Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, the show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 103 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA Educational Series to grow marketing for painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in North America and learning from their experiences.

In this series titled “Success Looks Different”, Shane Fast of Renew Painting will be discussing his surprising journey from ministry to painting, and the many lives he has impacted, lessons he’s learned, and counterintuitive approach he has taken along the way.  It is a 6-part series.

In episode 5, Shane will walk through his counterintuitive approach to hiring and sales, and the hedgehog and flywheel his business runs by.

If you want to ask him questions related to anything in this podcast series, you can do so in our exclusive Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum on Facebook. Just search for “Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum” on Facebook and request to join the group, or type in the URL Facebook.com/groups/PainterMarketingMastermind. There you can ask them questions directly by tagging him with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

What’s up, brother? Hey man, how are you? I am good. Welcome back. The, uh, I know you and I, you know I briefly touched on this. I don’t know whether it was on one of the episodes or offline, but you definitely look at hiring and sales and and.

A little bit of in a different order, I’d say than the vast majority of companies. Yeah, I know you said that, and I was kind of curious is that um I, I was, I was looking forward to hearing you tell me what you, what you’re hearing that that uh draws that out for, for you to respond and say that. Yeah, well, uh, at, at the risk of kind of having a spoiler alert, I know you had focused more on the team. And the hiring and kind of investing into that and that making that your, your primary focus early on and kind of your growth mechanism, really, uh, and then the sales essentially following that, whereas I think the more common outlook is, hey, let’s sell, let’s figure out how to sell, and then let’s ensure that we build a good team in the process.

So I, I found it really interesting. That makes sense. OK, tracking, tracking. Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna build this team and then, and then we’ll sell to fill the team versus we’re gonna sell and then build the team to fulfill the sale. Yeah, we’ve had a little bit of, yeah, we, I mean there’s a give and take both ways there we’ve had a little bit, a little bit of both there, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, uh, floor is yours, man. How’d you come up with, how’d you come up?

What is your philosophy because I’m, I might have just totally butchered it. So you don’t, you know, if it, if it’s wrong, just say, hey man, that’s not it, uh, and then how did you come up with your philosophy? No, I, I think that I mean, I think that we So a few years ago, we looked at um We looked at our. Um, I’m sorry, it’s, I’m so distracted by it. I, I thought I had a quiet spot in my house and I’m listening to my wife and daughter yell like back and forth across the house right now.

This is real life, folks, real life. So let’s go overcome adverse confront adversity right here as a confront the adversity. OK, this is why I should be wearing headphones. All right, so, um. That being said, yeah, we, you know, Good to Great is a book that’s, man, what’s that book, probably 20 years old or more now. Uh, but such good principles in there. One of the things he talks about is the flywheel. And so that’s the, that’s the, the idea that once you have this big wheel and, and if you can just get it going a little bit, and a little bit more, then eventually it starts to kind of turning on his own, you know, and And Collins, I think it’s Jim Collins, is that Jim’s name I think, right?

Yeah, so Jim Collins goes through different companies and they actually, they, the flywheel caught on in such a way that it’s almost his own little subbook and so I listened to that little subbook or. Uh, pamphlet almost, you know, small, a few years ago, and, and just really got me thinking, OK, what, what the whole thing is like, what drives your economic engine, you know, that’s kind of like the, how do you, how do you stay in, you know, what’s, what’s generating your business? How are you growing, all those kind of things.

And So, you know, one of the things he said was, OK, you should have no less than 23, definitely no more than 7, you know, probably somewhere in between on in terms of how many things you’re gonna list out, you know. So when I, obviously a lot of this is audio, so I’ll have to just kind of talk and, and at some point, I don’t know if we can hear where we share the visuals or how we do that, but Uh, but our, our office did a great job turning them into an actual visual representation.

And so at the top of our flywheel is this is and as you, as you go through this because we do a video here, most people consume this content via via audio through podcast, but we do a video goes on a YouTube channel. So what I’m gonna do actually for the first time ever, I don’t think I’ve ever done this on a podcast episode is all screen share. So as you go through this, we’ll actually have it pulled up. OK, this is great. Yeah, if you’re listening and you If you’re listening and and you have this in the podcast, go check it out on YouTube, Painter Marketing mastermind podcast, check this episode out on YouTube, and you will see uh what Shane’s talking about.

All right, brother, you’re ready to rip. Right. Yeah, we can actually look at the hedgehog real quick cause that’s a, that’s a, those are his history, and actually, I use that, that question drives your economic engine. But those are his three questions are, you know, what drives your economic engine? What can you be the best in the world at? What are you deeply passionate about. And, you know, we’ve gone through the core values, and we talked through that. And I talked about how we use them as a filter, we want to serve people, you know, when their mission statement, we talk about really impacting people in our community.

