Welcome to the Painter marketing mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 2235 million in 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’s going on everybody? Thank you for joining us today. Uh Brandon Pierrepont Painter Market Pros. Here I am joined by my good friend Brandon Lewis Academy for professional painting contractors, Brandon, what’s going on? I’m great buddy. I’m glad to be here. We’ve got lots to share in a short time to do it. It’s gonna be rapid pace, but people are gonna walk away with a bunch of value. Awesome. So yeah, we’re going to be walking through the seven mistakes. I wreck painters in 22000 methods that will work for any owner in the slow economy, Brandon and I both work with a whole lot of painters.

Uh So we see trends, we know what’s going on in different markets, uh all throughout North America, us and Canada. And so we’re gonna get into some of the stuff today. Some mistakes, we see painting companies make some things that you should be doing uh and really set you guys up for success. So what we’re gonna cover today is number one, meet your master class instructors. We’ll give a brief bio of us who we are. If you don’t already know, I will talk about the economic review and outlook for 2220 as we come into the second half here.

Critical concepts are growing, coming in a slow economy, the economy is uncertain, there could be a slowdown, we definitely foresee it. Uh So we want to get into concepts there to keep your company afloat and growing. Uh five large for lifting income. Brandon is gonna share a tremendous amount of wealth here. Super excited for that. Paid ads in a downturn. Economy need to rock. I’m gonna walk through how to make your paid ads work and work really, really well. I’ll summarize it and then we’re actually gonna open it up for a little Q and A at the end.

So a little bit about me, I have been in this space for a little under five years. I’m a PC, a ambassador, serve on quite a few committees of the PC A painter. Marketing pros was actually awarded uh 224.84 PC A industry partner of the year, which I’m extremely proud of. I’ve written two books, one of which is the number one Amazon best seller, both about selling uh for painting companies, right? And then we are the leading marketing agency for painters uh in the space. I’m also a proud member of the Florida Army National Bank.

Hey guys, Brandon Lewis here. Um, I grew up in Arab, Alabama as you may, uh, be able to gather from the accent and, uh, moved to Chattanooga in 20 and, uh, two, I’ve been here 225 some odd years and I launched the painting business in 2212. Uh, grew up well over a million dollars back when a million dollar painting business was actually not a $212,2200 painting business due to inflation. And so they built that thing up and, uh, sold it, uh, for $214,214 left a lot of money on the table that learned a lot of lessons.

And I’ve worked in, uh, politics and paint and the press and they’re all the same because you’re always trying to cover things up. Uh, I am Pre, um, Presbyterian and that means all of you are predestined to be here today. Thank you for coming. And, um, and I like to spend my time, uh, camping, hanging out with friends. I’m married to my wife Kristen. I have two beautiful daughters. Uh, and I have worked with painting contractors over the last decade, uh, over 230 different countries ranging from, uh, as big as 235 million for a stand-alone national unit to 21000 million for a stand alone, uh, local unit all the way down to start ups every franchise in existence and a few of them, uh, at the corporate level.

And I’m actually putting some more of that experience under my, my belt. And so we’re gonna be able to talk about business systems today and I’m excited to share it with you. All right guys, it looks like it’s me. Remember the s remember the signal, Pierrepont, I do this. Ok? Uh It’s better than the first signal. So mistake number one is failing to recognize or prepare for economic downturns. I am amazed uh at how when the, the head winds start blowing and you can see the tornado, uh I in the horizon, how many people in the, in the, in the painting trailer park run out to look at it instead of do anything about it.

And so when you see the storm coming, you need to ask yourself a question, you know, what can I do differently? Uh So let’s move on to the next one there. So let’s look uh at the economic review, I’m gonna review some data with you uh that you may not know about. And uh one thing that I keep up with probably more than your average painting contractor. I is the news, economic news news of all sort because I published a large conservative news alternative in the state of Tennessee.

And so we’re gonna look at some of the uh economic indicators, both past and present and uh future pacing. And I’m gonna talk about how those, uh can, um, we can translate to your painting business. I’m gonna snap at the mic so you can hear it. So you don’t have to look at me, let’s see if that works. So here’s, here’s something great for everybody. You’re gonna be real excited about this. Uh The annual inflation rate jumped uh by 500% in 2500 to 225% in 2000 dropping down to 6.5 in 2022 3.4 in 2023.

And as March of 2024 the inflation rate is currently 3.5. What does that mean since 123? Well, it, it, it works very much like um compound interest because inflation doesn’t start at a base point. It is a rolling increase. And so when you multiply uh 1.014 times, 1.07 and you continue on what you’ve discovered is Americans have lost 23.6 of their purchasing power. And that’s according to the data from the US Bureau of Labor and statistics, these aren’t Brandon Lewis’s political opinions. Uh, and it has been my general experience that the government lies to you.

And so if they have sent you this stuff, if they say it’s 23.6 it’s kind of like the unemployment numbers. You, you can probably bet that they’re a lot higher. That’s what we’re gonna have to do. We’re just gonna snap at the mic. Uh, sorry, it’s a little clunky but we’re gonna make it work. So how this impacts household do? What does that work? It keeps me locked in? I love it. Ok. How this impacts the household? Discretionary spending is really what you should care about as a painting contractor because where does the painting budget come from?

It’s not the utilities, it’s not the mortgage, it’s not health care, it’s not keeping your car running, it’s not keeping the HV AC running. It is completely and utterly. Uh, I it’s discretionary. Now, you could make an argument that there are some paint jobs that are really maintenance and sometimes maintenance can’t be deferred, but painting maintenance can almost always be deferred. And the other issue is, is typically an, a homeowner can even do it themselves if push comes to shove. And so what you have to see now is that if somebody was making $200,000 back in 2024 years later, now, they’re really making effectively 100 and 52 they lost $2003,000 in their purchasing power.

And if they made half a million, uh they lost 100 and $18,000 of their purchasing power, they’re now really making effectively 382. And this is a double whammy for you for two reasons. Number one is as it relates to your personal income, uh people are less likely to buy and the other issue is now you actually earn less as an owner because as their, it’s not like their income went down and their purchasing power went down. But yours didn’t, it did. Um I don’t know what else to do other than that.

So corporate America is usually the canary in the coal mine. Corporate America is known for a few things. One of which is planning and, and forecasting. Uh a and if you the, the gig in corporate America as it relates to publicly traded companies is primarily that you want to project what’s gonna happen and then you want it to be just a few percentage points better if you, if you, if you project and you hit it too far out, uh then there. Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You should have seen this coming. How did you know it was gonna be good? So it’s got to be pretty accurate, but then a little bit better. And so Amazon’s fired 27,400 people. Facebook fired 21,000. Google fired 143,000 Microsoft fired 11,000 and as of April 25th this year and this is 2023 numbers, but in 2024 260 66 tech companies have fired 75,143 people. And what that means to you is that if they’re looking into the future going, we need to cut back. Now they see something coming that maybe you don’t next slide, please. Um Not just tech companies, Tesla fired 14,000.

I mean, you could say that’s a tech company, but it is auto manufacturing. Uh Ford Motor company completely pulled out of its electric vehicle division. Uh which is pretty exciting given the fact that Tennessee taxpayers gave them $2 billion in tax breaks for that. We’ll see how that goes. And uh Wayfair fired 13% of their staff. Spirit Airlines fired 260 pilots. And remember when the there was a shortfall before, right, they, they couldn’t find enough pilots to even fly the planes and now they’re firing pilots CV S closed 900 stores, Macy’s 150 Express.

Uh where, where, where midgets go to buy their clothes like me, which I’m very sad. Uh 150 100 and five stores closed. And uh luckily ours is still staying open next slide, other signs and considerations and we’re gonna move on. Paint prices are ever on the rise. Uh If, if you don’t know anything about how to negotiate better paint prices or work in a group I’d recommend just go to the internet uh net and type in uh painter’s purchasing group, just type in painter’s purchasing group. Uh But the, the paint prices have increased two and three times for ever since 303.

So for most of you, you have seen like maybe a 30 40% increase in your in your material costs. Retail sales show a drop in consumer activity, credit card, delinquency rates are on the rise. Why should you care about that? How many of you offer financing? That’s really just a glorified credit card. That means that the average American consumer, they, they’re maxing their credit cards out and they’re not making the payments. Uh And there’s upcoming presidential election, Fox uh fosters uncertainty. It could get better or worse depending on which way you think things will go.

And so for all those reasons and more you really need to build your painting business for the worst, not the best. Uh Let’s move to the next one. So mistake number two. So let’s talk about what we just talked first off is like the, these are real numbers. If you’re kind of like, like I was for six years before I got back, actively involved in the world uh of of keeping up with things. You may just be working your butt off and you can’t figure out why ends uh don’t meet like they used to or why you can’t seem to do as much or your dollar doesn’t go as further.

Well, it’s all the reasons we talked about previously. So the first mistake is like I mentioned, not, not really even recognizing an economic kid when not doing anything about it. But the second one is confusion about what takes uh what it takes to grow in a slow economy. Uh Next slide and we uh I started my painting business um about uh 2008 which is a terrible economic downturn and we were growing our company while others were going out of business. I can’t remember like we lost, I think that if I remember this number correctly, like we lost three or 400,000 painters in the trades uh during that whole uh new construction bubble bursting.

