What does it mean when someone tells you that you are “covered?” In reality it could be a porch, a gazebo, a roof, a hat, financial backing, an insurance policy, an umbrella in the rain… the options are endless, especially without context. So what do we do in this age of technological advancements when there is a question without an answer? Look it up.

According to Merriam-Webster:

To have someone or something covered: to have done, gotten, or provided whatever is needed : take care of everything.

We have intentionally made the decision to focus our services on the area(s) closest to our home here in Sapphire, North Carolina. We believe that this type of focus will help us cover all of your needs, and help us achieve our goal of individual satisfaction, on an everyday basis, on every project we work on, and with every client who has provided us the opportunity to work with them on achieving their goals.

As my father told me many years ago, don’t expect to be able to be be all things to all people.

Over many decades in the corporate environment, something became more and more pronounced the older – uh, I mean more experienced – I became. If the business was going to be successful, “we” the representatives of the business needed to be intimately familiar with and completely understand what it is the client really needs, spoken or not.

As a leader in the organization what you need, should be the exact same thing that WE NEED or HAVE NEEDED. Let me attempt here to get away from the obvious and move into the more focused examples.

When we moved up to the area, we needed to find a few trustworthy sources that could help us out do things around our house while I was working and my daughter was at school. What we were looking for was craftsman who could do what was in our best interest, when we were not there “doing it” ourselves. While I have completed many of the smaller projects personally, I have also used support workers locally for some of the larger and more labor intensive projects like graveling the driveway.

While I will spare you the details of disappointment, let’s just agree that if you were to talk to your neighbors as we have, the outcomes were depressingly similar with vendors in the local area. In reality, craftsmen are not the same as they were ten or twenty years ago. I am in no way implying that there are not top rated craftsmen who can do the tasks with excellence, but the reality is they have become few and far between. Here locally, handling “smaller projects” is not something an artisan is willing to put in his or her schedule. The fact is, smaller projects with smaller budgets, are not worth their time.

If you want to find out more about how we operate or our beliefs, message us. We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss your needs and get to know you better. Much like you, we choose who we want to work with and it all starts with getting to know each other.

Until then.

I remember how easy it looked when my father did home repair and improvement projects. Remember dear reader that this was before the DYI (Do It Yourself) movement. We didn’t have the luxury in my house to watch it on HGTV. We were expected to be actively involved.

I was dipping the mops in the blacktop when he was blacktopping the driveway. It was made to look effortless when he put a cement parking pad on the side of the house, so mom could back out of the drive. I remember the unbelievable heat when helping bring the pink rolls of insulation up the attic stairs. Do you remember the Pink Panther commercial making it look so easy? I recall getting sunburned as we tore out and rebuilt the deck during my summer vacation Junior year of High School. I can still remember watching my dad as he managed a crew while building a cement bunker (OK, it was a garage…) in the side of the hill behind our house, so he could store his 32ft Chris-Craft boat out of the elements over a Wisconsin winter. Ah, those were the days.

“Dad, why don’t we just do it?”

Getting snapped out of deep thought is sometimes jarring. Here I was thinking about a time before my daughter was even born. “What do you think Dad?” she asked again. An honest question from a ten year old. “Hold the phone”, I told her. “I know it seems easy watching me do all the work around here, but sweetheart it’s a lot of work do do what I am doing in and around our own home… let alone someone else’s.” What she said next made me want to take on all those “smaller projects” each and every neighbor says that they are in need of getting done.

“Look at everything you have done here already… and how wonderful it looks now.”

Huh, it’s not close to her birthday or Christmas. Maybe she is buttering me up for some over priced video game, or technological do-dad. Or maybe she sees what I was missing. Maybe in my haste to come to a conclusion about how to handle the next project here at the CabinCare Cabin, maybe I have become a little cynical, I got tired of people not showing up, not doing a quality job, leaving a job site (my property…) a mess, showing up late, leaving early, being on their phone more than they were working?

