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, Daniel Honan and Brandon Pierpont break down how to grow a painting business from $0 to $500K in 2026. Learn how to build a strong sales system, generate Google reviews and referrals, find leads through networking and door knocking, price jobs for healthy profit margins, and manage cash flow. Discover the essential marketing and financial systems that set your painting business up for sustainable growth.

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.

If I started a painting business today in 2026, what would I do? The whole name of the game here is just building the system. If I started a painting company from scratch today, everything I do would be to build the future. Just making sure you can produce profitable jobs that will give you more money. Welcome to the podcast. In today’s podcast we’re gonna talk about if I started a painting business today in 2026, what would I do? Unfortunately it’s not just me here. I’m here with Brandon Pierrepont of Painter Marketing Pros.

Welcome to the podcast, Brandon. What’s up, man? Excited to do the collaboration. Yeah, I, I’m, I’m ready to roll, man. This is exciting. I, I just remember back when I was starting my painting business and it was just. Honestly it was a terrible experience. It’s just like when you’re getting started it’s I have so many horror stories I like last night I woke up in a cold sweat of just remembering one of the things that happened to me when I was starting my painting business. It’s just it can be rough so rainbows and sunshine, yeah, but we’re gonna be looking at.

The startups phase from 0 to 5003K from a financial perspective and also a marketing perspective and going through the specific moves that we would make if we were doing it doing it again so let’s start it off like what what should we be looking at from a financial or a marketing perspective? What should we be looking at in startup mode? So I, I think a lot of, a lot of company owners in general, a lot of painting company owners view things pretty backwards and so I think you, if you.

There’s certain work that you put in up front that causes you to be able to leverage everything else and so I call these always marketing channels and you’ll see companies you and I have both been in this space for many years we’ve each worked with, we’ve worked with well over 400 companies so then I know you like to say you’ve worked with over 500 companies, 600. We’ve worked with over, we’ve worked with over 700 companies and you’re at over 600, um, we’ve each worked with a lot of companies, right? And so we, we’ve been in the space a long time, we’ve seen how it works.

And, and most of the we’re typically working with a little bit more established companies and so many of these companies don’t have the things that that I’m about to focus on for the companies that are just starting out and I call them always marketing channels. So some of the always marketing channels that you need to have are, are things like a really strong sales system. So having a, a dialed in CRM, having automations, having a, an in-home sales process so that you’re gonna take your lead and actually.

Maximize your opportunity to close on the lead and close the project and close it for a healthy profit margin. Things like effective ability to generate reviews consistently. So I, uh, you know, at least 1 out of every 3 projects, bare minimum, you should be getting a 5 star review. Um, proactive repeat and referral business program. How many, how many painting companies have we talked to where it’s like their primary method of growth was word of mouth or, or, well, people just, just find us, refer us, right? But it’s, it’s typically a passive process.

So we actually put something active behind that. Ends up being much more impactful, um, having a process where when you go out and you provide an estimate or you, you complete a project you systematically, um, hit the neighborhood doing the 5 round, 03 round, 15 round, putting flyers, door knocking, having, having something where you take any kind of momentum you have and you use it as leverage for further for further momentum like guerrilla marketing, guerrilla marketing and, and just recognizing, hey, if you’re in this band of 0 to 500. You have to build assets assets are, um, reviews on Google massive asset assets are your client list that actually still remembers you because you keep in touch with them because you strategically resell to them because you have referrals, so you get something they get something from referring you, right?

So, um, assets are before and after photos, right? A portfolio that you’re building because you’re strategically capturing the work that you’re already doing which so few painting companies do. And these are things that you should always be doing. This is you should start with these habits so that you can keep these habits going. This isn’t something like you should just do when you get started. You should always be doing these things and it’s like the, the basics, right? Because I see a lot of folks, they’ll get to 500K or maybe even higher and then they stop doing these basics and then leads start waning and it’s like, hey, just do the things that worked in the beginning, keep doing those things.

I have to remind myself of the same thing too. I know we all do. And, and I think it’s, I, I almost call it like a, like a multiplier, right? So each of these things like a multiplier because when you get However many leads you get, let’s say you just get 10 leads in a month. If you have a, a structured sales process that has some sort of value proposition, some sort of explanation process that shows why you’re different, why you’re better to the other estimates that they are certainly getting.

