We are taking a local contractor to court after paying him $3K to do a job and he never showed up. How hard is it to collect after court?

The bad new is that, judging by the experience you've had with the company, you're probably going to need the help of a collection attorney.  The good news is that many collection attorneys work on contingency, and their fee is a percentage of what they collect so that the less they collect, the less their fee.   You wrote that you "hired a company", but that you "had him served."  If the "company" is a corporation, llc, or other independent legal entity, you need to sue it, not "him", and you can only collect from its assets, not "his".  As a general rule, the owners of an entity (shareholders of a corporation, members of an llc, etc.) are not personally liable for the entity's obligations.  There is nothing in your question to indicate that you would have grounds to sue, or get money from, the individual, only from the entity (again assuming that the "company" you mention is a separate entity like a corporation).