Maybe there are other people that are having the same difficulties and want someone reliable to handle the small stuff for them? If you are like me and want even the smallest projects done with excellence, contact me by clicking here and let’s talk about the project you have in mind.

Large or small, CabinCare can help with it all.

While preparing to start the CabinCare WNC blog, we though it only appropriate to start with a what you should expect as a reader, potentially as a customer, definitely as a vendor, and without question as someone interested in joining our team.

Let’s focus on first things first… what you should know about working with us.

We as a company, are not looking to “compete” with the undocumented workers behind the gas station, someone who will accept a minimum wage offer because they need to feed their kid (or their meth addition), actively choose to use substandard “products” to save money while increasing their profit, neglect to see the value in carrying the proper insurance coverage, don’t see the value to our community or our country in paying taxes for their “side hustle,” accept to exchange their time for “pittance,” because of the need to pay rent or engage in the popular pricing game of “a race to the bottom” that leads to cutting corners, subpar results, eventual resentment, and a guaranteed relationship termination.

So we are clear, if you want to find the cheapest, lowest dollar per hour human willing to work on whatever project you have or simply can’t do whatever it is for yourself, please consider using someone… other than us.

When you are not happy with the results or the services ended up being sub-par, it will just cost you more in time, money, effort and energy to repair it or do it correctly later when you are doing it again… and you will be doing it again.

Before you hire, think

Please, if you are going to bring non-residence working people into your home, onto your property or in our community – at the very least – conduct a criminal background check online just to make sure they are not currently wanted by the police or the FBI.

At MINIMUM make sure they have been arrested for theft, drug usage, narcotic distribution or are on some pedophile website. You are bringing potential problems into OUR community.

Maybe you are not a “full time” resident, maybe you are simply looking to save a little money on that Honey Do list, but this is still your community. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts, that its not the residence of this community that are throwing trash out the windows of the vehicles that are on the sides of our roads and within our communities.

We would hope that you would want to come up to the Mountain for a visit, and know that you, your family and your loved ones are safe and there is not a three time sex offender working next door because he was the lowest bid.

If that is the level of work you want or if that is who you would like working at or in your property, there is someone to is always willing to provide that level of service for you, and as sure as the sun coming up… it isn’t us. So do us all a favor, and don’t contact us or take us up on the FREE quote.

When you are ready, contact us and we can talk about a long term solution with someone you can trust.

If you are reading today’s post, most likely you have clicked a link… so thank you. Thank you for your interest in our company and your time getting to know what we stand for.. and what we won’t. The one major take away from my time in business is that time is the one thing that we can’t get more of, no matter how much we hope or how much we have to spend… so we truly appreciate allowing us some of yours.

When it comes to matters of the heart, we have all been advised at one time or another to take our time and be patient. Well, if previous dealings in the romantic arena are any clue to how things of an important nature should move forward, the same advice might also have value in a relationship where trust is required.  This level of trust includes relationships with someone who has been hired to come into your home or has been granted approval to access your property.

Trust is earned, not given.

If you are going to work with our team at CabinCareWNC, there are a few key things that are important to us. One of the most important is that we need to know each other on a deeper level. Deeper than your typical handy-man, paint vendor, cleaning service or any other type of on-call service. While having someone on-call (or on speed dial if they have been with you long enough), to “go fix” something at your home… especially your second home… nothing trumps having a trusted resource that can help you manage your time, your home and your property… in the way you would want it done, without doing it yourself.

To accomplish this level of trust, I am sure we would need to agree on a few key areas.

First, you will need to be able to get to know that person, I mean really know that person, if you are going to allow them the opportunity to earn your trust. To know how you want certain aspects of the request done within in your home (and outside for that matter), open and honest conversations are a must. Without these conversations, vendors may fail to meet your wants and needs, and we are not looking to be just another vendor. When the time is right, this earned trust will allow this “partner” to take the reins and do what needs to be done on your behalf. That is not as easy as it might seem simply reading it.