And therefore why they should pay you more and still close with you, obviously you’re gonna make more money from those 10 estimates, from those 100 estimates, from those 1000 estimates, whatever you have over x number x time period, you’re gonna make more money if you have a tight sale system. So I, I think not having it, what does that mean? That means if you don’t have a sale system that’s structured and if you’re just, hey, I need more leads, I need more leads, that was a good lead. That was a bad lead.

I need more leads, but you don’t actually spend the time and, and think about, hey, am I. Maximizing the value of the lead, am I making sure that I close at at as high a rate as I can for as high a profit margin as I can, then of course over 10 leads, over 5003 leads, over 1000 leads, over 10,000 leads, you’re gonna make a lot less money because you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I was just talking to a painting business owner they were. I was talking to him. They, there’s, I asked them what their close rate was, and they said their close rate was like 30%, 25-30%, and I was like, Hey, so what are you actually doing when you go to the home?

Do you present in home? And he’s like, No, I just go there, take the measurements. I go home, I send an email the next day or a couple days later, and I’m like, Well, that’s, that’s your problem. He was like spending, he’s like spending all of his time going to all these different estimates. He had so many leads coming in. But he wasn’t presenting at home because he felt like he had to go to the next estimate and so he wasn’t just spending the time to actually do a in-person consultation in home consultation asking for the job handling objections he was skipping all that so that he could do more estimates but if he just focused his time and actually did a proper sales process and tried to close on the spot, his close rate would go up, he would require less jobs and they’d probably be higher quality jobs probably priced better.

So I see that a lot where folks are kind of spinning their wheels because they’re not taking the time to actually do things the right way. Yeah, there’s a John Wooden quote, a famous basketball coach says, Don’t mistake activity for achievement. And I think especially when you’re early on, sweat equity is such a big thing, hustle, grind, hustle culture, that’s real. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. You do have to work harder than you want to work for longer than you want to do it, but I think it’s really easy to not necessarily focus on the quality of the work that you’re doing, but more the quantity.

And you can, you can overcompensate and you can have some levels of success. You can get to half a million, which is what we’re talking about right now. You can get well beyond that without hitting these fundamentals, but you’re, it’s like tying an anchor to yourself and then just running, you know, and you, and you’re trying to run as hard as long as you can, but you have this anchor tied around your, your ankle. You have this weight that’s kind of just like dragging along the ground behind you and if you stopped and maybe like you said you gave fewer estimates, you kind of slowed down, but you sat there and you undid that knot and you got rid of that weight.

Eventually you’re gonna run a lot farther, a lot faster, and things are gonna go a lot more easily because you put in some of that work up front versus just trying to outrun basically what are bad habits, not having a structured sales process is a bad habit because you haven’t developed a good habit of, of treating the lead the way that it needs to be treated and you’re trying to just compensate for it by running faster. The good news is that’s what almost every company does. So by doing that you’re kind of running with the herd and you can outwork them and beat them, but the even better news is if you think a little bit differently.

It’s really not that hard to start making leaps and gains in this space because so few companies spend the time on things like referral program, repeat business program, structured sales process, getting the reviews, actually looking at it as a business, not really a hustle. I just need to keep going to estimates. I don’t even have time. To do what I’m supposed to be doing, which is selling the project, so I’m just gonna continue to have to do everything and, and things will play out well enough because that’s quite frankly how unprofessional this industry is.

You can still succeed-ish doing it that way, but you’ll succeed a lot more if you, if you just stop, stop running, untie the weight, and then free yourself of that. And I wanna go back to something you mentioned which is having profitable jobs. This is really key in the startup phase is the whole your whole goal is demonstrating that you can produce profitable jobs every time, or at least most of the time. Sometimes things will go wrong and the basis for that from what I’ve seen working with hundreds of painting businesses that are performing at a top level, top profitability.

They’re using production rate estimating and a lot of folks in the startup phase are not familiar with what that is. Uh, just last week we’re working with somebody. They’re doing like $400,000 gross profit really low, so they were in their profitability is super low. That’s the first question. Are you using production rate estimating? And they didn’t know what that was. So basically what production rate estimating is, is how long it takes a painter to paint a given surface. So. You should be able to go into a home, measure all the different surfaces, the walls, the trim, count how many doors, windows, etc.

and then for each of those surfaces, you should have a metric on how long it takes a painter, one of your painters, to paint that surface. So a door takes 1 hour, 5003 square feet of drywall takes 1 hour to paint, whatever. And then from there, this production rate, this production rate should allow you to generate budget hours from each estimate that you do. And from those budget hours you can. Multiply it by your, your, your charge rate or or your fully loaded labor rate let’s say first so that’s basically how much you pay your painters with fully loaded burden and and payroll and all that stuff, all payroll taxes.

