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 explain how to grow a painting business from $500K to $1.5M. Learn how to scale marketing with Meta ads and Google Local Services Ads, improve profit margins, manage cash flow, hire key team members, and build long-term assets through SEO and your website.

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 got you to 103K most likely will not get you to 1.5 million. You’ve gone from the minors to the majors or whatever, you’re, you’re moving into a, it’s a different game. You have to raise your, your prices here so that you can afford to, to grow, to build a financial plan on how you’re gonna actually reach that 1.5 million. Welcome to the podcast. In this podcast we’re gonna talk about how you can grow your painting business from 500K to 1.5 million. What got you to 500K most likely will not get you to 1.5 million.

And so myself and my lovely guest Mr. Brandon Pierrepont from Painter Marketing Pros, so lovely. You’re very, very lovely. I really enjoy your company and I’m glad you feel good about herself. You really know how to make a girl feel good about herself. Well, that’s why I’m here. Uh, no, I think this is gonna be a really interesting conversation going through the financial and the marketing moves that you need to make to get from 500K to 1.5 million. We see it a lot with the hundreds of painting businesses that we work with and so we’re gonna try to distill down what we’ve seen works from a marketing perspective, from financial perspective to get you to 1.5 million.

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. So I’ll kick us off here. The first thing I think you should do is to build a financial plan. On how you’re going to actually reach that 43 million. When you’re at 500,000 at this point, you will likely have painting crews, right? They’re doing the painting on the job site, but you’re still likely doing the sales, the production management, the admin. So you’re still doing a lot of the things that the business needs. Now What you need to do to get to 1.5 million is that you need to pretty much fill that sales position, that production manager position, and an admin position.

Uh, you can sometimes stretch to 2 million without filling all those roles, but most of the time, depending on what your work-life balance is gonna be. You’ll need to Get sales, production management, and hiring an admin in place to get to allow you to get to 1.5 million. And so with those hires you need to be prepared for paying people, right? And understanding what your margins need to be at and what you need to, how, how to compensate those key roles. So coming up with like a financial plan doesn’t have to be super complicated, but just how, how much money do you need to be making on each, on your jobs like your margin.

How much are you gonna compensate these different roles and what your profitability is gonna look like? I would say generally for this stage you wanna still have cash flow to owner, which is basically like net profit plus any kind of officer salary that you’re running roughly between 23 and 33% of revenue depending on the roles that you’re playing in the business. Now, the other big thing from a financial perspective in this stage is just since you are making some money, like 30% of a, of a million is 300,13. So it’s a good chunk of change to be making in this it’s definitely possible at this level.

You need to be making those estimated tax payments. We just see a lot of folks where they don’t realize that they need to make those estimated tax payments and estimated tax payments are just basically. The IRS is a pay as you go system. It’s not, hey, I just pay my taxes on in April. It’s like you actually have to pay them as you go or you’re gonna get hit with penalties. So keep that in mind as you kind of grow, uh, to the at this level. And then the, the big one which I think you’re gonna have a lot of comments on this is the transition from more inbound marketing where you’re.

All of your leads are coming to you because you worked with them before or they were referred. By somebody to work with you or they found you on Google, they found your website. You know those are inbound leads. They’re very warm, which are great leads to have, but in order to really grow quickly, you’ll need to transition from inbound marketing to more outbound marketing, which is the benefit of outbound marketing is that you can grow faster. The downside is that it’s usually more expensive and they’re harder to close.

Those leads are harder to close. We’re talking about like paid ads, uh, pay per lead, those sort of things. So You’ll Basically need to set up your your economics and your business so that you can make that transition appropriately from inbound to outbound. So what are some of the things that like in the short term. Uh, that folks should, should be doing for marketing perspective. Yeah, so I think the, when you reach 500, 5000, so you’re half, half a million, you’re trying to get to 1.5 million, you have some money to invest into marketing.

And so we, Dana and I talked previously, another episode in the 0 to 500 phase, a lot of that’s gonna be the grassroots sweat equity, right? Investing your time, investing your effort, knocking doors, boots on, boots on the ground, um, kind of work, work in the network to get leads. Once you number one rule businesses don’t go out of business, so don’t invest money into marketing that is going to cause you to go out of business. That is a poor business decision. Once you actually have enough capital, which when you’re at $500,000 you do, to start investing in the ads, uh, this is your quickest lever to get more leads and to grow the business more quickly.

