From day one, it is a four part series. In episode one, we discussed brad’s decision to walk away from his previous partnership and the assets he found available to him. In episode two brad dove into what it looks like to launch a highly professionalized painting company from scratch. In episode three, Brad discussed how to effectively build systems and processes that create a roadmap for future success and in this final episode episode for brad will elaborate on what it looks like to scale a painting company, both in terms of mindset and concrete steps.

If you want to ask brad questions related to anything in this podcast series you can do so on our exclusive painter marketing mastermind podcast form on facebook just search for painter marketing mastermind podcast form on facebook and request to join the group or type in the U. R. L. Facebook dot com forward slash groups forward slash Painter marketing mastermind again at U. R. L. S. Facebook dot com forward slash groups forward slash Painter marketing mastermind there. You can ask brad questions directly by tagging him with your question so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

Brad is a return guest from season two of the Painter marketing mastermind podcast brad. Thank you for conducting this wonderful series, the birth of a giant with us. Well man, you conducted it. I’m just here for the ride. I’m here for the ride man. You you’re one of the easiest podcast guests. I have you you got the the itineraries, pretty outline and going a method. You know I don’t have to go by the by the seat of my pants as much as I usually do good but you’re good at going by the seat of your pants bro.

That’s why people love being interviewed by you. Yeah I feel like people love listen to me. I don’t know whether they love being interviewed by me or not. I feel like I pushed a little bit but hopefully I appreciate that brother. I know you you’ve run your own popular podcast. So coming from you it means a lot to appreciate it. Um let’s dive in man. So we we’ve kind of talked about you walking away you know everything. We just went through the decision to grow the business what that looked like in the very beginning and now we’re okay.

You’ve got that base, you’ve established it, you’re looking forward. So this is the first thing, I think this is the first episode that’s really forward looking for you about scaling. Yeah, I mean at this point pretty much everything we’re going to talk about today is technically kind of hypothetical or theoretical in nature, right? I have plans on how to scale. Um, but most of the things we’re gonna be talking about and most of my strategies, I’ve seen other companies do it. So it is a proven track to success, but I’m really interested in sharing with you and your audience, you know what my plans are to, to actually scale.

And what’s funny about saying that is a lot of, a lot of painting companies will look at what I’ve already done and said, oh, he already scaled, he’s already at scale, right? But fortunately we have other people to look up to that are far, far, far, far ahead of me on the track that I’m trying to catch up with. So refresh us on where you’re at, you know, when companies look and they would say already scale, what does that mean? Where are you? So We launched end of April, beginning of May, we’re at, we’re gonna wrap up the year at about one and a quarter million in sales, I think.

What is that? eight months, something like eight months, about eight months. That’s pretty solid for the 1st 0003st 8 months, The first eight months, right? Yeah, awesome. What, uh, what’s your goal for 2023 as we head into this new year? So our mutual friend Skylar Stewart actually texted me this morning and we ended up hopping on a phone call because I was just working on that today. The goal for 2023 is three million, so it was 2.5, I’m gonna push it to three. Um, it’s been fun with Skylar. Skylar has been in business for a few years now and he’s going to finish the year at about a million.

I think I might beat him my first year, which makes me happy, but he’s doing, I’m happy to do so. And he said he was aiming for 2.1 this coming year, a little more ambitious on my end, but we’ll see. Yeah. Cool man. So let’s get into, you know what it looks like, not just to grow, but to scale what’s the difference there? Well scaling, if you build systems that allow you to scale, it allows you to grow not only more quickly, but with a lot more structure and systems in uh, in place or structuring systems.

Yeah, um, more repeatable processes. The ability to, to bring people on and not try to reinvent the wheel every time. So scaling is a process of basically duplicating rather than creating, right. Would you agree with that? I would yeah Jason phillips describes it as I think he’s actually got one at his office, the easy oven, you know, easy to bake those brownies or whatever. Like a child can do it. That’s right. You create the recipe and now putting the ingredients and there you go. Yeah. So what what is um what is step one, right?

If you’re, if you’re the owner and you’re, you’re conducting, you’re wearing all the hats, you’re doing a bunch of different job roles. What’s step one? Well I guess step one technically would be to to look at goals, right. What are your goals for the production of your company and the revenue and the profit and all that. But I think the tactical first step is an updated or chart. So we talked about having an ORC chart in place when you launch a company um even at my size were essentially me and a project manager that’s our our chart and we lay out our tests and responsibilities that each of us are responsible for.

But as you are looking forward to like big growth and scaling type growth, you need to have that updated work chart. So it’s going to be constantly evolving. Um there’s gonna be redistribution of tasks and responsibilities as a company grows but you have to have that future or chart in mind and that’s gonna help you plan the steps to get where you want to be right. So one of the things that we’ve been thinking about um were you at Garrett martel’s breakout last year at the expo, I wasn’t, yeah, I heard really good things about it.

Yeah, so he did this really interesting talk and it was really just like Dink Dink Dink step by step, uh essentially what roles and people are needed to hit certain revenue milestones. And he went, you know, at one million, you need this many salespeople and project managers, 5,000,004. And then he sent us all the, all the documents, all of his, um all of this power point slides or whatever that that kind of track that. So I guess for us, we said, Okay, well if we want to hit say three million um and right now it’s just me and one project manager, what do we need to do and what I guess, what is the capacity of each role?

So I would say for sales, we’ve set the capacity and the goal at $1.5 million dollars in sales per salesperson. Now that is a number that I is, I’ve proven is attainable. Um the first year I started selling painting services was 50 experience and very very little guidance on it. I sold $900,000 in my first six months. Okay, And ever since then I’ve sold anywhere between 1.5 and two million by on my own. So that 20400 and that 2030 is an easy 2045 million, that’s without me doing any in home presentations, it’s simply doing estimates um Kind of the easy way.

So a goal of a salesperson should be 2010 million. Uh in speaking with other company owners in our industry, I’ve been told that 2050 million is a reasonable expectation for a project manager to manage. So essentially for every $202345 million in sales and revenue, you need one salesperson, one project manager, right? One person to sell them one person to complete it. Now when at my size with at 20103 2011 million in eight months we’ve been able to do that with just that. Now technically we’re ahead of that that pace. Right. If you extrapolate our data over 20100 months from eight months to 2050 months we’re at like 21000 million I guess run rate.

And we were able to effectively manage that with one salesperson and one project manager. Uh But it’s it’s eventually gets to a point where you can’t just have a one for one. The company is going to be large enough, there’s gonna be enough say incoming phone calls, incoming emails. People that need to be touched before they even become an estimate for example, You need to have administrative help. So uh in the number I’ve been given there is one admin or schedule er per 212-213 total sales people and project managers.

