Amy Matthews and Chris Terrill talk with Mark and Theresa about dating, exploring the Arctic, DIY Network, home advice, and dump trucks at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in New Orleans.
Mark: Rock me back to MyFixitUpLife inside the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show, or KBIS, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the big easy, crescent city.
Theresa: Question for you.
Mark: Yes?
Theresa: What year is it?
Mark: Well that’s.
Theresa: That’s a tough one.
Mark: It’s always the times and the dates that crush me.
Theresa: Do you even know what day of the week it is?
Mark: I’m not good with specificals.
Amy: I know, I know.
Theresa: The voice you hear is Amy Matthews, who knows what day it is.
Amy: I do. I think it’s Friday.
Chris: I think you’re correct.
Theresa: Ding ding ding we have a winner. You just won a CD.
Mark: Well played Amy Matthews.
Amy: I just want to take the guy with the guitar home and you can for the whole family.
Theresa: I know isn’t that wonderful? He should just jump somebody.
Mark: TimWilliams.com.
Theresa: I often have the fantasy of, that it’s like Frosty the Snowman or somebody walking around narrating my life and singing a little song and make it happy. Do you know what I mean?
Amy: I haven’t ever thought that but I think it’s a great idea.
Theresa: That Antonio Banderas character, Leg, in Vita where he just appears and he’s just very sexy singing a song about your life.
Amy: You should get one of those for your house.
Theresa: I know it would be a good addition. We are here with Amy and Chris and they are talking about home advisor here at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show. My husband is fascinated with you. Did he tell you why Chris?
Chris: No, but I’d love to know.
Theresa: He says that if there’s anything that ever happens to me, you know where he’s going to go?
Chris: No.
Theresa: Match.com.
Chris: I know Match well, I was there for a long time.
Mark: We’ve read your bio before you got to Home Advisor and you were with Blockbuster. You started Chemistry and the food one.
Chris: Food one, Nutrisystem.
Theresa: Nutrisystem.
Chris: Nutrisystem. You guys should’ve got P90X, I know that.
Mark: I read your bio. I want to eat better, watch a movie. I can’t do match.com, so I want to make a lab experiment at chemistry.com.
Chris: Perfect.
Theresa: I always say that I want Mark and I to sign up separately to something like and see if we get matched.
Chris: See if the algorithms put you together.
Theresa: Wouldn’t that be interesting.
Mark: If you did, what would you do about that?
Theresa: I don’t know.
Mark: That’s a tough question, don’t ask how.
Theresa: I’m going to write into whoever developed match.com and say, you know what we’re matched anyway, what’s the deal with that.
Chris: That’s a good point.
Mark: Now, Chris and Amy, check down on Home Advisor, homeadvisor.com. What problems have you guys tuned into for referring homeowners and getting contractors together and making that work better?
Amy: We need a therapist, that’s what we’re here for.
Theresa: We need a couch.
Chris: It’s a bit like dating. Really, when you think about it, it’s getting the right people together. You’ve got to understand what the homeowner needs, you’ve got to understand what their project is and you’ve got to figure out who’s the right service professional to really help them with their particular needs. That’s what we do. We sit down and figure out what’s your project and who can help you and can they help you right now. That’s the crux of what we do.
Theresa: That is such a good answer because who else is inside your bathroom or your kitchen or in your closet or, you know, your contractor. You don’t let your lawyer in your bathroom and just poking around in your shower.
Chris: It’s like dating, if you make the right match it’s a perfect relationship, you’re both happy.
Amy: You better watch out for that because if she goes on to find a plumber or contractor and it’s more likely that she’d get that match on match dot com, I think you might have a problem.
Mark: Well, I mean, take a look at me. I mean what’s… There’s going to be like one.
Theresa: It’s going to get better than that.
Mark: One girl would show up to dinner and drinks and be like, just drinks thanks and you buy. That’s good nice shoes. I got a guy just, building’s on fire. The other thing you’ve got at Home Advisor is, I don’t want to call it peer review but, customer review. Mary A from wherever has used this plumber or this contractor. Is there a way that you can actually measure how valuable and how much impact those reviews have to pull business towards a contractor, to help people focus?
Chris: I’d go back to dating. It’s much like a photo. If you have a profile and you have no photo, it’s a lot harder. If you’re a contractor, you need those reviews. People are looking for it. Seventy-five percent of all people are going online and looking for reviews before they do anything, whether it’s repair, maintenance, or even a big project, so it’s critical. Those reviews tell consumers and homeowners, yes someone’s used them, I can read about what they’ve done, they’re the right match for me.
Theresa: I read that there are 2 million ratings on Home Advisor.
Chris: Yeah, we have over 2 million now.
Theresa: That is insane.
Chris: It’s great and what’s helpful is its good, it’s where the space is going. More and more restaurants, hotels and service professionals, people are going online and looking for reviews. They want to know that someone else has used them. They want to be able to read and understand.
Amy: Absolutely and, as a contractor who works with a lot of homeowners, they’re always asking me how do I find a professional. The one thing I’ve found, in my business, was so challenging for people is they had to do all these background checks themselves, they had to go to the Better Business Bureau, I mean you’re letting this person in your home like you said, in your bathroom, and your kids are there and they might even have a key to your house and you want to know that you’re letting in a person who is totally credible, who has had financial criminal background checks done on them and who you’re reading a review not just a review on the service, but a review on that particular person that you’re hiring. There’s so much time and effort that goes into what Home Advisor does, is it takes it off the plate of the homeowner, which means that my clients can focus on their project, they can focus on their family and they can focus on all those that are important because these guys just took the leg work out of it.