“The best way to know someone is to spend time getting to know them.”

I know this statement seems very basic, but is it? When my family used a “service provider” around our properties, we were always taught to go out of our way to try to have more in-depth one-on-one conversations and get to know who we were dealing with.

This kind of depth allowed us to get to know someone more intimately, how they operate, how they invoice, what we should expect, to make sure they were fully aware what we expected and to clarify what we should expect from them. While the wisdom was passed down multiple generations, the take away was more than just making sure a “vendor” knew what we wanted him or her to do. It goes much deeper.

This leads me to why you are here…

I would like you to consider allowing CabinCareWNC to work on your behalf.  We are aware that you have a list of people that you call for all those “little things” around your cabin. If they are good at what they do, we would like the ability to refer them for our requests as well. If you have someone you know, like and trust, tell us about them here. We also know (first hand) how much of your personal time it takes to manage multiple people and projects.

Living in the area we service, we understand the hassle of trying to get someone “local” to come out to your property to give you an estimate, show up for what you believed was a scheduled appointment, or to finish interior work while you are there… especially if you are only up for the weekend or a holiday to supervise. We know the frustration of trying to wrangle service providers, so much so if I told you our experience was like herding cats, you might tend to agree.

If you have lived here long enough then you may have come to realize that many of the top local service providers are so good – not only at doing the work, but managing their processes – that the ability to get those providers to work on the smaller projects that you need to be done (from $250 to $10,000), has become virtually impossible. The issues this causes homeowners like you and me, and the process of locating and retaining some to work “locally,” seemed not only inefficient but ineffective. If you are like most, good enough has become the norm. What it does accomplish could almost be considered theft.  It has stolen large chunks of your valuable time, stolen it away from the things you would rather be doing while you are here.

This leads me to why we are here…

We at CabinCareWNC would like to offer you a trustworthy solution locally. We want to earn your business. So much so we have designed this company to be more like a partner. In our opinion, not only have we lost the beauty and art of business to “box stores,” but we have by default trained the workforce to run the race to the bottom while engaging in pricing wars and putting integrity and professionalism last. More importantly, we are not teaching the future generations how to “properly” open, manage and operate and successful small business.

But there is another reason…

I am helping my 10-year-old daughter’s business idea.  If you don’t know the CabineCareWNC back story, you can read it here. Needless to say, when she expressed interest in opening a service company here in the Sapphire Valley, successful or not, I wanted to expose her to what the process was  to start a small business and what it would take to follow through on her idea.

Like any parent, I could not be more proud of the vision. It was her choice, after all, to find and purchase the rights to the Black Bear hugging the trees because she said the image expressed what we wanted people to know and the importance of keeping this area beautiful.  It is not a simple thing to open a business, and so she didn’t struggle, become frustrated (as we all have started a business) and eventually quit, I submitted my resume and fortunately was hired as her Operations Manager.  I say this tongue in cheek of course, but I wanted to make sure all the “T’s” were crossed and “I’s” were dotted.

I believe in her idea so much, that when she is working on a clients behalf on one of her services (Residential Cleaning, Pet Sitting, and House Sitting, I am right by her side making sure it is being done correctly and she is learning not only the how… but the why.

I also had the selfish desire to make sure that people like us (you and I), have access to quality sources to do work on our properties here in Sapphire.  It was my goal to build a list of people and local businesses that we can trust. I wanted to be a resource for people that are actually doing the work, so they could focus on doing what they were good at while allowing me to focus on my skills (marketing, customer service, and design). Most of all I saw a need for hardworking and dedicated people from within our local community, that could not only take care of the things that we needed to be done, large and small but would join us and continue to add value, work hard and improve the community – one property and one client at a time.

No matter you need, I would be honored to discuss it with you at no charge. Click here to send me a message.

Sincerely,

Chris Bauer

Operations Manager

CabinCareWNC, LLC.