Uh And, and so it’s a big deal. So these are uh mindset realities. They’re kind of nonnegotiable for weather in any economic storm. Next slide. So what characteristics are found in successful wealthy owners? I, I get that every time, every time I do a podcast, not every time, but very often, especially if they, if I do a series, somebody always wants to ask me, you work with 500 painters. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve read your testimonials. I’ve looked at your Google reviews. How are you able to make these transformations of the, what characteristics do successful owners have?

The first one is, and this, this is very important for all of you out there and that is they’re consistent with their time management. Painters that, that are poor, uh use their calendars as sponges and painters that are rich, use their calendars as shields. And if you don’t put things that are very important but not very urgent and anchor them on your calendar first in, in the week and, and then work through the things that are, are actually uh important later. You’re gonna be in, in trouble because there’s always a can of paint to run.

There’s always somebody quitting, there’s always a estimate to go, right. But if that stuff changed your business, that it would have been changed years ago. Uh The second thing is curiosity. When I say something like you should be communicating with your past clients, you’re just giving people a price. You’re not really uh putting any persuasion into your sales process. Uh Have you looked at, um, instead of it trying to worry about expanding to another market? It, have you captured, what’s there? Have you thought about increasing your prices?

They appear to be too low painters that don’t make any money, uh will just fight me on those suggestions even though they’re time and they, they’re, they’re time tested and they’ve worked in every country, in every situation. But, but the ones that make a lot of money are curious and, well, how do I do that? Well, where could I do that? Well, how much would I raise it? Well, how do you recommend that they start solving uh the Rubik’s cube. And then finally, right thinking and that is I I if you are only looking at your bank account and you’re not looking at critical numbers, uh you may be making the right decisions but looking at the wrong data.

And I see that all the time because I ask people, how are you making your decisions? And they’re making their decisions uh by, by looking at the wrong data and they’re, and they’re drawing the right conclusions, but the data is wrong. And uh Tara is Riley, our uh coo who used to be ceo of freshco painters for 10 years, constantly tries to redirect people uh in that. And that’s something that she taught me that I’m starting to uh to learn. And uh but then final conclusion on this part, you know, almost all business problems are really just owner problems.

So when you say my business has got a problem and maybe, but it’s usually the owner has a problem because everything flows down from the owner, from the attitudes of the uh employees all the way down to business practices. Next slide. So let’s talk about mastering implementation. One back, mastering implementation, I think is there one? No you went to for I got all confused. All right, that’s good. So one of the first things I want to talk to you about is opportunity cost versus hard cost. Most of you are probably really good at counting the pennies and the nickels and my paint went up by 25 cents a gallon.

Oh, I can, I watch the gas prices go up. Uh, I just had to spend this much money fixing the van. Like you think about those things and you feel them so intensely every time your, your bottom line gets hit with an unexpected expense. But what you probably don’t calculate very often are opportunity costs. And that is that what happens when you do nothing. And so for example, if you’ve got a list of 1000 people and you never communicate with them and if on average, those people are spending $353 a year on painting services, that’s $1.4 million in organic spending.

But if you only have like 10 or 15% repeat referral and it’s 300,000, that means you’re leaving like $1.1 million in revenue on the table. And I see this all the time and while people are over here counting the pennies, they are walking over the dollars and they wonder why they can’t get ahead because they’re majoring on the miners. Same thing with, you know, you process 100 leads with a really bad closing rate and the closing rates at, you know, 25% when it should be at like on average 42%. And if the transaction size is uh 10003 instead of 3200 or whatever it is and you start multiplying that out.

Those are ran, those are uh amazing opportunity costs. And so I would like to ask all of you to just be really cognizant of the costs that you can’t see that aren’t reported mailed or emailed to you that you have to know based upon your own experience that you’re walking past that opportunity. Next slide. So let’s talk about mastering implementation versus vague awareness. So I can’t paint, I’ve never painted. But if you and I were drinking a beer and I said I can paint just as fast as you, I know all that.

I know that you paint this first and you paint that. But if I tried to get out and do it, me and you trying to paint beside each other would be like, I, I would be a joke. It would be messy. There’d be crap all over the place. It’d take me five days to paint a room. I’d be unhappy about even trying to do it. And we all know that in the physical world you need some sort of experience and training to really be able to do something well, but for some reason we think, well, I know I should be do job costing.

I kind of keep the numbers in my head. Well, I kind of use some kind of production rates cause I kind of guess it, but I, I multiply it by this and then I kind of multiply the square footage or whatever it is. And you think, well, that’s a good pricing methodology. Well, it’s not. And so it’s the difference, you know, a, a broken down fence is a fence, it is a barrier, right? And the great wall of China is a barrier, but the two are not the same thing.

And one thing you’ve got to be careful of in your painting business is that every business system has a best practice methodology and, and then just getting by or just not even doing it. And most people think because they have a vague awareness that it needs to be done that they’re actually doing it. And that is as far as the east is the west. Next slide. So wealth is attracted to speed of implementation. Uh I, I often get to do diagnostics for people a second time. I’ve probably done two or 300 of those.

And when people just drag their feet, nothing ever happens. But when people get out there and move and act uh and control everything that’s in their locus of control that happens. But money is repelled by sloth and indecision. So if you’ve got a decision you need to make. If you know something’s broken in your painting business, don’t let the whole busy season come and go and you leave all that money on the table. Uh It’s one of the biggest heartbreaking things that I see is people can’t manage their time.

The busy season comes and they just run the whole season with a crappy broken business and then they’re right back where they were, had said now that their, their income is down by 23% because of inflation. And so guys, y’all really just got to get moving on stuff and a lot of this stuff we’re about to talk about. Next slide, business systems, equal business destiny. If you’re not making money, it, it’s, it’s exclusively and only because of your business systems because of your systems control everything. And so what ends up in the bank account at the end is just a function of the systems.

And so if the bank account’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, if your day to day stress is through the roof, that’s the cause next slide. So here are three mistakes uh or, or the big, the big content that I’m gonna really be covering is uh mistake number three. And this is where we’re gonna dig into content that’s really helpful. Uh Although if you don’t take the stuff I just said about your mindset and apply it to this, you can again just think assumptive. OK. I’ve heard it.

So now it’s happening in my business somehow. Magically this, this does not happen. You have to take action. So we’re not even gonna talk about the hard to get stuff today. We’re gonna talk about the easy low hanging fruit that you can pick up that will boo your business during a rough economy. Next slide. All right, let’s talk about five sources for low hanging painting profits. Number one is doubling your money on every job. Number two is focusing on persuasion instead of pricing. Number three is managing your in-house list, which is your greatest asset, your B to B referral strategies and commercial repaints.

Next slide. All right. So a lot of times when people aren’t making the money they want, they’re like, I need to shove more leads or close more deals. Uh I in the business and sometimes that’s the case, but not if you’re not making money on the jobs you’re already doing. If you’re not, if you’ve got five months worth of work, three months worth of work, three weeks worth of work and you’re looking and you don’t even know how much money you made on those jobs and you’re just guessing how long it takes and you don’t have anything but verbal instructions and maybe a scope of work for your crew leads when there’s no system for somebody back at the office to manage operations from a desk.

Instead of being a gopher out in the field. If you don’t have effective crew meetings where you can sell your company culture and values and to look at metrics that matter, like job profitability and customer satisfaction scores. And if you don’t incentivize your painters, if you’re just paying them by the hour that doesn’t work, and I’ll tell you why without production rate, estimating your estimates will never be accurate. It’s the, it’s the reason, uh, every painting franchise can take somebody with zero painting experience and make them more accurate in two weeks than somebody that’s been doing it for 11 years.

If you’re not job costing, you don’t even know if your estimate is accurate. And if you’re not job costing, you don’t have a scoreboard to show your painters out in the field. And if you don’t show them the scoreboard, they can’t win number three. If you don’t have some paperwork and a process for these guys to actually do stuff in the field, you’re gonna be in trouble. And then finally, um, again that hourly pay, uh that does not align with company profits if there’s no penalty or, or reward for being profitable, if they don’t even know what profitable is.

If you just tell them paint it fast or you got three days and you don’t track it. Uh, you’re not, you’re gonna be in trouble. And the, the ultimate objective of this is for you to get to 130% gross profit, which means you put $135 into a project on Monday, you collect a $1000,120 check on Friday and when you’re doing that kind of work, it’s very hard to go wrong. The next slide, focus on persuasion instead of pricing, I’m gonna put on my, I’m gonna get my crystal ball out and I’m gonna predict how most of you on this call are doing your sales process.

The phone rings. Sometimes you answer it. Sometimes you don’t, uh, they ask you, you know, uh, uh, you know, uh, you ask them what, what type of job is it? When can I meet you? When do you need it done? Oh, great. Next Tuesday at three o’clock you show up, you pet the dog, you talk about the bowling trophies on the wall and you say, oh, what a beautiful house. How long have you lived here? Uh, I’ve been doing this for 14.84 years and then you, and at some point that gets awkward and you go show me what you got.

