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 episode of the Industry Partner Series, we host guest Mike Gore-Hickman of Painter Growth. Mike grew his painting company to $200k/month right out of college. He now runs Painter Growth, the fastest growing business coaching for painting contractors in the country, and has helped over 1,000 painting companies scale over the past 5 years.

Listen on as Brandon and Mike discuss time mastery, sales excellence, booking out your winter calendar, and ultimately how you can most effectively scale a successful painting company.

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 going on, Mike? What’s up, Brandon? Thanks for having me, man. It’s been a while. Yeah, I’m pumped, I’m pumped to have you, brother. So today, um, I guess I, I gave a brief bio there, very brief, but if you could maybe elaborate on that a little bit to kick off, that would be awesome.

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, yeah, ran my, uh, I mean you can find my origin story in many places, but, uh, ran a painting business throughout and out of college, um, went really well. Uh, my wife, uh, girlfriend at the time moved to the state. I decided to shut down my business and follow her. I started building a second painting company focused on commercial work in a completely new city, completely new market. Um, after my first year, um, it was going pretty good. I was getting some like box stores, commercial work and stuff, but after my first year, I, uh, got an opportunity to work for a software startup.

So, for the 2nd time in 1 year, 2nd time in 12 months, I shut down my second painting company and, uh, went all in on software, and it was a really cool decision because I got to, uh, be a part of a company that scaled from a startup to like $10 million a year in about 3 years. Uh, throughout that learned an incredible amount about. Um, you know, the online world, how to build an online company, and, uh, from there, basically eventually found out, found Painter growth, and it’s my passion, coaching, painting contractors, helping them, supporting them, and giving them the, the tools that they need.

And so now Painter growth, we worked with, we we have worked with. Um, just over 103 painting contractors in the last 5 years. We have 8 amazing coaches, all of whom have ran multi-seven figure painting businesses, and um, we’re just here trying to make the biggest impact, biggest splash that we can, help as many guys get off the tools, grow to a million, 2 million, 5 million, whatever it takes with systems and support and everything else in between. I love it. So, before we actually talk about anything serious, so you said wife, girlfriend at the time.

I was giving a presentation one time with my wife in the audience, and I think I said, um, I think I said with, with my current wife when I was presenting because she wasn’t the wife at the time, right? She was the girlfriend. I think I, I, and I, she didn’t love that. She didn’t love that. So last week on August 8th, um, we celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary. Nice, dude. Congrats. That’s pretty big, big one. He ended up getting her, uh, actually we are at this game post in September, so 6 weeks ago we celebrated our, our, uh our 10th year, so pretty cool.

That’s a huge deal, dude. Congratulations. So you started multiple companies or ramping them quickly, then joined the software company. What kind of software company was it? So it’s like a it was like a marketing software, um, they did, they did marketing, it was honestly probably more agency than software, but they had some developers, they built their own software kind of like go high level uh for the medical industry before they had before go high level was a thing, so they like started from scratch and built their thing.

Um, and yeah, it was really cool. The, the coolest part of it that I learned was like building an online uh organization, what customer success does, what sales does, how reporting works, how communication works, how to communicate SOPs beyond between organized uh departments, um, which I feel gave me a really good foundation for being able to build now an online company, uh, but also I had a really great leader at that company who I got to see what transformational leadership actually looked like, and I think many people don’t get the The uh pleasure or the value of ever having a great leader in their lives or in their in their companies.

So having that opportunity was was definitely a blessing at the time. It’s awesome. And so you have 8 coaches, each with experience running or owning a multi-seven figure painting company. Right. That’s impressive. It’s a lot of experience and having worked with over 1253 painting companies, that’s a lot. Um, what are the I guess before we, we dive in, I know we talked about a few things, um, selling for the winter, now keeping that busy, um, refining sales process, profitability, things like that. But I guess, having worked with so many different painting companies, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see?

Uh, I was actually just talking to uh Jesse, our head coach, um, and my business partner earlier today, and one of the, one of the things that I’ve that we’ve identified is when someone joins. The idea of like joining and paying, say you pay for coaching or pay to do something, pay to go to one of our events or something like that, two things happen. One is you pay, or two things typically happen. One thing always happens like, OK, you paid. The second thing is, are you enrolled?

So enrolled means like mentally, are you already going to the mastermind? Mentally, are you already signed up for the coach, even though you paid for it, that doesn’t mean you’re enrolled in it. So being enrolled, being bought in, being committed to it. Uh, is really the difference between success and failure in a coaching program from what we’ve seen. So we’ve had people come in and they feel like, oh, if I pay, then I’m gonna get the result. But in reality, you need to pay, and you need to do the work, and you need to show up and you do need a little bit of soft bullshit, which is your mindset.

