was in my head, which after lunch is mostly weather. By May I could not swear which version of the deck the family had settled on, the eight footer or the twelve. Launchbarr put every lead and every job on one board that I can see and my son can see and the office can see. Each job sits in its stage, plain as fence posts. The permit wait was our quiet killer. Customers go silent for weeks and start telling their neighbors we forgot them. Now check ins run along the way. A lady told me she showed her sister the board like it was a baby picture. I have stopped losing people to the silence, and I have stopped losing versions. The twelve footer won. It usually does.

I answer the phones and run the schedule, and my honest title should be Keeper of the Things Everybody Else Forgets. Launchbarr gives me a task list that knows what day it is. Follow up with the couple waiting on the homeowners association letter. Check the permit that went in three weeks ago. Call the man whose deposit landed but whose start date never got set. It taps me on the shoulder so I do not have to hold it all in my head. My boss asked if the list makes me feel replaced. It makes me feel backed up.

My partner Walt and I split it this way: he builds, I am the one who has to be likable before coffee. Finished decks are our whole advertisement and for years the photos lived on Walt's phone, which is where photos go to retire. Launchbarr started posting our finished work as we complete it, real decks, real yards, no stock anything. A man called from two streets over from a job we had just finished and said, I have watched that deck go up all month and then it showed up on my phone finished, so I figured it was a sign. Walt says the sign was his craftsmanship. The man signed with us, so they are both right and I do not have to pick.