And that can be done simply through doing a phenomenal paint job. It can’t. It doesn’t have to be more than that, um, certainly in our case, we don’t want to be less than that. And You know, what other things can we do along the way that that are really gonna drive everything forward, right? And so, I’m of the firm belief that there are a lot of people in our area. That can produce a quality painted surface. And that might seem silly to say, because we want to be the best or whatever, but let’s just be real.

Like, there are literally homeowners that can probably paint as, as, as good as professionals at points, right? And, and so producing a paint, a, a good paint job to me, is not enough. It, it doesn’t make sense. That’s not really, if you look at this question here, what can you be the best in the world at? There, there’s no way we’re gonna be the best in the world at painting something. Um, I would say our cabinet coatings rival anybody in the area and I stand behind that.

But is it the best that, I mean, that’s a, that’s such a subjective term, A, B, you know, what’s the difference between 6 people who can produce a 9.5 out of 10 on cabinet seat? Nobody’s gonna discern the difference between that. Most people can’t discern the difference between the 8 and versus the 9.5, you know, I mean, it’s kind of the price of admission. If you’re running a company, you should be able to have a solid painting product. Yeah, and you, and you have to, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves, which is what this whole like exercise he does is about, is what’s going to differentiate is, it’s not gonna be the best painted surface because again, that we have to be realistic and realize that a lot of people can do that.

And so, it’s, it’s, can we, yeah, it’s no less than producing a quality product, which is what we kind of finally came up with, produce a quality product, but it’s really the latter part, while creating a premium customer experience. So it’s that premium customer experience that we believe we really can be the best at. Maybe not in the world, I think it’s a funny, yeah, this question there is kind of funny. And again, he’s working with like your apples and whatever kind of thing. But if we talk about You know, can we be the best in our area at this, you know, which, which of course means that I’m borrowing ideas from the Michael Chaney’s of the world and the, you know, the Nick Slavics and the, you know, who, whoever else, Josh out in California.

I mean, there’s all kind of people I’m borrowing ideas from, right? So, it, but it’s, can we be the best in the Greenville, Spartanburg, South Carolina area at producing a premium, a quality product with a premium customer experience. And so, That’s really kind of what we anchor on, and we talk about a ton, especially in the offices. Let’s Figure out how to do that better constantly. How do we get better? How do we get better? How do we get better? The example that I gave in the last episode with the fence company employing me, you know, to call them back at specific intervals and speak with different members of their team, and, you know, maybe, maybe I needed to come in and kind of provide a tutorial on whatever, uh, CRM software they’ve now, they’ve now so I can figure out when they’re coming out to the house, that would probably not be a premium customer experience.

Yeah, yeah, that was. Yeah, now an example of that is, you know, I, I was this about Last say, well, I was first told the idea sometime early last year. Told again in spring and then finally said, OK, we got to get our act together and do this. But we now have it set up to where there’s a, I think it’s 50 or 60 seconds and it’s just if you schedule a quote with us and there’s an automated text and email that goes out with the link to the YouTube video a day before that quote that says, here’s what you should expect when you come out.

That was not a very high bar. Now, admittedly, I had to be hit in the head almost to get it done. And that has more to do with my, you know, lack of organization than anything else. But that to me, that and then folders that we leave behind when we quote that tell different things. Hey, if you’re getting multiple quotes, here’s something, here’s questions you should ask, you know, different, your FAQs or here’s your expectations for interior exterior cabinets. Sure, all this is on our website, but finally putting it into a place where we can hand it to somebody.

Yeah, so some of this stuff is just Are we’re gonna be, are we’re gonna actually do what we say we’re gonna try to do. And, and that’s what it kind of came down to for me was empowering Hannah essentially to say, go do it. Like, I’m, I’m saying go spend the money, do whatever it takes, let’s let’s do it, you know, let’s execute it. I want, I want, Shane, I want to pause you for one second just because you, you’re doing a couple of things and I think you’re viewing those things as very basic and they are basing in the sense that they’re not overly complicated to do, to implement, but they, they put you head and shoulders above the vast majority of contractors.

And so the what you just put, and it’s something we, we integrate with all of our partners at Painter Margaing Pros, but, uh, CRM. The customer relationship management software, so a software that essentially can automate some communication with your leads and your clients, something that consistently sends out an email text at different intervals prior to your quote or after the quote prior to the project or during the project status updates, things like that. You sending that out prior to you delivering the proposal, and then saying, hey, these are, this is what you can expect.

Versus the fence company that I’ve been talking about. I don’t know who’s coming, when they’re coming, if they’re coming, you know, I know I’ve paid them half for the project. I don’t know, you know, what’s happening. Um, having the video and then, and then what you’re doing too, so there’s so many things you’re psychologically doing, you’re differentiating your company from all the other painters that come out because I guarantee you basically none of them are doing that. So even though it’s a small thing, you had to sit down and actually set it up, you’re, you’re not different in the, in the client in the lead’s mind, in the customer’s mind.