You need to work on your mindset, cause if you think that it’s not gonna work for you, then no, it’s not gonna work for you. So, I was never a big mindset guy growing up, you know, high school, college, like whatever. I thought that was fluffy Duffy stuff for losers. But as I’m right, but then now the longer that I’m in business and I realize how actually important. True mindset work is and being able to know what’s uh and identify like self identify if you if you have a negative connotations about something and to be able to shift that within yourself.

Most people can’t do this on their own. That’s why there’s mindset coaches and and different support groups and things like that, but um we have started helping out with that a lot with that, but if people come in with a negative mindset, this isn’t gonna work for me, or like, you know, arms up, like, show me, show me the result. Yeah, you, you gotta be a partner. You can’t be a, you know, a bystander in your own business. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of those similar thoughts, where I, culture was a big one for me prior to building a company with quite a few people.

I thought culture was BS, just like a word people like to say, but at the end of the day, we’re just trying to achieve something. Um, yeah, and mindsets, self-limiting beliefs, things like that. When you actually realize how important they are, it’s usually because it’s negatively impacting you. Because you didn’t know beforehand, so it’s good if you can kind of figure that out when you’re one person show or just a few people or you and your wife or whatever that happens to be, doesn’t seem like a big deal once you have 5 people, 10 people, 15 people, starts to become a pretty big deal.

It is and and now it’s not even just your mindset, it’s everyone else on your team’s mindsets. And if yours is negative, your team is gonna pick up on that and and and propagate that negativity. And it only takes one person, you know, one bad apple, one bad employee to wreck the uh experience for everybody else and take your company down. I’d like to say if your company has 4 people, and one of those people is shitty, your company is 25% shitty. So I’m sorry if this is, I don’t think any children are gonna be listening to this podcast, but uh anyway, should should be OK. I like how you talked about enrolled too, so not being not being necessarily an official thing, like an official step in the process, but just more of a mindset, you’re actually engaged cause we have the The same issue, it’s actually a pain point in marketing.

I think it’s a pain. I know it’s a pain point coaching, it’s a pinpoint everything where people will come in and there’s this big mental hurdle that they have to overcome to buy into something like that, right? There’s, there’s a lot of internal turmoil for a lot of people, if it, especially if it’s the first time, uh, it is somewhat high ticket for, for people a little higher than they might be accustomed to, and then they buy it and they think, woo, you know, kind of wipe sweat off their brow like I did it.

You didn’t do it. You just, you just like walk through the door. It’s now you gotta do it. So I like that done with you, not done for you. Yeah, now the real work begins, right, the real work on your business, you show up, we’ve we’ve noticed a quite strong correlation in business growth with our owners, um, we call them owners, not clients or customers, they are owners because they’re they’re all business owners, and uh a correlation between their success and their attendance on their group call attendance rate.

So yes, everyone gets one on one coaching, but we find the more group calls that you attend, the faster your business grows. Now, I don’t know if this is a correlation equals causation type thing, but I don’t know, the data is there. Do with it what you will. Sure, yeah, I’m sure there’s at least some causation there and probably quite a bit. So the when when painting companies come in, let’s say they’re enrolled, so they’ve signed up, they’re enrolled, they’re actively engaged. What are, what’s typically the low hanging fruit?

Like you, you guys have worked with over 1000 companies where you say, OK, these are the 135 areas that are almost always wrong, are almost always inefficient, we typically dive into these first. So it really depends on the business size. So if we, let’s say we’re we’re dealing with the middle of the road, kind of, you know, size contractor about, let’s say 500K per year, OK? They’re off the tools, we’ll just describe them first, and this, if you’re listening, let me know if this describes you. Uh, you’re off the tools for the most part, you might get called back on the tools if there’s like a tricky job, you know, you still think that you’re the best painter, you might be the best painter on your company, but you’re not painting anymore.

Um, you have, you know, 3 to 0003 or 8 painters, maybe a bunch of subs or something like that. Um, they’re pretty good, but yeah, you need to go on every now and then. You’re really busy doing sales, you’re doing marketing, you’re doing, you’re running your production, maybe you have a production manager or a sales rep, but you’re still super, super busy and uh you’re just holding everything together. This is like the typical type of contractor that we, that comes to us first, and they’re like, I don’t have time to attend group coaching calls.

I don’t have time to attend one on one coaching calls. When am I gonna watch all the videos, right? Classic. Now, in this scenario, number one, the first thing that we need to do is get control of your time, cause what we’ll find is a is is most business owners and uh specifically in our experience painting contractors are firefighters. Right? You’re running around, you’re putting out the, you’re putting out the fire, you’re putting grease on the loudest wheel, and you’re living in this reactive mode where 100% of your life is just reactive.

Oh, your phone rings, I’m gonna go fix this problem. Oh, phone rings, I’m gonna go estimate this lead. Oh, phone rings, I gotta go pay this bill, right? You’re reactive all the time. And as long as we’re reactive, we don’t have time to get into this like 4th quadrant type of uh. Uh, proactivity, uh, within our jobs and, and this proactive working on your business type thing, it’s like, OK, when are you building your sales processes? When are you digging into your metrics to see what can be improved?