So what I’m predicting is if we’re gonna do $2110 million dollars in revenue next year, we’re gonna need to salespeople to full time salespeople to full time project managers and one administrative person. So, so when you, you have one admin per for 2110-2110, which based on this math means basically 2110-2110 and a half million of revenue. When is the, when would you recommend getting that? What’s the lowest barrier? Like when would you get that admin? We could have taken out an admin this fall. We were, we were busy enough that it was taking a lot of my time to respond to estimate requests.

And uh project, my project manager is, he’s the one that’s in charge of keeping track of all of our paint costs, material costs, labor costs, all that we could have brought someone on in the fall as an admin. We, we could have done it then but we knew we were going to slow down in the winter and it didn’t make any sense. So I would say you need to bring on an admin, you need to bring on another salesperson. You need not bring another project manager before you start selling those $212023 million worth of jobs.

So our plan in michigan uh it’s super slow during the winter. My plan is to hire beginning of March for those three roles. I’m gonna make a big splash, bring three new hires on pretty much at the same time and that’s gonna give us about a month and a half before exterior season officially starts. So we’ll be selling a lot of exterior jobs in March. Um we’ll be coordinating them, we won’t actually be executing and producing them until middle of april or so, so by that point when we need to be humming at 21400% hypothetically everyone’s up to speed.

Okay, so you’re bringing them on to make sure that they have the time to train and get acclimated before things are full force, yep, and that’s a cost at the beginning, right? I’m not gonna be making any money off any of those, it’s going to be just an expense. But I, I firmly believe that we can hit that $3 million revenue mark, but we’re only gonna do it if we have the people in place. So it’s a short term investment for a super huge long term gain, yep.

Got it, yeah, you’re investing into the business and betting on yourself so to speak, but not overly risky bet. Okay, um I do wanna put push on one thing here, I think this is really just a marketing, I think it kind of goes outside of the scope of what we’re saying right now, but there are gonna be some people who are listening to say, you know, one salesperson for 1.5 million, I’m not even at 1.5 million. You know, I’m at 1,200,000, right? Wherever they are, what would you say to them?

Should they be looking at the salesperson or should they be that salesperson until they’re at 103? I would say that you don’t need a second salesperson. Well, it depends on if that person is good at sales or not. Right. I think that bad salesperson can sell 5 to $700,000 worth of painting services if they have the lead flow, right? I mean, if if I gave someone all of the leads that I ran this year with very little sales experience, very little sales acumen. They could stumble into 5 to $700,000 worth of sales. Right.

Um, so if, if, if a if a painter is good at sales and they’re selling 5 to 700,000, if the goal is to go from 253 to 700,000 up to 1.5 million and then, well, if they’re good salesperson, then I would say they should continue to do that. They can be the face of their organization, but it would be worth the investment to bring a project manager on to take over the responsibilities on the job. If they’re bad at sales, then no, do the opposite stay on as project manager handle the scheduling of the project themselves and the completion of the projects.

But hire a killer out there to, to sell the jobs outsourced where you’re weakest? Yeah, I think we talked about that in a previous episode two, yep. Cool. Okay. So then we have, we have basically the cadence, the revenue numbers of when we need to hire these different positions. How do we set these benchmarks goals? So we, I know you’ve, you’ve read the book traction, right. And the entrepreneur operating system, we’ve, we’ve talked about this required reading. That’s right. So we, we set our benchmark goals based on our V. T. O. So we have our 10 year target.

We have a three year picture, we have our one year plan and we have our quarterly rocks. So that’s, that’s the first thing that’s like written down here is where we want to be in 10 years here. Here’s what we want three years to look like. Here’s our plan to make movement in the, in the next year and so on. Um but I’ve also, I also talked with other companies to say, what’s reasonable, What have you seen people do, what type of growth is possible? Um what type of growth should be expected.

Um and, and go from there. So I already mentioned the the 2022 expo speech by Garrett martel. That was, that was pretty helpful for me. But of course I’m talking to all all our friends and seeing how have you scaled what, what numbers are reasonable? Um and then of course the real question is, how do you, how do you hit those benchmark goals? And we kind of talked about it already. You hire preemptively. So I can’t say for sure that I’ll hit three million this next year, but I can say that we definitely won’t hit it if we don’t have that team in place, right?

So I feel confident that you know, we, we track our data, we manage our finances well, it’s not like we’re, you know, we need, we need the money from today’s job or the next job to pay for the last job and and so on and so forth. And we keep a pretty healthy balance in our bank. So that allows me to, to take bold risks without basically threatening the existence of Ellison painting. If things go awry, right? And if we, if we, sorry, if we, if we fail, if we end up at 1.5 million for next year, I’m still doing great.

Like that’s still a great life for us. And Ellison painting is still technically thriving, I’m still making more money than I need. Yeah. So you’re pretty good at the numbers and you’ve got that that pretty dialed in. But for somebody who’s listening and you say, you know, we keep a healthy balance right essentially. You’re not living, you know, paycheck to paycheck here, You know, you have a healthy balance, what is a healthy balance, What, how should people be looking at that with their company? Well I think that can be answered to cover different ways and it’s going to depend on um how efficient they are in their collections because the painting business, especially if we’re talking about residential repaint, which is pretty much all that.

I do. The cash flow is quick, the payments are quick and the expectation should be when you finish the job, you get a check or a payment from that customer on the last day. So you shouldn’t be having to float out material costs and labor costs much because it’s every job should be profitable and you should be paid for it as soon as it’s done. So really I don’t even think you need to have that much of a balance in there just to operate a business. Um We keep you know, dollars wise that we keep about $200,000 in our, in our business checking account.

If you talk to some of our friends that own commercial companies, they have like 0003 to $2 million in their account right to float those big jobs. I don’t think you need 200,000 I would say depending if you say you got three or four crews and you’re doing a million dollars a year. I would keep, I don’t know, a couple of months worth of labor and material costs in a bank account. Um And so what’s that maybe maybe 50, now that’s, that’s for a company that’s aggressively trying to scale. And if, and if you’re not, you can keep much less and every keep a minimum balance of $30 or $40,000 maybe and cash out your all the profit every quarter if you want.

Uh for me, we, my wife and I live under our means and we have, since we started dating and so that allows us to invest more money and risk more money than others would. So we can, we can take that risk and bring on essentially maybe 15 to $20,23 worth of additional employee costs. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna probably double our marketing expense starting in March as well. And so we may eat 50 or $60,000 into our account before we start seeing a return on it. Yeah, okay, that’s uh, that was very helpful and I think at a minimum people should be taken away.