So typically this is like $35 maybe $40 per hour if you’re using a sub roughly speaking. So if you have a 100 hour project, 100 hours budgeted times $35 an hour, so that’s $3500 in cost to you to produce the project. Then the second big thing is the markup that I see a mistake all the time in folks that are starting up their painting business. Their gross profit is below what they’re targeting. Oftentimes you see the production rate mistake of not using production rates or they’re not properly marking up their labor and materials.

Time and time again I see maybe they’re marking up labor properly, like 100%. If you, if you do a 100% markup, you’re basically targeting a 1.53% gross profit margin. You’re doubling the cost to you. And uh that should allow you to target a 50% gross profit margin which is the standard for residential repaint um that’s the tar the the minimum standard so you gotta mark up labor and materials a lot of folks they won’t mark up materials they’ll just forget about that or they feel like oh I shouldn’t mark up materials because.

You know my customer could just go to the store and just buy paint themselves and so I, I feel weird marking up materials but that’s you’re you’re providing a service right for getting the materials getting the correct materials like the proper sheen, the proper product. Actually ordering it, making sure it’s good to go, getting it to the home, all those things, that’s work, right? Your, your customers don’t wanna have to like figure out what to buy and all this stuff, uh, most of them, and so you need to.

Have a markup on on your materials as well. Uh, and so once you get your production rate estimating in place, you get your proper markup for labor and materials and you’re targeting usually residential repaying 50% target for gross profit for GC work usually a little bit lower, like 35% gross profit target. Once you do that, then you should be doing weekly job costing on the projects that you did. So you should be validating that you actually hit your targets or you’re close to your targets. And so that’s another habit, you know, those basic habit that you should be doing is that weekly job costing to make sure your, your jobs are squared away and profitable because that’s the big thing in the startup phase is just making sure you can produce profitable jobs, uh, and so once you have that ability to produce profitable jobs that will give you more money to then acquire more leads.

So do you, do you happen to know anything about leads? I don’t know if a little bit, yeah, I wanna, I don’t wanna go you and I could, could spend hours on just. Head trash. So I don’t wanna go too into, into that. But when you said it can feel weird for people to mark up materials, it doesn’t really matter which way you skin the cat. That’s an easy way to do it, obviously labor and materials and, and double it, and then, OK, you have a 50% profit margin.

But if it’s weird to you, then you, you can just put some other multiplier in your labor. At the end of the day you’re, you’re providing a service and you’re taking a risk, and I think that. A piece that people miss, I think they miss a lot is this idea that you are taking a risk things are gonna go, are going to go south on some projects. That’s a fact for every business ever things go wrong and then when those things go wrong, you have to make it right.

If you wanna stay in business and grow your business and frankly do the ethical thing, then it’s on you, uh, regardless of what happened or why it happened. If it’s on your watch, it’s your fault because that’s part of the joys of entrepreneurship and so. You know that’s that that that 50% that’s like the perfect scenario that’s not always gonna play out and so you have to you have to you’re you’re self insuring in a way every single time you step onto. A job site you’re in you’re inviting a lawsuit every every single time you talk to a lead, you talk to a customer, you, you talk to a neighbor, you’re inviting a one star review.

So everything you do entails risk and so you have to make sure that the reward that you’re setting yourself up for is part of that insurance policy you are self-insuring against the negatives of, of what can happen just from existing, you know, there, there are all these predatory. Uh, and I don’t wanna digress too much, but all these predatory law firms in California now and some other states that are, are trying to, to do all these, um, digital. Lawsuits because your, your, you know, your website violated X, Y, or Z law or your website wasn’t ADA compliant and to make a website ADA compliant is it, it renders it unusable if you go to the nth degree, um, and that’s just part of the risk of running a business.