So you, you have now stood out, you’ve given them a reason to pay you more money and still select you, which is ultimately sales, uh, and then. And then having that leave behind folder, there’s something powerful about having something physical that they have, having that leave behind folder with the questions you should ask because what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna leave the project as you know I’m obviously saying this for people listening, you’re you’re gonna leave the, the bid you’re gonna, they’re gonna have the number they’re gonna have your proposal hope you know I think you delivered on site and then the.

Somebody out chuck in a truck and you know all these people are gonna come and then at the end of the day the the consumer is not probably terribly educated on the scope of work that you propose versus what they propose and maybe some of the differences there and they’re just gonna look at the numbers and then at that point you’re a commodity well this number is lower than that number and so I kind of feel like I should, it would be negligent of me to just choose a higher number for the same thing.

So when you leave behind an FAQ. You are letting them know these are apples to oranges, it’s not apples to apples, so make sure you ask it because it’s a, it’s a post sale play, like a post sales call play. I just wanted to get into that because that, man, that stuff we preach so much at painter marketing pros, and I, it’s, you’re right, it’s not hard, but you do have to sit down and you have to do it because you’re already spending hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours going out and delivering estimates, proposals, quotes, whatever you wanna call them.

So put in a little bit of work on that, on that front end, putting in the, the CRM, the texting, the FAQ, the differentiation of your company, and then you’re gonna close more, you’re gonna sell for higher prices, have higher profit margins in your life just gonna be better. I just want to hit that because that, that, it’s just so important. Yeah, it’s been, I mean, those things have really, really helped us and, and I’m just so, I’m so proud of our team for, you know, working on those things and coming up with them, cause it’s one thing to say, hey, I heard this idea, it’s really good.

Go on the idea of bin, the trash bin, yeah, to have a team that could pull it off and that could hold me accountable to it. OK, Shane, we’re filming the video on this day, you know, wear this shirt, make sure you shave, whatever it is, you know, so, um, and so, yeah, so it’s, that’s, it’s we have an awesome team, so we really do, um, and so if we look at This attempt to create a premium customer experience. There’s a lot of layers to that, right?

There’s a lot of layers to it. But if we go down that also informed our flywheel as we start to think about, you know, how do we create that premium customer experience. So, it’s a little bit ironic cause I’m saying that, and then there’s really not much on here that talks about our premium customer experience. Uh, so it’s a little bit counterintuitive is to use your word, uh, but to us it’s, it’s worked and it’s made sense. So, so our, our starting place on the flywheel is to recruit passionate, hardworking people.

We don’t care if you know how to paint, we just want you to be passionate about something. I don’t, I don’t like coasters. Yeah, in the sense, and they’re great for drinks, but for, you know, just cruising through life, it’s, I, I just don’t, I don’t relate to those people very well, um, that just kind of float and cruise through life. Uh, I was, I, I’ve always had to kind of scratch and claw and, and work, and I wasn’t the best natural athlete, but I worked my butt off to get to the place where I could compete.

So that, that’s just that, that kind of mindset. I like to have. you’re passionate, you’re hardworking. And we can teach you how to use a brush or a roller spray or or whatever it might be, you know, we can, we can teach that, that, that’s teachable. The other things are really hard to teach. Yeah, I mean, I think as a parent, you have a chance to impart that, pass that, it gets pretty tough. Um, so that goes into the next kind of section, develop, train and empower them.

So that them being the passionate hardworking people. So, Develop, train, and power. Those are three pretty loaded words. Train is probably the clearest of those. Uh, train is gonna be skills, so maybe they need to literally learn how to paint. Maybe they know how to paint, they need to learn how to do this aspect of the job. Maybe they, maybe it’s as simple as, hey, you’re a great painter, you’re ready to rock and roll. We gotta teach you how to read a work order, how to use company cam, and how to use it properly, and this, you know, different softwares how to clock in, whatever it might be.

Uh, I think to develop and empower are the tougher ones. Develop is Hard for me especially because I’m not a very patient person. I just kind of want things to go. I just want to work. I came up with an idea, it should just work. And, and that’s not a lot. Yeah, that’s not life, and that’s fair. I had to be developed, plenty, plenty, plenty, plenty through life, still am. So I’m glad people did it for me, and we want to do it for our people. And so, you know, that could be a great example that is, is sitting down at, at, at Denny’s with a, a disc profile and saying to Ryan, hey, we’ve been looking at going in this direction and actually reading your profile, what do you think about this idea?

And, you know, I think this, this might be something you’d really thrive in and really love. And it, it’s like everybody has a light bulb moment, you know, and it’s, but it’s taking that time to say, I’m gonna spend an hour looking through his disc profile. I’m gonna talk to our project manager about it, then we’re gonna meet with him, you know, there’s several, there’s a good bit of time involved in that, right? But This guy’s phenomenal. Everybody loves him. My customers love him, the teammates love him.

He crushes it, you know, well worth the time to take time and just figure out how do we best position somebody to succeed, you know. And then how do we continue to invest in that person? And I’ll be the first to say, We’re not the greatest of this, uh, partly because, I, I, again, I get going in so many different directions that our, our quarterly reviews suffer and some of those things. So we’ve got a lot of growing to do still in this. But that’s our desire.