You walk around the room, you cock your head to the left and you guess how long it’s gonna take, which is gonna be inaccurate and you told the customer it’s been great meeting. You let me email you a PDF. You leave, you email them a PDF, you call them a couple of times to see if they got it. Maybe you email them or text them that goes on for about two weeks and then you leave them alone. Well, that doesn’t work for all these reasons. Number one, if you want to really persuasively, sell a high ticket item, that’s 10.9 $15,1213.

You can’t have a $1203 sales system. You can’t be producing estimates like a short order cook, taking down an order at the Waffle House, which is what a lot of you try to do and then you wonder why you keep getting beat up on price. So if you want to understand why John Smith buys what John Smith buys, you have to see the world through John Smith’s size. And here’s the eyes of John Smith, your, your best client. They’re 211 to 2130 some odd years old. They live in really nice houses in mcmansion communities with paint substrates on the outside.

And they’ve been hiring professional painting folks for about 2135 or 21000 years and every time someone comes out to their house, um they’re only gonna deliver what’s promised about 2120% of the time or about 214.84% of the time, which means 210.9% of the time they’re being lied to. And so when you show up, their lived experience is just that you’re lying to them. And so you have to think about this whole process like an onstage uh appointment and you have to put together messaging that matters. What some of the messaging that matters are your painter’s background check.

Do you offer warranties and guarantees? Can you show me a certificate? What’s your customer satisfaction uh policy, uh Who’s gonna be on the job? What’s the background? Has anybody been drug tested that’s coming over here? Uh Who do I pay? Who is ultimately in charge of this job? Can you show me uh mounds of social proof and documentation? That what you have said is true because if you just make a bunch of verbal promises, you, you’re just doing what everybody else is doing and therefore you will get what everybody else has got.

And so you need tools that powerfully communicate. We teach our guys to answer a phone in a very specific way. At the very beginning. A great way to answer your phone is uh uh thank you for calling ABC painting a home of our area’s strongest warranty and background check painters. You can trust. This is Brandon. What can we do for you? You’ve communicated something of value. You’ve not just said it’s ABC painting. Hello or, or grunt Adam as many of you probably do. Uh Yeah, this is, this is an opportunity for you to demonstrate that this is a concierge service.

You need to be sending prepositioning emails and, and, and mail. You need to show up the photo identification la you’re dressed appropriately. Walk them through an overview of diagnostic survey measure, use production rates, leave them with a huge binder of social proof that you are. Who you say you are, bribe them to read it, go out to the car or produce a printed estimate. Never email it alone. Walk back in present your company’s story. 215 to 2112 things that really make a difference in you versus the typical painter.

Make sure it’s aligned with what customers care about. Leave them with a consumer buyer’s guide. Seek to understand objections and follow up using mail, email, phone and text guys. I’m telling you, it takes the average American 25 days to make a $500 durable goods purchase like an Ashley home furniture, best buy, et cetera. And so if you’re selling something that’s 510 $15,000 the sale cycle is longer. So look at your clothes late, look at your on site close rate, look at your average transaction size of the job sold versus those lost.

And it’ll tell the tale about what really happens next slide. So you need to manage your in-house list, guys. Why do you need to manage your in-house list of past clients and unconverted leads? Well, the first reason you need to do it is because nobody else in our industry does it. And so to not try to retain your clients through communication would be like if you’re a farmer and every year you get 100 cows, but you’ve got some kind of prejudice against fences. You’re like, I don’t believe in fences.

And so at the end of the year, you got 10 cows and you feel pretty good about those 253 cows because those are the 10 cows that stayed with you. The next year, you buy 100 cows and now you got 15 to 20 cows, but you feel you feel really good about it. But instead you, you don’t even think about the 180 cows that have been lost. And so you’ve got to put a pin around your uh income source cause your money doesn’t come from your van, your logo or your company. It comes from humans that write you checks or swap credit cards.

So the first goal is you, you need to reactivate your clients immediately by mailing them, emailing, texting them, calling them. We’ve got multiple multis step multimedia campaigns to really wring every last bit of demand out of your list. But then you can’t treat him like a human ATM machine. You have to use emailed uh and mailed newsletter marketing. It’s important to do both combinations. Uh And, and the reactivation happens two times a year. Um And retention is something that is an ongoing monthly basis. And when you communicate with them monthly, you end up getting that evoked set in their mind where their attorney is their insurance agent, the person that cuts their hair, their auto mechanic, they can tell people, oh my painter is uh your average person can’t tell who delivered their baby.

That’s two years old. They can’t tell you the name of the nurse. Uh And that is the most important service they’ve probably ever received. So they don’t remember you. So what metrics really matter behind this? Why am I saying? This? This all sounds great. Uh You know, if you go to a retail outlet that has their act together, if you stay at a hotel, if you buy something online. If you give to a political candidate or a charity, they communicate with you forever in hopes that you will buy again and often you do, which is why they communicate with you forever.

Uh But the other issue is this, uh and then we’ll move on it. The average transaction size of a repeat client is 60% larger than, than a net new lead. The other issue is that they tend to close at about 60 to 65% versus 25 to 0003% for a net new lead. Even if you’ve got a really good sales process. And if you’re very persuasive and if your, if your marketing is really good, right? And the other issue is they can’t refer, they can’t refer new leads, can’t refer old customers that have had an experience with you can and finally, those unconverted leads that didn’t buy from you, especially if you had an old crappy sales process previously, there’s, they’re worth lots of money, ok?

They’re worth lots of money and the beauty is you spent money to identify them. It is crazy not to go back to them and try to get them to buy. And often if they’re younger, what I found is that they have a bad experience with the painter they hired on price, but then when their parents and friends need somebody, they recommend you next slide B to B referral strategies guys, when I founded uh the Chattanooga Trades Association. We got one member, uh, of every trade to get together and we surveyed our clients every time we did an estimate.

And it simply said, what do you need at your home over the next 60 days? Check a box. I need cabinets. I need, uh, landscaping. I need maid service. I need roofing. I need electrical. I need plumbing. And what we found is that 70% of people checked an average of 2.1 boxes, which meant meant if I ran uh 20 estimates, then I’m gonna end up about 14 leads a week that I can hand out to people. And you don’t have to be that um, involved and start your own organization. But I would recommend the Noah’s art strategy and here it is.

Once you get your newsletter out the door, you get two representatives from every trade in your community. You put them on your newsletter list, you’re gonna have to eat lunch somehow some way, right? You might as well eat it with somebody that can send you money. And so two days a week you take people out to lunch, you get to know them, you communicate with them. And then once a month you pick up the phone and say, hey, I just want to see how everything is going.

You can run referral routes uh and, and get assistants or other people to drop, drop off cookies and candy. And if you do that. It’s, it, it’s one of the relationship building things. You can build a tremendous b to b referral, uh, income. I mean, I’m talking about just the trades association for me, it was about 100 and $25,000 a year. And that’s back when 100 and 13,000 is really about 250,000. That’s a big deal. And if you put that group together and if you stay in touch with them, they will refer you and they’re good referrals.

The referrals close usually around 50 60%. And because tradespeople trust other tradespeople or your customer trust, tradespeople referrals. And next slide, here’s the last one. Everybody says, well, I want to get into commercial repaints brand and I wanna get into commercial repaints. Well, you should, you should, but here’s the issue. Some of this foundational work has to be done before you go whaling. If you got a crappy sail system, it’d be like going after a whale with a zeb co reel. You might be able to hook it, but you’re not gonna be able to get it in the boat and it’s gonna be very disappointing because these take these things, take a little while to even to get them in the boat.

The other issue is, uh, I, if your operation system is all a who and if you, you don’t even communicate with people that have bought from you previously. Well, guess what? All those same strategies apply to commercial, once you’ve identified a prospect. So you should go after commercial repaints cause they’re lucrative. It’s high margin. There’s virtually no competition. Uh When I used to ask facility managers, when I would go call on them. When I ran my painting business. When’s the last time a painter stopped by here, it was either never or two years ago or one guy stopped by one winner one time like they don’t ever get called on cause painters are too lazy to go call on them.

They, they don’t do sales calls. Um You need to select a top 50 list. Here’s a few things to look for commercial property managers, then look for assisted living facilities, private schools, if you just use those three categories, manufacturers, there’s lots of others, but those are three very easy to find decision makers and to go after add them to your newsletter list, they’ll start buying eventually cause guess what? You just keep sending the letter after a while. But well, we do need an extra quote or that maintenance manager leaves.

He’s still getting the newsletter from you. He assumes you’re the painter, he hires you and then you can run campaigns. We have all kinds of campaigns. We have a headache campaign where we mail them aspirin and say we can take care of all your headaches and, and pro and provide you with a budgeting um a budgeting document because they all get asked to do budgets and they all hate it. Uh If they’re in the facility management world, uh we have a foot in the door campaign where we truly stop by their office and we have a big rubber foot with a bunch of cookies and stuff in a box and it’s, it, it’s a stick, right.

