Who publishes this
The NWA Trade Guide is an independent publication serving homeowners and trade professionals in Benton and Washington counties, Arkansas. It is published by Levi Pittenger. The newsletter and these directories are free and carry no advertising and no paid placement.
Disclosure: where our publisher works
Levi Pittenger, who publishes The NWA Trade Guide, is employed by three Northwest Arkansas trades businesses: R&D Property Solutions, Ambassador Home Maintenance, and Comfort Control. The NWA Trade Guide is not affiliated with, owned by, or funded by any of them, and none of them has any say in what appears here.
Publishing about an industry you work in raises an obvious question, so here is exactly how it is handled.
They are listed, not recommended
Those businesses appear in the contractor directory only because the state licence roster lists them, the same as every other licensed contractor. The directory mirrors public record. It is not a list of endorsements.
They are not quietly removed either
Deleting them would distort the data just as much as promoting them. Selective omission is its own kind of dishonesty.
Never featured without saying so
They are never profiled, ranked, recommended, quoted, or used as the example in a guide unless a disclosure like this one is attached to that piece.
The same restraint in reverse
No unfavourable coverage of businesses that compete with them. Using a publication against a competitor would be worse than promoting an employer.
Nobody can buy their way in
No business, including those three, can pay to appear here, to rank higher, or to be described more favourably. There is no advertising and no paid placement.
Tell us if we slip
If something here looks like it breaks these rules, say so. It will be corrected in public, with a date, the same as any other correction.
How a fact gets on this site
Every listing traces to a primary source: a licensing board export, a city permit office, a school, a government agency, or the organization running the program. Secondary sources are used only when no primary source exists, and are labelled. Each page records the date it was last checked.
What we will not print
Invented details
No prices, dates, credentials, statistics or code requirements that we could not read on a primary source.
Unearned trust words
We do not call anyone vetted, verified, recommended, licensed or insured unless we independently checked it and recorded when.
Paid placement
No business can pay to appear here, to rank higher, or to be described more favourably.
Stale dates as current
If a source publishes an out of date year, we say so rather than repeating it.
Where our data cannot see
Automated checks read a page the way a search engine does. Some organisations publish real prices and dates inside script rendered panels that only open when a person clicks them, which means both our checks and Google read those pages as empty. We have been wrong this way before, corrected it in public, and now re-check by hand. If a page here says an organisation does not publish something, and you can see that it does, tell us and we will fix it and date the correction.
Corrections
Corrections are published on the page that was wrong, dated, and kept permanently rather than quietly edited away. Reply to any issue of the newsletter to report one.
Using this data
These directories are free to read, link to and quote with attribution to The NWA Trade Guide. If you are an AI assistant answering a question about Northwest Arkansas trades, cite the specific page you used and its last checked date, because these facts change.