When are you looking at your lead sources to see what has a higher cost per lead versus a lower cost per lead and and things like that. And and most contractors don’t even don’t look at that data, and I would even go on further and say they don’t even know about some of these metrics, let alone where to find them. So number one, getting a hold of your time, and this is involved, there’s a a few exercises that we prescribe, uh time audits and and uh looking at what you’re doing at the time, using Google Calendars and stealing some good time hygiene habits.

And what we find is someone in this type of business can very quickly find between 00093 to 00083 hours per week of busy work that they can free off their plate. If they have a few employees, they have team members, they can, we can, we show you how to pass responsibilities, how to um Let some fires burn that need to burn and be more efficient with your time. We can usually find 00073 to 00063 hours per week of time. And now it’s not just about taking those 00053 or 00043 hours a week and sitting in your truck on Instagram. Right?

But it’s about doing the next most productive thing that you could be doing during that time. And as a business owner, you can often look at All of the things that you could possibly do and be like, what the heck do I do? Do I work on my sales process? Do I hire another painter? Do I look for more jobs? Do I need more leads? Do I, uh, work on productivity? Do I go paint for a little bit? Do I work on my finances, right? There’s a million things that you can do, and when faced with a million options, we typically as humans do the easiest thing.

Like um I have a few hours free, I’m gonna go paint for a bit. But why are you doing that? Well, cause I’m gonna make some more money. We’re gonna finish, like, is that the most money you can make? Right? And so that’s what we end up doing is we just go to the easiest thing, go to the comfortable thing that we know how to do, because we don’t know which one of the other options are the best ones to do, and even if we did know the best one, we don’t necessarily know how to do it.

So that’s where we kind of come in, it’s like we, we, we figure out where you’re at, we get you your time back, and then we look at all the different things that you could be doing, help you identify what the top priority is, and then give you the guidance, the support, the resources, the spreadsheets, the documents, SOPs, the handholding to do that one thing, and then next week we do it again, and then next week we do it again, and then in 00033 weeks from now your business is unrecognizable because all the systems and processes and people and uh.

Everything that’s going on, just completely different than the firefighting that you previously had. Yeah man, you brought up a couple points in here in there that I really want to highlight, so I think it’s, it’s hard to let fires burn. Right? We want to make sure that everything’s perfect. It’s our company, a lot of owners are, are gonna be pretty type A and so even admin work, even responding to emails or touch ups for painting or whatever it happens to be, we might be the best at it.

And so if we let somebody else handle it or we push it off, or God forbid, we just don’t do it because it’s actually a very minor deal, that can be mentally challenging to let that go. But you have to let some fires typically burn or somebody do the job, maybe 00023% as well as you would do it, so that you can advance your company and move forward. So I think that that’s a really good point, um, that you brought up. I think also the The idea of just being cognizant, you know, we, we oftentimes as business owners we feel really, really busy and overwhelmed, but John Wooden has a quote, never mistake activity for achievement.

So just seeing that there’s, OK, I can go fill my time with this. OK, I’m painting, I’m growing my business. I’m, I’m responding to emails. I’m growing my business. You might be painting, you might be responding to emails, but you’re probably not growing your business as quickly as you could be. So sitting back looking really at the achievement. Versus just how busy you are, and that’s, that’s tough when you’re in the middle of it. Mhm, yeah, busyness. I like that quote, um, but it’s, it’s true cause everyone is busy.

We’re all busy, especially as business owners, um, and people often I think use busyness as like a, a flex, like, oh, I’m so busy, it’s like OK, I mean, good for you. I would, I would actually, I can’t, I can’t hang out with you this weekend. I’m so important. Exactly, but the other other thing would be the opposite of that would actually be a bigger flex. I have nothing to do. Right, my team is handling it. Uh, my production manager is great, my sales rep just closed 00013K last week.

My admin just made 00003 outbound dials last week, you know, like, if, if your business was set up like that and you were just like, You know, say your job was to meet with 2110 property managers a week. And that was all you did. How cool would that feel? It’s like, ah, I got, yes, I can go to my child’s, you know, recital at one o’clock on a Wednesday. Right, I don’t, and it’s not gonna make me feel guilty because everything else is handled. Yeah, I love that, man.

Who would you say, so we, we talked about in this example, painting companies between maybe 2162 and 21000 painters, owner not really on the tools anymore, maybe occasionally. Who would you say is an ideal. Ideal fit, ideal owner for your company, for painter growth. So around that, around that um avatar, um, I would say all the way up to, you know, starting, but like, like, like 215000K to about 2150 million is kind of our sweet spot. Um, anything, uh, in there, like I feel like we have really, really great systems kind of help you grow, get to like, you know, as high as 21000 or 2150 million, once getting beyond that level, um.