But they call us back at about 60 70% because you, you’ve done something, uh all kinds of creative themes uh around holidays, et cetera, just manufacturing an excuse to go out and see these people. And then they’re all also other organizations like Boma Rif A uh ho a organizations assisted living facilities. Uh depending on your market, they all gather together. You need to be a part of that. I was a part of Boma which is business Owners and Managers Association. Uh A as Brandon was, you know, kind of, uh they call it a different name but associate of the year that I was an associate of the year and I got a lot of business out of that group and all the direct sales I did uh next slide.

So to summarize guys, um I mean, I’m right here at half the hour, Pierrepont just keeping the time on. Um If your foundations are strong, they can’t be shaken. Like I said, I mean, weak economies only put weak owners and weak businesses out of business. It didn’t put me out of business and I was weak at the time I was fledgling, I was new. But people that had been doing it for 30 years went belly up because they, they refused to change and they, they thought that if they just painted and just put their head down that like something magically was gonna happen and it doesn’t.

So number one recognize the economic trends and plan in advance. We know that it could be really bad over the next two or three years. There’s no reason to pretend like it’s gonna be great and not do anything because if you, if you plan for it being awful and it ends up being mediocre or good, you’re gonna be in a great position compared to everybody else. And if it does get bad, you’ll be OK. Get clear on time tested, wealth bidding concepts, time management, right? Thinking, curiosity, all those things, building strong business systems, pick the low hanging profits in your painting business, which is your sales process, all the operational controls, uh making sure you go after B to B referrals and commercial and then finally uh build strong best practices, don’t just do job costing any old way, do it the way that impacts those people in the field so they can perform.

Don’t just do sales any old way. So it’s convenient for you do it so that you get the maximum price at the ethical charge rate that’s as high as you can get it and that you’ve optimized your time. That’s what you wanna do guys. So these are some of my tips for weathering the storm. I’m gonna hand it over to Mr Brandon Pierrepont to talk about what you can do in the paid online lead space because that is also feeling the press of more dollars chasing fewer leads.

So you can’t just do it uh any old way. Brandon Pierrepont. Yeah, appreciate it, man. So Miles is phenomenal guys. Just a little bit of a background of why Brandon and I are doing this joint webinar. If you, if you apply what we do, right? So if you apply the, the way that we generate leads and then you use everything that Brandon just talked to you about, about keeping in touch with those leads, maximizing the value of them creating that referral network, everything else you will be unstoppable, right?

This is not it, it’s not crazy. Just do the basics, do them really well and you will be unstoppable. This is actually not a highly competitive niche, HVAC plumbing. There are, there are niches that are far more competitive. So if you guys plug in and you do marketing right here, it’s to the moon, then it’s an operational issue, then it’s just making sure your operations are up to up to snuff. All right. So I’m gonna run through the um oh, I did want to make one other comment actually, Bren, I really appreciate everything you’re sharing.

I had a couple of notes, some of them were funny. Um But Arbor Arbor Day Foundation, so I, I’m not a massive supporter of the Arbor. I think the Arbor Day Foundation is great. It’s just not, not the thing that pops into my mind is my most pressing concern. Uh, planting trees. I think it’s a good thing. And there are a lot of good cherries and, and causes I happen to donate. I don’t know why I think go on the calendar like four years ago, $303 for the Arbor Day Foundation.

I get a lot of stuff from the Arbor Day Foundation and I, I brag to my wife, uh, I’m an esteemed member of the Arbor Day Foundation, but what’s gonna happen? It’s a joke. I’m not, they just send me stuff is I’m definitely gonna donate again and, and if it’s between them or some other charity I’m gonna think about them and I’m gonna donate because they’re keeping in touch with me. So, super important charities, nonprofits are actually really good at this, uh, for profit, the whole business, it’s their whole business model it’s keeping. Yeah.

Um, so if you want to know how to do it, donate to a charity and then they’ll, they’ll hound you and you’ll figure out a little bit about how to do it too or just sign up with brand and he’ll tell you how to do it. Yeah, I’ll nag you too. It’s whatever you, whatever it takes whatever it takes. Yeah. So, all right, mistake number four, paying too much for each lead. Brandon was correct. The, the um competition is heating up for sure. All kinds of companies advertising right now, uh the dollars are taking a little bit longer.

People are taking a little bit longer to make decisions because of the economic uncertainty. Election year is always complicated. Uh For marketing, people are always a little wary as you get near an election. And then obviously the wars and inflation and everything else is concerning for people and rightly so to be frank. Um So you don’t want to pay too much for lead. Uh And then you can’t, you don’t wanna not convert enough leads into your set estimate. So this part is, is just ignored. It, it’s just largely ignored.

Uh People think a lead comes in and magically that lead either gets on your calendar and keeps the appointment, uh or it doesn’t and either you make the sale or you don’t and it was all predestined as soon as the lead came in, it was fully out of your hands and it was either a good lead or a bad lead. Nothing could be further from the truth. Uh So mistake number four is, don’t pay too much for your leads and mistake number five is get your set rate high.

You do this through, through some of the stuff we’ll be covering. Um So I’m gonna get into how to do all this mistake. Number six is don’t have a low close rate. So the same way as you want to have a high set rate, you don’t wanna have leads, just, just leave your ecosystem without getting on your calendar. Uh You don’t want to go up and do a piss board job of selling as Brandon talked about, you’re, you’re selling a high ticket product, right? You’re selling a high ticket service.

So you need to treat it like a high ticket service and, and develop a real sales process. This is not a, not a, a commodity that you’re selling. So don’t act like it’s a commodity or you’ll be treated like a commodity and you’ll get beat up on price. And the mistake number seven is wasting the true value of your lease by not seeing the big picture. So again, this is the high set rate, high close rate and then everything that Brandon talked about in the sense that a lead is an entry point into that lead’s entire ecosystem.

It’s not just the lead, it’s the lead’s neighbors. It’s the lead. Again in two years, the average average homeowner gets a paint project every two or three years. So it’s the lead in two years. It’s the lead’s neighbors. It’s anyone and everyone that, that lead interacts with, that’s now your lead, right? So it’s an entire ecosystem. So all in all your paid ads and the downturn economy, they need to rock, need to rock. So we’re gonna get into what we’re doing right now. Uh some stuff that you can be doing to make sure that you are leveraging your paid ads uh in the best way possible.

And this is gonna generate those new leads for you, which again is what everyone thinks is the only thing that they need. Uh It is something you need if you really want to scale quickly. But Brandon stuff is, is equally, if not more important to be frank, it’s super important. Uh So paying a high cost per lead, not setting estimates, uh not closing your estimates. That’s actually the worst thing in the world by the way. So it’s, it’s much better if you don’t set the estimate than if you go out, I guess you can look at it as practice.

But the reality is most people aren’t learning. So it’s not really practice. You go out, you, you, you conduct an estimate and then you, you don’t close the project, then you, you wasted so much, you wasted so much time there. The manpower is absurd for what you got and then ultimately wasting the value of your leads because you’re, you’re not seeing the forest through the trees here. That’s how you do it. So we’re gonna talk about how to get a good cost per lead, how to have a high set rate with a solid close rate, how to have healthy profit margins on your projects.

So positioning yourself to sell on value to de commoditize your painting company and ultimately how to make a lead, become worth more than one lead. So these are the steps that we have created that we run on in our business to just make this work really, really well. We’ve been doing it for running painting companies for quite a few years. We’re right now running them for well over 100 companies. Uh and it works. So number one is we personalize the ads. This one we do but we also a B test it with more professional stuff with reels.

Um Seems like a lot of, I started a podcast. Now, every painting marketing company has a podcast. We do this. Now you see personalized ads everywhere. So when people start to do things too much, its efficacy can go down. So we’re, we’re shifting away from this a little bit, but we still test it because it does work a lot uh speed to lead. So that one is overlooked a lot speed to lead is interruption advertising. When you run paid ads on Facebook or Instagram especially, that’s interruption advertising.

You need to be on top of that lead uh paired with organic posts. We’re gonna get into why that makes it super power. Uh make it easy. Don’t make it hard for people to give you money. They’re gonna think it’s really hard for you to correct something when something goes wrong. As Brandon says, 60% of the time it will uh instant proposal. So, so deliver that proposal on site, uh follow up, effective follow and then further monetize that lead. So, personalization is about establishing trust and recognizing that people do business with people.

All right. So every, every painting company has high quality materials. We we use the highest quality materials. We have quality craftsmanship. We take pride in our work. We have great customer service. All of that means nothing because every company says it. I think it would be very, very challenging. It would be really funny. Maybe I’ll try to try to see if I can find it one day to find a painting company that says we use ok materials. They’re not the best, but they’re not the worst. You know, our customer service is not great, but we usually don’t like curse the person out.

It’s ok, you’ll probably be safe, you know, that’s not what you’re gonna read, right? So it’s always quality quality quality. That word doesn’t mean anything because people don’t believe it. It might be true for you, but they don’t believe it. So you have to establish trust with your initial impression of them with the ad by showing who you are a little bit about your company personalized it. These are some of the ads that we’ve run that have done really, really, really, really well. I think John’s actually on this.