If you want to have a website, there will be digital risk. Everything you do entails risk. Make sure for the love of God that you’re pricing your projects accordingly because it is not risk-free. You are not guaranteed that 50%. You are not guaranteed to not have anything go wrong, so make sure you’re getting paid. Absolutely. I was working with someone recently and they were, they had some employees but they also subbed out work as well and they were only marking up the sub by like 20 or 30% and so their margin on subcontractor work was terrible and their thinking was like, oh well, we don’t have to do any of the work they just take care of everything so I’m just making 20-13% profit on that.

Like, well What if that sub doesn’t finish the job or they, they screw it up and you have to do it again or you know all these things, you know, you’re responsible they hired you, not them, so you’re taking again all that risk so you gotta think about that that’s huge, yeah, and you have to, yeah, you, you, you know, most companies are gonna be organized as an LLC. You can be like a C corp. You can be something else, but one of the core ideas of creating a separate entity for your business is, is liability.

Reduction, right? There’s, there’s a corporate shield between you, your person, and the business, but the business is an entity that needs to also be kind of protected. And if you get sued, again, let’s say something negative happens with a painter, there’s an accusation of some kind with a painter on a job site, and you get sued, or God forbid even there are legal charges of some kind that come into play, the entity needs to be able to protect itself even if maybe they can’t sue you directly, which there are ways to do that, but even if they can’t.

Um, the, the entity will have to be able to defend itself, right? And be able to, so. I digress. The but marketing. Yeah, you talked about a couple different leads. A common thing I hear is like, where are you getting your leads from? Like in that startup phase, like you just like not sure where to go of where do I actually get work. So that’s, that’s a common thing I hear from folks in this stage. We have a magic bag. So there’s a, it’s a magic bag.

I don’t, I don’t give it out to many people, but I’ll tell you guys. The secret to the magic bag is that there is no magic bag, so it cuts out of the bag if you will, and, and I call it sweat equity. So 0 to 500k, there’s, I’m gonna run from, from an assumption that you’re not a previous business owner, uh, coming up with a ton of experience and capital, right, because that’s a little bit of a different scenario. I’m gonna run, run assuming that you’re bootstrapping a painting company, maybe it’s one of your first ventures there, there’s, you’re always gonna pay for things with either time or with money.

And so if you’re. Just starting out, you’re under half a million right now in annual revenue, you were going to pay for it with time. And so, the things that you can do are things that are hard. And that is what it cost. And so you go to BNI Chamber of Commerce, right? Things like that. You go to professional networking groups. You go to your, you tap your friends and your family and your coworkers, kind of your personal network, um, you, this is scary. This is gonna ruffle some feathers.

You, you, there’s this crazy thing. So you take your hand. And you kind of like go like this and you walk up and you go and you do it on these on these on these like structures people refer to them as houses sometimes homes and and there’s like a it’s like a rectangle I guess kind of like usually sort of in the middle front of it and it’s usually got like a little circular thing yeah kind of on the side in the middle and you go and you if if you if you hit it usually like 5 times fairly loud and then you step back a little bit what will what will happen a decent amount of time is the rectangle will open and someone will be on the other side and that person.

Is a prospective customer. Yeah, I actually just had my 6-year-old daughter do this yesterday. Did she? Yeah, so I, I told her this little strategy. I was like, Hey, uh, take this quarter because she, she, she, she’s all into making money. Like she wants to like figure out ways anyway, so I was like, Take this quarter, go to everyone here in this little neighborhood. We have like a closed-in neighborhood. And say like, hey, my name is Ada. I live right down the street. I have this quarter and I’m playing this game called this trading game called Bigger or Better.

Do you have anything that you would want to trade for this quarter that’s bigger or better? And so. Then the person like gives them whatever something a little bit bigger, a little bit better, so she knocked on a few doors and um she got a little toy thing. It took like she, she did that for like 15 minutes and it was like her 1st 3 doors, 3 or 4 doors that she had ever knocked on and she already like created value for herself. So that’s pretty awesome, yeah, just, just if you’re hesitant about whether you can do it, my 63 year old daughter did it yesterday, so, um, anybody can do that.

Just come up with a simple script, keep it simple. And you’d be surprised if you knock on 100 doors that can create a few $1000 in profit for you. Yeah, so there’s, there’s door knocking, um, there’s cold calling, there’s professional networking, there’s going to networking events, there’s talking with real estate agents, local Facebook groups, so actually posting in Facebook groups, posting on Nextdoor, non-spammy post, introducing yourself, your company, what you’re willing to do, really just get, you know, I, I call it kind of pounding the pavement. You’re right, um, boots on ground going out there cause that stuff’s free and it’s stuff you don’t want to do.