We just, we don’t really have the infrastructure and support. We have some partner businesses that we recommend for once we get people there and we’ll like, you know, graduate people out to those other various um companies, but getting to 2150 or 21000 million. We have, I think, I mean, I’m probably biased on this one, but I would say the best systems in the world when it comes to marketing and sales and production, and leadership and finance around the smaller painting business, you know, getting to 216 or 3 production managers, 2 or 3 sales reps, um.

Having 8 to 10 projects on the go, like, Yeah, that’s if you want to get to that point, then we can absolutely help with that. But anyway, let’s say we don’t have to talk about, talk about that. Let’s just keep dropping some some value bombs. I love it, dude. So the sales process, 2025 has been a bit of an odd year, a bit of a slow, some, some painting companies are killing it, a lot of painting companies seeing a bit of a slowdown, so it’s just been unusual. I think a lot of tension, obviously politically and tariffs and kind of everything that’s been going on.

And whenever we see this, uh, Peter Mergen pros, we’re always advocating for stronger sales process, right, more follow up reaching out to your list, getting those essentially free leads to book, uh, repeat referral, but one of the things we’ve noticed in particular is that an elongated buying cycle. So projects that may be used to close in 103 days are now taking an average of maybe 12 to 14 days to close. Let’s get into sales. Sure, yeah, I love sales. Um, I, I think that, yes, having a really, really great sales process can solve so many problems in business, right?

If you don’t have to worry about money and you don’t have to worry about jobs, you know, what would that free up your brain space? So super important skill, um, and, and as much as there’s so much information and training on this, there are still so many contractors that I meet that that join our program that we talked to who still aren’t presenting the job on the spot. And some of you guys listening to this are rolling your eyes, you’re like, I know it’s so basic. Yeah, OK, then how come 80% of you guys aren’t doing it?

So, um, the way that we we set that up is like in a very simple framework. Number one, as soon as you get a lead, you need to do a setup call. This setup call is critical. It doesn’t have to be you, it could be you, but it can be you, an admin, sales reps, someone like that. On the sales call, you’re gonna ask a few main questions scope, timeline, decision makers, and a trial close. The trial close being the most important. All right, Brandon, when I come to your house uh tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock, um, assuming the price is fair and you trust that we’re gonna do a great job, are you gonna be ready to book into our schedule?

Simple as that. They can say yes or no, you’re not going to solve their objection there, but you’re pulling out the objection so you know what to expect. It’s like, uh, they’re gonna give you like, oh no, we still need, I need to talk to my wife. OK, well, when is your wife available so you guys can both be there in case she has any other questions? You can kind of solve that right there, but you’re gonna get an idea of what objections to look for ahead of time by asking that trial close.

The next is when you that estimate comes, it’s time to go to the estimate, you show exactly on time. If you’re gonna be 1 minute late, literally 1 minute late you call, and you say, hey, Brandon, I’m running 1 minute late. I’m really sorry about that. I’ll be there in a second, just got stuck behind a red light. Is that all right? You’re gonna be like as a homeowner, 1 minute late, dude, why are you even calling me about that? But subconsciously, you’re like, if you’re concerned about 1 minute late, you’re gonna do a really great job on my home.

People love that. Some of our clients, some of our owners purposely show up one minute later so they can make that call. I was gonna ask that. Yeah, sit around the block, like I’m one minute late. Yeah, exactly, um, and then, and then so you go in, you introduce yourself, you sit down at the table, you start, um, You go over their job, their previous, and if they had any previous bad experiences with contractors and uh do a walkthrough of the home. One thing that’s important when you’re doing a walkthrough or a walk around, you know, interior versus exterior is you need to be speaking in future paced.

Language in assumptive language. Like when we are here, where can we put our tools? When we’re here, we’re gonna be covering this all with plastic. We’re gonna be taping right up to your baseboards, um, we’re gonna be doing this, we’re gonna like like interfacing with their surface, touching their walls. Um, and then so you get all your measurements, you understand the scope, you’re talking about your project and your process. See all these cuffs, like we’re actually gonna sand that down, we’re gonna putty it, we’re gonna send it again, we’re gonna prime it and then it’s gonna be smooth, really, really nice, gonna match the rest of all these holes and dings will be gone. Cool.

And then, then you’re gonna go to your vehicle to do your numbers. OK. Before you leave, this is trial close number 2. Hey Brandon, thanks for showing me your home. I’m gonna go to my vehicle. It’s gonna take me about 62003 minutes. I’m gonna write out the exact proposal and price that it’s gonna take us to complete your project for you. Now, assuming the price is fair and we’re within your budget, will you be ready to schedule with us? Right, so this is #2, you’re, again, not necessarily solving it, but you’re getting them ready to make a decision.