The, the big change, as you kind of mentioned, when you’re, let’s say you’re, let’s say you’re, um. Let’s say you’re in a BNI and you’re, you’re getting leads, um, you know, from someone in your BNI and it’s kind of a warm handoff, it’s a warm introduction or you’re, you’re getting, you know, leads through your personal network, you know, friends, family, people who have, have worked with you have referred you to other people, those leads are fairly warm. They’re, they’re kind of coming in. There’s somebody essentially vouching for you, saying, hey, I think you should talk to Joe.

Joe, Joe’s a really good guy, runs a painting company. He’s gonna take care of you. So then the homeowner going and talking to Joe is predisposed to trust. Joe, right? Like Joe almost has to screw that up. Um, it’s a warmer lead, warmer handoff when you let’s, let’s then contrast that with Facebook ads. If you do a ton of Facebook ads run, um, I don’t know, well over a million a year in Facebook ads right now for painters and, and so you’re a Facebook ad that Facebook ad doesn’t know Joe.

Right, so that Facebook ads just use Joe’s painting company and it could be Sam’s painting company. There’s no personal affiliation. There’s no personal vouching or handoff or warm warmth there at all, um, which means it’s a colder lead. And so when you have a colder lead, you have to have a more structured sales process. You have to have a way that you interact with that lead quickly. It’s called speed to lead. And so when the lead comes in, how quickly are you on the phone with that lead?

Um, how quickly are you demonstrating value to that lead in terms of making the, the estimate setting process easy in terms of, of kinda, um, serving them before you serve them, so to, so to speak, right? And so you have to get these things dialed in when you actually go and show up to the homeowner’s property and assuming residential here, the homeowner’s property, and you go and you provide that estimate. Are you conducting the sales process in the home? Are you objection handling? Is it dialed in because that trust factor is not there.

So once you move from. Every, every lead I get is someone I know or someone I went out and I, I personally got to, OK, now I’m gonna, I’m gonna swipe the card. I’m gonna do it myself or I’m gonna hire an agency that knows how to do this. You’re, you’re almost like in the next, you know, it’s almost like baseball, like you’ve gone from the minors to the majors or whatever. You’re, you’re moving into a, it’s a different game. The pitches that come in faster, they’re more varied.

The players are bigger and stronger, and, and so you have more potential there, but it’s a different game. And, and then, and that’s where a lot of companies will kind of, kind of crumble. They’ll say, well, the, the Facebook, Facebook leads are bad. Yeah, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that, like Facebook, Facebook doesn’t work for me. Yeah, Facebook leads are terrible, yet somehow we. We, we’ve generated I think over 100 $150 million Painter Marketing Pros has for, for painting companies through Facebook. So, I guess it can’t be that terrible, it can’t all be terrible, right?

To have $30003 million of painting revenue generated through over the past five years, but um. Yeah, that line is so common, right? Like all those leads are, they’re all just tire kickers. I think it’s just the business owner not being used to the cost of acquiring a lead. Like they’re used to people just coming to them. They’re like you said, they’re warmer. They just came in the door asking. They need painting done like right now. It’s like it’s, it’s almost like you’re just taking orders. You’re not even having to really sell them.

They just, you’re just taking their order. OK, you want this? Got it. And so Facebook or outbound type marketing, you could be door to door as well or direct mail to people you don’t know that also sort of outbound. These people weren’t necessarily thinking of painting. Maybe it was kind of in the back of their mind, but it wasn’t like the forefront. They weren’t like Googling for it, but they saw your ad, and now they’re like, OK, yeah, I guess I could, and slightly interested, not super warm, and then they also don’t know you.

And so like you said, you gotta have. Gotta be willing to spend more money to get in front of them then also have a stronger sales process and this is where folks don’t realize like you actually oftentimes have to raise your your prices here so that you can afford to to grow and that’s, you know, raise your prices slash raise your gross profit and like the the common. Rule of thumb you hear is like 50% gross profit. And that can work, but usually around this phase between 500K and 1.5 million, that kind of falls apart where you might need to be targeting a little bit higher, maybe 55% gross profit.

