Hanna Taylor is the owner of HotWire Electric, a 9-time Best Of HomeStars Award-winning electrician company in Toronto. With over 660 reviews on HomeStars and more than 10 years of experience, we spoke with Hanna to find out more about her journey and the key factor for her company’s success.
Growing HomeStars and HotWire Together
HotWire Electric has a lot in common with HomeStars as a business. Both companies were founded over 10 years ago, both companies are run by women, and they both know the value of listening to their customers’ feedback and creating close personal connections in business.
Hanna’s unique approach to running an electrician company has led her to great success over the past 10 years. Before HomeStars, social media and review boards, it was difficult for companies like HotWire to build a reputation without spending a significant amount of money on advertising. Word of mouth was really the only way to get more clients.
Hanna explains that it was a slow process for a long time. “We did a good job for one client and we asked that client to refer us to the next and the next and the next and we slowly grew,” she recalls. “Before HomeStars it was a much slower progression and a much slower build of a company name out there.”
New Online Landscape
Ten years and over 600 reviews later, connecting with homeowners is no longer the challenge it used to be for companies like Hanna’s. Not only has HomeStars provided a platform for Canadians to be able to quickly find home service pros in their area, it has also been able to bridge the gap between customer feedback and company learnings. Because of this, companies can learn from their mistakes and ensure that the next job is better than the last.
This is the key factor to HotWire’s success. Listening to feedback and having the right processes in place to follow up and address any concerns. “Once we do a job for you, whether we messed up a little bit or we did a great job, we want your feedback. So we have an automatic process with our employees to get that review going and to get that feedback from the clients so we can learn from it, we can grow from it, and we can appreciate the amazing work that we did.”
Listening to Feedback is Critical
Listening to your clients is important to Hanna and it is to HomeStars too. We want to hear feedback so that we can create the best product for both our homeowner community and the home service professionals that make up our website. Hanna knows this and has been open and forthcoming with her suggestions. It was her suggestion in part that helped the ‘vacation mode’ function become part of our HomeStars for Business app. After expressing her concerns that her clients would be left unattended while her business closed for vacation, and that this would affect her Star Score, Hanna knew where to go and who to talk to, to turn this feedback into a change in the product.
“I talked to Nancy [Peterson, HomeStars CEO], who talked to Sarah [Steele, Director of Customer Success], who talked to the IT guy. When I came back from vacation, the vacation mode was added. That’s what I mean, you take our feedback into consideration and together we make this better. Someone else would be like, ‘okay it’s not that important to me, who cares if her score goes down.’ But if we work together, it is also good for the client because then they don’t think I am ignoring them. All it took was a couple of conversations with an IT guy.”
Having a successful business is all about being open and willing to accept and consider feedback. If you are able to really listen to what your clients want and work towards creating that for them, it makes everyone happier at the end of the day. When we asked Hanna what her advice for other home service professional companies is, she gave us this final quote:
“Accept the good and the bad, don’t fake it, be honest with your clients, be ready to help them. You have to understand that it’s all open, once you are open to the exposure, you have to be ready and prepared for what that brings.”
While both HomeStars and HotWire have grown over the past 10 years to become successful companies, the main point of note is that we have grown together. It is this partnership of open and constant communication and the willingness to change to help better serve your clients that is the biggest reason for both companies’ successes.
