Many a home-owner worries on the perils of finding a Decent builder.

The honest industry providers know this.

An acronym identifies those who mostly give all their kind a bad name; trip.

It stands for tiling, roofing, insulation, paving.

As a trader it can be difficult to prove you’re one of the good guys.

After all, as a potential buyer of such services, how do you know if a reference is made up? That outstanding issues will go unfixed? That a cold call purporting to ‘notice damage’ is illegitimate? That being pushy and presumptuous is accepted behaviour?

So the good guys use the acronym^[1] to their advantage.

Home-owners easily remember it. Especially in the context of not wanting to get tripped up by the Rogues.

Decent tradesmen propose and follow measures that show theirs is the right path to share.

I can almost hear how this works. “To make sure you’re happy with everything, let me take you through your TRIP points…”

The solution selling outfits I’ve helped tend to have at least two things in common. They’re not the cheapest option out there first off. They also have a particular competitor that over-promise and under-deliver, typically in the form of crazy day-one price drops followed by ever-mushrooming on-costs.

It’s a fairly short leap forward to match these post-sale woes with your own Trip-style checklist.

Which also has the added benefit of increasing the chances of the deal being framed in your terms.

As a generic jump off point, how about technology, reputation, implementation, payments?

Other short words are available. This is just to start you thinking…

^[1]How about this list of what TRIP can also stand for.

Of the 27 listed at time of first visiting, I liked;

Topic, Relationship, Identity, Process (conflict resolution)
Turning Research Into Practice, (the most common result from google, and the classic abbreviation,)
Triplicate.