So we feel like developing someone, training someone, and then empowering them. And you know, the word empower is pretty loaded. And, and so we’re really trusting them to go out and, and essentially, hey, represent renew painting. You are renew painting, period. You know, when, when it went on the day to day at a customer’s house, I am no longer renew painting, it was me by myself, me and a few people, sure, but Not, not, not anymore, you know, it’s, it’s our team. It’s our team of W-2s, it’s our team of painting partners or teams of painting partners.

They’re representing a new painting to the customer now. So we’ve got to empower them to, to go forward and do that. So the idea for us here is if we invest in our people enough that they’re going to then take care of our customers. So that, that might be the kind of counterintuitive part is, is let’s invest in our people and that’s 33k, that’s a health insurance option, that’s PTO, that’s holiday pay, that’s profit sharing. I mean, there are other things that go into that, that, that there’s, there’s boxes and there’s buckets, there’s competitive wages, all those kind of things exist, for sure.

Uh, I didn’t mean to skirt over those. So we do, you know, we’ve Kind of worked hard to figure out how to get some access to some of those things for our people. Um, but we really believe that if we invest in our people, if we take care of them, that they’re going to take care of our customers. They’re going to, they’re going to want to do a good job because they’re living on our core values. They’re gonna want to care for our customers because hopefully, we’re selecting customers that are They’re joyful, you know, we, every customer doesn’t make coffee when they show up at 7:30, but a lot of them do, you know.

And so that, that makes it much more enjoyable for everybody, uh, for our people. And then that, you know, so it’s just that, that, that becomes its own cycle and I’m getting on a tangent there. But, you know, if we can get By God’s grace, we have a lot of really good clients that we work with, and they love our people well, and that just, I think incentivizes our people to love them, you know, even, even better than hopefully, they’re already doing. And, and, and even, you know, trying to outperform what they would normally do.

And, um, so anyway, I’m getting a little tangent there. But, so if we can deliver a quality product, that premium customer experience, then that’s gonna build our brand power and build customer demand. And that’s, that seems pretty obvious. And that’s that’s your reputation. Go ahead. I’ll, I’ll just, uh, kind of chime in on that, that deliver a quality product and a premium customer experience because I mean happy, a happy team, they, they make happy customers. And I think a lot of business owners don’t really think about that, right?

They just kind of say, hey, do, you know, if you do your job this way or that way, then you’re gonna make customers happy, but If teams are unhappy that comes out, and they’re not, they’re not likely to go the extra mile or don’t have joy and, you know, joy in their work, right? That, that use of the word joy. And so I think a lot of what you, you’re essentially walking through how to do that through all the different things, the way that you empower your team and the and the different benefits and competitive rate and, and everything that they’re offered an ability to be recognized through core value, um, usage that we talked about in the last episode.

But at the end of the day, it’s, you know, if you have a really happy, flourishing, thriving team that genuinely like what they do, that feel valued, that feel appreciated at at your company, it’s a really good chance they’re gonna take great care of your, of your clients. Yeah, and I can prove that there was, there’s been 2 in the last 21 months where I’ve sent somebody in afterwards, and there, there’s an issue on the job. I think both of these were through working through a renovation company. So I’m not exactly sure where this some of the communication broke down or something about what was supposed to be done or what wasn’t, or these questions and you know, I, I know one.

It was an incredibly uncomfortable interaction. We’re on the front porch and I had pictures. We had taken a picture before we saw flashed it, and after, and she was, you know, she’d accused us of ruining the door, and we clearly had evidence and it got to a place where she said, well, do you have a time stamp on that? And I just said, OK, let’s just, we’ll stay in your door. You know, we’re not gonna go, we’re not, this is not, this is not gonna end well for anybody, right?

And so I, I got no. Level of pleasant interaction with this client. Um, you know, I, that’s the first time I met her. I’d only worked through the renovation company and I send Ryan there, and he texts myself and the project manager afterwards, hey, she’s delighted. She’s, you know, extremely happy. I, I don’t know what it is about y’all, y’all, but she seemed to love me. So. He said, he said that’s twice in the last quarter that you’ve sent me on these things that you kind of give me a heads up on, and they’ve been great.

Ryan shows up and it’s soft. So, you know, maybe, you know, like you said, you know, that joyful person coming in being willing to say, hey, I’m gonna win, I’m gonna win this person over, you know, and so he’s really doing that in those moments, which only enhances our reputation, obviously. And as our reputation, the brand power, those things increase, then customer demand will then increase as well. And You know, we, we looked at this wording, increased revenues, uh, we looked at that wording a few different ways.

