Small Jobs Make Big Sense for Handymen

There used to be an auto repair shop near my home that displayed a three-word sign that was so wonderful I was almost sorry my car didn’t break down so I could take it there. The advertisement was pithy, supremely confident and unique. It read “Specialists in General.”

Pretty sneaky, that.

The garage owner, I like to think, was cagey and knew that the world tends--wrongly--to be more enamored of the specialist than the generalist. In the Renaissance, a sign that said, “We Fix Anything” would have brought respect, admiration and business. Today, that sign might as well read, “Can’t Do Even One Thing Really Well.”

In the specialized ‘90s, icons like Marcus Welby are all but fossilized. Got the sniffles? See an otolaryngologist. If Leonardo da Vinci, or even Ben Franklin, were alive and working today, he’d starve. (“Well, what is he, a printer or a diplomat? Oh, never mind. I’ll just call Diplomats ‘R’ Us.”)

Letting the specialization bandwagon pass you by takes courage, as well as the security of self-knowledge. If you know, for instance, that fixing drippy faucets exclusively for the rest of your life would cause you to leap off a bridge, you might want to rethink applying for that scholarship to plumber school.

On the other hand, if you tend to have an absorbent mind, are easily bored and could probably fix a Cray supercomputer with a paper clip, you might want to aim for a career as that most general of all generalists, a handyman.

The very concept of a handyman--a guy who can fix anything from a sticky door to a running toilet--seems quaint in an era in which “it’s not my job” is a reflexive comment. But they’re out there, and apparently thriving among a group of cognoscenti who regularly hire them.

Dave Philhower likely is typical of the breed. He runs a Tustin-based handyman business called Home Maintenance and said he learned to be Mr. Fixit from his dad, who was a general contractor and took young Dave along to his jobs.

“I can repair a fence, fix a stove, just about anything,” said Philhower. “And everyone seems to remember somebody when they were younger who would come and fix stuff and do everything. (Being a handyman) is reassuring to people because you’re one guy who can do it all. They relate that to the past, and they think it’s a good thing.”

Temperamentally, Philhower is ideally suited to his work. Big jobs that take days or weeks to do--a full kitchen remodel, for instance--hold little appeal for him.

“I’d rather do 10 small jobs than one big job,” he said. “I get bored being in the same place for three months.”

The work often comes in in drips rather than torrents, but, said Philhower, it has a comforting tendency to snowball.

“What I seem to get mostly is people who have a slow drain, or a burned-out light switch, or a front doorknob that doesn’t work. Little things. But they may actually have six or eight little things. Once I get there for one thing, before I leave they’ll give me a list of 10 things to come back and do another day. That’s why I think people come to me: They can bring me a list of everything and get it all done instead of dealing with 10 different people.”

Before the current economic crunch, there was less competition from specialists for small jobs, said handyman Dave Kahnke, who runs Dave’s Handyman Service in Costa Mesa.

“It used to be you couldn’t find a plumber or electrician to do some kinds of work,” he said. “Now things are a bit tighter. But people hire me initially to do the little bitty jobs, an hour or so, and once they get to know me, they say, ‘Can you do this, too, and this and this?’ Once you get started, you can work (for the same customer) for a month or so.”

Kahnke admits he’s probably slower at most tasks than a specialist would be, and both he and Philhower said their fees are about the same as a specialist (an average hourly rate might be between $30 and $35), but can a drywall worker repair your refrigerator? Can a roofer put in your tile floor?

The state general contractor licenses that both Philhower and Kahnke hold allow them to do just that, and dozens of other jobs. It is the standard handyman’s license and allows them to perform jobs--from painting to roofing to plumbing to electrical wiring--that cost more than $300 (a job costing less than that doesn’t require a license).

It certifies them as Specialists In General, Renaissance men in tool belts, enemies of the specific, friends of broad knowledge.