Chris: Plus we give peace of mind with screening and approving. We screen and approve everyone in the network so you don’t have to worry about that. That’s a big deal, a lot of people want to know are they financially stable, have they been screened for criminal and we do all of that ahead of time, so it helps the homeowner.
Mark: Two things. One, I wouldn’t pass and two.
Theresa: You would pass.
Mark: I would pass. I’m a nice boy.
Theresa: There would be dope reviews though.
Mark: Amy you’ve got a young child at home.
Amy: I do.
Mark: And in all the stuff that you’ve done in your contracting business and on DIY Network, which you’ve got a huge body of work in all these different projects, small, big, has the presence of a new life in your life changed your approach to how you do projects?
Amy: Absolutely. Everything well, number one is baby-proofing the house is a challenge in itself. It just takes forever. I thought I think I should write a book on that because if you think design completely different. I keep putting the same thing down in the middle of the room that I like, this décor piece, and as soon as he wakes up and goes in there he pulls the glass pieces off, and I was like okay.
Chris: They’ll hone in on the very thing you forgot to. It’s amazing they will find that one specific area.
Amy: They do. They find it. It’s like they just gravitate towards the stairs.
Chris: Oh, I’m not supposed to go there, I will. I’m into that.
Theresa: Design by baby.
Amy: Also, as a mom, I think it’s the time and I think that’s one thing that Home Advisor clients are probably looking for too is they don’t have time to spend on all these other things. Our lives are so busy nowadays that you don’t want to … you know it’s funny actually, yesterday, as I was coming to KBIS, or preparing to come this morning, we had a snowstorm. It’s April, we had a snowstorm in Minnesota, it’s ridiculous. There’s six inches of snow flying. There’s sleet. There’s rain. There’s everything. It’s a disaster and I have a really steep driveway and my husband is out of town and I can’t drive the tractor out there to get the snow plowed and get the salt down because the baby’s in the house and it’s like forever, we have seven acres, so I can’t leave him in the house and I’m there by myself.
I get online to try and find a snowplow in my area, and do you know the first thing that came up? I started cracking up. It was Home Advisor. I found something through Home Advisor to get the snow out of my driveway, so I actually had a good laugh.
Theresa: That is fantastic. I do want to say one thing though. Snow, your husband is on expedition right now.
Amy: Yes, he goes to the arctic and I get snowed on.
Theresa: Did he send the snow to you? Like he sort of wanted to share in the universe.
Amy: I think he might’ve. It’s beautiful 13, well he thinks 13 degrees is beautiful, sunny skies, there’s mountains everywhere. They don’t have a town for five days in one direction or five days in another. He’s in heaven and we’re getting snowed on.
Mark: What is he doing there? We saw a tweet from @DIYMatthews that he was gone, but I don’t know what he’s doing up there.
Amy: He is a professor at the University of Minnesota. He creates adventure learning projects. So people can follow along in real time as these adventurers and explorers are out there interviewing people, interviewing elders, collecting traditional ecological knowledge of these villages, and how things in that area are changing and how people are evolving.
Chris: Can you imagine going to a party with these two? They ask you what you do and you’re like, ah nothing. I don’t explore the arctic. I’m not on TV. I just do stuff.
Theresa: I sit on my sofa and I eat chips.
Mark: I have a cube that’s cool. I have a picture of snow.
Theresa: I walked up and down the stairs today in my house.
Mark: Even though I want to get back to HomeAdvisor.com, the most important question I have right now, this is mission critical, you own a snowplow.
Amy: Oh yeah, a riding tractor. It’s awesome.
Mark: Riding tractor snowplow. We’re going to spend the rest of the interview on that and get all detail. I’m fascinated with snowplows.
Theresa: Mark saw, it was a dump truck with a snowplow on it.
Mark: It was a garbage truck.
Theresa: A garbage truck with a snowplow last year and he hasn’t stopped talking about it.
Amy: You might need one. Do you have a big driveway?
Theresa: No, we don’t need it.
Mark: No, we don’t need one.
Theresa: And we don’t need a dump truck.
Chris: You always need one, you need one.
Theresa: We have a truck and a trailer. We don’t need a dump truck. We don’t need a snowplow.
Mark: Do you have a dump truck too?
Amy: No, but my little guy that’s 18 months old is fascinated with tractors. I have the feeling the first thing we’ll get him instead of a fancy car is probably a dump truck, which is fine with me.
Theresa: Yeah, Mark’s been shopping online for used dump trucks.
Chris: Put flames on it.
Mark: Actually, I’ve got a friend doing it for me. I can’t do it myself because I’ll just buy one.
Theresa: He’ll get in trouble if I see him shopping for a dump truck too. We don’t need a dump truck.
Chris: What’s a dump truck go for these days?
Mark: It depends, I mean, as it turns out I just have a printout right here that I keep with me in my pocket of.
Theresa: You saw one it was like $10,000 or something right?
Mark: They’re all over the map. You can buy all kinds of used stuff …
Theresa: Not bad really for a dump truck.
Chris: Think of all the uses.
Theresa: We don’t really need.
Amy: Father Day is coming up.
Theresa: We don’t need one.
Mark: Father’s Day is coming up, beep beep.
Theresa: Do you have a website that you’ve developed for that?
Chris: For dump trucks?
Theresa: Yeah, for marriage intervention.
Chris: No, but I can talk to the folks at Match and see if they can figure that out for you, as far as the full cycle of life. Get you together then.
Theresa: Because you can eat healthy, you can find a contractor, you can find true love.
Mark: You can follow Chris and Amy @HomeAdvisor on twitter. HomeAdvisor.com. Facebook.com/HomeAdvisor. Check out Amy at AmyMatthews.com and @DIYMatthews at Facebook.com/DIYMatthews. Check us out we got to go. We’ll be back with more of the kitchen and bath show more of MyFixitUpLife.
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