Guest Interview: Brad Ellison of Ellison Painting “The Birth of a Giant” Live Q & A

Published On: April 21, 2023

Categories: Podcast

Guest Interview: Brad Ellison of Ellison Painting “The Birth of a Giant” Live Q & A
Brad Ellison

📣Missed the live Q&A with Brad Ellison ? No worries! You can still catch up on the insightful discussion about our 4-episode series, ‘The Birth of a Giant.’

Whether you’re curious about a specific topic or strategy and how it applies to your painting company, or just want to learn more about Brad’s journey, this discussion has something for you. Brad is a great example of an aggressively growth-oriented business owner who also maintains an excellent work-life balance. 💪

In this podcast series, Brad shared his journey of starting and scaling a professional and profitable painting company from scratch, including his strategies for effective systems and processes and scaling your business to achieve your goals. 💡

Video of Interview

Podcast Audio

Topics Discussed:

Live Q & A

If you’re interested in diving deeper, here are the links to each of the 4 episodes:

 

So, what are you waiting for? Access the recorded interview and discover the incredible insights shared in “The Birth of a Giant” series. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to watch this Q&A!

Audio Transcript

Expand

Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over one million and annual revenue. I’m your host. Brandon Pierpont, founder of painter marketing pros and creator of the popular pc, a educational series, learn do 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.

 