We started to say something about pricing, and I thought, you know, it’s really not. It’s really not just, oh, we’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna try to be a high priced person. We’re, we’re gonna try to be in line with the market that, that we feel like we’re, we’re worthy of. So there’s a, a normal kind of labor rate market. And then, and then maybe on some things we know we’re exceptional with cabinets or other things or line washing. And so maybe we push that a little bit or, you know, we kind of, we do tweak and play with some of those things, but At the, at the end of the day, we do believe that if we can produce that quality product, we can give a premium experience and we can charge the upper end of that market rate, right?

And, and then it’s, well, what do we do with that? So we want to, it’s not that we give all the money away. I don’t, you know, I, I clearly, you know, um, have my needs are met. I’m, you know, very, very thankful for our team and the income that this generates. But we do want to say, OK, well, if we use a PEO system to get access to the 22k and health insurance, there’s a little bit of pay to play money there, you know, and so we don’t look at that as well, that’s a loss, but it’s a, it’s just an investment.

OK, we have to, we’re gonna pay a little higher on some of the payroll ends in order to get access to these things because we want our people to build careers. So if somebody is in there. At 2100, they’re stocking away that 2169, or whatever percent they can, you know, stock away, I guess, simple as 29%, 22K 23 or whatever it might be as far as the employer match. I can’t, there’s all that different rules and stuff. But we want to encourage them, you know, we, we essentially say, if you don’t stock away the 22 or 22025% or whatever it is, then That we’re giving that automatically.

So if you don’t do it, you’re leaving money on the table. So you’re essentially leaving free money on the table. And so we really encourage them to, to, well, we can’t mandate them to opt in, but we really encourage them to do that in order. So that’s an example of where, hey, if we can produce that printing experience and build. The brandpower, and then we can increase our revenues as a company, then in our overhead stays in a similar, you know, fixed place or grows at a proportion, then we’re gonna have more resources to invest back into the team.

That could be uh a vehicle as soon as uh one of our people is hit, um, kind of so that’s why he took out his truck and I said, hey, are you gonna try to buy a new car or do you need me to get you a van? He’s one of our best painters. And I’d offered to him before. He said, no, I’m good. And then he came to me a week later said that would be really helpful. So it’s, well, can I go out now and find, let me go find a van for this guy, you know, so there’s There’s a lot of different ways that kind of plays out, but we feel like if we do increase revenues and following resources to our team, then that’s also going to enhance our reputation as a great place to work.

We actually see this happen with subcontractors. We see, we, right now we have two different Uh, guys who were members of subcontractor crews that rub shoulders with our team and actually ask, hey, will y’all hire me? I’m, I’m no longer working for that company over there, but I see your culture, I see what you guys are about, and I want to work for you. Um, and so, so we believe we scroll back up to that. Sorry, I jumped ahead. I didn’t mean to jump quite ahead. So, so again, the way, the way Collins writes is it just keeps going.

So that’s kind of the idea is that you know, if you enhance your reputation as a great place to work, you’re gonna find more passionate, hardworking people, you invest in them, they take care of your people, blah, blah, blah, just keeps going. And so, so our kind of counterintuitive. The attempt that we’ve been operating on now for, for a few years is, OK, what if we invest in our people first and really put them first. And See how that goes. Let’s see if they take care of our customers, and, and I think that’s, but I think we’re seeing it work, so I feel like I’m still kind of like watching it, but, but, but I think it’s working.

And, and we do have a, we kind of developed a little bit of a model with the painting partners, which is what you’re about to, to scroll on to. But go ahead and, and jump in if you have anything to interject. Yeah, I just want to sidebar for a second because you mentioned a PEO and I think some of our listeners aren’t going to necessarily know what that is or the benefits of it. Could you just kind of quickly run through that? What does it stand for?

Do you remember? I think it’s preferred preferred employee organization. It’s such a they essentially are the ones that are employing. We’re not even a full year into it, so we’re still kind of evaluating it, but what it, what it does is it kind of puts you into a professional employee organization. There you go. So best I can say it kind of lumps us into a broader organizations. So now our people are employed by the PEO, technically not Rene Painting, but that gives access to the 296k to, uh, better, it actually gives us a lot better workers’ comp and GL rates as well.

And access to health insurance, cause you get bundled into kind of a bigger group plan. And dental insurance, vision, some different kind of benefits there, trying to think of some of the other things that, uh, obviously they do the payroll at that point. There can be, um, I mean there can be liability reduction as well. So if you’re, if you’re hiring people from other states, which might be, you know, might have certain um You know, California comes to mind, right? California can be challenging from a labor law perspective if you’re hiring people from California and you’re in, in maybe what would be considered a more traditionally business friendly state.

um, there’s certain protections that you can be afforded through that and essentially um a PEO basically takes their scale and is able to secure all these rates and, you know, in exchange for you essentially paying them something and they, I think they are actually technically. The your employees technically are employees of the PEO I think is the legal way that it’s set up and then they take, you know, they take some, some money from you. That is, uh, that is the, yeah, that is very true. Yeah, and it, it, it’s, I mean, I, I heard several people do it.