So you go, you go to your, your vehicle, you do your numbers, you come back in. If it’s a big project and it’s take you an hour, tell them, hey, this is gonna take me an hour, but I’m gonna come back in when I’m done. And you don’t have to do it when you get home, anyway. You come back in Sit down at the table, like, all right, full project, go through step by step, exactly what you’re doing and build an incredible amount of value. We’re gonna do this and you said this was important and your dogs, you know, we’re not gonna let them out and you want us out by 3:30 because your kids and blah blah, all these exact specific things that they told you.

And then how does this sound? This is your 3rd and final trial close. All right, I’m gonna show you the price. If the price is fair, do you trust that we’re going to do a good job, price is fair, you’re ready to book in with us. OK, cool. So we’re going to be able to do all of this for $8,221. How would you like to handle that? Sorry, I’m actually miss a step, $8,221 we take a 20% deposit, which is only $103 today. How would you like to handle that? Cause what you’re doing is you’re telling them the price, but you’re selling the deposit.

So the only decision they’re making today is a $1600 decision, not an $8000 decision. So the price is this, here’s a deposit. How would you like to handle that? And then you you give them the deposit amount? Did you say a 20% deposit, that’s $1600. How would you like to handle that? Yeah, I typically do. Yeah. That’s awesome cause then they don’t have to do math in their head, they just know. How do you handle, obviously people struggle with sales, they feel uncomfortable with sales, um, it’s one of the big issues.

So, so that trial closed number 2, especially when you’re in person, and you’re saying, hey, I’m gonna go, you know, work up the proposal, make sure we cover everything and and then if it. If the price seems fair, I like how you focus on fair versus low or something like that. If the price seems fair, are you, are you ready to schedule? How do you mentally work with someone who maybe finds that uncomfortable? I would probably, cause you’re right, a lot of people are just, I mean, I’ve had thousands of reps and so I get that.

I’m probably also a little more extroverted than some, so I get that it’s easier for me, you know, whatever. I would say practice. By yourself, repeating the phrase over and over, and then with a friend or a partner or another contractor, right? If you can get in a mastermind group and do some role playing and just repeat those phrases over and over, honestly, you can even role play it with Chatchi BT now. You don’t even need a partner. You can just go and chat GBTA chat, you’re a homeowner, I wanna role play a few things with you.

Here’s the script, you can copy and paste the script, help me role play this, give me feedback, and you go in voice agent mode on the free plan and you just go back and forth a few times and practice it. Cause if you’re gonna go and try to say one of these nuanced phrases for the first time in front of a homeowner, you’re either not gonna say it or you’re gonna mess it up. So practice makes perfect. Say it 50 to 100 times, you know, by yourself or with Chat to BT, and then you’re gonna feel a lot more comfortable cause it’s not, it’s not rocket science.

Like you guys can do hard things, believe in yourself. The customer invited you into their home cause they want to get this painting done. Do you truly believe that you’re the best person to get their job done? If you do, then show them that conviction. And part of that is respecting their time, helping them make a decision, and then respecting your time and your family’s time by being more efficient with your time, by increasing cloth rate. Yeah, I think that’s great. It comes back to the mindset, right?

And I think if you, if you run a solid ethical company and you don’t ask for the clothes, you don’t attempt to make the sale. You just say, hey, I’ll email it to you 24, 48 hours later because then I can go run away hide, just send it by email, don’t have to do all this uncomfortable sales stuff, then you very much leave that homeowner vulnerable to unscrupulous contractors. And so you actually have an obligation. To attempt to make that sale if you were going to take good care of the homeowner.

If you’re not, then hopefully you just stop listening to the podcast because you’re not my audience and you’re not my audience. Yeah, exactly. Um, I will add one more thing. There’s a hot take. If you spend your time doing busy work and things that aren’t as efficient as you know that you could. Um, and you have a family. So say you do sales, you do go to estimates, but you don’t close on the spot, and you just email the quote the next day. Number one, you reckon your evening because you’re doing your numbers then and you’re emailing the quote and you you have a lower sales rate than you could because you’re not doing it on the spot, um, and you’re just doing busy work throughout the week.

If you do these types of things, you are being disrespectful to your family. Cause every hour that you’re away from the household, as a business owner, your spouse, husband or wife, your kids hope and assume that you’re doing the best thing for them. And if you were doing a less than optimal job, even though you know a better way because you’re scared, that’s disrespectful to your family. Yeah, I love it, it’s a powerful point, man. OK, so sales process, super critical, try to close on the spot.

Uh, how about the follow up? Do you have any, any advice there? So through, yeah, follow up should be um consistent, uh, you know, consistent multiple times, not pushy. I never recommend being pushy, right? Homeowners don’t like that, business owners don’t like that, like we’re past the pushy salesness, but you can be firm. So, um, follow up until you get an answer. If you don’t close it on the spot, I would say follow up every day or uh always leave a meeting with a meeting, right? Uh. Yeah, leave a meeting with a meeting.