What is going on everybody? Welcome to the live Q and A with Brad Ellison. We are taking a deep dive, answering any questions you have into his four episode series, the birth of a giant where Brad walked through his decision to walk away from his previous partnership uh to start his own company and the rapid growth that he has incurred in the very minimal time that he’s been operating his company and how he uh essentially is teaching you to do something similar. Brad. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Brandon.
Happy to be back. Looking forward to this Absolutely, brother. Let’s start, let’s kick this thing off with, I guess, a quick recap of the series. Ok. Um, so what do you want me to do? Talk, talk to you about the first episode? So, in this first episode is I just kind of ran through, um, and gave you a history on, I had been running someone else’s company for a bunch of years. Uh, I didn’t have a background in painting, but I had a great, pretty extensive background in sales and management.
Uh Ultimately, we had the goal of buying that company and when push came to shove for bunch of reasons, some inside within my control and many out of my control, we decided to walk away and um launched Ellison painting in April of this past year. So we actually, so technically, we are over one year old now from when we’ve filed our letters of corporation, but uh we sold, sold my first job, April 25053nd started production on that May 25043th, almost come up on that one year anniversary of the first sale.
That’s right. And um yeah, so we talked about kind of the, the, the thought process that Rachel and I went through when we were deciding whether we were actually going to move forward with the purchase or leave. Um What we thought was going to be our strengths in launching a new company and what were some weaknesses. Um Yeah, that was a really fun episode. I got a lot of feedback from that one. I’m sure you did too. Yeah. Yeah, that was, uh, that was a tough decision.
And I know when we were at Nick Slavik Live, went to retreat, that was something you were, you were really struggling with. You had a, a pretty, you had a pretty cushy situation. You liked it. You were good at it and starting a business is kind of not that fun. Sometimes the thought of it was not appealing to me, like starting, starting over from scratch. You, you couldn’t spend the whole day at Crossfit every day, man, you had to like start working for a living. It turns out you, uh kind of still can all day, you can still can spend all day at crossfit.
Um, as you know, talk offline about this, you can help come in and yeah, and as you, as you know, I’ve, uh, I, I committed this year to work, do one workout every single day for the entire year and yesterday was day one oh two. So even through in the first year of launching my company, I’ve managed to get to the gym every single day. It’s awesome. Yeah, we are going to, to figure out how you do that. So that was Episode one breakout is hard to do um profitable good partnership.
You had a good relationship, uh, ultimately you decided to leave and, and do your own thing. Episode two. What was that. What was the title of episode two Rocket Man? Like they launch a highly professionalized painting company from scratch. Got it. So that was, we talked about the strategy. What was our, what was our goal to launch quickly? What were our plans and how, how we gonna or what were our goals and our plans to get there? Um Yeah, that was a fun episode because it was really, it was, we were really recounting that we uh we put our feet to the fire and we put our money where our mouth is and we really just jumped in, right.
We launched as if we were a huge company even though we were brand stinking new. Um Yeah, that was fun. It was it. I had a, I almost said I had a, a unique, unique opportunity to launch quickly the way I did just because of the tools and resources I had available. But I think as we’ve discovered in the more conversations I’ve had with other people, everyone has access to those same resources, right? Everyone has access to marketing agencies, everyone has access to uh drip jobs, everyone has access to industry wisdom, knowledge, people, all of that is available if you know where to look and there’s people like me and you that are willing to tell people where to look, to find all that info, but then it’s up to them to actually follow through and do it.
Yeah, I would, I I guess I would describe that as an abundance mindset. You know, and I think, I think many people in this industry obviously don’t have that mindset. It’s kind of one of the problems of the painting industry, but it’s also one of the opportunities of the painting industry because if you go in, you’re competing against med spots and you’re willing to throw some money behind marketing and bet on yourself. I can tell you. So are a lot of other people that you’re competing against and painting if you’re willing to bet on yourself and invest into your, your online presence and do all this stuff.
Oh my gosh, you’re an anomaly. Well, that makes things a lot easier for you for sure. And I say that to my customers all the time, you know, we, I hear that they’ve had painters out and they’re, they never received the estimate or the guy said he was going to be there at one o’clock and showed up three at 5003 25023 didn’t apologize. And I tell him like, listen, you know, I’m not a painter by trade, but one of the reasons why I love owning a painting company is that the bar is set so low by my competition that all I have to do is show up and run my business like a real business and I perceived as a superstar.
It’s not that difficult. Yeah. Respect your business. It is a business and I think that that can be an issue. You know, you were kind of an outsider, Brad, you actually had a, a background in, in sales and marketing prior, you know, I know you ran your own marketing agency for a while there prior to even going into painting. So for you, you’re coming into it from a totally different mindset and that’s something Jason Phillips has talked a lot about, you know, the, the painting is really the widget.
What you own is the painting company. And what you are is you’re, you’re selling a marketing and running a professional business, the paintings, the widget, right? That we, you know, I, I used to say, yeah, you know what we, we are a sales sales and marketing company that happens to sell painting services. But I really think, I believe in the way that we set it up and the way we’re operating is we’re actually a project management company. So we, we focus heavily on sales and marketing, but we are actually providing a service, the service that we provide directly is not painting, right?
We provide project management. Um But we’re doing that at such a high level. Yeah, you’re selling the experience, right? And anyone can, you’re selling, selling at ease. Um Someone said, bought the book, I don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t know uh who it is because they didn’t, they didn’t do the uh they didn’t do the streamer instruction, bought the book. It’s actually, what do you mean? Actually, actually full of good stuff, reading it, actually full of actually. What did, did you think? I was gonna sell you something that was garbage.
What is this dude? You’re so cynical. I’m, I’m glad that they are actually enjoying it. I wish I knew who, who it was. I hope that I know them. I hope that they don’t dislike me now because I said that I am just messing with you. Um OK, so that’s episode two, episode three, changed the world from scratch. How can that systems and processes that change the paradigm of your local market and create a road map for future success, right? So the simple answer to that is uh copy, what other people are doing well already just do that, right?
Uh None of the systems that I created were uh revolutionary or groundbreaking or novel to the industry. Uh I just took what I had worked at my previous company, um what worked even better at other companies around the country and um and implemented those. Now, what’s funny is even now we’re about a year in the systems and strategies that we launched with a year ago were really designed to be managed by me and one other person at that time, it was me and my wife Rachel. Uh But now we have a, we have a much bigger team and so we’re changing a lot of our systems and strategies and adapting and, and taking what was working and just making it, um, a little more functional for a bigger team which is allowing us to specialize, which as, you know, is ultimately gonna be way more profitable for us.
Yeah, I think it’s so important that even though you might have built those systems for the team members you had at the time, you’ve always had this, this vision of mind that you’re building a company and it’s not gonna be at, you know, 25013,25003, 213,21100, not gonna be at a million. You know, I don’t know, we, we can get into your ultimate goals, but I know you’ve mentioned numbers in the 21100 plus million. So you’re building with that kind of end in mind, upsetting the infrastructure, set yourself up for success.
Don’t kind of start making a bunch of sales and be like, oh, oh God, I think the systems systems should be built in such a way that they’re gonna get you to your next goal. Uh But they will likely change over time. So it doesn’t have to be, I think it’s unrealistic to, to build systems that uh a $2150 million company can be run under from the get go. No, you build a system that’s you, you build systems and strategies to support growth to one million. And then you say, OK, now what, now what are the changes we need to make for the new new system. Yep.