We’re, we’re like I said, we’re kind of not even a full year into it, so we’re just kind of, you know, we’re still evaluating, but so far it’s been a win, so I haven’t heard of a lot of painting companies using a PEO. That’s interesting. What turned you on to that? Uh, financial advisor, you know, he helps a lot of small business owners like, hey, I think y’all should probably consider this and just talk to him and see, and so. You know, the numbers, the insert savings were enough for us to take it, take a run at it, and we’ll see how this goes, you know, so.

And you’re, you’re, are there any, I don’t wanna go too far off track here, but it’s just, it’s something that I, I don’t think it’s come up in any of my other episodes. Are, are there any drawbacks or anything that, that are kind of bothersome to you aside from maybe having to pay them? Yeah, I mean, there’s a little bit, it’s a little. I mean, there’s been, there’s been a lot of learning curve kind of things, getting things rolled into the 401k or so the setup kind of stuff took a little bit, some of the Reporting and things, it’s been a little bit clumsier trying to get them, get that dialed in.

Hey, we actually want our salaries coded in like these ways versus like one big lump. And yeah, there’s, there’s been some, some headaches that Hannah has dealt with a lot more than I have. And handled, um, so it, I have a lot on the HR side. Yeah, but it hasn’t been, it hasn’t been, have there been any kind of control issues or you’re running into limitations that maybe wouldn’t have run into had you not used a PEO? Nothing like that. It’s great, man. I mean, a lot of that stuff you’d have to go through anyways, right?

If you’re gonna set up a 401k or or certain things, there’s there’s just a lot of hoops to jump through. And we had the simple IRA before and we’d run payroll and it’d tell you what each person you need to put in their stuff, and so you have to manually do that, at least now it just sweeps all in there. So there’s a couple, there’s definitely some benefits. So, you know, the insurance is being calculated automatically based on the payroll versus like having to deal with the audit.

I hated the workers’ comp audit every year. That was so much work. Um, Since you’re diving into that, we’ll, we’ll scroll down to the painting partner model flywheel. Yeah, so and this is very fresh for us. I know we’ll get into this in the next episode, but we’ve kind of gone to this hybrid in the last roughly year, we started experimenting with it this time last year, and really probably leaned into it fully August, September last year. So the idea is, you know, we want to recruit subcontractors who have character and who have ambition.

Uh, the ambition were, I mean, character is pretty obvious. Ambition Either it’s, hey, I, it might just be me and my wife, me and I never want to go more than me and two guys, but I wanna be like, good. I want to be really good, and I’m trying to try to grow my own business. Or it’s just, yeah, I have a, have a high drive to be the the best of my craft, and I have a small team, or I’m OK. I hear stories, we don’t have any like this right now, but here’s stories of people who have subcontractor relationships and they have 4 or 5 crews.

And I love, I love that ambition, uh, because, I mean, why would I not love it? That’s who we are, right? And, and so, you know, the, the character, the ambition, and, and the next one intentionally develop, coach and empower them. This is, this is a little bit murkier for me right now. I, I had a long conversation with Matt Keper not too long ago and You know, one of the questions I asked him was, well, how long, and we have somebody that fits that first profile, the character and ambition.

Yeah, how long do you keep working with them when there’s a call back every job or there’s an issue every job, but they’re always coming back to, they’re always fix it, and they’re always wanting to learn, and they are showing signs of progress. And, you know, it’s a it’s it’s it’s tough. There’s no right answer is essentially what he said, you know, you. Sometimes you could, he said, I’ve done it to where my best crew, you know, sub subcontractor right now, we basically had to teach them how to paint when they started.

And I’ve had some that We worked with and worked with, and you just essentially you’re given enough rope to finally hang themselves because they’re gonna do a job and you’re gonna have to pay somebody else to come in and fix it. And so it, it’s just, uh, it’s very subjective. There, yeah, so this is one that I’m a little bit like, uh, but I will say that I, I mean, I just got a, a few texts yesterday from a sub and he said, look, I’m making, trying to make these decisions because I want to make renew painting look the best possible.

I’m, I am team renew painting and I want it to look as good as it needs to look, or as it good as it should look like, right? And so, so his team is when we’ve had a lot of consistent like gotta fix this, gotta fix this. And so, you know, we’re still dealing with some of that and So I’m trying to talk to him, Hey, I, I’ve tried this before, this works a little bit, you know, we just dialogue and bounce ideas around. But what I don’t question is that his desire is to deliver that quality product in a premium customer experience.

And what we have found, interestingly enough, is that people have tolerated some of the, hey, can you come back and fix this because they like his team so much. They’re like, hey, they’re delightful, they were whatever. And so it’s not a big deal. We expect a few things that have to be fixed, you know. And that’s kind of the posture that we’ve gotten. And so the, the, the rest of this is kind of the The same idea, you know, build brand power, customer demand, higher prices, increased sub revenues, you know, that’s, that’s one where I did throw that high prices, but it’s kind of, hey, if, if, if I, if we can, if we can push the upper end of the market, then you’re gonna make more money.