I don’t know that in the past, I don’t know ever. I don’t think I have ever in my entire life had a painting company knock on my front door. Yeah, a painting company. I’ve had quite a few solar companies, some roofing, no painting companies, but yet painting is one of the most visibly obvious things you can see like this house is right, like is degrading. It needs a paint job. That’s how I started my painting business. I just grabbed a clipboard. Pencil went to every neighborhood that was like in my target market and knocked down literally and I ended up bringing a couple of people with me as well after a while but.

Knocked on like every single door in every single neighborhood and uh generated all my leads through door to door. But yeah, I just like grab a clipboard if you like look professional and look like you’re looking at. They’re Their house, they, they initially don’t know that you’re trying to actually sell them something like, oh this looks like a professional like they’re like inspecting my house or something and then you can kind of do your, your short look hey just I’m in the neighborhood we’re painting, you know, so and so’s house just down the road and I just noticed there’s some peeling here and we’re, we’re giving out free estimates for, for painting services.

Uh, can I get your name and number to get that scheduled or you know whatever something like that and I mean you can, it’s, it’s a gold mine, man. Yeah, and so I think there, there’s never really um a reason to not have leads as a, as a painting company. I think what, what everyone wants to do is find the holy grail. They wanna find kind of the, the free pass, you know, it’s so much easier to just press a button to swipe a credit card, to hire an agency and just say, well, the agency is gonna get, get me all the leads and agencies can get you leads 100%.

But if you then don’t have a dialed-in sales process, if you have little to no Google reviews, if you don’t have any kind of professional presence. You don’t have even a one page good looking Wix website. I mean just something people can go to and say, OK, this is a legitimate painting company, right? Just the, the bare kind of necessities, the right to play, the bare right to win in the space. You don’t have any kind of before and after photos, it’s hard to win and I think there, there’s this.

You know, Daniel and I will end up talking about um we’re we’re gonna do a couple more episodes where we talk about a little more advanced tactics as as companies get bigger, but when you’re starting out, you, you have to kind of get good enough to graduate to the next level and when you do things like running paid ads that that ad has much less affinity for you, much, much less forgiveness for you I guess than if they’re a neighbor of yours, right, and you knocked on their door or if if if it’s someone from your church or someone being an I who knows you well or.

Those are warmer leads as soon as you start going to this broader colder market, you have to be a little more dialed in and sometimes kinda cutting your teeth on door knocking on on getting these fundamentals right even though it’s a little bit slower you’re stopping, you’re untying that that weight from your ankle you’re investing a little time you’re not necessarily moving as fast as you want to move, but you’re positioning yourself to be able to scale to much rapid, much more rapid rate if you can’t close warm leads, you’re not gonna be able to close cold leads.

Yeah, and that’s where it’s where you, where do you get your leads from and that that’s where that question that is asked so frequently so incomplete, where do you get your leads from? How about where do you get your projects from? Right, because a lead, a lead is not. I, I like to do this exercise when, when I’m, you know, I speak at, at a lot of events, a lot of PCA events and some other stuff, um, each year. And I like to do an exercise where, where I can talk to the whole group.

Sometimes there’d be 100 people, sometimes it’d be 200 people, and I’ll bring up this hypothetical lead, a little background on it, but essentially the, the, um, takeaway is that that lead is a different value for every single person in the room. The same lead holds a different monetary value for every single person and, and that’s where this well Angie leads are, are crap. Angie leads are no good. Facebook leads are no good, right that. But then this other company will be doing $5 million on just Angie, right, or $10 million on just Facebook.

Somehow they’re good for the for that company and maybe they’re even in the same area. Somehow they’re magically siphoning the good ones and you’re magically just getting the not good ones. Yeah. Part of it goes back to the what I was talking about, which is profitable jobs if you have. If just to take an extreme example, if you made a million dollars for every lead that you got, you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on on acquiring a customer, right? So it depends on obviously no one’s very few people are making millions of dollars on one lead, but.