Yeah, you won’t have a like an entire middle management layer, for example. And I, I think from 2150 to 212, you know, is gonna change at one million, you’re gonna change 21250 to 21000, you’re gonna change 21250 to 21000, you’re gonna change and, and 10 and above you’re, you’re gonna very much change what got you here will not get you there kind of thing. Uh Jesse. Yeah, always, always feel free to ask questions. So that’s really what this is about. It’s the, the live Q and A, you know, Brad and I are gonna talk about, about the series.
Um Go into things Brad will elaborate. But if you have questions, that’s really what this is. So Jesse asks if you have been growing as a business and have been doing all of your marketing project management and financial analytics, but are starting to grow at an overwhelming rate. Nice job Jesse, what’s the first member of your team that you would hire and why? So we talked about this on the uh on the podcast. I would say there’s two roles within a company that need to be filled and until you’re up to about a million dollars worth of or, or million dollar per year run rate, the owner should be doing both and that’s the sales role and the project management role.
Now you might hire marketing agencies and you might have software tools to help you do some of the tasks within those roles. But those are the two roles that need to be there. So, what we talked about on the podcast, if you remember Brandon was you pick which one that you’re best at and you want to do more and then you hire out the other one. So for me, project management is not a strength of mine, the organization piece is not mine. I’m great at customer service.
I can certainly, you know, console a, an upset customer better than anyone. But as far as scheduling jobs, getting them, getting them kicked off, doing all the billing invoicing material tracking, that’s all things. Those are all things that I’m absolutely terrible at and have no desire uh to learn to be better. Uh What I’m really good at is sales. So for me, it was focused on sales. Second role. Uh It would be project manager might be different for any other individual. And you’re saying that from 0 to 1 million, even if you don’t like the project management role, you should be doing both those things to a million dollar run rate. Yeah. Yeah.
And so what we did is I, I, I, when we launched, I already planned on being at a million dollar run rate. Plus right from the get go, which is why I started day one with M as sales and then a second person as a project manager. But people that are, are slowly growing, maybe they’re at 300,000, they’re at 500,33. Uh unless you have plans and a marketing budget that are gonna help you to get to that million dollar run right run rate right now. You probably can’t afford to bring on a project manager or a salesperson.
Would you agree with that? I would. Yeah, you don’t want to sink yourself. The number one reason uh small businesses go out of businesses, cash flow constraints. Uh You also wanna look into obviously how you’re charging for your projects. You know, people try to sometimes uh create a competitive differentiation for themselves by not accepting any money down. Well as you’re growing and you’re small, that might be a bad move. Maybe that’s something you can do kind of down the future. Yeah, though I say the, the taking money down uh we’re, we’re a cash flow positive business.
Every job should be cash flow positive, right? Even though the very first one you do and the length of time from the time you sell a job to when it’s completed shouldn’t really be that long, especially when you’re starting. So if you start a company like I did from actual scratch, I sold a job and then you start it the next week, right? So do I need that deposit? Probably not because within two weeks I know that the job’s done, I’m getting paid. Yeah, those jobs are pretty short.
It’s not a, a huge commercial project, you know, but there is, you know, for some companies, there is a big advantage to taking deposits um and having that cash flow available. Um We do, we just do a $500 deposit just and the reason why I do $500 is just to have some skin in the game for them. Because what I found at my last company was, we are oftentimes the, the most expensive and people would say yes to us, but there was no deposit. And so they’d start shopping around and we would lose a lot of jobs because they were just kept looking.
Why wouldn’t they, they said we could paint their house but they didn’t have any. It wasn’t like they were, they could lose that $500 if they changed their mind. Yep. Yeah, once people commit to that, then they’re, they’re pretty locked in. Um, won’t get the buyers remorse or, or whatever that would technically be defined as, by the way, when, when Brad’s saying, um, run rate, he means 83,000 month. So that’s a million dollar run rate. So if you’re making $83,000 a month, then that’s, that’s the rate that he’s talking about.
And he’s able to get there fast because he was already investing into his site, investing into, to how he was gonna get those initial leads before he actually launched. Obviously, mostly listening. Priority. Have your painting company. But the concept is similar about investing kind of before, you know, marketing investment, that that’s a leading indicator of success. You put the money in and you get the money kind of a little bit down the line that faster, obviously depends on your strategy. That’s right. Um OK, so that was episode three.
Change the World. Hi Kaylen. Uh Good to see you again. Episode four. Don’t, don’t stop me. Now, what does it look like to not only grow a business but scale a business? Is there such a thing as too soon? Well, we’re gonna find out Brandon because we are right there. We, we, you know, we all turn down or not. We launched quickly. We got, so we ended up, we ended up closing the end of the year. Um The goal was to do a million dollars worth of revenue in our 1st 12 months.
Well, we sold our first job, April 13nd. We started it producing it on May 17th. Uh just did my taxes for 2022 for that year we produced one million $13,000 worth of jobs. So we did over a million in that first, whatever, 788 months or whatever. Yeah. So we beat, we beat our goal. Uh If you talk to a bunch of people that are smarter than me, they will tell you that the, it’s, it’s very difficult to go from 0 to 1 million in the painting business, but probably even more difficult to go from one million to say three million.
Uh because you have to start adding a lot of overhead in the form of sales people and project managers and admin and probably office space and vehicles and increased marketing spend or whatever. Well, that’s our goal for this year is to try to do $3 million worth of revenue, not sales necessary, just like actual revenue. Um And in order to do that, I ha I had to put my money where my mouth is. And so we hired salespeople and project managers and admins. So now I’m still running.
Um I’m I’m do about half the estimates. I have a second sales person that now is out in the field and closing deals and doing a really, really great job. Uh We had my full time project manager, Ron who replaced my wife back in October. So he’s been with me about six months now and he’s like my right hand man. He is the uh the yin to my yang. Uh He’s more risk averse. He is um probably more serious than I am, which is maybe a nice balance.
And so uh he’s been really instrumental in helping us to build systems in order to grow. Uh but he’s got a capacity too. Uh kind of industry benchmark would be $1.5 million in sales per salesperson, $33 million per projects being managed by each project manager. So we have a new, a second project manager starting on Monday. Also hired an admin, we call her a project coordinator because she’s a lot more than an admin. She’s handling scheduling of all the estimates. She’s now handling uh initial scheduling of the projects themselves.
She has uh experience and skills in graphic design. So she’s like a graphic designer now too. She’s doing like a ton of things, but we all that to say, we added a lot of overhead that I can’t justify right now. Right? I have, we have about $400,000 worth of exterior jobs sold and we just started painting outside this week. So we have, we have about a month that’s should be about four weeks worth of work uh to keep all the crews busy that we’ve um we’ve on boarded.
Um But outside of that, like, I, I don’t have the, I don’t have enough leads coming in really to, to need two sales guys. Uh I don’t have enough projects really to need two project managers. But I know that if we want even a prayer at hitting three million, I have to have those in place. So we spent, and this is the first time apart from that, that initial 20,000 that we dipped when we first launched. This is the first time that the company financially is going backwards coming out of interior season.
Um We’re, we’re, we’re spending a lot in marketing. We, we probably dipped about $60,000 in the past three weeks. So it’s an investment. Um, I understand that I’ve had to have a couple of pep talks with people that I, I know and love. I was on the phone with Jason Paris yesterday. Like, I’m like, hey, man, I need you to tell me whether this is like, really good, the decisions that I’m making are really good and wise or, uh, that I’m being an idiot and I just need to keep, I just need to go backwards and he’s like, no, he’s like, if you really want to grow, you basically have to do these things and you are the primary investor, you just need to be monitoring your sales and your production and say, OK, is this investment worth it?