Simple as that. And all those things together, you know, reputation as a company that powers business growth. Uh, we don’t want to be that company that, that holds them back and says, oh, you can only work for us, or if we find out you’re working for somebody else or whatever, all the things that aren’t legal anyway, right? Um, pays them by the hour, you know, we have a lot of, we hear a lot of our subs say, well, so and so pays us by the hour. It’s not legal, you know, it’s not only, it’s not only illegal, but it’s holding me back.

It’s, it’s, it’s holding you back because we’re gonna say no, if you, if this is a $5000 job and you do it in 1 day, 209 day, 3 day, 4 day, I don’t care. We, we really do not care. We just want to see you do it right and as much money as you can take home, that’s great. And, and so that’s, and so what we found is that You know, these, these subs will talk to each other. They’ll talk to the people at Sherwin. So it kind of starts to develop a little bit of reputation.

Hey, if you need some work, you might call it a new painting, you know. And so that’s kind of our, our goal and, and, again, it’s, I’m not, to be honest, even though this is my flywheel, we just kinda, we really cultivate this for this podcast because the, the, the W-2 1 we had. And now we’re looking and saying, OK, what does this look like with our painting partners? And so we’re still kind of asking that question a little bit. Did you guys just make this one, the painting partner model one?

You made it. I made it, uh, right when you and I first talked talked about this podcast two months ago. Uh, I was on the way out to Colorado for Springer and my family, and yeah, just, I sketched it on a plane. I texted a picture to Hannah. That’s cool, man. Prompted action. You took action. That’s right. Yeah, yeah, you, you know, talking about this when you’re not kind of started touching on it. I realized I’ve got this for our in-house team. I don’t have it for the painting partners.

I wanna know what it looks like. And I’m not, I’m not fully convinced this is it. Um, I think it could be. I’m, I’m not positive, you know. So it’s something where, again, we’re very fresh into this subcontractor painting partner relationship. So we’re learning a lot and uh what, what else do you, what else do you need to accomplish at your business, you know, from a fundamental perspective, because what we can do is we can go ahead and get a podcast on the schedule to cover that.

You’ll just knock it out there just knock it out. assign a deadline to it, right? That’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I mean, this, this flywheel looks good to me. I think it makes sense. I think the, yeah, the higher prices increased sub revenue. I mean, there’s multiple ways to increase revenue, so keeping it a little bit, a little bit, I guess, more open-ended on the W-2, I think makes sense and But at the end of the day, the subs, if, if scope of work increases or you’re cross selling or whatever ways you’re maybe increasing revenue outside of price.

I don’t know. I, I think you’re, there’s gonna be a certain margin that you’re gonna be paying to your subs, you know, ensuring that you have certain gross, gross profit margin on your, your products and the way that they make more money is, you know, increasing your prices if they’re gross money unless you want to start taking home a lower gross profit, which probably, uh, you do not want to do, right? Yeah, and I that and we’ll talk more about it in the next episode, but we, there are certain ones where, you know, I’ll say to RPMs and hey if If you can start them and he can just absolutely crush it, and the, the customer’s delighted and you’re not gonna have much issues, then we can look at increasing that, that percentage, you know, I mean, we’re not sitting there talking to subcontract, hey, you get this percentage and this person, you know, we’re giving them the numbers in the scope of work not being.

You know, we know internally, yeah, there’s a certain amount of, if we have less management. Then some, there’s, that is worth something to us, you know. So I thought about that. I looked at the flywheel and I thought that’s, that’s way too numbersy and heady to insert in here, you know, but it kind of goes into that, that idea of, you know, you’re, you’re gonna have higher sub revenues if you deliver that premium experience. And so the more we can get men and women in our subcrews to catch on to that and to live that out, then, then the more they’re gonna thrive.

So. For sure. Well, hopefully, hopefully, um, Hopefully listeners were able to tune into YouTube and actually check this stuff out. Yeah, the, I really like the Venn diagram as well at the top there. Yeah all stuff is good to great Jim Collins, yeah, that’s a classic of sorts, I guess, in the business world. 100%, yeah, highly recommend for listeners who have not read that book. Yeah, Shane, that was the first dude. I don’t, I don’t think, I think, so I looked at our YouTube channel cause I didn’t know how many episodes we’ve recorded.

And I think this is number 169, and I think that’s the first time we’ve screen shared. Let’s go, push me to action, push you to action. Yeah, this is a total, total change here. Yeah. Video first, maybe we’ll go video first. Um, Awesome, and so what, what, uh, so investing into the people, have there been? Any drawbacks to that, right? Cause I think the fear would be, hey, we’re gonna invest into our people, we’re gonna, gonna focus on recruiting talented people and, and then through that, we’re going to You know, create this virtuous cycle and then go to market and, and be able to track more, uh, leads and sales and, and charge premium prices and all of that.