Not in all cases, but it depends on how aggressive you’re, you’re pushing the outbound marketing. If you’re really hitting the gas with meta ads. Then you might need to have a higher, higher than 50% gross profit to be able to afford and make the, the, the economics work. Yeah, and I think the, so I wanna quickly just touch on the channels that I would target at this point. So met ads is a really good one to target. Again, you have to have that dialed in sales process. You have to have the speed to lead.

You have to have what’s called lead handling. So how are you actually communicating with the, with the lead prior to the estimate, at the estimate after the estimate. To maximize chances of your clothes and then to be able to sell at higher, higher, uh, profit margins. There’s Google local service ads, so at this point if you haven’t turned those on, you definitely need to turn them on. So there, it’s the little Google guarantee, little check mark, uh, yeah, I, I have to show people what that is because.

The difference between Google Google pay per click and Google local service ads like when you do a search. Yeah, so Google, Google local service ads actually show above the Google Pay per click. I do not recommend doing Google Pay per click ads at this point. Uh, you are not big enough right now that you should be doing them. So, Google local service ads, uh, green check, green check mark, top of the results page of Google. Make sure you’re responding to the lead. Um, make sure you set the budget pretty high.

Google’s not gonna spend that whole budget, but when you, when you set it pretty high, Google’s gonna give you more leads, and then make sure you’re getting reviews. So, especially anyone who comes to the Google Local Service ad, but it is merged with your Google Business profile. It’s a profile on Google with your reviews and, and everything that you write about your company and your photos and everything. Um, those things are merged, so you have to get a lot of reviews, and that’s how you show up more often for the Google Local Service ad.

But have that running, make sure you’re responding to the leads because, because that is gonna become a, a better and better asset for you. You’ll get more and more high quality leads that way, um, if you’re running it and then if you’re actually answering the calls too, can’t ignore a lot of companies they’ll, they’ll set it and then they don’t, they’ll call back from a different number and Google thinks that they, they just ghosted the lead and so Google stops giving them the leads, um, or they don’t ever get reviews from those leads and so you have to play Google’s game really well.

Couple traps, I, I would say the biggest trap that I see. Even prior to 500K, but definitely around 500K, biggest trap I see companies fall into is this paper lead trap, right? So thumbtack and Angie, it’s the, it’s almost like the Staples easy button, you know, just lead, lead, it feels so good, right? Just like, yeah, I’ll take that lead. The problem with that is you are not, your company is almost certainly not professional and efficient enough yet to win at that game. And so you’re, you’re playing the Angio the thumbtack game.

And you’re competing against, you know, some of your closest rivals and, and some of what you’re gonna be considerably probably bigger than you that are playing that game. You don’t maybe you as the owner are still doing probably doing the estimating at this point. You might still be doing the project management, um, you have a lot on your plate. You, you might not have a fully automated CRM. You might not have a, a fully dialed in sales process and so these leads are coming to you and.

And you’re basically dropping the ball on them because you’re not set up to win at that game yet. So I, I caution heavily against doing the paper lead stuff when you’re at that $500,0001 million mark unless you really have front loaded your effort in terms of, of your sales process of, of your lead handling of your, of, um, objection handling of monetizing the lead on the back end through repeat and referral business, then you can play that game because that game’s actually pretty expensive. Those leads are $43 several $100 now per lead and they’re selling them to like 4 or 5 companies.

It’s insane. Yeah, and, and usually folks on Thumbtack are a little bit, it seems to be more price sensitive. They’re kind of for sure comparing and so they’re, they’re more expensive leads and then they’ll, you also have a lot of price sensitive, but it can still work like there’s any of these channels, yeah, and that’s what people don’t really they think there’s this, there’s one like. This one works and that that one doesn’t work. It depends on your company. Angie’s wouldn’t be around if it didn’t work for anybody, right?

It’s a pretty big company for it to never work. It definitely can work. I’ve seen it happen, but yeah, that’s, uh, I think folks again it goes back to exploring these different channels, not realizing like. Hey, outbound costs more money. You need to have that margin available to, to afford it because if you, if you do truly want to grow to the next level, you gotta have the margin available and so oftentimes it means increasing that gross profit. Was there anything else on, on that one? The other thing I, I was gonna mention is Google Pay per click.