You know, you should probably at least have a couple of months, a few months um, in there if things take a turn or you hire and it turns out it’s premature that higher didn’t work. And so you have to hire again, you know, don’t, don’t be uh, don’t be two weeks out and honestly operationally what that does. If we’re not even talking about growth, we’re just talking about operations. It allows me to not freak out in the winter. We’re not, we’re not making much money right now.

I got eight crews and three of them are working right. So we’re, we’re way under our capacity but I don’t have to start offering jobs at cost or even at a loss to keep guys busy. I don’t, I’m fine. We’re gonna weather the winter and um december and january may actually post a loss a little bit for the company but we have such a large cash reserve that a small loss in the grand scheme of things means nothing surprising doing business in michigan. Yeah. Yeah sure is.

So you, so we’ve talked about sales 1.5 million per salesperson kind of for people under that, how they can think about it. And then we mentioned, I guess there are two different components of sales. One is the lead flow. So the number leads you you have coming in, the quality of those leads and then the second is the close rate. So the ability of the salesperson to close the professionalization reputation of the company online reviews all that stuff. Let’s dive into the actual marketing component and what you’re using different strategies you’re using to scale Ellison painting.

Okay, well these strategies, I think we had talked about them in previous episode as well. There were some strategies that were highly effective to launch quickly. They may not get you the best our ally dollar for dollar, but they’re going to get you immediate results. Um, so for example the, you know, facebook ads or that was one of the strategies that used very heavily quickly flow, not great lead flow quality wise, but quickly flow and high volume. So what we’re trying to think now is okay. So if we’re gonna go from 11 and a quarter in our first eight months to three million in year two and obviously I’m thinking far beyond year two, I’m thinking year five, year 10.

What are the strategies that we should be working on now so that we can continue the level of explosive growth that we’ve seen up to this point? So referrals is our number one long term strategy. You can’t really spend money to get referrals at least you can do it ethically. But you know, as time passes, more and more projects are completed, referrals become more and more valuable. We have more and more evangelists for Ellison painting, more people have heard of us, more people have used us. Uh you know, Slavic, he does something like, I think he said he’s going to 2.8 or $3 million by the end of 2022.

And something like 33 to 50% of his leads come from word of mouth and referral. So think about that, that’s say $1.5 million worth of revenue that he didn’t spend a dollar for when it comes to marketing. So that’s that’s a long term strategy and that’s something that continues to become more effective as you do more projects because then you end up with repeat customers. Which which what I would, you know that’s an unpaid marketing uh unpaid marketing source. Um Happy customers refer their friends, their family, people just start to know who you are and those referrals come in.

So that’s that. I would love I would love to be able to maintain the percentage of our work that comes from referrals right now. When I was talking to Skylar this morning, He actually was asking me what’s your what’s been your highest return? And I looked at it and of that 1.27 million that I’ve sold to date, About 50% has been referral. Can you believe that in our first year over $600,000 worth of sales just from people referring us which I think speaks to. Um and a lot of that is customers that are referring us to their friends.

But a lot of it is the goodwill that Rachel and I have in this community and the reputation that we’ve built. I think people generally like us, maybe they like her and they tolerate me but regardless they see Ellison and they referred us out to a lot of people which I didn’t get in my last company, we didn’t get a lot of referral business and we just got so much, especially when we first launched. So if we can do anything to try to get that like do you, do you ask for it at all or does it just happen?

Um we, I mean we ask for referrals and some of our, in our drip campaigns after we do after we make sales. But I think a lot of it for everyone listening, you, you have an automated system that sending messages asking for referrals, referrals, reviews. We talked about that last time too. Yeah. Um but I think part of it honestly is this this, I can’t track this directly back to our paid facebook ads, but our facebook ads are everywhere. I mean in our local, in our local area, if you’re on facebook you’re seeing are as you’re seeing them many times and because it’s my last name and because so many people know who me or my dad or someone in my family, they know the last name, Ellison.

We are top of mind. So when someone goes on facebook and says, hey, I’m looking for a marketer, we’re getting a lot of people saying, oh, you should reach out to brad Ellison Ellison painting. So it’s not, I can’t track it directly to facebook ads, but I’m sure that’s helping. Yeah. Do one more question on that brad because I know you said ethically you can’t pay for it. Do you ever offer any kind of incentive or, or discount or anything like that for referrals. Uh we haven’t um and I don’t really want to get into it.

I think it actually creates an opportunity for a negative interaction because often times are very hard to track, right? So we can offer $100 for a referral and you know, you call Ellison painting and you, you say, yeah, I was referred by someone but we don’t track who it’s from. And then your friend jimmy who referred you is like, hey brad, how come I never got that $100 because I referred Brandon Pierpont, I thought I thought I was gonna get 100 bucks. Well if you don’t have an effective way to, to track that or if the referral isn’t mentioning, you know, jimmy was the one that referred me super hard to track and that happened at my last company to Yeah.

And I honestly think that because I operate this way and I bet you do too. If someone does a great job, I don’t want, I don’t need you to pay me to refer you happy to do it. I like your business. I like you. I want you to be successful and I want to refer. I want my friends and family to find someone and you, someone that I know is reliable and trustworthy. So trust that other people operate the same way. Perfect. So yeah, referrals, they’re always going to be your best lead source, hands down.

You should be closing those all day long and you should be having very high profit margins if you’re running a reputable company, um What is next on your list of marketing strategies? So as I look at the other companies in our industry that have scaled to the level that I want to scale to. Um so again paris Slavic Garrett martell, all of them are implementing something around door hangers in every door direct mail. And that’s so those, those two uh strategies have been very effective for us this year and we’ve really just kind of hit the tip of the iceberg with those.

We, we focused on a limited number of areas and zip codes but I think that can easily be scaled as we increase our need for leads. So whether that’s expanding to more areas or hitting the most profitable areas more often, I mean our most profitable zip code is 103. It’s it’s Birmingham. It’s like a wealthy subdivision here or suburb rather. And uh we hit, we only hit him once with the door hangers and I got like $85,000 worth of business from those 5000 door hangers. Right? So maybe I just hit that zip code three or four times a year and I may not get the exact same return every single mailer.

But hey, alright, let’s identify 48009 as our hotbed and continue to hit that while we’re hitting other areas and spreading geographically? Yeah, I love that. Do you find with this direct mail with the door hanger that you’re usually able to get the return right away? Or do you find that sometimes you have to send it a couple times the same addresses to to really start seeing a lot of return? Well for most of our mailers and our door hangers, we only hit him once and we got an immediate return.

