• BY:ADMIN
• Dec. 20, 2023

Should I Buy from an LED Lighting Distributor or General Contractor?

You can delegate the responsibility for energy efficient lighting solutions to your general contractor. Perhaps they have a particular distributor that they work with (whether it be national, regional, or local). Or they might put the lighting portion of the contract out to bid with a number of different distributors. In either case, the management responsibility falls to your single point of contact (the GC).

The GC will manage change orders, inventory, and invoicing. You’re likely to pay more for the service but you’ll have less to worry about if pricing isn’t the most critical factor under consideration.

Working with a general contractor tends to be the best option if you’re building a facility from the ground up, where lighting is one of many different considerations. In this case it makes sense to use the GC as the single point of contact to manage the entire project.

There are a few things to watch out for when using a general contractor, though:

• Make sure the contractor has a good reason to bid out different pieces of the project to different LED lighting distributors. Dividing your purchase among multiple vendors will make it more difficult to achieve volume discounts.  
• Quality control can be an issue.  A GC will often attempt to obtain the lowest cost product from the lowest cost provider available.  It is important to have standards or specifications that require a minimum level of performance or quality of lighting products to ensure that you do not run into issues in the future