So you, you brought up the difference between local service ads and Google Pay per click. Uh, Google Pay per click, we recommend a minimum $3500 a month ad budget. Those leads are gonna typically be at least a couple $100 a lead, um, whereas for frame of reference our average Facebook lead right now is around $60. So I would rather have more at bats. You know, I’d rather have 4 or 5 times as many leads through Facebook when I’m at this stage of the game than than have maybe a bit of a higher quality lead, but 1/23 as many through Google.

I, I would hold off on that and I would go into Facebook and Google local service sets. Yeah, and Google Pay per click, you’re kind of competing with like those big, bigger companies like Angie, for example. They’re running those ads. They, they drive up, uh, Angie and Thumbtack, and if, if you just search painter. Your city painter X and and you just look at the ads on the top. Yeah, those lead aggregators are running ads and that’s part of why they’re they’re driving up the cost of those keywords.

That’s part of why those leads are so expensive. Also kind of shows gives you a little insight into how this whole game works too because they’re, they’re getting them from Google Pay per click. They’re getting that lead and they’re getting that lead from SEO, which we’ll get into in a little bit, um, and then essentially they’re turning around and then selling you the lead. So they’re buying it and then selling it to, you know, to a bunch of you. Yep, so. Going off of that, like these basically your outbound channels are gonna go up in terms of the, the, the amount of money you have to spend to acquire a customer.

There’s a really important metric that we start using at this stage is the gross profit to customer acquisition cost ratio. Which is basically a comparison of gross profit, which is what’s left over after the job, right? You have to spend money on the painter and the materials. What’s left over is your gross profit. So usually the biggest cost in your business is the cost of goods sold, your, your cogs, your cost of goods sold is the biggest cost, and gross profit is an indicator of how well you’re doing on that front.

The second biggest cost is your cost to acquire a customer. So this is basically all the money you got to put in to close a deal, close a project, right? So this is your marketing spend, paying your sales people, every dollar you got to spend to close a deal. And so the ratio of gross profit to customer acquisition cost basically tells you if you put $1 into your business to acquire a customer, how many dollars back do you get in the form of gross profit? So it’s a very powerful ratio, gives you a lot of information of how you’re doing on this front, and it’s something that you should start reviewing, at least overall for your company.

And we use That transition point we’re talking about from inbound marketing to outbound marketing like you, you grew your business through inbound inbound marketing people, you know, finding you on Google referrals, repeat customers, all that stuff inbound marketing primarily your, your gross profit to customer acquisition cost ratio should be at least 4.5 to 1 so. Uh, when I look at your gross profit, if it’s at 45%, your marketing spend plus any sales people, which usually at this level you’re still the sales person or you just brought on a salesperson, usually it’s around 8% for comp of of what they close around that, so.

So if you’re at 45% gross profit, you look at your marketing line item if it’s 2% of revenue and then your sales person, let’s say 8%, so 10% total customer acquisition cost, so 903% compared to 10% is a 4.5 to 1 ratio there. So that would be the minimum gross profit to customer acquisition cost ratio for someone that’s doing primarily or mostly inbound marketing. And so if you’re not, you can look at your profit and loss to get these numbers right now and see where you’re at. But we recommend that you have to be at least 4.5 to 1 before adding in those outbound channels.

So what often happens is they need to improve their gross profit because maybe they’re only at 40% gross profit and they don’t quite have that 4.5 to 1 ratio. So usually they got to start either becoming more efficient or increasing the prices to make some a little bit more room for those outbound channels because they’re going to be more expensive like you said because you’re trying to reach out to colder audiences. And so that’s the first thing is, is to really make sure your GP to CAC ratio is dialed in before layering in that outbound channel and usually I don’t know what’s your thoughts on this we usually say like Add one outbound channel at a time like don’t, don’t go, you know, if, if you’re.