To prove the point, if you’re very profitable, you can spend a lot more on acquiring customers. So yeah, you gotta, you gotta make sure in this stage that you produce profitable work. The other thing you gotta make sure you’re doing is you’re staying out of jail. That’s always a good thing to do. And so from my perspective, finance perspective, you need to be compliant. You need to have books, you need to have a tax return submitted on time and making sure you’re just covered for payroll, like you’re doing payroll compliantly.

And you’re also, if you have sales tax in your area, making sure that you’re remitting those sales tax to your to your state, if you have subcontractors get those W-9s from them and do the 1099s, you know, in January, all those little things, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can become a very big deal and it’s cost folks in this stage tens of thousands of dollars or sometimes even more because they’re not doing those basic blocking and tackling from a financial compliance perspective, so.

Just make sure if if you are starting a painting business, my assumption is that you want to grow something and actually be legitimate and you know potentially sell one day or pass it on to your kids and this is gonna be a long term type of thing so if that’s true, you wanna set up the business and make sure you’re compliant so you don’t have to worry about the IRS knocking at your door and that sort of thing and uh the other thing is a lot of folks don’t think of this they think about profitability but they don’t really think about cash flow.

You gotta, you gotta start protecting your cash. Just having a basic rule of thumb of having two months of overhead costs as cash in the bank, like your overhead costs are basically all your costs that are not directly related to the job site. So not talking about paying your painters or paying for materials, but basically your, your software, your any marketing that you are doing at this point, all those overhead costs, look at it, whatever you’re. Spending per month and then multiply by 13, you should have 2 months of overhead costs as cash in the bank, and this is because.

Things go wrong, right? You, your truck breaks down some unforeseen circumstance or. You know, December through February is usually a pretty slow period for most painters. If you have a couple months of overhead costs as cash in the bank, that will help you get through that slower period. So that’s a big thing. Cash is king. You got to pay attention to cash flow. And then the last piece from what we’ve talked about profitability a couple of times, how much should you actually be making in the startup phase, depending, we usually look at it from the roles that you’re playing.

So if you are literally doing everything, if you’re starting from zero and you’re doing all the painting, the sales, the production management, all the admin, you’re doing literally everything, wearing every hat, you should be making somewhere around 70% or so of whatever you’re charging your customers, 70% should be going to you. Now, as you bring on more people like painters to help you, that’s going to cut in half, maybe be making about 20% if you’re doing sales, production management, admin, everything else besides the painting, about 2500% or so. But having just a rough idea of how much that should look like, and we actually have a, if you click on the link in the description, we have notes on this podcast, so you can actually look at the numbers.

There’s like a little chart in there you can take a look at on how much you should be making at this level, and some of the notes from the marketing side too. But uh I think once you once you get your cash dialed in, get your profitability dialed in, this is when you can really start looking at those paid marketing uh avenues, you know, uh, where initially, like you said, you’re doing a lot of the sweat equity, door knocking, networking, that sort of thing. Once you’re, you, you start getting rolling and you’re, you’re profitable, you have a couple months of cash in the bank, then you can start looking at some of those paid, uh, paid channels.

Yeah, well said, and I think like the hindsight, I, I don’t believe hindsight’s 2500 but I think you, you can see things differently. When, when you’re kind of through it and you started a painting company, built that I had an auto detail company that I ultimately exited prior to starting painting marketing pros and looking, looking at how I looked at things when I started versus how I look at things now is really interesting. When I started it was kind of 21.5 inches in front of my face and it would be so I get it like hey where are the next leads?

How are you getting your leads? How, how are you get it’s like a like a crack addict or something like hey man, where, where, where’d you get those leads from man those look really those look really nice, um, and, and you’re kind of chasing the dollar and number one rule of business is don’t go out of business so makes sense you have to make money, you have to figure out a way to generate revenue, but kind of this, this view that I have from being a little bit more seasoned and a little bit beyond that, you know, having been beyond that for a while.

If I were to go start over again now, if I started a painting company from scratch today, everything I Do would be to build the future right beginning from the, the standpoint of, hey, I, I know I’m gonna wanna get to for me I, I would wanna get to, you know, several million, then tens of million and and something really big, but even if I just wanna get to several million in the very beginning it’s gonna be make sure I make enough to eat, make sure we, we have enough money that we have the two months of overhead cash that the business is safe if something happens like we’ll be able to cover payroll, you know, it will be safe.