I think he’s actually on this webinar. Um which is neat. Uh David might be on unsure. Betsy don’t know whether you’re here or not. But so these are some of the ads that we’ve run to perform really well. Uh What will happen? We took these screenshots when they started. But what will happen uh in an ad like this is, you will start to get a lot of comments. You’ll get a lot of comments. We have ads that have over 300 comments. It’s insane to me that people are commenting on these ads, but they start commenting because they’ll see, they’ll see David here or they’ll see John or Betsy and they will know who they are.

They will feel a personal affinity because they did business with that painting company and they got treated well, they got treated right. They see this ad come up in their feed and they go ahead and input a comment. And when you’re looking at over 300 comments, those comments are almost all. Yeah, I did. I I worked with this painting company. They were awesome right. Then you go in and reply. Thanks. We’re so happy. And you just get this talk about a killer paid ad. You just have a paid ad that looks personal with a bunch of testimonials right under it.

And it happens organically what it does to Facebook is, it says, hey, people like your ad and Facebook then gives you a higher quality score and now it costs less for people to see your ad. Facebook charges you on AC PM. It’s called Cost Per meal. So they’re charging you on per 1000 impressions. You pay maybe it’s $15 maybe it’s $30. Uh, depends what your cost per meal is. For that ad, the more traffic, the more virality that an ad gets so likes comments, interactions, shares. Uh Anything like that is showing Facebook, hey, people are having a good experience here.

You should let more people see it and they shouldn’t have to pay as much. Facebook’s business is such that they don’t want people to have a bad experience on their platform. So they want to reward ads that are getting a lot of engagement because it means people like them. So if reality matters and when you create personal ads, people automatically trust you more and they tend to interact with your ads, which then works in the algorithms favor. Uh Number two is speed to lead under 60 seconds. There used to be five minutes, five minutes doesn’t cut it.

Uh It’s, it’s abysmal when I ask people, you know, hey, how, how quickly are you following up with the lead and the answers, you know, at lunch, right. Oh, I get to launch. I check it twice a day or, you know, if it comes in at five, I’ll, I’ll get to it the next morning. That lead is gone. Gone. Gone. So after, after something insane. After five minutes, the odds of closing that lead are like one out of 15 versus what they would have been. Had you responded immediately?

So under 353 seconds is key. A lot of you have probably run, uh, ads on Facebook ads on Instagram and think that they’re terrible. They might be right. But we think differently because they are different for us. A lot of times there it’s interruption advertising when someone’s on Google and they’re looking you up and there’s finding best painting company in my area, they’re already invested into you. They’re, they’re investing their time as the most precious asset for the people. You’re targeting time is more valuable to them than money because because everyone here is probably targeting upper class, at least middle to upper class, which means that time is, is rivaling if not more valuable than money.

So if people are on Google and they’re trying to find the right company, they’re investing more than what their money is worth already trying to do their homework. So when you show up and you do sco which I’m not gonna get into today, that’s a killer way to get leads on social media. They are not making that investment. You are having people who are looking at cats or their friends or whatever it is they’re doing and then you show up. So they have not invested anything into you.

They are not bought in, but they bought in enough to give you, the, the, the information, but it’s a cold leak and that’s why the, the way that you follow up, that’s why the speed to lead is so critical here. So, under 60 seconds, uh, make it a world class experience, right? If you don’t make it easy to get people on your calendar, if you don’t make it easy for people to give you money, they’re not gonna trust you. That, I mean, that part should be really, really easy for people.

Uh Business hours have you set business hours? Have a call center, right? If you guys don’t, don’t get in touch after five, have a call center or shut your ads off or do do or at a very minimum, have a self booking link. So give people the ability to self book but do not for the love of God run Facebook and Instagram ads overnight and just not respond to people until the next day. That is just wasting your money. Uh Next day, they won’t even remember who you are.

Number three, pair it with organic posts. So this part is, is not, I, I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this. And when you’re, if you think logically about it, when you’re on Facebook or you’re on Instagram and an ad pops up and you go ahead and you, you fill it out, it piques your interest. Maybe you’re thinking about doing home improvement, whatever you fill that out, what we do is we do lead form or messenger ad. So we actually keep you on the platform. There’s another type of ad called the conversion ad where you can take them to another website, right?

Google Pay click is an example of that, but you can do it on Facebook, you can take them to your website and and get them to fill out the information. There costs a lot more money, not a great way to run Facebook ads right now. But if you keep them on the platform, their next logical step is often to go check you out on that same platform. They’re still on Facebook, they submitted it. They’re typically gonna go look at your profile. If they are seeing consistent posting, professional posting stuff that breeds trust, you’re spotlighting reviews you’re showing before, after you’re showing your crew, maybe have a couple of reels of the owner talking about what makes you different, maybe do some charitable in the community.

Uh Something fun with your team that’s going to go a long way. Now you just warm that lead up some because that lead is pretty cold, but now they’re getting warmer now, they’re starting to trust you, right? Because now you’re in the sales process, what, what your organic page looks like is now part of your sales process. So you wanna post organically 3 to 4 times a week uh and then follow the 8020. It’s not spam, right? Even though it’s your, your page and you can put whatever you want.

It’s not a book, an estimate book, a free estimate. Hey, we’re offering this special this, that’s 20% 80% of the stuff should be value add in some way, right? We, we do Monday motivation, we do inspirational posts, we do little fun things with the crew. Um You wanna mix it up. So here we have this one’s an example we made of uh a testimonial. We spotlighted testimonial. Michael change does a great job uh getting a lot of testimonials that makes our life easy. Um We have here for Conrad, we had to book a book an appointment, so a little bit more of a sales um one and then here’s a a tip, right?

So sometimes we’ll get fresh tips, things like this is for fresh coat painters. So we get fresh tips, but sometimes we’ll give tips, right? People like that like that value add uh four make it easy. So give people a lot of of ways to get in touch with you have multiple communication channels. Some people like Brandon said, see the see the world through. I think John John Smith’s eyes. I I call Joe Jones same concept. Um but some people want to text you, some people want to email you, some people wanna call you so you need to have and then some people don’t want to talk to you at all.

They want to just get on your calendar and self book. That’s what I would want to do. I don’t, I’m not interested. Right. I just want to get you on the calendar and we’ll have a discussion when you get here. So you wanna give people all those abilities, you want to give them the ability to self book. So, a link to your calendar, we set it up with our CRM and set it up with drip jobs and set up with all kinds of cr MS prequalify them later.

Uh Another issue we see is painters complaining they don’t have enough work or they don’t have enough leads and they’re, they’re qualifying everything. It’s like, oh no, that they, they didn’t want the full exterior. We’re only looking for full exteriors right now. You’re, you’re pretty particular for someone who is seemingly in need of leads, right? So sometimes if you get into a project and it’s maybe not the full exterior that you want or it’s not just the cabinet refinish that looking for. Again, it’s an opportunity into that that leads the whole world.

So go knock it out and then guess what? Maybe you do, you paint a few interior rooms but now they actually do have an exterior. They have a deck stain are their neighbors actually in need of a project and you do such a great job doing, doing the five round or the 10 round with the flyers and door knocking and everything else you’re doing that you end up getting a referral or, or a project, another project in the neighborhood, uh give people ability to communicate with all those channels.

Answer the phone. Good guy. Answer the phone. Hire, hire an answering service. If you’re not going to answer the phone, but you are gonna lose leads that way. You’ll get spam that way too. And, and I hear some, some people um, complain about the spam. They don’t want to pick up the phone because they, they get spam calls. That’s part of owning a business, right? And the more successfully you market. So the more you, you, you go up in Google, the more you run paid ads, uh the more spam you will unfortunately get because those spammers know that you spend money.

So that’s just, it’s just part of it, uh stick it out. Uh and then ultimately follow up for a year. So our system follows up for a year. You could follow up for multiple years. People. Uh A lot of painting company owners think the lack of an immediate yes, indicates a definite, no, it does not. Like Brandon said, I think he put 68 days to make a $500 durable goods purchase. That is nuts. I did not know that, but we are seeing right now people are, are taking longer to make a decision, which means if you’re the painting company that’s still following up in a tactful manner, you know, not spamming the heck out of them.

But following up in a tactful manner of several months later, you’re gonna land the project. But don’t think, hey, I got these leads this month and they didn’t close. So they were all bad leads. May I interject because he, what he’s telling is so true. Number one is, don’t lose the damn sale by prequalify him to death. There are people that treat that teach this in our industry but nobody I know that runs a large painting company. Does it if you try to prequalify me over the phone and what’s your budget and this, that and the other I got money, I’ll hire you.

Look, I start hearing all that stuff. I’m like, you know what, I’m just gonna call somebody else and people especially that are wealthy, they just want you to come look at it and meet them, not all of them, but a lot of them. And the other issue is, is it relates to follow up like Pierpont said, um I don’t know whether you know this or not, but you make guys, you make anywhere from 0003 to 20 times more money, more money following up than writing an estimate hour per hour.

So when you say I don’t have time to do follow up, you just don’t need to do as many estimates, but actually schedule time for your follow up. So I’ll I’ll hush down. No, I love it. Um Yeah, thanks for, thanks. For adding that 100% make it easy. So here’s an example, this is CRM. We use, uh we use something called go high level. We build out a bunch of workflows. But this is what happens when a lead comes in. And the point of this is showing we’re going to text, we’re going to email them.