You’re the investor and if the investment is not worth it, then you might have to change your strategy and that might mean scaling back the people you have on board. Um Or you just keep pushing harder and sell what else you got to do to sell more jobs. So we’re moving forward in faith, my man, I love Jason’s per perspective. He’s always looking at it like uh almost like a private equity investor or something, you know, very business or uh I know you got mad at me yesterday, Brad.
So I’m just gonna publicly just bring it out. You know, I said, Jason Phillips is my favorite podcast guest. I did say that. Yeah, I did say it in episode six. I love all my podcast guests. I love you, Brad. You’ve been been on many, been on many things, buddy. But uh yeah, I, I was very into the moment I did say that but uh you know, I love everybody. So Jason Phillips, if you’re gonna have a favorite, is there, is there, is he a bad guy to have to be your favorite?
He’s a phenomenal human being. He did a seven episode series. So we were supposed to do a six and then, yeah, we were supposed to do a six and then I uh well, he kept dropping stuff about his sales process. We’d be talking about something totally unrelated and he would say something like it was no big deal. And I was like, well, Jason, you did it to yourself again because now we’re gonna go down like this fifteen-minute rabbit hole that you don’t want to go on. And I could see he kind of almost visibly gets nervous sometimes because now I’m taking him in a totally different direction.
I’m like, dude, stop saying interesting stuff if you don’t want that to happen. So we did episode seven was all about, hey, what’s your sales process? Because I wanna know it. Yeah, I wanna know it. I can ask what I want to know and then other people get the benefit. I see a comment here and again, I can’t see who said it, but he said when we were talking about my business going backwards, they said, I see mine going backwards for the first time in five years as well.
It’s hard and playing with my mind and emotions. Um, whoever that is, um, are you are like geographically? Where are you located? Are you located in northern state? Southern state is, is seasonality an issue for you. Answer that question and then, um, we’ll talk about it. Yeah, I wanna, I wanna bring up one other thing too, Brad because I know you, um, you were very open in your, in your, uh series, you know about people contacting you, uh, about wanting to, to share and then you got kind of flooded, uh, because your series was a very popular one.
A lot of, a lot of people listened to it. Um, and you, you kind of came back to me and let me, you’re on a lot of phone calls. Now, what were some of the, the common questions, the common conversation that you were having with people. People have a lot of questions about how to find an onboard subcontractors. You know, how do you, how do you find them? And of course, I’ve shared that I use the, the Facebook group. Um I use my Sherwin Williams rep, which has been, I mean, that’s, those leads are always really good because they’re, they’re prescreened, right?
My, my Sherwin reps not gonna refer a crew over to me that he thinks is not gonna be reliable or high quality. Um But really, once the, once the ball starts rolling, painters, no painters. And what we’ve been focusing on this year is we, we came out of last year with, um let’s see, seven or eight solid consistent crews that we were using uh of those 84 of them are just absolute superstars like, man, I wish I could clone these guys. Well, that’s what we’re doing this year.
We’re cloning them. And, and what I mean by that is, you know, we said, hey, Robert and Bao, you guys are the best. We love you. You will, we will feed you unlimited amount of jobs if you wanna bring on two or three more painters. And now you either have a team of six or two teams of three, you will be prioritized 100%. And so now those guys are like, all right. Well, we love working with Ellis and painting. We’re making all this money. It’s really easy. Um You know, the, the work’s not easy but it’s easy.
The relationship’s easy. Uh Now Robert and bats are bringing on more guys. So that’s, that’s now we’re really just, we’re dealing with Robert and Bozzo who we already knew we’re not trying, we’re not having to try out new subcontractors, but now through them, we’ve doubled their workforce and if we can do that with three or four crews, you know, Bingo Bango. Uh but we also did a huge recruiting push. I think we interviewed like 15 or 1003 new crews and uh we have, we, we’re, we’re entering the spring with 20 uh compliant and active subcontractor crews slash crew leaders um that equates to like 50 50 something painters that we could have working for us on any given day.
Um So, yeah, that was, that was the main question was subcontract how to find subcontractors. People asked about my sales process which is actually changing. We’re now doing in home presentations wa wa wa was it all virtual before? No, we would, we would go and we would meet the customer and everything. But then we would just email the estimate the proposal by the end of the day. But now we’re actually meeting with the customer, going back to our vehicle, piecing everything together, going back in the house and presenting it to them.
That’s what my favorite guy does. All the best guys do. That’s why I knew I’m like, listen, I’m having great success doing it the way I do it because it’s me and I can do it. But if I need to train new sales people, if I want to not be the guy selling all the time, then I need, I need to have an actual sales process. So we’re doing that. And um my new sales guy hasn’t started doing in home presentations because I’m still double checking all his numbers before he sends the estimate over.
Um, but he’s, he’s closing already like one out of three without doing an in home presentation, which is very promising. Um, which means he’s building rapport and he’s, you know, he’s providing value without doing that. Uh, my in home presentations. So we just started doing it this week and really, I’ve only done three and I’m three for three, all three said yes right there on the spot. Yeah. Um, ok, so whoever this was said, northwest suburbs of Chicago is that I believe that’s Justin with a legate painting, but I’m gonna look for a confirmation on that.
Ok, cool. Justin. Great. Uh So Justin, if that’s you, um I think so. I can’t compare what I did last year compared to what the market looks like this year because I didn’t have a last year at Ellison painting. Um, what I hear from a lot of people is that a lot of people are having a harder time selling that the average job size now is smaller. Maybe people are taking longer to make decisions. Um, coming out of the winter, obviously, we always slow down and then if you’re in Chicago, you know, it’s gonna pick up if you focus on exterior jobs.
Uh I think that we need to. Um, oh, it’s Brian Maddie. I don’t, I don’t know if I, if I know Brian, I don’t think I know regardless, uh those of us that want to grow our business. Even through what could be a challenging season or summer or year, we need to really hone in our messaging our marketing, our sales process. If we can do that, we will be able to uh out compete and out hustle the people that aren’t going to make the changes and adapt.
So it’s things can go backwards for a period of time. But I would say you need to have a plan if, how long can it go backwards before it now becomes an issue for you? And what are your plans? If, if, if you don’t think it’s just a seasonal or cyclical thing, what are your plans to, to reverse it so that you’re moving forward again when Brad, when you’re growing and you, you know, you hit the million and, and then you invest more heavily with the goal of the three million and then you’re probably going to do something similar again with the goal like the five or the 10 million.
What is, what is your thought on liquidity in terms of how much money you should have in the bank or, or what kind of run rate you should give yourself? So we, I haven’t, I haven’t settled on a number. Um Through Q one, we stayed static. We didn’t, we didn’t profit at all. We didn’t lose at all. I paid myself a small, my small salary and there was no profit in the business. But through that we kept, I think we had about 100 and $50,000 in our, in our business checking account. Right.
Well, now we’re actually losing money. So it’s, it’s dropping down. Uh, one of the, one of the, um, topics of conversation with Jason Paris yesterday was a business line of credit and he said you should apply for a business line of credit when you don’t need it. So if you ever need it, you already have it because once you need it, no bank obviously is gonna give you open up that line of credit for you. And he also said, hey, even if you have the money to, to use in your, in your business checking account, could you be using that money somewhere else that’s going to be getting you a better return than the 6% or so that you’re gonna pay um, in interest on that business line of credit answer that is probably, yeah, if that frees up my cash to spend more in marketing or you know, hire another really top line sales guy then yeah, I’m gonna get more than 6% back.
So, uh I just scheduled an appointment with my, uh, my banker at Chase to open up that line of credit. I don’t know yet whether I’m gonna use it or not. Um, but it, it’ll be nice knowing that if, if I need to, I can or I can just keep my, my, my cash liquid and use the line of credit basically to function. Yeah, having access to that working capital is very important. You never really know 1003% what’s gonna happen? What if you get sued or something? Right?