We talked about before, like you always should be doing these things like you should always be having a referral program, always reactivate your past customers. You always have a strong sales process like those things you should always be doing. And then when you’re adding an outbound channel, add one at a time because oftentimes people like, hey, should I add uh Facebook and also start doing door to door and also start doing direct mail campaigns like just like adding like multiple things. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think the concept makes sense. I think you can add Facebook and Google local services at the same time because Google local services you won’t get that many leads from. But it’s really important to not neglect elites. So really important to play that game the right way, to answer the phone, the call or call back through the system so Google knows you called them back and they get those reviews. And I, I almost think of Google local service as almost as inbounded, so because they’re looking for you and they’re super warm and it’s not.

Not that expensive that you just want to start building a track record on it so you a track record in the sense that that the leads are reaching out to you through Google local service ads you’re either picking up the phone live or responding to them in a way that Google can see and then you’re getting reviews like 5 star reviews from those leads because then Google is gonna continue. It’s almost, yeah, it’s like a mix should do Google Google local service before you do Facebook to make sure you have that process in place just to kind of like not a, not a, yeah, not a bad, not a bad strate.

I mean, I, I would kind of just do them both at the same time. I, I think if I opened a painting company today I would have Google local service that’s up today, but You, you, that’s because I would know what to do. You have to make sure that you actually are answering the phone and have a CRM. Like you have to have those pieces kind of in place structurally. As soon as you do, then run Google local service ads. So yeah, I would say LSA could happen earlier than Facebook ads.

Facebook ads is when you’re ready to put gas, pour gas into this machine and go faster. Google LSA, you just need to kind of get up and running as soon as you can actually handle the lead appropriately because it, it will be kind of a trickle, but it’ll be a high quality trickle, and you’re building that asset with Google, that track record. Cool. So understand that GP to CAC ratio. Then the other thing is making sure your cash flow is ready to scale like you mentioned, pouring, uh, pouring gasoline on fire for, for Facebook.

So before you do that, make sure your cash flow system. Is set up appropriately. So what does that mean? When you close a deal. Well, let me back up. The, the whole thing, the whole game with cash flow is to get paid faster and to slow down payments to others. Like you can be profitable on paper but have very little or no cash in the bank, which is not good, obviously. And so the, the reason why that happens is because there’s cash flow is all about timing.

Just to take it to an extreme example, let’s say you spend a bunch of money on marketing to get a lead, right, so cash going out, then you have your sales person close that person, then you pay your, your salesperson commission, so cash going out again. You don’t take a deposit, you produce the work, you pay for the materials in cash, and then you have to run a payroll cycle for your painters before you get paid. And so now you have all this outgoing cash, outgoing cash, outgoing cash, and then finally at the end.

Of this 5003 month process from from when you started spending money on the lead to to when you actually finished the project. Then finally you get paid so you could have been profitable on that project but you had to have so much cash going out the door between when you’re looking for the lead to when you finished the project that you could have had a really tough time from a cash flow perspective. During that process. So that’s what I mean when I say your cash flow system. Like where are you getting cash and how are you managing it?

So typically if you’re switching from inbound to outbound, I usually recommend to raise your deposit if it’s already if it’s not already at like 50%, this is a good time to raise it up if you’re in one of those states that allows that. There’s a few states that you can’t raise it beyond 33% or you can’t raise it beyond 10%. Obviously check, check your state laws there, but. Take as much money as possible down because again outbound is more expensive. You’re gonna have to put money on a credit card at least uh buy that and you only have 30 days interest free and then you’re gonna have to pay a salesperson, etc.

so get some money down and then also look at implementing progress payments, especially for projects that go over a week in time taking a progress payment so that you can again get paid faster. And that’s going to help the cash flow. And then on the other side of the coin is slow down payments to others. So simple things like making sure your sub is paid after you’re paid, not paying your sub if you’re using subcontractors. Don’t pay them before you get paid. And oftentimes folks will say like, oh I just pay them after the job is done.

OK, cool. Well, just wait an extra day to, to ensure you’re paid so and then pay them and this is, this is standard practices, but it happens. I see it a lot where folks just pay the sub immediately, but they don’t actually wait until they’re paid. It’s usually only a 1 or 2 day cash gap, but it’s still a cash gap. Well, it’s a liability too, yeah, exactly, because if there’s some, some sort of problem was discovered with the project and the sub’s already been paid. Sub might not come back and fix it versus if that’s set into the contract with the sub prior to the beginning of the project that hey they’re paid out once the homeowner’s fully satisfied with the project and has paid you it just makes it flow a lot more smoothly reduces your liability.