But the fear would be, at least the fear that comes to my mind would be kind of overinvesting, maybe before you have the sales to kind of back it up and then potentially going into a cash flow crisis or having to let people go and now you’re hurting the team morale. Have you, have you encountered any, any, I guess, of those issues that would make people pause? So we have done this pretty typical growth in terms of, OK, we got this much revenue with this many painters, and we’ve sold this far ahead so we can hire somebody else.

I mean, so, uh, there, the only spots where I’ve probably hired before already would be the office manager and a a second project manager. Um, so not as much in the painting, you know, day to day field. That being said, one, the, the, the places that I’ve really seen this kind of overinvestment or overdevelopment and people hurt us has been with our painters because I’ve given people too much time. You know, made it, made a bad hire and let it stretch out way too long. And, and, and that, and that’s a growth area that, that I’ve, you know, I’ve grown a lot in that, um, I, I won’t.

It’s not that I wanna be right. It’s um just like it works out like I won’t be that person. I want it for that person. Like, when you have this opportunity like go after it, you know, and so I just keep hanging on and, you know, and so we’ve gotten a lot better at that. We’re a lot quicker to, to let people go now for their good and our good, but I would say. Not having that maybe maturity is the right word or just kind of the the experience maybe with that to to kind of have that discernment activated more quickly.

Sticking to that flywheel would, you know, essentially kind of hurt us and, you know, when we do let somebody go, uh, it’s like almost like everybody on the team’s like, oh, OK, thank you, you know, and then thinking like, y’all should have been telling us this. Um, but now we have a, we, we, we went all the way back, we went all the way from 9, W-2s down to, to 3, and so we, as we added, they’re more quick now to give us that feedback and they know, they know what we’re looking for and they know the type of person we want, so.

Sure, and it is, it’s hard to let people go. I think it’s one of the hardest things in business if you care, and I, but to your point right there. You’re typically not even doing the person that you let go, you’re typically not doing them a favor by not letting them go. Because who, who wants to be failing. In their, in their job, in their career, no, no one wants to be failing in that. So as long as you’re, you’re kind of just continuing in this state of failure.

The company is suffering, the fellow employees are suffering, the clients are suffering, almost certainly, and that person is actually suffering because you’re doing them a disservice long term. Right. But it’s tough. It’s tough tough. It’s really tough. Yeah. Business is not for the faint of heart, right? That’s right. That’s right. It’s a tough game. Um, Chang Dang, man, this has been, this has been really great. I actually had no idea that you guys put together that, that second flywheel for the podcast. Thanks for doing that. Yeah, that’s cool, you know, like I said, it, it’s just one of those things where I I hadn’t even realized as I was looking back at it, I thought, oh, we’re not just straight W-2 anymore, we’re hybrid.

We got this looks a little differently, you know, because I don’t give obviously like the same investment into subs and it is, it’s different, you know, but, but when we started looking at it was not as different. Now again. You know, uh, uh, Matt and Maggie Kiper, or Jason Perry, people have done subcontractors for a lot longer, um, and there’s many different people around the country that have done this. Might immediately poke some holes in it. I, I don’t know. I’m looking forward to, to, to kind of, you know, having some conversations I see some of those people this summer, so I love it, dude.

Is there anything else that you wanna add? Prior to wrapping up this episode, we got one more. Yeah, I, I just think that, you know, all this stuff can sound really great, uh, as I’m, you and I are talking about it, and, and, and really sometimes beneath the surface, I feel like, I feel like we have, you know, this 2025 whatever fancy car and you open the, the, the hood and it’s like a ’96 like Corolla engine in there or something, you know, it’s like, it’s not bad, it’ll last a long time, you know, um, and so.

Uh, you know, we’ve got a long way to go. So I think it’s, I, I, I guess a lot of things we’re sharing are still are, are in a lot of ways aspirational from uh for us, and I think they always will be to a degree if we’re continuing trying to grow, but Um, but I just Yeah, I wanna, I wanna say that because I feel like that’s, that’s more authentic, I guess, is that, hey, we got a long way to go. We’re, we’re striving, but and this is where we’re trying to head, but we have a long way to go.

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. I think it’s, it can be discouraging for people listening to podcasts, watching, you know, motivational speakers or you want to learn from, obviously from people who have come before you or people who are doing things well, but it, it sometimes can feel like They’re in just in a totally another league, right? And they’re so far ahead like you, you, you’re just not going to get there. So I think I really appreciate you saying that, hey, we, we have all these ideas.

Maybe when you actually look at how they’re being implemented, there are gonna be hiccups. It’s not gonna be, it’s not gonna be as refined and polished and perfect as it sounds on this podcast. So when you’re looking at your company, you’re thinking, man, Shane’s company, gosh, why, why is he so perfect and mine is so imperfect. Maybe the disparity is not as, not, not quite as big as you would otherwise think. Absolutely love that. I appreciate you, Shane. Thank you for another phenomenal episode. I’m looking forward to the next one, man. Awesome.

Thank you, me as well. I appreciate you.

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