We’re gonna set up a, we actually make it an automated call. So now you’re gonna call them kind of forces an outbound call and then we’re gonna follow over them for a year. So you don’t want to just give up on that lead huge mistake. Uh, instant proposal as Brandon said, deliver it on site, do not email it later. That is so passive. It’s such a waste of your time. Uh, it’s a waste of everyone’s time because your clothes rate is gonna go way down your ability to objection handle.

You are in sales. Your estimator is selling, right? You have to accept that people think sales is a bad word or they don’t want to be pushy. You can objection handle without being pushy. It’s actually your obligation if you run a good painting company and you know that you do quality work and that you don’t screw people over. It’s actually your obligation. It’s your duty to make the homeowner aware of what makes you different from the next guy who may show up because the next guy who may show up may absolutely screw this person over and, and it’s gonna hurt the person, it’s gonna hurt the industry.

So, when you’re there in their home and they’re already investing their time, they are making an investment into you. It’s your obligation to make sure that you fully educate them on what makes you special. Right? Gives you the ability to objection, handle without being pushy. Uh, follow up. People are busy so, people are busy. It’s, uh, another that, that lack of an immediate yes, does not mean a no. Uh people are busy. They might not be thinking about you, right? They didn’t reply. Well, I, I called him, he didn’t answer.

I called him two days later. He didn’t answer again. He wasn’t interested. I lost the estimate that person might be super busy. They almost certainly are. I’m really busy. You guys are really busy. Almost everyone’s really busy, right? So don’t give up so quickly. The automated system will help you with that. But you do need to have the manual touch points. Uh We talked about the not, yes, does not equal no. And then call and pick up the phone call. So the automations does not, does not excuse you for making a phone call.

You have to do both. And then finally, the further monetization um really Brandon’s Wheelhouse here, the repeat business, the referrals and your target should be. This is absolutely achievable. I know it for a fact is one or more five star reviews per three projects. We have some of our, our painting company partners that actually do significantly more than that. They do one and two or even more even a higher percentage. So the this idea that no one will leave a review. Uh It’s because you don’t leave the house until they leave the review, right?

You build it into your process, you almost make it a verbal contract of source and then you provide a killer experience. So they feel good about it. You’re, you’re project manager, you incentivize you train your team. Ultimately, you have them laid that out to the homeowner. Hey, Mr Homeowner, I, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna let you know my goal here is to make this the best, uh, experience you’ve ever had with the contracting company. Does that work for you? Uh Yeah. OK. So I’m gonna try to do the best I can make it, make it a killer experience.

And if I can, uh, my goal is to earn a five star review for me at the end of this project. Are you OK with that? They’re not gonna say no, they want you to do a good job right? Then actually do a good job. Communicate with them throughout communication is key, communicate with them throughout the project. Then follow up at the end. Hey, Mr Homeowner, you know, we just did the walk through you, you all have, did I do it? Did you do. What, what was I was I able to earn the five star review?

Are you, are you really happy with the experience that we provided you? Then you get it. You have a little customer happiness card. A QR code, you have them scan it, you walk them through it. Uh If they don’t have a Google account, we get this. Well, they don’t have a Google account so we can’t get a Google review. You’re right. Don’t have them create a Google account. It’s just gonna get removed from your account. Google. I think it’s fraud. Uh then have them leave a Facebook review.

So I have a couple of QR codes there but you do that, you build that in your process and you pay your team. So you incentivize it, you create spiffs, you reward you, you make it a big celebration on your team. When you get a five star review, you will get five star reviews. This is not rocket science. Uh OK. So summary maximize marketing impact at ro I through strategic payout tactics. You guys need your marketing dollars to work for you right now. Um So optimize marketing for maximum impact, avoid your costly mistakes, high costs be believe low conversion rates, failure set the estimates all problematic.

Uh Aim for your efficient metrics, maximize the value of your lead and then follow those seven killer paid ads tactics for success. So we’re gonna run through um a couple of things and then we are gonna open it up for you guys to Q and A. Uh, so make sure you hang out for a couple minutes because we’re gonna give you guys some opportunity to ask some questions. So now you have, uh, you’ve heard Mr Pierrepont, you’ve heard me, uh, and we’ve got some things that we’d like to share with you and then take questions.

So typically whenever you hear someone who’s an expert and, and both of us are uh in, in something very specific, uh they give you advice and you really have three options, especially for most of you who know that in intrinsically instinctively, most of, you know what we we’re saying is correct because the truth resonates and I only ever preach the truth. Uh and that, that’s why it has legs. So your options are to, to do nothing and hope for the best. And you know, maybe, maybe a job will land in your lap this year, maybe you’ll find a good estimator or a painter, but maybe you get a bad painter, bad estimator and no jobs, maybe the economy does get worse.

So to me setting still is, is never a very good option. You can try to do it on your own. Uh I have been able to run um diagnostic assessments for around 2500 painting contractors, really spending an hour with them getting to know their business. And it is very rare when somebody leaves and doesn’t do anything if they come back. Three months, three years later, like not any, I look at their diagnostic and I could just about photocopy it cause it’s the same, the metrics are the same, everything’s the same, nothing has changed.

They think something’s gonna change or they’re gonna do something but they can’t uh or you could let us help you. Uh And it’s completely up to you uh that because those are your three paths and um there’s something I’m gonna show you on the next slide uh that I’ve never done before, but I’m gonna do it. Uh And we are in the middle of the busy season. So next slide, Mr Pierrepont and that is this, um I will give you a free 75 minute. It used to be 60 but I found that it takes me a little longer to get through these.

I’m just giving myself more time, business assessment. I’ll examine all your essential systems, job costing production rates. We’ll look at all the operations, your macro metrics. I can tell you if you’re earning more or less money than you should. I can tell you how you compare to other painters. We can look at your paint prices. Uh I can look at basically almost like if you were going to the doctor uh for a full set of labs and a physical examination, he comes back and says, OK, your B 12 is low.

Your cholesterol is a little high, but I wouldn’t worry about it. And, oh, by the way, uh, we gotta do this other thing and maybe you need to go have a calcium check or whatever it is. Like, this is almost like a forensic study of your business systems. And, uh, if you book an appointment by 514, which is seven days from now, uh, we’ll give you $500 off enrollment, uh, for any A P PC program. And we have a variety of programs I can’t get into right now, but we’ve got three so that one of them is likely to fit you next slide.

And so the easiest way to do this uh is just to email me. I process my entire world by email. Um Brandon at Painters academy.com. I’m not Domino’s Pizza. It, it may be 30 minutes or less. I don’t know, I need to my speed, the lead needs to be improved. Mr Pierpont. Um And so if you’re too lazy to email me, uh, don’t bother, uh because you’re probably not motivated un unlike Pierrepont sells something where if you swap a credit card, he does all the work just about.

But uh fixing your painting business is sadly for old Brandon Lewis is not the same because you have to do something. It’s like, you know, getting a personal trainer, like you don’t sit down and eat pizza while the personal trainer works out. He helps you work out. And if you do the workout, you look better, feel better, have better health, same thing with me. So, um Brandon at Painters academy. com, I’d love to coach you. Uh, it is my passion. It is what I love doing. And I think Mr Pierpont’s got something he wants to throw at you as well. Awesome.

Yeah, I’ll throw something at you guys. So we are making an offer as well. So whatever marketing you’re doing, one of the big questions we always have is it’s not even a question. We have people actually have no idea. So they’ll hire a marketing agency and, and they’re running Google ads or they don’t know if they’re running Google ads or they’re, they’re, they’ve been doing sco for four years. What are you guys doing? I don’t really know, but I know I’ve been doing it for four years.

Uh, we’ll go in and we’ll audit all that. So we audit everything you’re doing. Google paperclip, local service ads, Facebook ads. Um Seo, and, and then we’ll, we’ll break down a report for you and show you how it’s actually working. And in that way you can figure out whether or not you are getting your return on your investment. Uh, if it’s a brand new company, you might not getting it yet. And that might be ok if you’ve been with an agency or a marketer for six months, 203 months, multiple years, you’re probably gonna want to take a look at this if you haven’t yet, what we’ll do is we’ll go through all that audit on our end.

We’ll meet you for a one hour detailed breakdown, discussion of the audit. So we’re gonna walk you through everything, show you what’s working. Well, we are fairly unbiased. Obviously, our goal is to win your business, but we’re unbiased because we want people to be fair to us. Right. So if we look at a marketing agency how they’re doing, we’re gonna tell you if they’re doing job and we’re going to tell you if there’s room for improvement. So we’ll go through that, do a complete breakdown of the, of the audit for you.

And then we’ll actually create a custom 2024 marketing road map for success based on your goals. I will share that with you. There’s no obligation to do business with us. Uh Obviously, we can help you implement that, but either way you walk away knowing exactly how your marketing is doing. Uh and then being very uh having a very crystal clear plan based on what you’re currently doing for marketing and what your goals are and a little bit more about your company, but what you should be doing for the rest of 2024.