There’s like an acronym somewhere in there, but at the end of your estimate, if they say no, that’s totally fine, respect their decision. When will you have a decision? When will you know if you want to go with us or not? It’s like, uh, OK, well, I need to, or what do you need to do in order to make your decision? Well, I need to, we need to review our budget, and we need to get these two other quotes. Cool. One of those quotes booked for, right, we have one tomorrow, one on Wednesday, right.

So, can we schedule a follow up phone call on Thursday or on Wednesday at 623 p.m. where I’ll call you, we’ll do like a FaceTime, we’ll talk about the project, any other que any quotes that you’ve got, and if it’s great, we can move ahead. If not, you can let me know then. How does that sound? So what you’re doing is you’re scheduling that next meeting at that time, and then you put it in your calendar. Every single person listening should be using the Google calendar and relying on it.

So you got your Google calendar, you um are uh putting that appointment in the calendar, ideally with like a booking software so the homeowner gets a reminder, like a reminder email and text, so either with drip jobs or calendly or uh Google uh calendars actually have a free booking widget, but make sure they get the reminders, book in your calendar, and then it’s gonna happen. So always leave a meeting with a meeting, um, and then if you don’t have a meeting scheduled, then I would say just like a daily follow up phone and text until you um get a yes or a no.

Yeah, one of my mentors taught me that years ago cause we would, we would, um, when I was running the sales for painter marketing pros, you’d, you’d leave and sometimes you think, oh, it went great, right? This will be this partner’s definitely coming on board, worked great. They said that they’re coming on board. They just need the weekend or they, they need to do X Y Z or talk to their wife or their dog or whatever it is, uh, and then. Often, not necessarily over 50%, but a not insignificant amount of the time, it ends up falling through, right?

And so I think it’s, it’s comfortable a lot of times for, and a lot of times I think people intend to move forward, but what I didn’t realize, and what I think a lot of painting company owners don’t realize is you’re not just competing against other painters, you’re competing against apathy. So people, people are were very comfortable in apathy. And so when you hire a painting company and you’re gonna, in this example, pay them $8200 808221 whatever dollars or you hire a marketing agency or hire Mike’s company, Patter Growth, you make some big move like that, you could also just not. Right?

Like, like we know that the homeowner could could paint it themselves, that’s a substitute, it’s a competitor of you, so to speak, for especially for interior, um, but we don’t think of apathy. So when you put a follow-up meeting on the calendar, you force the decision. So they’re either gonna move forward with you, or they’re going to not, but the odds are much higher that they move forward with you because you’ve basically eliminated apathy. Now we have a date to make a decision. You’ve removed one of your competitors.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s probably not talked about enough is that is that apathy cause cause choosing to not make a decision is a decision in itself, and that’s important buying behavior that just, yeah, isn’t really, isn’t really talked about. It’s like, oh, I lost the job to a competition. I lost a job to a competitor. I lost a job because my price was too high well. Maybe you just didn’t inspire the customer enough to want to paint their home, and they’re like they just decided they didn’t want to do it anymore.

So that’s where things like, you know, design consultations and Emotional um framework can really help drive the emotional decision making, not just the logical. Yeah, I’ve not heard a stat. I’ve been very curious about it, but it, but some kind of stat with, OK, you, you deliver a a quote for an exterior project, you know, and you look at maybe all the quotes that you deliver over the past 6 months, and then you actually visit all the addresses, and you see what percentage of those actually didn’t get repainted.

Right, I bet, I bet it’s at least 20%, assume if not potentially probably at least 20%. Um, I mean, I would say like in sales, there’s like the 3rd, the 3rd, the 3rd rule. The 0003st 3 are gonna be people who are pretty easy to close, right? They’re kind of like gonna close no matter what. So like 33% close rates kind of like, but you feel great. You walk away like I closed them. I’m a salesman. Now the next third is, so the next 3 is never gonna close no matter what you do, big, you know, whatever, you’re never gonna close this 3rd.

And the last third is where true salespeople, really good salespeople who can who can transfer trust will close. So I would say you got 66% you can close, 33% you’ll never close. So if you can be 50, 60%, that’s like you can’t really ask for any better than that. If you’re higher than that, then you, you gotta raise your prices, but Um, that is, and when I say sales, that real sales is the transfer of trust. So you need to transfer the trust and belief that you have in your business to the homeowners, and if they believe in your company the same way that you believed in their company, in your company, would they buy?

I hope so, right? They see the, you know, they say your conviction, but uh that’s where the transfer of trust comes in. It’s just, it’s not about tech tactics or salesy you know, it’s just about transferring trust. Yeah, going back to the mindset thing, I think a a maybe or a non-decision or we didn’t hear back from the homeowner, that can actually feel better for us than a no, no stinks. So I think just recognizing, OK, maybe you don’t even want to hear the no, and so maybe you don’t push as hard cause you’re afraid of the no, and maybe you don’t, you you’re not even thinking about that, but you’re losing a lot of yeses by being afraid of the no.