And so you need to be prepared because when you when you do a mailer or a door hanger campaign, you are going to get a high volume of responses almost immediately, like the day they go out, right? Someone says, oh top of mine I’m gonna call or I’m gonna schedule an estimate and then it tapers off over time to the point where, you know, maybe a month later you’ll get a random call. Hell I had this door hanger stuck to my uh stuck to my fridge for the past month and now it’s time, right?

Um but it’s it’s more of a direct thing. But our strategy moving forward will be to hit him on a consistent uh consistent rhythm with different messages based on the season. Yeah. So when you send that out, make sure you are ready for those calls that you’re ready to handle those leads because otherwise you’re going to just waste marketing dollars. If you’re not getting not picking up the phone and get back to them right away. Exactly. And so if you’re gonna send 50,000 out or 40 or 50,000 like I did don’t do them all at one time because now you’re gonna have people waiting for estimates for weeks.

So we spread it out, we found the right rhythm was about 103 out per week. Which we’re going to up it to 10,000 per week come this spring if we’re gonna have to sales, people got it, make sure you spread it out. Um Perfect man, all about getting that R. O. I. On your investment. So we have referrals, we have door hangers. Let’s get into some digital stuff that I know you do as well. Sure. So google has been a primary strategy for us. Um As you know better than most the S. C. O. Is going to continue to get better and better as more attention is more attention is paid to your website.

Um And you know regular relevant content creation. So I love sc oh we’re getting some great results and moving up in the rankings for our website and we’re getting calls, we’re getting clicks, we’re using PPC. Which I think is feeding into that. Um I don’t you know we don’t actually know google’s algorithm right? But wouldn’t we all be shocked if google wasn’t rewarding companies that were buying advertising by also increasing their their organic search results. What do you think on that? I’m hesitant to speculate on that.

I think uh if it moves the needle I honestly don’t think it’s significant. I think they’re pretty separate but google rewards everything right, google business profiles type people think you don’t don’t need to do anything there but it actually gonna gonna move your website, it’s all interconnected. Yeah. Well regardless PBC can be turned on and off as needed. So as your S. C. O. Gets better and better and you’re getting more and more organic traffic, the natural progression would be to scale back your PPC and if we if I can eventually get it down to 20, that would be great.

Um But as as you work on your PPC campaigns, if you keep continue to fine tune it, the price per lead, it goes down lower right? So it gets cheaper as time goes. I just don’t know the scalability of it. Um Can you can you spend an unlimited amount in google and I know where you are essentially because you’re you’re in a pretty urban location, there’s a high population so you’re unlikely to hit it. And we worked with the company in New York and we’re spending over 10,000 a month in PPC.

I’d spend which for a lot of painting companies, I think that’s absolutely insane. But there is a point of market saturation with Google ads because it is pay per click what would happen is you actually wouldn’t use your ad budget so you might sense a massive budget but if there just isn’t the volume of searches in your in your area because it is a pay per click you just wouldn’t get enough clicks and you just wouldn’t maximize your budget theoretically there is a ceiling then there is a c 100%.

Yeah it’s whatever the keyword search volume is and whatever you’re targeting that’s the that’s the other um uh the other digital strategy we’ve used is the social media. So as I mentioned already it’s a it’s a really good tool to grow quickly early on and growth. Um I’m sure that some people use that as a continued tactic to to grow in scale. I’m just really really want to scale back my facebook ad spend just like all those leads man the cost per lead is expensive. The average job sizes lower the close rate is lower there.

I think there’s always gonna be there’s always gonna be a space for it in our marketing budget but I’m hoping that it will continue to be a smaller percentage of my overall spend. Makes sense man, it’s a good kicking off point especially in this in Q four. You know the algorithms everything is more expensive in Q four. So when you’re relying on paid ads you’re at the at the mercy. Not only are more painting companies especially when they’re you know exterior, exterior painting is no longer I think they’re all competing for the interior jobs.

You also have e commerce so you have black friday you have christmas specials, New Year’s specials which just increases the prices across the board for everybody. Yeah. And then the last strategy that we’re planning on using long term is more of a, a network marketing type approach. So that’s essentially establishing relationships with other professionals to refer you business. So that’s builders realtors, other tradespeople, you know, roofers, electricians, we’re all, we’re all servicing the exact same people. So if I have relationships with those, those types of professionals, it’s uh, you know, I send you one, you send me one doesn’t have to be any paid relationship.

One of the, one of the tactics that we just committed to is, um, I signed up for one year of advertising within a realtor publication goes out to the top 500 realtors in my county. So they, I have a full page ad in there once a month. They, they’re gonna see that. And uh, they have three or four live events where realtors and the, the sponsors can get together and rub elbows, you know, coffee chats and year end events and all that. And uh, it was, it was, it was 1800 bucks or something for the year.

It’s, yeah, it’s, it wasn’t so much that I’m like, oh, even if I never get one job, it’s fine, it’s not a huge loss. But if I get one job, then it’s automatically profitable. Right? And what I’m looking forward to there is, I haven’t got to one of their events yet. They’ve only had one and I was, I was busy, but I’m looking forward to meeting realtors who have worked with other painters and they can see me. I think I see. Oh, brad seems a little different than some of the other companies we’ve worked with.

And if, if I can establish myself as a trusted partner with these realtors, that’s a natural referral lead source, they sell a house, the buyer is gonna paint it. Here we go. I think people, people need to understand because I think there’s this idea like, well why would a realtor refer them to you? What do they get out of it? If there’s no paid relationship? Remember that a realtor is trying to provide value for the homeowner. So if they, if they know that a painting company or a plumber or whoever is going to do a good job and they refer that company and they save the homeowner, the headache of finding them that looks good for them.

And I was like, oh well now they’re going to be more likely to actually recommend that realtor to other people. So it’s a win win. That’s why they care and realtors get asked for referrals on everything and they don’t want to risk their reputation on someone they can’t trust. And yeah, and if they say, I don’t know. Well then it it’s like a slight thing because it’s something they weren’t able to help with. Right. Oh, you’ve been a realtor for 20 years and you don’t know any painters interesting. Yeah.

Okay, yep. Exactly. Do you, do you, are you a member of any other groups, Any other local networking groups or chapters or anything like that. Now, I know a lot of guys have had success with like bien, I type networking groups And I just think for the amount of time that you have to commit to it. Uh, and the potential return, I need a much higher lead volume than, you know, those 103 or 12 fellow members could provide me in the long term. Um, also I’m not a morning guy.

