The official blog of Redbeacon, the only Website that allows you to find, compare, and schedule local businesses and professionals for your service needs.
What’s good for the small-business owner is good for the consumer
By Aaron Lee, cofounder, Redbeacon
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the problems of promotion on user-review sites. These sites have come under heavy fire, so I’ve been reassessing what sets Redbeacon’s review process apart — in a beneficial way — from other sites in the local space. There are two parts to the criticism of user-review sites: first, that these sites are increasingly difficult for small businesses to support, and second, that the reviews can be manipulated.
Let’s start with the small businesses. Sure, the cost of advertising on a review site is prohibitive, but that’s not really the problem. Particularly for the small-business owner, paying hard-earned dollars for advertising on a site where they don’t get to control any of the messaging is alienating to say the least. A completed Redbeacon profile is free SEO for that pro, but unlike other local review sites, our pros build the messaging for their profiles. At Redbeacon, we want to support the small business owners who are our lifeblood — without the independent handyman or the plumber, there would be no Redbeacon.
The Redbeacon business model is this: You can’t buy CPM or CPC advertising to promote your business on Redbeacon. The payments that we take from our pros are entirely pay-for-performance; they only pay us if they win and complete a job or visit onsite when they have to give an estimate. In this way, everything we do is to make our service wholly pro-friendly, and no amount of advertising dollars can artificially boost one pro over another in our system. We don’t sell advertising, and we don’t promote individual pros based on any amount of money they pay for their Redbeacon commissions.
The reviews on our site, however, are as honest and as transparent as they come — we want our consumers to be as educated as possible to the strengths and experiences of each pro who works with us. Redbeacon reviews are never bought, and they can only be submitted by consumers who have used that particular pro’s service for a job. The reviews are the one thing a pro cannot control in his or her Redbeacon profile, which not only encourages each pro to finish a job that earns a good review, but it also ensures to our customer that no five-star Redbeacon review has been purchased.
You can’t hide from a bad review on Redbeacon, nor should you be able to. The Redbeacon model takes the best of review sites and the functionality of a small-business owner’s own personal website — all to give our consumers the best possible experience. And I think we accomplish this better than our comrades in the local space.
Redbeacon’s got a new Valentine this year — in fact, we’ve got two! Their names? Dallas and Austin. Starting today, we’re launching Redbeacon’s services in these fine Texas towns, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be reintroducing the Lone Star state to our passion for bringing home-services professionals and consumers together, as our friends in Houston can already tell you.
And what perfect timing! Now we’re just in the nick of time for you to get your home cleaned for your sweetheart. (Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a clean house!) You’ll seem so thoughtful if, after weeks of neglect, you’ve gotten the lawn cleaned up and the pesky to-do list for your home projects finished.
2011 was an amazing year at Redbeacon. We expanded into 9 new markets including: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and experienced huge growth. We also expanded our team significantly and brought on our CEO Anthony Rodio.
As we continue to make strides towards our vision of changing the way consumers find and book home services, we are happy to announce that today Redbeacon has been acquired by The Home Depot. In our opinion, The Home Depot is the perfect place for Redbeacon to achieve our vision even faster. Redbeacon and The Home Depot share many of the same core values around forward thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, excellent customer service, commitment to quality, and empowering pros and homeowners. We could not be happier to become part of The Home Depot family and to grow our team together. We want to assure all of our current users and service providers that our service will continue and will only get better!
We could not be where we are today without our amazing service providers and users, their trust in our service, and constant feedback, so thank you! Also, none of this would have been possible without Yaron, Aaron and Anthony, our stellar board Raj, Brian, Ben, Rajeev & Dev, our lawyer Ted, and most of all, our amazing, hard working and talented team.
We are excited about working with The Home Depot and continuing to improve the way consumers find and book home services together.
How does your house stack up to your neighbors’? Most of us spend our time keeping up with the Joneses, but maybe it’s time to one-up the Joneses once and for all.
Here at Redbeacon, we got to thinking about how to make your home more efficient, more attractive, more up-to-date. With this in mind, we created an infographic that illustrates some ways that you can improve your home and some statistics on what your neighbors might be doing to enhance their homes as well. (You can also check out a portion of our research on Apartment Therapy.)
This year, the Joneses will be keeping up with you.
It’s not the same as pledging to lose weight or to stop chewing your fingernails, but your home has resolutions, too! Here are a few ways to get 2012 off to a productive start:
1) Stay inside. You shouldn’t have to stop improving your home just because it’s cold outside. Because inclement weather can make external improvements difficult, focus your efforts internally. Good projects for the wintertime include electrical work, tiling projects, or appliance replacement. Limit projects that require painting — those frigid temps outside will make it hard to open windows to ventilate fumes.