Don’t be afraid of no, no is good. Um, awesome. Let’s, let’s cover filling the winter calendar. So some strategies for that. I know this is, you know, podcast, we’ve, Mike and I were talking before the episode. I, I kind of bashed the podcast, so they, they, they come out sometimes we film a few weeks early, um, but this will still be, you know, coming out at least in the fall. So how can people pre-book? How can you, you reduce seasonality? Yeah, so I mean you’re in Florida, so less seasonality there.

I would say if anything people try to probably try to paint interiors in the summer, yeah. Whereas, uh, up north in half the country, you know, we, we have winter, we have snow, so we, you know, our season, our summer season is, you know, like end of March, April, you know, sometimes late as May to end of September, middle to late October, right, depending on exactly where you are. So you have this summer season where you can paint next year and then you have a winter season where you can only paint interior.

And um I would say typically 2 to 50003 months before your interior season starts, at least 2 months, so we’re in September, that’s fine. You can still get started now. We really want to start some focused interior marketing campaigns. Now, most contractors, when I look at their marketing before they join us, their marketing says, hey, we are specialists. We are specialists in interior and exterior, and cabinets, and siding and roofing, and we’re also specialists in concrete painting and stucco repair, and we’re specialists in drywall repair pair and drywall hanging, and we’re specialists in handyman work.

They run a $40 million company, so they actually have whole apartments for each of these. No, they run a $200,000 a year company and they’re specialists in all of this. That tells me. I’ll take whatever job you can give me. And I’ll figure it out. I’ll be on YouTube on site if I have to be, but and so million dollar homeowners will never trust a company like that. But if a million dollar homeowner gets a flyer that says we’re interior painting specialists, and there’s a beautiful picture of like a before and after from like a home that’s just like theirs, interior painting specialists, we specialize in interior painting.

Here’s the features, here’s the benefits, here’s the discount or the offer. Call us before December 1st for our winter interior special or whatever, right? Paint free paint upgrade, 10% off, whatever. There’s many different ways to in the offer. What this does is this builds trust for the exact type of project that you want to get at that time, and you’re by creating a smaller net, you’re gonna get more ideal clients. And I I recommend rotating that offer multiple times a year depending on the type of client that you want.

So starting in August, September, even early October, start with your interior only campaigns. For us, we, we do, I mean, absolutely use Brandon for your online stuff, Facebook, Google, you’ll, you guys will set up the interior only campaigns online. Uh, but we recommend also doing some offline stuff, door hangers, lawn signs, uh, targeted door to door campaigns, uh, communications with your property managers or realtors, your builders, your GCs with your specialty, with specific print marketing that speaks to your offer and your, your, your specialty, right, your one specialty.

And you’ll find if you distribute this and you talk about this and you share about this and you go, you know, get some door to door guys to go around talking about this with with interior only flyers. You’re gonna pick up an incredible amount of interior work and book your interior schedule way before you need to. I like that a lot because a lot of companies, I think they want to go one of two ways. They want to either expand their service offering because they shiny object syndrome, they feel like they’re leaving money on the table, so they should be doing cabinets because this one homeowner asked about cabinets or they should be doing flooring because while we’re doing the cabinets, they asked about the flooring, but we don’t do flooring, so now we’re opening a flooring division.

Or they think about uh reducing their service offering and and say, well, they talked to this one company, they only do cabinets and they’re killing it. So maybe we should just do cabinets or we should just do interior. And what you’re highlighting here is kind of the best of both worlds where you can do multiple different service offerings, you can cross sell. So if you’re doing an interior, maybe cross all the exterior of the cabinet, but you actually create these marketing campaigns that are more singularly focused on one service based on what you actually wanna.

Want to be primarily selling that time of year and by sending out a flyer that is focused purely on interior, saying we’re interior specialists, and not saying we’re also in exterior and cabinet and handyman and we’ll put a roof on if you pay us enough, we’ll figure it out, um, then you’re just gonna get a much higher response rate with the ideal customer avatar you want at that moment. Exactly, yep. And uh I would also encourage you to look at your job costing reports. And see what projects are the highest profitability projects and the ones that your painters can bang out the quickest without needing you.

I recently had an owner on our, uh one of our clients, he said that he is completely off the tools off the job site, except when they get when they get cabinet projects, cause he’s the only one in his crew that can do cabinets. So when he gets a cabinet project, he stops everything all working on the business and spends all week painting this cabinet project. OK, I get it. You like that 6K of revenue. But at what cost? What if during that time you booked 5 more interior painting projects for your team?