Also, also, I don’t like the, I don’t like the forced referral thing. I don’t know if I’m in a group with the, with the realtor for example, I have to give my referral to that realtor. Well, guess what? My brother in law’s a realtor and one of our best friends, a realtor. I don’t want to give my referral to this dude just because I’m in a B and I chapter with him. I don’t think he’s going to do as good a job as my brother. And that’s, that’s the rule, you’re not supposed to be referring people outside of the group.

That’s the whole point. So it’s, it’s, they’re pretty strict about stuff like that. I’m just not into it. I did do a local chamber of commerce and uh, I got some business from that. Um, again, it was, it was in my hometown of Royal Oak michigan where everyone knew me or my dad or my family. Uh, I haven’t, I haven’t re upped my my membership there just because I didn’t have the time to get down for all the meetings. Um, but that’s something that could be, could be valuable, it could be a valuable lead source, less less commitment than a.

B. And I sure, I mean, I think the fact that you found this group with 500 Realtors and a magazine, you know, when you’re looking for are rely on your time investment, it’s probably going to produce so much higher our ally than B. And I probably let’s get into something. You and I are both passionate about both heavily involved in the listeners are probably for the most part also involved in or at least familiar with P. C. A. Yeah, so this is an interesting question. You know, I’m a pc a evangelist, I know you are.

And obviously Jason and Nick are the chairman and vice chairman. I am constantly referring the pc out on our facebook groups saying come to the expo, become a member and so many people will, what what is it, what’s in it for me? What do I get out of that membership? I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna stop honestly, every time I usually like, oh well there’s all this training and there’s the expo and there’s this and I’m just gonna say look at our industry. All the most successful people are in the P. C. A. If you want to be one of the most successful people you should be in the pc.

That’s it. And if you don’t have aspirations to be that successful and within your business you don’t want to grow your business then don’t join the P. C. A. I mean it’s only like it’s like $400 to join. It’s not that much anyway. But the reality is like if I’m looking at it like oh gosh that guy that guy that guy that guy all the guys that I want my business to look like they’re all members of the P. C. A. The logical thing to do is to join the P. C. A. And that’s what I did.

That’s what I did when I first joined a couple years ago with my own company is I didn’t really even know what the benefits were. All I knew is that all the people that I wanted to be like we’re members and I wanted to be with all the people I wanted to be like so that’s the number one for me right? And I can say and this is not an exaggeration that the P. C. A. Launched my business because if it wasn’t for them Jason paris never would have invited me up to Minneapolis to check out his his operation.

So I wouldn’t have that face to face uh about a year ago with Jason. Um I never would have been Nick Slavic wouldn’t be hosting his retreats so I wouldn’t have been invited there. There wouldn’t even have been something to be invited to. And that’s where I met all of my best friends within the industry and those are the people that have helped me launch. So makes sense man. The best. Learn from the best. Yeah. And I don’t think this can’t be stressed enough. You know, you’ve heard this that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Right?

So you gotta ask yourself do you want to be the average of people like Jason paris and matt, Maggie Kipper and Nick Slavic and Ryan Davis and Brandon. Pierpont and brad Allison and whoever the people you look up to within the industry or do you want to be the average of all the cranky old painters in our facebook group. You know the drive beat up old trucks and just complain about everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. I know you wanna if you wanna be the average of good people, be around good people and that’s within the P. C. A. Yeah man.

Elevate your game, surround yourself with all stars and learn be open to learning. That’s another thing I would add the network is huge with the P. C. A. But the learning opportunities are are just as big. You know that like you said the 400 or whatever it is a year, you have access to the overdrive, you have access to not just this podcast which is publicly available as well but tons of other podcast lessons, there’s business accelerator, it’s insane. So the structured educational pieces are invaluable. But here’s the other thing you wanna you wanna have a real education talk to nick Slavic on the phone directly.

What’s crazy is about our industry right now at this time the access to the top minds in our industry is there, you can literally speak directly to the chairman and vice chairman of the P. C. A. And at any given day they’re going to give you all their knowledge and resources there, you know trade secrets for free right now that will not last. That that is not the case in plumbing is not the case in roofing as this industry evolves, you’re not going to have access to everyone forever, yep.

But right now you can and I I’ve told you, I have conversations once or twice a week with with guys that are trying to launch painting companies or scale painting companies and they just want to pick my brain. So I hop on a phone call and I give them 30 to 45 minutes of my time. I don’t ask for a lot of them say like well can I can I pay you for your time? You don’t gotta pay me for your time, other people have done this for me, I’ll do it for you and you do it for someone else as you get further along. Yeah.

I love it man. It’s a great industry. Uh You know the Pcs mission is really to elevate the industry professionalized industry and it’s exactly what you’re doing with with your time there with Jason and Nick are doing, it’s what’s what’s happening right now. And I think one and I mentioned this quite often to maybe I’m freaking broken record. But the best part about the P. C. A. And the people within the P. C. A. And the the offers from the P. C. A. Is it eliminates all need for creativity, right?

I didn’t need to be creative in launching Allison painting. All I had to do was look at the most successful people. Most talented people see what they were doing and copy it. So yeah we’re all gonna make tweaks and changes. We’re gonna we’re gonna make decisions to to better suit our skill set or goals. But my my business Ellison painting is basically just a fast growing clone hybrid of paris painting painting painting P. G. H. Painters so on. Yeah. Yeah. And I know you you have actually gotten S. O. P. S. You have gotten documents and processes from from friends that you made in the P. C. A. Uh It’s this idea don’t reinvent the wheel.

This is not a new business model, you might think it’s new but it’s not wherever you are. Even if you’re doing a little bit different promise you there are other people in the P. C. A. And elsewhere that are doing something very similar to you learn from them. You know like you said tweak it, tweak it combined it however you want to do. But this is a roadmap father, otherwise you’re gonna spend years trying to trying to build it yourself. I would ask this question um you know to a guy like you if you’re gonna start a painting company Brandon, do you think that you know more about painting or running a painting company?

That Jason paris? I do not think that great. Get all his S. O. Ps. Get his estimates and just use those. My man. Yeah exactly. It’s gonna save, it saves years literally years and years and then we’ll come to the P. C. A. And it’s like oh man crap like I should have done this 10 years ago, do it now. Yes. Cool. Let’s get into, I love I love hidden you know where the rubber meets the road the tactics there is there is a place for mindset. I try not to make this podcast to mindset oriented but the reality is the mindset is actually incredibly important.

So let’s get into the mindset. How are you having a shift from where you started, you know you’re on that day to day your grind. You know get the facebook leads, get leads coming through the door somehow start building something and then now looking out now you’re now you’re leveling up, you’re saying three million, what’s the mindset look like? They’re so my wife and I, we’ve, we’ve benefited even from when we first got married and we quit our jobs and we were, we were really you know, pinching every penny to launch our first business.