You just, you never know. Um So Heidi Heidi, what, what kind of question is this, Heidi? I know you’re a go getter, you’re doing everything. Uh So Heidi and I have been in touch. She said, how do you get away with not being a morning person? But I know Heidi is, is very much getting after it. I met Heidi. Heidi came over to my house for the gathering of gathering of Michigan painters. We got to meet in person. Um I would say, how do I get away with not being a morning person?
Why do you need to be a morning person? Your customers don’t want you at the house at six AM. And I, and I don’t want to get up and go to the gym at six AMI. My alarm goes off every day at seven and I get up and the first thing I do. Uh Well, I put on my glasses so I can see and then I go make my daughter’s lunch and I help her to brush her teeth and get ready for school and then I get myself ready and then I’m out the door and you know, I’m out the door by 7 45 every day.
Uh That’s efficient. It is like an hour and a half. I don’t wanna waste time. Yeah. All the kids. I, I think my, my daughter probably thinks the only, the only word I know in the morning is let’s, you know, hustle. Come on, hustle. Um, but the real answer is, you know, you, I make the most of the time that I’m working and then I make the most of the time that I’m not working and I don’t think you need to be a morning person to be productive from, from 8 30.
I basically work from 8 30 to 2 30 every day. And then I’m at the gym every day but for the 3 503 class and then I’m home by five and family time. Maybe the maybe the kid, maybe after the kids go to sleep. If I have some follow up emails or estimates to send out, I’ll do that. But um so Chris Chris uh has asked, I li I like these last two questions a lot guys if you have questions, put them in there. Um Is it harder to have a consistent brand while using subs?
Is it harder? Yeah. Uh Is it hard? I would say not if you’re doing it right? Um So the way we operate is my, me and my project managers and um sales guys, we all have our branded vehicles. Ellison painting every one of our jobs has Ellison painting signs out front. We have Ellison painting shirts that are subcontractors, we ask very nicely for them to wear, can’t make them, of course, but um, most of them will play ball. Uh But more importantly, the contact that our customers are having is primarily with an Ellison painting employee.
That’s the project manager. The project manager is my face when the once the job is sold. So, um, can you maintain a consistent brand? I’d say? Yeah. Uh, all of our marketing is very consistent, all of our job sites are very consistent. Um I don’t, I, I don’t think that I don’t think you would, you would see a difference between the brand if I was using employees versus subcontractors, I can’t imagine what that difference would look like from employees sometimes work more slowly. My subs hustle they want to make money, you know, they know they’re getting paid, you know, $8000 for this project, whether it takes them three days or eight days.
And so they’re incentivized to, to get it done quickly efficiently and at a, a high quality level. So they don’t have to go back. Um So I would say the big, maybe the big difference is that we are consistently faster uh and more efficient than a company that uses employees. And, and you have a pretty deliberate interview process with your subs, you wanna kind of quickly run through that because obviously starting with a good crew is pretty integral to this whole thing. So what’s the question essentially.
I know you, you’ve walked through kind of your process, right? You talked about finding subcontractor crews, but I know you have certain criteria, you, you have a certain method to the way that you hire them, vet them. You know, you typically start them on a certain kind of project prior to moving to another kind of project. I think that all plays into this, into them. Actually, you know, for me that, that question is, hey, how do you make sure they don’t screw up your brand like by being bad?
So I think to, just to go back to Chris’s question real quick, I don’t think it’s hard to maintain a consistent brand. I think it’s way more difficult to maintain a consistent culture if you’re using subcontractors, right? Employees are coming to your shop, they are managed by your foreman, they are and your crew leaders, they are. Uh it’s, it’s all your company all the time. Um The culture can be tough, but that’s why when you’re, when I’m interviewing these subcontractors, that’s what I’m trying to identify. Do I think that they’re a good culture fit for how we operate?
Are they a good person? Do, did they show up on time for our interview? Um Did they seem like they’re telling the truth? They’re just, you know, kind of sticking their feathers out and, and bragging uh to make themselves look bigger or better if, if someone’s, if someone’s a good person. And I think that the culture fits meaning they seem to have high integrity. They do want to operate professionally. Um, they, they believe in fairness, uh, they believe in merit based opportunities then I don’t know that there’s any real effective way to vet them further than that because you can’t really tell the quality of their work until they actually start out one of your jobs.
And so it’s important when they, when we assign the first job that we are, we’re paying a little bit more, um, a little bit closer attention to what they’re doing on the job site as it’s kicking off. Um, but the one of the things you mentioned, Brandon is, yes, we do, we do look at the, the first job that we’re gonna give them, we’re looking for long term relationships with our subcontractors and until they start working with us, they don’t know that I’m any different than any other contractor they’ve ever worked for. Right.
Everyone tell them, yes, we’re gonna pay you on time. We are going to pay you. Well, our jobs are great. This is gonna be easy. Everyone tells them the exact same thing and it turns out every contractor is a liar. Right. And they’ve all been burned before. They all have not been paid before they were all promised something and then not given that well, until they actually start working with us, they don’t know that I’m any different. So, the first job has to be a good one.
It can’t be some nightmare customer. It can’t be a job where there might be a, you know, a bunch of things that make it less profitable or take too long. We got to give them a real home run and make sure they see how we operate because they’re gonna be experiencing two things in that during that first job. One is how, well we pay on these jobs, but two, how we, how we operate, how we communicate with them and the, the efficiency there. Well, we can obviously control fully how we operate and how we communicate.
Um, but if we, if we give them a bad job, we give them AAA customer that we should have identified right from the get go was gonna be a headache. Uh That’s a loss because now, even though we weren’t lying to them, you know, we, we didn’t really do anything. It seems like the job was a failure and it wasn’t their fault and it wasn’t, it was, it was our fault for not, not prepping it. Right. So, yeah, it’s important you, you just try to find subcontractors that are decent people that will communicate well, that will follow through on what they say they’re going to do.
And then you just got to give them a shot and make sure you’re looking over their shoulder for the first few jobs a little more closely. But then once we what we found is that once a, once a crew has done a few jobs with us and they see how we operate and they see how profitable it is. Now, they’ve been incentivized to continue to do really high quality solid workforce. They want us to be happy because if we’re not, we’re not gonna keep giving them work and they want more work.
It’s basically almost like a probationary period or something for, for employee, for us too though. It’s, we, we need to be on our best behavior in the first few jobs because if we do something that, that rubs them the wrong way or makes them think that we are just like every other company, then we’ve lost that long term potential to work with them guys. We’re, we’re just past the halfway mark of the, of the live Q and A, I wanna do something I haven’t done before because I, I want to get a gauge.
I, I never ask people when we’re doing these Q and A s like who actually listened. Um So if you could put in listened or didn’t listen, that I would just be curious about that. And then if obviously a lot of people, we, we put up these recordings, uh in the Facebook group, we, we do a push out to our networks. A lot of people will listen to this as a recording. Uh If you can put up live, a recording that would just be great to get a metric on, on kind of how people are listening and how they’re coming into this.
Uh There is another really interesting question um which is, which is funny. It’s funny because my wife and I have actually had similar discussions regarding painter, marketing pros. Um What is the rush to grow that fast? Wouldn’t maintaining a profit throughout your scaling, make more sense? Um Yo, why you gotta come at me like that? Why are you so like aggressive man? So first thought we’ve maintained profit uh 2022 even though I left my last company and started a new one was um personally for me and Rachel our best financial year ever.
So it was, we are profitable. Um We weren’t profitable through Q one though most companies around here that operate like we do, even my last company, we never had any profit in Q one. And actually talking to Jason Paris yesterday, he said Paris painting has never profited in Q one and oftentimes they lose like a million dollars in Q one. And then it’s not until middle of the summer that they’re actually profitable. So, um yes, maintaining a profit, profit is important and that’s certainly one of our core focuses.