Yes, it has multiple benefits. Yeah, absolutely. So you pay faster, slow down payments to others, also leveraging your Sherwin Williams account or your Benjamin Moore account and get that 30 days interest free, um, or even sometimes 90 days interest free if you have certain loan multi-month projects. Sherwin Williams will actually, uh, give you even more time. So look at that cash management system, making sure it’s dialed in before you start adding those outbound channels so that you’re not gonna have an issue with cash because growth is hard on cash flow.

We see it again and again like it’s, it’s really hard on cash flow so you gotta make sure that’s dialed in and then uh a couple of key hires in this stage as well is. Usually the the admin is the first one if you’re at 500 to like 1.53K like. Probably just need to get an admin if you don’t have one already, someone who can. Answer the phone, do the speedily that you mentioned, make sure they’re taking care of those Google local service ads. Leads or Facebook leads.

And then also helping you with onboarding, you know, new clients that are signing up, getting colors or, you know, customer service type things or maybe sending the final invoice. Just those admin tasks can can really free you up a lot uh and just just if they’re just doing the answering the phone or doing speed delete that’s just that alone will be worth it uh. You know, well, well over the cost that it’s gonna cost you to bring on admin, which is usually. 2 to 4% of revenue is what you would need typically what we see it’s like the benchmark to pay an admins about 22 to 21% of revenue.

And then once you get to like 23000 to a million or maybe a little bit more, bringing on a project manager is another the next big hire is usually that and. Project manager is basically managing those crew leads and making sure that they have the materials they need, all that stuff, you know, doing a final walk around, collecting the check maybe depending on how you define the roles and responsibilities of that project manager. Uh, but they’re basically making sure production is going well so that you can just focus on sales and marketing and then they got that that project management covered.

And so usually the pay benchmark for this is 24 to 22% of what they produce. And the reason why it’s kind of a bigger range is again because the roles and responsibilities from company to company change drastically. Like sometimes the crew leads are responsible for doing the final walk around and collecting the check and getting the Google review. Sometimes the project manager is, or sometimes the admin is doing the, the onboarding and getting the colors and maybe even ordering the paint, but sometimes the project managers, so. It’s kind of uh different depending on the way you’re structuring the roles and responsibilities, but generally as a rule of thumb between the admin and the production manager, the total comp of both of them should be around 290% of revenue overall.

And we’re, we’re obviously putting out a lot of information here. Daniel just dropped a lot of really relevant numbers. If you go in the description, you can download um our notes from this episode. We’ll get a, a full breakdown of all these numbers, all the different marketing channels. I’m talking about the do’s and the don’ts, uh, pros and cons of each. So, make sure you, you go in that description and, and go ahead and grab that cause that’s really good. Yes, and so once you’re. You got these numbers dialed in, you, you bring on those new hires, you have some more capacity, then you can start building more demand, right?

You have that, that team that you’re building under you, you’re getting to like a million, maybe a little bit over a million, you have some more. More work that you can bring on. So what are some like long term marketing strategies you can start putting into place at this stage? Yeah, so when you’re at 2500,1.53 21.5 million and, and you’re starting to staff up the team and build extra capacity. You have to start really thinking about your marketing channels as assets. So, running paid ads, running ads on, on meta is, is not really an asset.

The, the asset that you have when you’re running ads on meta is, is you’ve You should have put in work, uh, to, to have a dialed in sales process that’s an asset that’s something that your company owns that’s reusable, that’s leverage, um, you, you should have, uh, some sort of minimum viable, um, social media presence, you know, before and after photos, right, a Facebook profile that shows your crew, you, you’re putting some stuff up there that’s an asset and, and the way I think about assets is someone from outside the company could come in and buy it from you today, and it would be worth something to them.

The fact that you run Facebook ads in and of itself is not an asset. Uh, however, when you’re at this point, there’s some profit that you can carve aside every month and you can start to do things like, like build out a, a really strong website, uh, with a really strong painting specific SEO or search engine optimization, and this, what this does is it, it enables when people are on Google, so your, your, um, prospective customer is on Google and they’re searching for your service for, you know, best painter near me, house painter, office painter, whatever.