We benefited from still embracing an abundance mindset. Even back then we moved forward in faith. We were confident that the efforts and the money that we put into our business, we’re going to be returned over and over and over again and that abundance mindset for us has has served us so so well and I think the most important part about this about the abundance mindset is I found that the more generous I am, the more open handed I am with subcontractors and employees the more successfully I am personally right?

And so then you then you like try to battle, you’re like okay well I don’t want to be generous and selfishly right? Kind of seems like that like I don’t want to give because then I know I’ll get more but I found that that’s the result if I want, if I want to, if I want to be generous with the people that are working with and for me that the ultimate return is they, I also get more right, Everyone wins when I empower other people to win.

Yeah, I found that in my own life you give and the universe will get back Kind of. Um So again, like you say, you have faith in it, you know you have faith. Um I know you’re religious, you have faith in jesus christ and God, but having faith also just in your in your business and yourself and just Karma, so to speak. That does, it’s been proven, you know, it does come back and the and the reality is not only they’re not only is there enough business, our local market to go around between me and my, you know, competitors.

Uh there’s there’s definitely enough money within my business within Ellison painting for everyone. So I’ve said this before and some people probably think I’m lying but my subs are actually making more money working my jobs than they would if they were just work on their own right. I pay a higher percentage of the total job uh and people pay a premium to get the Ellison painting customer experience. So the end result is subs are making more um when I hired my project manager, I think I’m paying him like 50% higher than any of Nick’s logics project managers.

Um So I I paid him far above market rate, but it was because I had this vision to scale quickly and I wanted someone that was highly skilled, highly capable and fully invested in my vision. Now hopefully I can lower, you know what I what I paid project managers Ron is gonna have a lot more responsibilities than a normal project manager moving forward. So it made sense. But yeah I was happy to give sacrificial e for him to come on board because I really believed it was gonna be a long term win not only for him but for Ellison painting.

So I could make more money if I paid myself, unless I could make more money if I paid project managers less. Um I could probably make more money technically if I spent less on marketing. Uh just tried harder on my sales and pinch pennies here and there. But I’m I’m already making more money than I need. And I think this approach is gonna pay off way more financially in the long run anyway. Yeah it’s all an investment in your business and Ron you know you brought him on you know we had a good skill set and like you said he’s gonna be taking over more things.

He also took a risk. So when you when you bring someone on earlier on in a business venture, if they’re really good they are taking a bigger risk because your company’s not really established yet. So a lot of times you will have to compensate them a little bit higher for that. That makes sense for them. Right? Considering the crazy high percentage of businesses that don’t even survive year one let alone year 2345. It certainly is a risk for him to come on board. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah. I love it man.

And uh this abundance mindset in the in an interview conducted with Jason paris recently he was talking about how people have this kind of closed minded, you know, they just react. So if you say well could you would you want to entertain the idea of, let’s say moving from subcontractors to W. Two? And they would just instantly, not that you need to do that, but it’s just an example. They would instantly say oh no I can’t afford that because of X. Y. Or Z. His push back was well how much are subcontractors cost and he uses.

So he’s not just an example how much our subcontractors costing you in, in in turnover, right? Or having to go back for for touch ups or whatever it is. Um Okay. And then an example of what you just said, well can you improve your professionalization, you’re marketing your sales so you’re selling for higher revenue and therefore you’re building in more profit margin but it’s looking at things holistically not immediately whatever it is. Not immediately just saying, oh no I can’t, maybe you can’t, maybe you don’t want to but at least entertaining the idea how have an abundance mindset at everything for your business.

We’ll for sure. And the benefit for us to, is the data is there from different types of companies within our industry. You want to see what the gross profit per job is for an employee based model. Talk to a guy that owns an employee based model company, want to talk to the same for a subcontractor based model you got it, you can see the data and actually I don’t think the data is much different from one of the other. There’s there’s different benefits to having employees, there’s different benefits to having subs for now.

I would, I firmly believe that the sub model is the best for Ellison painting but um I am smart enough to know that I don’t know everything and that may change and so I am always open. I mean I’m open to uh completely changing my entire business model, maybe even not even a painting company. What if a couple of years from now this amazing opportunity to sell some other product or service that I think is going to be way more profitable and way more enjoyable and way better for my workers.

Maybe we stop doing painting all together and do something else. We should be open to that because if we if we just have this tunnel vision where our business, what we want our business to be and how we wanted to operate. I think it’s really going to limit our growth and really what it’s gonna do is blind us to opportunities that present themselves along the way. So do I think that Allison painting is eventually going to not paint and offer some other service, highly, highly unlikely, but it’s possible, yep.

At Allison Painting were the best window replacement company in Detroit. Yeah, I love it, man. Let’s talk about you. So you you’ve come on um you’re running this series for us, you’re killing it, I appreciate it. You’ve been on a bunch of, you’re actually the first, the first guest on the paper Market mastermind podcast, you kick the whole thing off, which I felt great about. But I also felt bad about because the quality of the audio and stuff wasn’t wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be at that point.

But what what are you doing in the P. C. A. As you kind of, you’re speaking at Sherwin Williams events, you’re doing a lot right now? Well, we I guess there’s 103 facets here because 11 of the things that I’ve thought about, um you know, especially when it comes to marketing is your clout, right? When you, when you launch a business, when you meet someone and you know, for the first time you have nothing. And essentially what you’re doing is you’re borrowing the cloud of other people or other organizations to establish some sort of reputation and we all do it and it’s not unethical.

Uh you know, people advertising Sherwin Williams on their website, You’re using Sherwin Williams clout to present yourself as a professional and there you go, right. And uh and I’ve certainly borrowed the cloud of other people that I’ve met within the industry. Um you can bet your butt that when I have nick Slavic in town for a master class that I’m gonna post a picture of me, nick and Jason on my social media now, that doesn’t help me sell paint jobs locally, but it helps to establish my reputation and build a little bit of my own clout within our industry, which is something that I am trying to do um partly for the long term strength and growth of my business because I see the people with these amazing reputations and they’re well known and they have the clout, they’re also running the most successful businesses, so I want to do that.

So that but that’s part of it. But I’ve also really latched onto their vision of giving back to the painter community. So now, now that I’m getting a little bit of notoriety, a few people know who I am, I’m looking forward to the expo and maybe someone’s gonna come up to me and say, oh my gosh, you’re brad Ellison, can we talk for a little bit and I’m happy to then give my time back so that you’re going to send me, I will, I’ll give you my john Hancock.