Uh our, our, our, um our goals this year are $3 million at 15% net profit. And that when we go through our uh E OS process and just revamped our V T O and did our quarterly meeting that is the goal is to maintain a profit. So the rush to grow so fast. This is interesting that you asked this because Rachel and I just had a conversation this week about it. Um And we kind of already touched on it. Now, Ron and I could have maintained Ellison painting at $1.5 million this year and it would have been relatively easy.
I just go sell all the jobs and he manages all the jobs and maybe we have an admin to help a few in a few areas and we could have stayed at 1.5 million. Um, maybe grown a little bit, just the two of us. There’s simplicity in that for sure. But the, the jump from one and in order to jump to go from 1.5 million to three million, I think is going to be way easier than going from 1.5 to 2 to 503 to 3. You know, once I’m at once, I’m over 1.5 million.
I have to, a project manager can’t handle it and maybe a sales guy can’t, can’t sell all that themselves. So I already have to hire someone else. Well, now I’ve added $500,000 in revenue, but I’ve also taken on one other full role that’s gonna be costly. So, rather than scaling slowly like that, let’s just swing for the fences. Let’s go from 1.5 to 3 million. I think it’s actually, it, I know from the outside it probably feels rushed, but it’s a strategic decision um because we did a million last year, but our run rate was really 1.5. Right.
So we’re doubling, we’re doubling our operation, um trip will hopefully triple our actual revenue calendar year. But um double our, our production or our um our kind of pace. So, is there a rush? I don’t know. It seems based on everything that I’ve, I’ve spoken about with industry experts. Uh one and from 0 to 1, 23 1.5 to 33 to five, those are the kind of the natural plateaus. Well, I’d rather just get to the three million right away and then figure out how to get the five million after that. So, Brad, I wanna ask you a question that seems simple, but it’s, it’s actually kind of a nerve wracking question for a lot of people uh because they will oftentimes people have goals that are more ambitious than what they are willing to share because they, they might think, you know, it kind of goes back to being a kid from everyone’s gonna laugh at me if I say what I want.
Um I’ve talked with painting couple hours, they want to get north of 100 million, right? But publicly maybe they’re talking about 10 million. So what is your goal? Are you willing to say what your goal is and, and why do you have that goal? Yeah. So our um so we’re, we follow the E OS the traction process, right? Something that’s been really helpful for us in, in uh in game planning and strategy and systems and structure and all that. Our, our three year. Um I can’t, I can’t remember if it’s a three year plan, a three year plan, three plan, um $6 million in revenue for Ellison painting here in Metro Detroit.
Um 10 year vision is 20 million in revenue. Uh And that’s also the, the current plan is to have Ellison painting branches in other major metropolitan cities. So, um you know, geographically, if we’re, if we’re looking there, it makes more sense to do. Uh I’ve talked about Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati and maybe Chicago and Indianapolis and start kind of taking over the Midwest Midwest region. Um I don’t know, during our quarterly meeting, we, we talked about the, the revenue number, the revenue number to me doesn’t really matter what matters is that me and the people that I’m working with are all having the time and money we need to um be for our family and that the painters that are continuing to work with us are also enjoying the fruits of working with Ellis and painting.
So they’re making not only uh you know, a, a living wage, but they’re making like a thriving wage and the type of money that’s gonna really gonna change their family legacy as well. So, you know, that could mean we get to six million and that’s it. And six million is a sweet spot for us and we just, we just keep doing that and just keep becoming better and better at what we’re doing. Um, maybe we say, you know what, six million feels good, but if we get to 10 million, then think about the other opportunities that’s gonna provide for other people that aren’t already working with us.
Uh 100 million. I don’t know. Could we be $500 million company? Wouldn’t that be fun? It would be something, it would be something. Um I don’t know. I, what I battle, you know, totally transparently is, do I have the skill set to manage a $6 million. 10 million, $100 million company? Um I don’t know. Maybe I think I’m a pretty, pretty bright and pretty capable guy. Um Maybe there’s probably people that are way better leaders than I am. Um way better uh creator of leaders than I am. Um And maybe I transition into uh a different role where, you know, I don’t know, maybe I spend more time working on the PC A or just traveling around the country to our different locations.
And, you know, it’s being like the, the pep up guy and we have someone else as a CEO to, to really facilitate the growth. I don’t know, you could be the mean guy, it could be the mean guy and like, really a lot. So, who knows? I mean, um, well, I really, really love what we’re doing. I love the painting industry. I love my company. I love the people that are working with me. I want to find more people elected people that are working with me and just keep growing and I think I we’ll keep doing that until we decide we don’t want to and then either plateau or do something else.
I don’t know. So this one, I don’t uh I’m not sure. I fully understand what the question is. But after painting for 23 years, I went off on my own in 2100. Has anyone had a five year business dip year or a level out year? So I guess that’s the question 2100 to 250 growth years and added painters each year by 250 when we hit one million in revenue and grabbed an office. Now in 22 I have three vans, seven painters, an office manager and myself and we completed 0003 K. But now the fifth year, the myth year is, I guess a struggle year but still going strong with jobs.
But profit is a little down but not as much as last year. Uh It might have been cut off after that. But essentially this, this business dip year the fifth, the fifth uh myth Year. I, I haven’t heard that. I haven’t heard of that Myth Year. Have you heard of that? I have not. No. Um, well, I would say it’s still early, it’s still early in the year. Right? It’s April. Um We finished Q one but that still means there’s three more quarters left to rally. And um I think that there was, there was a lot of worry about the economy and I just don’t, again, I don’t have the data to compare directly to last year.
You know, the number of estimates we were giving versus what we’re giving now, or the average job size now compared to last year. But I can tell you that we’re still doing estimates and people are still saying yes, I mean, I sold in March, I sold 2000 and $2250,2000 worth of paint shops uh in, in like a struggling economy during the winter. So I, I don’t know, I don’t know that I believe in that. It, it sounds like a, I know a lot of people hit, hit, um roadblocks for themselves where now they’ve been doing the same.
He’s OK. This person has been painting for 17 years now. They’re five years into their own business. That’s 22 years. And I bet things are not always as exciting and uh and um motivating as they could be. So I, I would, I would look inside there and see Well, is there something that you’re doing differently? Something you could be doing differently to, to kind of reignite that spark. Um But also it’s early in the year re reevaluate your marketing, where, where your leads coming from, how much are you spending?
What’s working, what’s not shift some dollars around? If uh if you’re not doing in home presentations, maybe start doing that. Um If you’re not presenting like super professionalized estimates, using something like drip jobs or job or something like that, uh take this as an opportunity to make some of those strategic changes that’ll help you close more deals and sell more jobs. Yeah. And I, I, I know I’ve spoken with some companies that are finding the markets changed a little bit for them. They’re finding some of the, the um deals that they would have closed.
It sounds like you’re not struggling with that Brad, but some of the ones they’re finding are a little more price sensitive. So I think Brad’s point is a really good one. You have to give people a reason to pay more money. Still close, right? So you need to decom modise your business. I think the in-home presentation presenting value oriented uh sales process, a consultative sales process don’t show, hey, we, you know, we paint good, we paint, we paint the best we’re not gonna buy on that, right?
When, when they start to value their dollars more highly, you better give them a reason it’s, it’s about getting the right lead through the door and then giving them a reason to pay more money. It’s just, it’s those two things. Um Heidi said, saying goals, I think this was about kind of what your end goal is and why saying goals out loud helps with accountability. I love that. If you don’t want to say it out loud, you might be doubting, you can do it, be confident if you fall short, refine and go again.