You start to take up territory. It’s almost like a digital real estate game. And so you start to show up for these different searches. That is an asset. That’s an asset that a private equity acquirer in the future would pay really good money for if it’s demonstrated to generate a ton of leads, um, like a real estate development project. The asset’s not gonna net you a lot of money in the beginning. And so you kinda have to, have to put money into it over time and that’s how I, I, I view some of this, uh, I’m gonna focus on the website and the SEO piece.

I view it as an investment that you make over time and so you, you’ve got your numbers dialed in, you’ve, you, you know, you downloaded the, the checklist that we have and, and kind of the notes that we have from this, um, episode, and so you, you’re paying people the right amount and you have this profit margin that you’re making every month and then you’re able to carve, carve out the say a couple of grand. Per month to basically build this long-term asset for your painting company.

And that, that is um That is what this is. It’s essentially this digital real estate play. I say when we do it for penny companies we typically are seeing. Fairly significant gains within 21.5 to 24 months. I say I like to go conservative and say, hey, expect nothing for a year. Expect that you’re going to do this for a year and then after a year you’ll start to receive the benefit, the dividends of what you’re doing, and eventually for many companies it becomes the primary driver of their digital lead flow.

Um, is through like a really optimized website with, with, uh, powerful SEO, but it takes time because you’re, you are playing Google’s game and you’re trying to essentially become the online authority for the painting services you offer in your space. Yeah, and this is gonna be huge that we have a client that he’s doing like 4 million. And he is just now experimenting with like Facebook Meta. And all of his. Customers are basically coming through SEO. Like he, he’s basically grown to 4 million in a in a relatively short amount of time because I mean you can grow with inbound marketing to 10 million or whatever.

It’s gonna take probably decades but typically, but uh, he grew his business probably I think it was about 5 to 7 years just almost solely off of just having a really good website and really strong SEO and he just ranks and he’s not doing any. Much, uh, outbound marketing, which is kind of impressive. Yeah, not the norm, but it, it, it does happen for sure. So yeah, that’s where, you know, Pan American Pros, we, we like to, when companies are around that million dollar mark, start to have this conversation with them, um.

Because ultimately when you’re building a company you wanna own an asset you wanna have something that that is actually of value, um. And the thing with ads, so when you’re, when you’re running ads on Meta again we, we run tons and tons of ads on Meta. They’re very effective. But when you’re running ads on, on Meta, really any platform, the algorithm can change overnight. And so it can take what was working today and then tomorrow it’s not working anymore. Google Pay per click, um, there was a transition and all of a sudden painting company leads cost 20 times what they, they used to be a whole lot cheaper than they are today.

The SEO algorithm, the organic algorithms, they evolved much less quickly. And so if you can own that space and you can do it in a way where you’re not abusing AI, where you’re not skirting Google’s guidelines, you’re not kind of keyword stuff, you’re not doing things that Google explicitly doesn’t want you to do, but you’re playing the game the right sustainable way. The con is that it takes a while to win the game. The pro is that it takes a while to win the game because you can’t easily be unseeded when you do it.

You’re entrenching yourself into a strong position if you do it the right way. So big fan of that. Google Business profile is something really similar. We talked about Google local services. They’re tied to the Google Business profile. That’s just your essentially your map pack, you know, the three of them, they show up. You got photos, you got your reviews, a little description of your business, your phone number. That’s your Google Business profile. Getting really strong on that, optimizing that. Google tries to make it as easy as they can for you to play their game.

They have a little circle and you want it to be green, and they have, um, you know, they have product cards, so it’s like products. Very few painting companies are filling these out. You can, we call it productizing your services, but you know the product is, uh, exterior painting. And so then you put in a description about your exterior painting. You, you list some of your local areas that you serve, and then you actually link from that product card on the Google Business profile. You actually do what’s called a backlink.

You link it to the exterior painting page on your website. And so the, the Google Business profile on the website, they start to power. Each other to essentially create a more dominant Google ecosystem for your business because at the end of the day the 1.53 out of 10 result here is somebody searching for exterior painting, cabinetry, finishing, office painting, whatever, whatever kinds of services you offer in your service area. You’re showing up in the Google local service ad, so there’s typically two companies with the checks, you’re one of them.