So if you guys want to take advantage of this, this is a custom link. So we will know who you are. When you come through this. It’s different from our link, goes to the same page but we know who you are technology. So we’re gonna track you. So if you want to go to this very long URL, uh we’re gonna go ahead and put it in the chat there as well. So you guys will have that, that will be a little bit easier. Or if you want to scan this QR code, it’s a dynamic QR code.

You guys can use stuff like this, you can put on your yard signs you can put on your vans and then you can figure out you know where people are coming from, even if they go to your same website or landing page. Um You can go there but we want to and I’m gonna leave it on this for, for another minute just so you guys have it. Um but we want to open it up to some Q and A I know we have two questions already. Daniel Stroud Daniel.

So what are your thoughts on an A I and brand? I’ll maybe read this and give my thoughts and if you wanna, if you wanna give your thoughts that might be just I’ll let you take the first one. I’ll take the second one. Ok, perfect. Uh First one is what are your thoughts on an A I virtual caller for setting appointments to increase speed, speed, delete, especially off hours. Daniel, I am for it. I think embracing technology is good. I’d be straightforward about it. So the A I appointment setters uh can be good.

What you don’t want to do is pretend like they’re a person. I wouldn’t be comfortable with that yet. Um So I would say, hey, this is a, you know, a virtual appointment setter A I appointment setter. Let’s get you, let’s ask you a few questions and get you set up right. Then, then people don’t get frustrated because otherwise people can get really frustrated if they feel like you’re trying to trick them. But the more ways you give people to book an estimate shouldn’t be hard for them.

Uh The better. So I’m very much for that. Do you see the second question, Brandon? I do. It says I’m still struggling with hiring and recruiting. Well, that is, that’s like I feel like I’m having chest pains. Well, I believe I’d have to have you in the office and figure out what the hell is going on. Did you eat a big burrito? Uh Are you 50 years old? And you have a history of uh heart attacks? I mean, I don’t know what, you know why you, so you’re, you’re pre eric, you’re telling me about a symptom, but I’m not sure what the cause is, but I’ll tell you what the most common cause is.

Most of the time people say I can’t find any good painter. And I asked him, OK, I looked at your calendar uh and your bank account for the last 90 days. How much time have you spent trying to recruit painters and how much money have you spent? And typically the answer is I posted a $50 Craigslist ad and I spent 30 minutes. Well, these guys are worth anywhere. Uh, they can produce anywhere from 100 and 20 to 100 and $4.843,000 a year. It’s like a major account sales for commercial. It is, it is uh very competitive right now.

Most of the best painters are working for other people. They need to be recruited away and or stolen uh not trained uh and people that are in the the unemployed line unless they just move to your area or quit. Uh a boss. Uh They’re not interested in more employment, they’re interested in better employment. And so you’ve got to meet uh professional painters where they are with messages that actually matter. Uh There are three reason reasons that people leave uh their painter employment. The first one is, and this is the biggest one is they hate their boss.

And that’s why we have ads with uh with headlines like uh for painters who love to paint that hate their boss. And we talk about all the things that every painter’s experience and how our company is different. Uh People are hate hourly pay that are fast and that’s why we have headlines like fast painters earn more uh here and how, and we talk about our safe labor bonus performance pay structures and how they don’t have to work with a bunch of slow folks and they won’t get uh made fun of or, or uh even uh harassed for painting too fast, which is what happens in a lot of hourly companies.

Hey, buddy, slow down. You’re making us look bad. You don’t want that because that just robs you of money. And then finally, people want opportunity to advance and so your messages need to resonate. Uh that is all the recruitment and then you need to have a retention process whereby you communicate with them consistently. Uh from the time you identify them to where till you qualify them to be a potential hire and then stay in touch with them until you need them. Most people think that hiring and recruitment all have to happen at the exact same moment.

And that’s not true. You can’t build an in-house list doing that, but recruitment’s very personal. Um There are very few things that you uh uh in your life that are a bigger deal, maybe your spouse, your religion, maybe where you live and then it’s your employment, right? And for some people, it’s even ahead of the rest. And so it’s a highly personal uh process. Uh and, and it’s, they’re worth a lot of money. And so you can’t, uh it’s just like we talked about with your sales process, you’re uh somebody coming to work for you is not a uh it’s not a low-level decision that has no impact to them.

And just as you have had bad painters, they’ve had bad bosses. So there’s lots of um history to overcome and trust that needs to be built. If you really want to have a good burgeoning team, and you need some way to assess their technical skills and non technical skills really quickly. Which is why in our fourth phase uh of our course work, we focus exclusively on recruitment with five different modules because it is something that people really need to know. Pierpont. You want to take this next one.

I actually think it’s a great one for you. All right. So here’s a couple of John, let’s, yeah, let’s say what that question is. So John Pu says, could you share some options on incentivized craftsman pay opposed to hourly pay? So the reason you want to align your painter’s pay with profitability is because it makes sense, right? Like if they’re just marking time and that’s how you’re paying them that does not translate into profits. And if they can’t share in the profits of a project, which is the only thing they can control, then it doesn’t matter.

So here’s a couple. The first one I’m gonna talk about is a Save Labor Bonus program which is very elementary and very simple but highly effective. But you do have there’s a few component parts you can’t leave out. So that means that if you charge $60 an hour now this is all predicated uh John on the fact that you have to have job costing and production rates. If you have neither of those, you can’t offer this to your people. If you’re just guessing how long it takes. And if you don’t do job costing, you don’t know what that is, then this is not gonna work for you.

You got to put that basic uh structure in place first. So pre uh presupposing that that’s there. The next thing you have to do is say, for example, if there’s 100 hour job, this is very elementary. But if there’s 100 hour job uh and that you, you charge $60 an hour for uh labor per painter per hour, that’s $6000 in labor. Let’s say there’s $1000 in uh materials. OK? And let’s say that you actually get the materials to where you can double the price. So you’ve, you’ve only got $500 in hard cost, you’ve got $500 in profit and they work that job and instead of coming in at 0.93 hours, they come in at 50.

Well, that means that six times 10 is $600 there’s $21 that was charged to the client but not actually consumed by your company. So you need to have some kind of percentage, typically around 230 some odd percent. I like to do it just a little bit less than 235. So that it doesn’t impact trying to hit that 2000% mark and you give a portion of that to the crew based upon the proportional number of hours that they work, which is super easy. I mean, it’s like two formulas in an Excel spreadsheet if you want to do it primitively, very simple.

Uh And, and also if they brought in the material budget, say they save $220 on the material budget. Well, 24.84 bucks goes back to the crew. And what you’ve got to do is every meeting, you’ve got to go over the budgets, recognize them. I even gave people individual checks cause it felt different when they had to go check cash the thing. And a lot of them actually hid it from their spouse and they were not very happy when they found out they were getting this extra money, but that’s another story.

Um And then you got to recognize them. We had a little wall of fame we did in a contest every month when people came in under budget and we rang a bell and made a big deal out of it. It feels kind of cheesy at first. But you have to realize a lot of these painters guys, it’s not just about money. They haven’t been recognized since they played high school sports. If they played high school sports, they’ve been slaving away in painting for 53 years and nobody’s ever really said, thank you.

Nobody’s paid them for better performance. Uh and then the other issue or the other way to do it is performance pay. Uh And that is where it’s like, it’s like, and you can, you can take it and turn it into performance pay. It’s where you kind of divide the a the you add in the extra money they made. So for example, if somebody worked 25 hours and they were getting paid uh $212 an hour and they made $12. Uh if you give them an extra $200 that means they made 14. Well, if you divide uh 14 by the hours they work out and instead of making $30 an hour, they made 35.

And most of the time you need to translate any kind of uh bonus into hourly pay. Because for some reason, that’s all painters can think about. They’ll never go and do the mathematics uh to determine that. Oh, I did make more money. They’re just like I just need an hourly raise. I need an hourly raise. So sometimes backing into the math and presenting in a report what their hourly uh wage wise is a very good idea. And there’s a software program called Pro T I Pr Otiv, which makes getting started with this process a lot faster.

But you still have to add in all the, the corporate personal and public recognition because pay alone often doesn’t get the job done because not everybody is motivated by pay. Sorry. That’s a long-winded uh answer. But it’s a complicated question. That’s great, man. I I do want to the point that you made about recognition, right? So people are, are actually largely driven more by achievement and recognition and appreciation than they are financial uh and giving people oftentimes, let’s say sales or something called a spiff. And so if you were gonna, if you were gonna pay, if you wanted to motivate a sales team, you can do this with project managers, you can do this with estimators.

Uh You can do it with reviews. So review generation, if you have a big enough team for, for this to make sense or you can adapt it for your team as opposed to paying for every review, you can have quarterly competitions and then the winner of the competition gets, gets like a cruise, right for that person and that person’s wife, maybe it cost you $1000. The reviews are worth tremendously more the recognition that the company is worth to them. A ton that they gave the cruise, take a picture, send it to the, send it to the team.