Heidi’s story is amazing and I think those, those words are really true. Yeah. Uh Yeah, I, I, I believe that we can do three million. Um I don’t know that we will. And that was Rachel’s question to me during our conversation. Well, what happens if we don’t do three million? Say? Well, we’re still gonna be profitable. We still will have made money. It’s not like it’s not like now worth $300,000 in the hole. If we sell 2.5 million instead of three million, we’ll produce 2.5 million at a 500% net profit.
Um Rachel and I won’t, maybe won’t make as much money, but the company is fine and we’re still highly profitable. Yeah. So with all the people that were calling you, I know that a lot of them were asking about subcontractor crews. You had some pretty common themes. Did you identify any, I guess, mistakes or any sort of? Um, I guess, like, logical fallacies, like flaws in the way that they’re thinking that might be industry wide. Whereas you might be thinking a little bit differently because I know the suc success really starts with the mindset.
So, a lot of these guys, a lot of these people I was talking to were, um, younger men who were trying to launch the business. Maybe it was their dad’s company and they’ve come on board or maybe they’re just, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re trying to start a company and do what, you know, I guess what I’m doing, um, they’re spending a lot of time listening to podcasts. They’re spending a lot of time reading books and talking to guys like me, but they’re not actually doing anything and it’s like they’re, they’re so paralyzed because they don’t feel like they know exactly what they should be doing or exactly how to do it, that they’re not doing anything.
And so I actually spoke to this guy yesterday, uh, and he told me that he’s got his, his dad and his brother and one other guy are painting and he’s not painting. Um, I said, ok, so you’re, you’re just doing like, estimates and project management? Yes. Ok. Well, how many hours a week are you working? Like, how many estimates are you doing? He said I probably do like, two or three estimates a week and I probably work like, I don’t know, an hour and a half or two hours a day.
So, what are you doing with the rest of your time? He goes, well, I’m, I’m, I’m trying to learn a lot. Like learning, doesn’t do anything for you. If there’s no action, you’re way better off doing something without knowing what you’re doing rather than knowing what you’re doing, but not actually doing it right. And so I’m like, bro, when we hang up on this call, he, he had actually ordered a ton of door hangers but didn’t have anyone to deliver them. Said when we get off this call, you need to grab a stack of those door hangers and go to a, a neighborhood that you want to paint in and start knocking on doors saying, hey, my name is Brad, I’m the owner of Ellison painting.
Uh We, we have painted a lot of houses in this area. Um When was the last time you painted your house? I’d, I’d be happy to give you an estimate. Um, whether right now since I’m here already or if you want to schedule a different time. Um Is that something you’d be interested in? What else are you gonna do with your time? You, he, he didn’t want to spend a bunch of money in marketing. Um, because obviously the, they’re not making a bunch of money, so he didn’t have much money to spend like you got to do something with your time.
And so that’s, that’s one of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with is they are growth, growth minded, right? They, they have goals and they have visions of what their company could be, but they’re not taking any of the actual steps to get there when I was, when I went and filmed that reality show this past summer. One of the things that, uh, that we spoke on which I bring up all the time is this idea of an M V P A minimum viable product.
And that means once you have something to sell, you just start selling it and it can continue to and can, and should continue to get better as you refine your process, as you refine your service and your product or whatever. But once you have something to sell that has any value, you go out and you start selling it and then make it better as you go. And a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs get paralyzed because they think that their product, their service, their brand, their company needs to be totally perfect before they show the world.
And then they end up spending five or six months perfecting it. And then they start, and they realize they don’t know what the hell they’re doing anyway. And it’s this slow ramp up period anyway. Well, if you started six months ago, where would you be right now? Six months ahead, you’d have six months worth of sales. You had a six months worth of mistakes that you learned from that you now you, you’re, you’re that much further ahead. So I, I talked to a lot of people who and I don’t want, I don’t wanna sound like jerk but like they talk a big game, they say they want to do these things, but they’re not actually doing anything.
And that’s one of the things that Rachel and I did effectively said, you know what, we’re gonna launch this company and here’s our vision and here’s our strategy and then we just freaking did it. We just did it. Spent the money. I did the estimates. I found the subs, we produced the jobs, we collected the money, we reinvested and here we are a year later, gotta do it. A lot of people struggle with paralysis by analysis. I can tell you for, for me, you know, I knew I had content to put out.
So I did a um I did a, a uh webinar series with the PC A like two years ago or something, did a live webinar series. Uh 1 to 3 people would show up. I did series for a year. 1 to 3 people would show up, right? The content was good but nobody showed up. So then I, I mean, that’s kind of embarrassing, right? Doing an hour long webinar, nobody ever comes. But I did it every single month. Now this this last year painter marketing uh massed my pocket. I mean, I think we had hundreds of thousands of streams, but I just kept showing up.
So the, the process by analysis trying to perfect it, you know, work on, work on it in the lab. Then when you go out, you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get knocked in the teeth anyways. And the best part about what you did is you got those reps in and you made all those mistakes when no one was watching anyway. That’s brilliant. Now, you got all hundreds of thousands of people watching and you’ve had two years now of really figuring out how to do it. Well, yeah. And it, it, it’s, it kind of doing it in the laboratory and then rolling it out, it doesn’t work.
It’s what everyone wants to do. It doesn’t work. You should talk, listen, but you need to do nothing. Nothing. Trump’s action. That’s the pep talk that I gave my sales guy yesterday. As I mentioned, he’s already doing a great job. He’s selling, selling jobs. Um, but I said, hey, you have to start doing in home presentations starting next week and I want you to understand that you are going to make some glorious mistakes. You are really gonna screw something up big. Ok? And that’s ok. Like nothing, nothing that you screw up can’t be fixed or addressed or adjusted.
So I gave him the freedom to like just freaking swing for it. Right. It’s ok. I know that you’re gonna make a mistake. You think that maybe you won’t, but you absolutely will. So, just go do it. Let’s get the mistakes out of the way and continue to get better. You have to have fun with it. Yeah, you have to, you have to be willing to laugh at yourself. Things become a whole lot easier when you did. You know that, um, one of our, one of our five core values at Ellison painting is Levity.
Have we talked about that before? I don’t think so. Yeah. So levity is basically just not taking things too seriously having fun. And we, you know, my, the team that I have between my um my sales guy, Ron, my project manager, um uh Veronica, my admin, we just, we laugh a lot. We make jokes at each other’s expense and we just don’t take things too seriously. So that when we run into issues with the company, like, don’t get me wrong. Obviously, we take our business seriously. We take our job seriously, but not we, we run a painting company.
It’s not an emergency room, right? There’s no real, real painters and painting emergency so we can have fun. And I think we portray that with the customer when I’m out doing an estimate. You know, it’s pretty lighthearted. I’m making jokes, the, the video that gets sent out about um what to expect when you show up for an estimate. It’s pretty lighthearted. I got a couple of jokes in there. Just like, hey, this is our culture. We want to have fun. We’re gonna take your job seriously. We’re gonna do a great job, but we, we’re gonna have fun doing it as well.
It’s a, you don’t, you have like a little subtitle being like this is my friend. I can, I, I normally hug my customers when I, when I show up for an estimate. But this is my best friend, Phil. He agreed to be in the video. But you know what if you want to hug when I get there, you let me know, I’ll give you one. I love it, man. Uh I wanna, I wanna touch on one more, more. Um big point before we kind of start wrapping up here because one of the things that you had talked about in the podcast series, which I think is really important is the advantages and potentially disadvantages you had going into this.
And I think obviously someone can’t just fabricate all their advantages. But I think understanding it can help people be more strategic in their approach. So you want me to talk about my advantages and disadvantages? Yeah, just because I think it’s a lot of people don’t even fully recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and that self awareness is important with the company. So advantages, we talked about the, the money that Rachel and I had been saving that we had at our disposal. Uh Advantages were my, you know, nearly two decades of sales and management experience.