Then you’re right below it in the Google Business profile. And you’re, you’re blow it and you’re the Google Pay per click if you’re eventually running Google Pay per click, and then you’re kind of the, the organic, you know, the, the more natural organic results, the 10 results that with the links to the websites you’re in there too. So the whole page is just you, right? And that’s where, you know, that, that $4 million dollar company, he’s gonna take up multiple of those territories because it’s not even just, even just Google Organic is not just one thing.

The whole thing is an ecosystem. And so when you start to play the whole game the right way, it, it has these really outsized rewards. I’m just curious on your thoughts on, you know. AI like chat chat GPT I think it stands for artificial intelligence. I don’t know, it’s new to me, but There’s a Chachi BT ads that just recently came out. And ranking on AI is a thing now. So how much, how much thought should we be putting into this as a painting business? I think we’re at the very forefront of chat GBT ads.

I definitely think they will become a thing for sure. Um, you know, OpenAd is obviously gonna monetize, right? You, you do things for, for free for a long time and you build a user base and you, you entrench yourself in the market and then you start to, start to more heavily monetize. Google did it all, this is how it works. Facebook did it. Um, the, so, so actually optimizing for AI search that’s called the AEO, so answer engine optimization, and you are, you know, essentially trying to, to rank if you will, on chat GBT right now very few commercial intent searches are running through chat GBT or other, um, large language models, so, so other, uh, AI search engines.

Very few commercial driven, uh, searches are being conducted right now. So like. The actual person who’s looking to hire a painting company right now is not typically doing it that way. They’re like 1% of those searches are still doing painter near me. They’re still painter near me. They’re, they’re still doing Google. What is more and more frequently being run through AI is things like how much does a, does a informational search, but it’s relevant. How much does it cost to paint a 3000 square foot house in, you know, Austin, Texas with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, right?

And, and then so you. Being able to write content like that, have blog, have pages that are kinda answering these, these common queries of people is more likely to then feed into Jet GBT’s result there, um, but there’s still not a huge, most people are not then going from that search to then your website, right? Most people are doing the search or getting the information, that’s kind of where it’s dying, so we’re still at the beginning of this. Uh, but the thing is it’s, it’s not, it’s not really different.

So what you do to rank for, for AEO is the same thing that you do to rank for SEO. And anytime there’s any kind of technical development migration, a common marketing tactic is to go in and say, hey, everything you thought you knew about XYZ is dead. That’s the old way. This is the new way. And so you’ll get these marketers saying SEO is dead. Google is dead, it’s all AI now. It’s not true, right? And Google’s been. Been building this this algorithm that their SEO for um decades.

AIs, where do you think they’re getting their stuff from? They’re getting it from Google. They’re getting it from the search engines. All that data is coming from that. So they, what you’re, what you have to do for effective SEO. Is almost identical to what you have to do for effective AEO. The difference is simply that some of the content will need to be a little bit different, a little bit what’s called longer tail keyword. People are searching more incomplete phrases, complete sentences, having conversations with, let’s say chat GPT versus just painter near me.

It’s a pretty simplistic, short, short keyword phrase search on Google, but there’s like a 90% overlap. You do if you’re crushing an SEO right now, a couple tweaks and you’re also crushing an AEO right now. Nice, cool. So we talked about how to build your business from 500K to 1.5 million. Basically, this is often where the transition of inbound marketing to outbound marketing, you know, adding in meta or Google local service ads. Making sure the economics work with your gross profit compared to your customer acquisition costs and bring on some of those key people like your admin, your production manager, and making sure you’re paying them, compensating them in a way that’s still gonna maintain your margin and then finally setting it, continuing to build those assets, those marketing assets like your website, SEO, and, uh, also making sure it’s tied to your Google business profile so.

If, if you’d like to get the notes from this conversation, a lot of details in here, definitely click below in the description, and there’s like a Google Doc that just has all the notes that we have and some additional information that will be super helpful to help you grow your business to 1.5 million. In the next video, we’re gonna cover building your business from 1.5 million to 4 million in revenue for your painting business. So definitely click the video on the screen now to check that out. If you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this podcast and how you can use them to grow your painting business, visit paintermarketingpros.com/podcast for free training as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company.

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

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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.