So there’s a there’s a bunch of different ways to build a personal brand or build a little bit of cloud. So I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I’ve been on your podcast more than, more than I’ve been in other people’s podcasts, but I’ve been interviewed, you know, many, many times about Ellison painting, I did that reality tv show thing really. Again, that was, there was no prize. I won. The thing, there was no prize, but it gave me a little bit of clout and reputation. Um, I’m taking on speaking opportunities.

So I’ve been invited to speak at the pc expo, which I’m super duper excited about. You are also speaking there, Right? My friend, we’re not speaking at the same time, which means we can hear each other. Um, getting invited to speak at, you know, nationwide, uh, conventions for painting franchises. Um, the facebook group, I mean the facebook group, I can’t speak more highly of Tanner’s facebook group and how instrumental that’s been to me in recruiting subs building a little bit of clout and name recognition. Um, it’s a small group that, you know, not, not that many people and it’s just like 100 50 some 2000 subs, you know, no big deal. Right?

But then I, I’ve taken that, that big group and then I formed the local facebook group, the gathering of michigan painters, you know, for networking opportunities and referrals and whatnot. So I think that’s, I think that’s important. I think if people trust you, if people see that you’re a trusted name within the industry. You’re gonna have a lot more opportunities for growth. It’s just gonna make everything a lot easier. So it’s not for everyone, some people want to be, you know, stay under the radar and there’s there’s even guys locally here in Michigan you guys that are running, you know, $22 million $23 million dollar companies and they don’t have really a public presence within our industry.

Um no shame on them. They’re they’ve effectively built their business without it. I think in order for me to really be a resource for other people and give back, it’s gonna be helpful if people know who I am so that they reach out and then I can do what Jason and nick and all these guys did for me. Yeah man, 210%. I am gonna need, this is pretty unrelated but I’m gonna need you to address that reality tv show comment you just made. Have we not talked about that?

You and I have talked about it briefly. We, I certainly don’t think we’ve talked about on the podcast. I’ve been criticized because I didn’t, I hardly publicized it at all. So it’s a it’s a show called the blocks. It was created by a guy named Wes Bergmann which if you ever watched Real World or The Challenge and MTV, he’s like, he’s one of the main people on those shows. He’s been on season after season one, all these challenges etcetera. He’s his real job is he’s a venture capitalist.

So he created this venture capital firm in um Overland park, Kansas, uh, the major metropolitan mecca tech mecca of Overland Park. And he, uh, so he, he’s like a business incubator and he had this idea and he’s like, well I have all this reality show experience and I have this venture capital experience. So he created this show called the blocks where he invites entrepreneurs there to basically for an entrepreneur boot camp, you’re gonna learn about marketing, your learning about copyrighting, you’re going to learn about sales and, and networking and like all these urban types of strategies and they film it and then it’s, it’s basically gamified.

So every day you’re doing pitches based on that day’s content. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a week long thing and they air it, I think my season was aired over seven or eight episodes. And uh, you know, I went in thinking, yeah, I think I could be okay this. I ran a marketing agency. I’ve been in sales for a long time. I’ve toured the country singing professionally, so I’m certainly comfortable in front of people and, and cameras like, you know, maybe I’ll do okay, maybe I’ll end up in like the top 210.

Well, uh, spoiler alert at the end, I got first place out of 210 entrepreneurs, like a painter, a painter from Detroit, won the whole thing. So it was a lot of fun. It was like a perfect, perfect storm of all of my skills, all of my knowledge, all in one place, the right, they picked the right topics that were just super duper relevant to what I had been doing. Um and it was a lot of fun, but so it aired, it’s it’s so it’s called the blocks. You can find it on facebook at Beta Blocks, B E T A B L O X. There’s also an app that you can download that you can watch on, it’s called Beta Blocks.

Uh I’m on season four and you can watch it. Yeah, sorry, I spoiled it, but I love it. So they gave, you know, so you won and you didn’t get anything. I have a little plaque that says like best start up on the blocks. That’s kind of lame man. It’s alright, it’s cool. I mean I didn’t do it for the 103,210 or something and I did it, I did it for the experience. I met some really, really cool people there that I stay in touch with on a regular basis, made some good connections that might turn into something, you know, business wise, what I’d really like to do is eventually go back and be a judge and you know, help those other contestants as they’re coming in.

So it sounds like it was a little bit different from Love Island or the Bachelor or something. If it had been anything like those. I think my wife would have a big problem, I think she probably would have. Yeah, that is a good point. Okay, um thank you for entertaining there on that one. So the, the, as you’re scaling, you know, one of, one of the things I run into sometimes when I’m talking to painting companies is they, they underestimate always use Jason paris is you know Sherwin Williams, paint store math example, but they underestimate the opportunity in their market and they think they need to go downstream or upstream or expand geographically.

So I wanna, I wanna touch on your plans, long term plans for Ellison painting and whether you plan to keep that all local or expand geographically or how do you think about this? Sure. So if you had asked me like four or five years ago when I was working at the other company, I would say that You know maybe the market cap for a decent painting company in metro Detroit is like $22023 million dollars and we were at 2400. But now obviously I’ve met other painting company owners locally who have far surpassed that and I’ve met other painting company owners around the country and markets that are similar or even smaller than Detroit that have far surpassed that.

I think I think of a business is structured correctly and the right people are at the helm, the there may not be any, any low cap on on what you can do within the market, if you look at someone like Lauren Fink apex painting in Hillsdale michigan, Hillsdale michigan where she lives is smaller than any city locally where I live. It’s like having 50 hills dales all right next to each other and she’s in this little tiny rural area and she’s gonna do probably over a million this year in her in her second year and she’s got, she said she’s got room to grow.

So if Lauren thing can do that in Hillsdale, you know what can we do in Metro Detroit now? There is a couple of differences and there’s advantage to being in Hillsdale because there’s far less competition. There’s 8000 people in there. You just 8000 people good for you and the township that I live in college man, I live in a township which is like a around where I live, it’s pretty small. 22,000 people, you know the cities that I sell into our like 255,2010 that are all within 20 minutes driving me. So, but as I was saying it’s uh less competition.

There’s not as many painters up there, um easier to build brand awareness, brand recognition, probably lower cost of marketing, but here where I am, there’s just like so many people I can sell to and so many more people I could hire us painters. So there’s there’s advantages both sides. So I think that based on what I’ve seen other people do. Ellison painting could be doing $10 million just in painting alone in metro Detroit within the next four years or so. I think I think it’s totally feasible. Um there I did have an opportunity recently to expand down into Cleveland.