But then everything else is how do I, how do I get the systems, the levers, the mechanics right so that when I do move into paid ads, when I do move into kinda pouring gasoline into this machine and, and making it go faster and farther, that, that it works. So I, I need that, that sale system. I need to make sure I’m sitting. With the homeowner in the home objection handling talking, I, they’re, they’re gonna have the same objections. It’s too expensive, right? And that that objection will show up various different ways.

I need to talk with my spouse and there are, there are only so many things they’re gonna say and ultimately it’s gonna pretty much boil down to I don’t, I don’t think that you nec I’m not convinced that that you are worth what you are, are trying to charge me, right? I, I’m not convinced that the value is here, um, is, is basically what the objection is presented 21 different ways and so if, if you can essentially learn to get ahead of that. And then if you can say, hey, this, this lead is just this lead, this project is just this project, but average homeowner, I don’t the various stats but needs a painting project once every 26 years, whatever that stat is, why wouldn’t I, why wouldn’t I do their painting project 5003 years from now?

I just did it right now. Very few painting companies are even thinking about that. Well, they’re, they’re in a pretty tight neighborhood. They seem to know a lot of their neighbors or even if they don’t, their neighbors know they’re getting painted because neighbors are nosy. Why would I not go do the neighbors’ houses while I’m here? OK, people like a deal. They, they, they like being a hero of the story. You did a good job. You didn’t screw them, which is the fear of contractors. They’re gonna screw them.

You didn’t screw them. You did a good job. Why wouldn’t I have a really proactive referral process that I then, oh, they don’t know anyone. OK, great. Why don’t I follow up again in 2500 month, in 2000 months, 21.5 months, 12 months? Eventually they know somebody who’s gonna get paid project. They’re gonna get paid. You’re gonna, you’re gonna pay the, the person, the referee, because you actually have a structured process. So it’s kind of this. It’s like 10,000 ft view that’s so hard to see when you’re starting because you’re in the survival mode like where’d you get your leads from, but what you’re not seeing is the bigger picture and so that’s kind of what we’re talking about here is like the bigger pictures, the before and afters, the Google reviews that you’re getting a Google review, frankly, one out of at least every two projects is a 5 star review because you have a process for it.

You, you have a, a 40 to 50% close rate. Your gross profit margin, bare minimum 0003%. I would argue over 60%. Um, you, you, you have a structured process for, uh, repeat business for referral business. You’re actually tracking that stuff. You, you, you have a CRM, customer relationship management software with automations, uh, so you’re keeping in touch with these past leads and monetizing your client list, and you’re doing these things so that we’re not worried, we’re not the 0 to 500 is really just building. You, you, you need to eat, take care of your family, and then the whole name of the game here is just building the system.

You don’t wanna stay here. 0 to 500, I think sucks. So you’re, you’re building so that then 500 to 1.5 and 1 point now we’re, we’re, we’re coasting because we built the machine, right? That’s how I would view it, which is not how I viewed it when I was there. Yes, no, for sure. I was when I was in that it’s just like literally just trying to make sure that the job that you’re currently on goes well and you know you have enough money to make payroll or pay the sub or whatever it’s just very.

6 inches in front of your face like you said. So, uh, but if you, if you have some time to back up from your situation, take a look at those, those financial moves, those marketing moves, maybe it’s on a weekend, end of the day, maybe it’s the beginning of the day. I know I like to do my deep thinking, get up early, think about these things. Are you compliant from a bookkeeping perspective, a tax perspective? Do you have some cash in the bank? How can you save, you know, two months of overhead costs as cash?

You know, how can you? And most importantly, produce profitable jobs and then how can you always be doing those kind of basic marketing moves that you can start in the startup phase but continue on reactivating customers, getting Google reviews, having a strong sales process, and, and then setting yourself up to to start putting. You know, money into more outbound marketing channels. Cool. Well, I think we about covered those marketing and financial moves. I know we covered a lot in this episode. If you click on the link down below, you can actually get a Word document that covers all the notes from here.

So we covered a lot of stuff. If you want those notes, just click on the link down in the description. In the next video we’re gonna talk about the build stage 1 or 500,000 to 1.5 million where we’ll actually go through what financial and marketing moves that you need to make to be prepared to scale through that portion of your business so I’ll see you in the next video.

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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 Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.