Um I had made myself kind of a public figure within the industry. So it allowed me to find uh subcontractors. Um Ultimately, it allowed me to find people that wanted to work for me, like, on the sales side too, right? Um They kind of, they listen to my podcast before they interviewed with me and like, oh, this is, seems like a guy that I wanna work with or a company that I want to work with. Um the disadvantages. I’m not a painter. I have to rely on other people to actually produce the, the service that we are um selling um disadvantages was starting from scratch.
I was worried that we wouldn’t, it’s because we had no real reputation, no reviews that it’d be really hard to sell a bunch of jobs. It turns out that’s a lie. You know, you just, you can sell jobs without any reviews. The more you get, the more it helps, but you don’t need them to start. Um You don’t have to charge bottom of the barrel prices either. I wanna put that in. You aren’t charging, I started charging, I started out charging more than I was charging at my last company.
And people are still saying yes. Right, because I’m providing the sales process. Yep. And I’m selling them the experience, the Ellison painting experience. Um But also in retrospect, and in line with some of what we’re talking about here. Uh One big advantage I have is maybe my enormous ego. It’s like I, I really believe, I really believe that I can that not, I, we collectively can, can create the greatest painting company in America. Like I fully believe that Ellison painting could be the absolute best, um could be also the biggest, who knows?
But I really believe that we can do that. Um Now I might be wrong but even if I’m wrong and we end up the 100th best 100th most professional painting company in America. Guess what? We are doing pretty darn well. But the fact that I believe that we really can be the absolute best allow allows me and equips me to take the risks and make the decisions that I make in hiring and spending and everything else that goes along with uh pretty explosive growth. So some people don’t have that self-confidence.
Some people don’t have that belief in themselves or their ability. Um, find someone that does find someone that me like me that doesn’t know anything about painting. Um, but knows about business and is great at sales and bring them on board, let’s say, uh being a, being a 50 50 partner in a $2 million year company is way better than being the sole owner of a $250,000 year company. If you like, if you want to have a big painting company that is um, some people just want to run a $250,000 company and they thrive there and it’s awesome.
And that’s a big success. But if you really want to grow, have the self-awareness to know whether you are actually the person that’s gonna be able to do it. And I, as, as I mentioned earlier, I’m trying to have enough self awareness that maybe I’m the guy that can get us to three million, But I’m not the guy that can get us to five or six million. I don’t know yet, but I need to, I need to be aware of whether I am the guy or not.
And I will say this is something my wife and I actually have talked about pretty extensively back when we were starting our entrepreneurial journey. I had a lot of doubts. I, I used to be entrepreneurs, successful business owners is kind of like a myth and man, that guy, that guy, that girl, they, they have something I don’t have. Um And I kind of came to the conclusion that I don’t actually have to believe in myself. Uh I just have to keep doing it. And so it, it’s, I think the belief in yourself basically means that you don’t stop.
I think that’s really the, the key um principle though is you don’t stop no matter what, even if you don’t believe in yourself, just continue to march in the right direction. Doubting yourself the whole time and eventually it’s gonna work out. Yeah, when someone says, well, I’m, I’m scared of failing. See, ok, well, then don’t stop. If you haven’t, if you haven’t stopped, then you haven’t failed. Just keep going right on. The only way you, uh, fails. If you quit, you will not quit. Right? Or people that are afraid of starting over, well, then don’t quit.
You know, if you don’t quit, you don’t have to start over Brad. Do you have, we are about at our time? I appreciate your time, man. Uh Wrapping up an amazing podcast series with you. Do you have anything else you wanna impart before we wrap this up? Uh Not in particular. I, I, I do want to stress like what, what we’re doing at Ellison painting I want to acknowledge is, is pretty rare and um and pretty special. I don’t, I never wanted the series to be like, I don’t want it to seem easy and um I don’t want to give people the impression that literally anyone can do this.
It doesn’t, I’m not saying that I’m something special, but what Ellison painting is super special. And um I, I wanted to be, I want it to be an encouragement. I want people to look at what I’m doing and inspire them. Um Maybe not to do exactly what I’m doing, but to make some changes, to facilitate the growth they might want within their business in some way. I, I just I don’t know. I feel weird. You, you see what I’m trying to say? Like, I feel weird. Like I’m, we’re painting this picture of that.
Anyone can just start a company from scratch and do what I did. And it’s simple but it’s not easy. That’s exactly it. Yeah. It’s, it’s simple. It’s not easy. And a lot of people are not willing to take the risks, um, and make the sacrifices that we make. Um So certainly, I, I hope that someone does it bigger and better than me. Um But the reality is most people are not gonna do this and that’s ok. Running a different version of a different company can still be, it should be uh viewed as equally successful, right?
It’s not all about explosive growth. It’s not all about huge numbers for me. That’s what I’m aiming for. Um But success is not purely defined by numbers and financial growth and there’s something Brad and I are both passionate about. Obviously, we’re both big advocates for the PC A on several committees for the PC A. But can that this is a tried and true proven business model you have access to, to Brad, you have access to all these heavy hitters who know what they’re doing. So don’t go it alone.
I mean, that’s where it’s simple but not easy. That that’s where it exactly is, you can go get all the answers you need. But at the end of the day you were still going to have to execute. So, Brad, thank you for your time. If you have questions, uh If you’re not in the podcast group already, probably most of you are. You can always tag Brad with questions directly. Um Brad’s always, you know, he’s a very big advocate for the, he won. Let’s see your, your plaque.
He won the biggest recruiter, I think for the, the PC A. What was the award? Exactly? Remember recruitment of the year I won that from at Expo. Went at Expo. It was Nick Slavic. I think the past like eight years, he’s got an unfair advantage, man. He tours the country recruiting people from PC A. I had to do a little more grassroots. Um But now I’m really proud of that. I am a huge believer as you know, in the PC A. Um the without the PC A s influence on the people that I trust the most within our industry.
Ellison pay would not even be in existence. So, um the, the PC A is a worthwhile organization. You should absolutely become a member. You should absolutely be plugged in. There’s tons of resources whether you wanna uh want help training your painters, whether you need training uh through the Business Accelerator Program, whether you want to get plugged in with other local painters. There’s the gathering of local painters groups. Um And of course, the annual Expo is, you know, for my, in my opinion, like one of the best weeks of the year in the Ellison family.
Ok. Well, Brad, thank you. Thank you for everyone who joined us. Super excited for this, the, the, the uh recording. If you tuned in late, we’ll be uh live in the Facebook group and super excited man. Super excited for this series. We’ll have you on again uh toward the end of the year and get a check in on Alison painting right on Brandon. Thanks, buddy. you got it.

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 painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast for free training as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again that you are l is painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast.

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 Painter Marketing Pros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon at painter marketing pros dot com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business until next time. Keep growing.

Brandon Pierpont

Guest Interview: Nick Lopez – Lime Painting Origins

Guest Interview: Nick Lopez – Lime Painting Origins

In this series titled “Systems Beat Fear”, John MacFarland of MacFarland Painting will be discussing how to overcome what can...
Read More
Guest Interview: PCA Commercial Painting Conference 2024

Guest Interview: PCA Commercial Painting Conference 2024

In this series titled “Systems Beat Fear”, John MacFarland of MacFarland Painting will be discussing how to overcome what can...
Read More
Guest Interview: PCA Residential Painting Conference 2024

Guest Interview: PCA Residential Painting Conference 2024

In this series titled “Systems Beat Fear”, John MacFarland of MacFarland Painting will be discussing how to overcome what can...
Read More

Would Like to Hear How We Can Help Your Painting Company Grow?

SCHEDULE A FREE STRATEGY CALL TODAY

Get Started with Painter Marketing Pros Today