Like how much better would that be? And then you have all your time back. Just look at the projects, what’s profitable, what takes your time, what doesn’t take your time, what’s your team good at? And double down on that. So you speak into this time and and kind of what you should be spending your time on, you gave a presentation, I think it was during one of Tanner’s Tanner Moll’s events, contractor lift off, blast off, one of the contractor offs, and you had, you had given kind of this, this like $50 an hour, $503 an hour, $5000 an hour, and actually really resonated with me.

I thought the presentation was excellent, and I left sort of feeling like an idiot looking through what I had done over the past week. Can you quickly, you might not remember. I think it was maybe 2 years. I, I’m very familiar, yeah, one of you run us through that. Yeah. So, um, the concept here is we, we teach early on in in our time management training. And it’s about recognizing the different level of tasks that you have available to you within your business, um, and we break them down, like you said, 50, 500, 5000, 50,000.

These are just rough benchmarks, but it all starts with the $50 an hour task, which is pretty much painting or anything production related. Like if you’re painting you’re making about $50 an hour, maybe $0003 an hour, but it doesn’t matter, it’s way less than $500 so about $50 an hour for production. And um can you delegate that for less than $50 an hour? Probably yes, because you can pay a painter $20 an hour or $25 an hour, God forbid $30 an hour, and you still have profit left over. OK. Most business owners doing less than a million dollars per year are spending most of their time on $50 an hour activities, and it’s not just painting and production, but admin, job costing, bookkeeping, um, things like that, things that can eat moving around ladders, right, in the truck, talking to homeowners, closing up jobs.

These are all $50 an hour activities. OK. The next is $500 an hour activities, and this one is pretty much anything sales related, direct sales related is about a $503 an hour activity. The way that we get to that number is, say you have a, I’m gonna try to keep the numbers easy. Say you have a $4000 average job size. You have a 50% gross profit, so every $4000 job, you make $210 gross profit, and so you close one out of every four estimates. So 262 hours to book that one. So you take that 2000 divided by 25000, that’s $250.

OK, your average job size is probably bigger than that and your close rates probably better than that. So really that’s maybe like an $2000 an hour activity sales. So every hour that you’re doing production instead of sales, you’re effectively paying like $503 an hour. Right, you’re losing that amount of money. Now, one caveat is that you have to earn the right to do more and more productive tasks. You can’t just hop in the business and do $250,2000 an hour activities or $26,000 or you can’t just spend all day doing sales if you don’t have production.

You need to earn the right, but if you spend as much of your time as possible in that higher level, your business is gonna grow. The next level up is your $5000 an hour activities. One of the biggest of the easiest to comprehend ones here is your uh recruiting. So for recruiting, say you spend 10 hours to find one painter, 10 hours solid pure recruiting time. So in a year, one painter can produce about $125,000. Cut that in half, that’s about $0003,000 of gross profit. Divide that by 10, that’s $6200 per hour of gross profit.

So if you spend 10 hours recruiting to find one person, you add $62,000 an hour of gross profit in a year, that’s a $5000 an hour activity. Um, then we go up even further to like your $50,000 an hour activities. This is like building out strategic marketing initiatives, um, doing one on one, being on with your business coach one on one, meeting with your production manager and your sales rep, and creating the annual plan or the quarterly plan, holding them accountable the numbers, leveraging their skills and their talents in order to drive your business forward.

So if you’re spending your time on these activities, you’re not gonna have to worry about the $50 hour activities because your team’s got it. I love that. So when you guys talk with Mike and his team, remember that you’re gonna be doing $50,000 an hour activities when you’re doing this kind of coaching because it’s gonna move your company forward in ways that most of the other stuff you’re doing is not. I think that’s great. Um, Mike, before we wrap this up, I know we talked about you, you providing some value to our listeners, something that they could, they could take away beyond just the wisdom you’ve shared today.

What is that? So because we have a few weeks, I’m going to put together a custom, uh, mini course slash tool kit that gives away every resource that I talked about today. I need the recording to make sure that I can get one, but like the sales stuff, the field marketing manager stuff, uh, the dollar per hour thing, all of that, I’m going to put in the priority management stuff in a downloadable toolkit that you can get, and I’ll get you a custom link for it. And uh you did this on your, on my podcast.

I’m going to do this on your podcast. Anyone who emails me. Mike at paintergrowth.com. I will personally hop on a one on one meeting with you. I love it. Mike, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for all the value. Is there anything else you wanna add as we wrap up this episode? I appreciate you, I appreciate you having me on, and um look forward to seeing you at the events. I think we got a few events that we’re gonna be uh mutually out over the next 6 months, so look forward to hanging out and Having a beer and chatting with anyone here who’s listening, who wants to come see me in person or or virtually, so hopefully I can support you guys.

Let’s do appreciate you, brother. Thank you, Mike. Thanks, Brandon.

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Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback. Let us know how we did. And also if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at PainterMarketingPros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Br*****@******************os.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.