2) Plan ahead. Major renovations in the favorable-weather months can be plotted and supplies can be purchased off-season when they might be less expensive. Taking your kitchen or bathroom out of commission can be a major disruption to your family’s daily routine, so the more you can get ahead of the inconvenience, the more prepared your household will be.
3) Consider the investment. With the housing market (hopefully) on the upswing, each project you complete on your home can increase its value on the market. An overhaul of your landscaping has the ability to have a 100% return on investment, as it boosts your curb appeal if your house is on the market. If you’re planning on staying in your home, a new roof can be a 25-plus-year commitment to your home’s health.
The holiday season sneaks up on all of us. We feel it, too: One minute you’re enjoying the crunch of fall leaves under your feet, and in the blink of an eye, you’re spraying de-icer on your windshield and fighting the crowds at your local mall.
We all ask ourselves how we’ll find the time to get it all finished. But hasty fixes around the house — particularly at the holidays — can mean unnecessary household injury. The right professionals can help you stay safe in your home.
Nearly half of all injuries during the holiday season are as a result of falling while putting up those colorful bulbs. Keep that in mind when you trundle up the ladder to take them down as well — a fall from one of your eaves is certain to send you to the ER.
There’s nothing like the fresh-pine smell of a real Christmas tree, but be warned: That Douglas fir will get very dry and will be susceptible to catching fire, if there are any candles, radiators, or long-illuminated lights nearby.
The only way you’re going to enjoy chestnuts roasting on an open fire is if you keep your hearth and chimney in good working order. In order to make sure you won’t end up with smoke in your home or structural chimney damage, you should plan to have your chimney inspected and cleaned annually. And as tempting as it is to toss wrapping paper into the hearth, resist the urge: The decorative elements in the paper cause it to burn quickly and could spark a flash fire.
We can help you make sure that your holiday memories include more smiles and fewer lingering home projects: the broken banister, the leaking rain gutter, the mud-colored walking path on your carpet.
Because spending time with your family is what the holidays are really for.
Now that we’re slipping into wintertime, there aren’t many things that are still growing. Except us!
To add to our eight-metro empire, we are announcing that Redbeacon’s availability now extends to Denver, Portland, and Boston. We know that there isn’t a better service to connect the fine citizens of these cities with trusted home-service professionals. And we’re doing it just in the nick of time to unclog gutters for the rainy season, shovel snowy driveways, and hang Christmas lights to make these three cities sparkle with holiday warmth.
We’re marching into these metros armed with our Home Service Guarantee and a veritable army of service professionals eager to tackle your home projects. Snow, rain, or shine, we’re ready for your to-do list this winter.
So, if you’re a resident of one of Portland, Boston, or Denver, let us know now: What’s your biggest home-repair concern for the winter?
In the Redbeacon offices, we have a lot of things to give thanks for: Energy drinks. Online radio. Remote-controlled helicopters.
But there’s only one thing that we could truly not live without, and that’s our service professionals, many of whom are themselves small business owners.
This Saturday — after the melee of Black Friday is in your rearview mirror — join in the national initiative Small Business Saturday. Think of it as the anti-Black Friday: no fluttering print ads for big-box discounts or overly caffeinated, trampling crowds. It’s simply a day where we celebrate small-business owners by buying from their businesses.
So when you choose to give your hard-earned dollars to small businesses on November 26, keep in mind that it also applies to your home-services professionals as well. (And we hear that the post-Thanksgiving weekend is a busy one, too.) We’re proud to support them, on Small Business Saturday and every day.
Here at Redbeacon HQ, we’ve been hard at work. We’ve been skipping meals and sleeping near our keyboards, all to bring you a product that we’re extraordinarily proud of.
Introducing… the Redbeacon iPhone app!
At Redbeacon, we aim to take the guesswork out of home services. With our new (and free!) app, users are able to take video, photos, and audio of the job, which enables the service provider to give the most accurate quotes possible. The app allows you to:
Submit requests
Review pros’ profiles
Accept quotes
Schedule appointments
Just because you have a leaky faucet or an unruly hedge doesn’t mean that your life stops, and with our new app, getting things fixed shouldn’t slow you down at all. Every step of the process can simply be done from your iPhone.
Need three of your four living room walls painted? Take a short video of the room. Have a washing machine that’s made a moat out of your basement? Snap a pic of the mess and attach it to your request. These additions gives our experienced pros what they need to make quick and meticulous quotes.
Life just got much easier for Atlanta home owners. Redbeacon has arrived!
Launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009, Redbeacon has since expanded to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Seattle, Houston, and now Atlanta. So for all you Atlanta home owners preparing for your winter home improvement needs and renovations, look no further. From appliance installers to yard workers, our service providers are trusted, reliable and Redbeacon-approved not to mention we offer an industry leading Home Service Guarantee.
If you’re a home service professional in Atlanta, this is good news for you too. Become a RB Pro today and take your business to the next level. Register here.
See today’s press release here. As always, stay tuned for more exciting announcements to come.
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