I met a couple of guys who were interested in starting Ellison painting down there so I would own it but they would run it and we would do some sort of like profits here compensation, something that I really wanted to do. Um My peer advisory board talk to me out of it. They said it’s not the time you got a lot of, a lot of things to focus on within Ellison painting in Detroit, do that first and maybe you know go other places next year. I had toyed with the idea of offering other services so maybe it’s Ellison home services and we are installing gutters and installing windows and doing roofing man.

I know painting and because there’s so much room for growth there, I don’t see a need to expand in other services at least not yet, maybe I do that Jason phillips approach and years down the road we start expanding but for now we’re keeping our eyes on the prize when it comes to painting. Yeah, I think people people make the mistake sometimes of thinking they’ve tapped out a market but it’s because they really haven’t actually marketed um haven’t really dialed that in. So they think, oh well we have all the leads actually, you only have a small segment, you just not necessarily tracking all the data, I think it all through.

So you don’t even, you don’t realize how much opportunity you’re leaving on the table right now, right? And as you, and as you grow bigger and as you scale and as you have more money for marketing, you can explore other marketing tactics that you never even could have considered. We you could be talking about radio or tv ads. I mean now you’re open up a whole different ball game where you have the money to do it. And if the R. O. Y. Is there, that’s something I would consider in the future, right?

But the last time I looked into that, it was like $25,000 minimum monthly spend. And I don’t have the marketing budget for that yet. Yeah, make sure you’re tracking that ri if you go go some go that way. But one thing I really like what you brought up is okay, you you had an opportunity, a lot of people that’s a tough thing to turn down. You know, people want to open it another city, you’ll you’ll profit share, you know, it’s going really well where you’re at, get it dialed in, get it dialed in locked in where you’re at, before you start expanding to a 2nd and 3rd location because it’s so our goal is to get to 10 million in painting revenue locally.

Um but somewhere along that path to 10 million, I do have the goal to start going nationally and I don’t want to do franchises, I don’t think again, I’m open to it. I haven’t made my mind anywhere and any certain direction. Um, but the stated goal in our 10 year vision is 10 cities in 10 years so that, you know, could be Cleveland and columbus and Cincinnati and Fort Wayne indiana, whatever kind of start from Detroit and expand outwards, just implementing Ellison painting systems in each of these areas. So I would, I would own the whole thing for me and if I have partners at that point, me and my partners would own it, but find integrators and just implement our systems.

Yeah, I love it. And then kind of one final topic I wanna discuss with you. As we wrap up this series, this four part series, you obviously are on a mission right now, your growth has been very impressive for the small amount of time you’ve been operating and you’ve walked us through how you’ve done that, the advantages you had and how other people can try to do something similar. What’s your, do you have a mission? Do you have something, you know, obviously you want to survive and you want your family to profit, but do you have something else driving you for this?

Yeah, I mean, I think we all, we all serve a higher purpose, right? And you know, we’ve said on this show before, you know, I’m a believer and follower of jesus and um I try to honor that and honor my faith and all the decisions, but from a purely business perspective, you know, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. Um, I grew up in a nice area and I certainly wouldn’t say that I was um underprivileged, I had many privileges that most people didn’t, but we didn’t have a lot of money.

Mom and dad didn’t go to college. Mom and dad didn’t make a lot of money. Mom and dad divorced when I was in eighth grade and you know, set our family in a whole different course. And one of the things that I’ve been heavily focused on within my, my personal life and now I’m expanding this into my business, is this idea of changing legacies, uh, on a, on a personal level, I’m trying to change the legacy within my family of, of divorce and broken families, right? Um, my kids, uh, I’m sorry, I’m gonna get emotional for a second.

Um, my kids are growing up in a family where mom and dad love each other and dad is open with his affection and his support and his discipline and I’m changing the legacy that was given to me from, from my family and that was given to them from my grandparents and um I’m fortunate to have found a partner and a wife that is shares that vision, and while she comes from just a tremendous legacy, she’s, she’s so heavily focused on helping me change the legacy for my family, right?

But to take it to a personal level, the a lot of a lot of painters come from painters and the painters they came from are not running multimillion dollar businesses there. They scraped by for decades painting houses and being underpaid and underappreciated and the and their kids that are now, some of my painters are simply in painting because they think that’s kind of all there is, it’s all they ever knew, that’s all they know how to do and they don’t really have a vision for beyond that.

So I want to create opportunities through Ellison painting that my employees and my subs can change their families legacies, like I’ve been changing mine. Um now I can’t control how they raise their kids, but I can help provide that financial opportunity. So many painters simply survive the, you know, they languished for years. I don’t want them to survive. I want them to thrive, which is why I’m so passionate about, in theory, over paying my guys. I want them to be so blessed by Ellison painting because their blessing me and my family just by being willing to work with us.

So for for Rachel and I it’s about helping to change legacies. I’m less concerned about creating a legacy and I’m more concerned about changing legacies, we all come from broken past, broken situations, hurt and distrust, but we all have the ability to change that and um I want people want people to see that that’s possible. And I’m hoping that Ellison painting can be a vehicle to say, wow, this is now, this is not something I would have ever imagined before, that could be possible. Now I see it and now they have a vision.

I love that man brad that that is deep, that’s incredible. This series, the birth of a giant. I did, I didn’t make you name it that because it is the birth of a giant. So now you have something pretty big time to live up to, I want to put a stake in the ground there for you. Um you have anything else? This has been just just awesome, right? So we’re doing all kinds of series this year, 2023 for the third season of pain market Mastermind podcast yours is just incredibly unique because it’s starting over, it’s starting from scratch and just getting an inside, look, you’re still in year one, you’re eight months in creating this just awesome company.

I’m doing really well so far. Is there anything else you want to add about this series before we wrap it up now? Not really, I just wanna, I just wanna thank you, I appreciate you giving me the platform and having the vision for this, this mini series. I really, really hope that it’ll help other people start or continue their journey um Similar to what I’ve been doing. Um I think that the guys like you but you specifically within our industry are valuable. You’re an honorable man, high integrity man and uh and knowledgeable so but the first two I think are our most important.

Um So I would encourage people that listen to this to reach out to Brandon if you need help with your marketing. Um I’d encourage you to reach out to me. If you just have some questions and want to pick my brain for a little bit, it’s free of charge and I’d encourage you to reach out to the P. C. A. And Bite the bullet $400 membership. If you can make it to expo, get to expo, take advantage of the resources that are available if you’re really trying to grow your painting business and then let’s all just constantly be so thankful and grateful that we found ourselves in an industry that I think is providing opportunities right now. Like no other. Thank you brad, appreciate it brother. Yeah. Alright buddy, we’ll talk to you soon.