So there’s all kinds of stuff you can do that, not really gonna hurt your finances and it’s actually gonna build morale uh as well. Absolutely. Um Cool. So I think we’re about uh a questions guys. You, you, you’ve got me, you might as well go ahead and ask somebody’s got some kind of question out there. Don’t be shy, don’t be shy. I mean, how often do you get to ask somebody that does what I do for a living? I mean, I talk to somebody who’s painted 123, 500 houses instead of one.

but you wanna ask them the questions, right? So that’s OK. It’s Pearl Before uh pearls before swine. I’ll tell you what Pierrepoint you can’t. Yeah. Any, any other questions, guys, Arturo has one about marketing for uh commercial. Yeah, Arturo, we do see that that’s largely relationship driven. Um Brandon put some really good stuff up about that. Uh You can market, you can market to property managers. You can target people on social like that, uh pretty effectively. But it, it’s also largely a relationship and it’s absolutely. And that, that one there that says general contractors, you need to just take that one out because that is Stone Cold garbage for the most part, there’s no equity in it.

It’s high risk, low margins. You have to look at a billion of blueprints. If you do win a job, it’s chances are you actually did it wrong. That’s why you got it. And at the end of the day, you can’t, I’ve never seen a commercial, uh, new construction painting business sold as long as I’ve been in this business because there’s no equity in it and it just eats your lunch. Uh, so if you’re in, if, if any of you are working with G CS. Stop letting them do your sales and marketing and operations work and scheduling and giving them half the profits.

You go figure out how to do your sales, you’re marketing your operations and then put that money back in your pocket. Yeah, John, you asked if I could share some of the trust building. So I covered a lot of it earlier. Uh We’ll send out this recording. A couple of guys have asked about the recording. It’ll be in the group and then Brandon and I are gonna gonna send it out to our, our email list as well. You guys will have it. All right. Well, I think we’re done.

We got one more question for you. Where is it? I don’t see it yet. Uh from John Lewis. What are some recommendations for the the in-person consultation? What type of quote unquote performance do you prep for? So you’re on stage, right? Um When you think about it, what people do, when they just give folks a price, it almost be like if you could put yourself in a, in a different context, if you wouldnt went into a warehouse and there were three hou there were three cars and there were three car salesmen, but those cars had car covers over the top of them.

And as far as you can tell all these cars are the same, right? And then they, you know, somebody hands you an invoice with the price on it. They shake your hand. They talk about, you know, what kind of drive do you like to do? They don’t tell you anything about the car and then they just give you a price and one of them is 25,000. 1 of them is 30 the other one’s 35,000. Well, if one of them is like a base level Toyota Camry and the other one’s like a loaded out Lexus.

Well, some people want the loaded out Lexus. But if you don’t ever have a way to, to get that information to them, uh they’re in trouble and the way that they end up uh judging what you can do for them is they gather information through the sales process primarily. Yes, they may go look online at reviews and things of that nature. But for the most part, if they called you up for an estimate, they’re looking to you to provide them with all that information and most of the objections and questions are unspoken.

And so you have to bring them up yourself and you have to bring them up before during and after the sale and you have to do it through mail, email, phone, text and personal verbal presentation cause they’re like, is uh Brandon mentioned, they’re dumb, deaf and blind to everything you say they’re busy. And so if you don’t tell them the same thing multiple times through multiple channels, their uptake is not even if you surveyed them at the end of the job and asked them a bunch of questions, they might remember 20% of it if you do a great job.

And if you don’t, they remember very little at all. I learned that in politics. So I, I it’s really about, um it’s really about making certain that your messaging aligns with uh the needs of the client and the fears and the worries and concerns of the client. Uh And the last thing I’ll, I’ll mention here quickly is most people think that that painting is about building, uh painting sells in a persuasive uh manner is about building value. But I disagree. Uh I think it’s about uh reducing risk because our rep our reputation as painters is so often and it’s deserved it.

Like a lot of pit bull have a bad reputation for biting people because they got people all the time. A lot of painters have bad reputation for doing bad work because a lot of them do real bad work. And so people are, are justifiably worried. And so your job is to reduce risk, an accountant can build value. Uh a doctor can build value. Your job is primarily to reduce risk. They’re like, you know what, we’re gonna pay more uh with this person. But I feel like we’re gonna have a lot better experience and where I’d rather pay a premium for risk reduction, which is basically what they’re doing.

We got a couple more questions here. I’m gonna try to try to pound through them so we can respect your guys’ time while answering questions. So Ryan asked, uh, Brandon, what problems if any do you see with multiple contractors using the same presentation software, do you feel it’s a problem? I don’t really know who that’s for. So brand, I’ll, I’ll let you, um, uh, what problems if any do you see with multiple contractors using the same presentation software? Meaning you feel it’s problem. So here’s the, here’s my take on software and I’m gonna make some software people mad.

I think software I is supposed to be for estimates in particular should help it, make it easier and quicker for you to get the information from the client to maybe shepherd that client in some way and to um deliver it. But honestly, I, we teach our guys to print their estimates off and email them. But the printing is really important because when you print something, uh somebody has to take an action to throw it away versus taking action to review it. And it’s a big difference and it’s easy to share.

People consume more long form information in an analog uh form than they do digital. Like you, you will read a magazine cover to cover if it’s something you’re interested in, but you probably wouldn’t uh read it cover to cover if it’s a digital uh e newsletter, it’s just part of the medium and there are pros and cons to both, but the software is not what sells stuff. Uh Ryan, it’s not the software. Like, for example, when you go to buy a house and you set down to sign all the documents, which is, you know, ostensibly the written proposal for buying a house, it’s an inch thick.

It takes an hour to sign. You have to have an attorney present. You don’t even read the damn thing. Nobody reads the closing documents, you just sign them all and hope to God that there’s nothing in there, you know, selling your firstborn child to Satan and you just sign it away, right? And people have already made the decision. And so your job is, is really not to rely on the software. Uh It, it, it’s to rely on your sales skills now. And, and finally, I will say a lot of uh software presents information in a text form which is fine for reviewing after the fact.

But when you present to people in person, it really either needs to be a physical like flip book presentation because the tools you use for presenting in person are different than the ones that you use for people to review after you’ve gone. But this is for human to human contact facilitation, not for, for human to document facilitation. And so you don’t want just lines of text. Uh So you need like some kind of slide show. Uh And we often even teach our guys to, to leave a, a video testimonial uh Montage and we click the play button before we leave and they just leave it running.

I know it’s awkward but like when they’ve watched three minutes of people bragging on you, it makes them buy more. So don’t lean on your software, lean on your sales schools, uh sales skills rather and just use the, the software to facilitate the sales process, but don’t depend on it. Yeah, Ryan, the software is a tool, you know, like a lot of people use powerpoint. So is it OK to use powerpoint? If another painter uses powerpoint, find the tool that works for you. And it’s about the messaging and how you leverage it.

Software is just a tool. Um John Outlaw Precision asked me uh what’s the best time of year to send, send marketing all the time? Right? And if you’re looking for promotions, there’s always a holiday. There’s always something that you can say if you’re trying to, trying to, you can even find wacky crazy holidays that people don’t think about. I’m not sure if that’s what the question was geared toward. Um It’s obviously kind of a bit kind of a broad question, but you can send marketing stuff out all the time, you can send it out all the time and you should, but there, there’s also the, I would just say this, there’s the issue of organic spending and so one thing that, that Iran and you probably got some data on this.

Uh, when you see the lead flow come in, I can’t remember. I looked at some franchise data and I think in, uh, January, come on in Ruby, I think in January, uh, February and December, it’s like 4.84 0.9 to 5% of all leads that come into a painting business come in. But it gets up as high as like 12 or 13% in, in January. Which means if you’re marketing in January versus July or August, like there, there are three times as many people looking to buy painting services and they are simultaneously probably more inclined to buy a little faster because it is the summer.

That’s when people paint. So there is some seasonality. But the issue is if you go completely dark in the winter, just completely dark in the winter, you end up paying for it in spring. And so you’ve got to keep something rolling, but it often means that, that you shift more in the winter months to uh what I call relationship marketing, building those relationships. Uh B to b, referral sources, interior decorators, realtors, customer appreciation events, uh commercial, uh prospecting and things of that nature. So I introduce everybody to my daughter Ruby.

They can’t see you coming in to see daddy. Um John asked when, what do you do when a prospect is not engaging with your sales process distant distracted rush. Uh John, you have to con you have to control the frame. So at that point, you, you’re not controlling the frame, they’re, they’re controlling the situation. Uh I’ll let Brandon get into a little, a little bit more of a right now. Right then you’re not uh they don’t perceive value in you or it was just the wrong time for you to conduct that estimate.

See uh that’s a good one. I don’t, I, I don’t think I’m seeing them. That’s fine. You just read them to me. George handy says Brandon L I may walk the plank and have you evaluate our business. You know, he, he’s not really walking the plank, decide to grow your business. Yes, but it is. I mean, you’re not going down to J Davy Jones Locker here. I mean, it’s, uh, it’s to make more money and the, but the problem is, it’s, it’s kind of like when you’re, you, you think you’ve got a health problem and you don’t want to go to the doctor because he might tell you you got a health problem.

Well, most of the time, you know, you got one already. Right. And the earlier you can go and the better you, you can get it fixed. It, it sucks to hear the truth. Um, we’ve all got things in our life. We don’t want to hear the truth about and we don’t want to address, I got a garage that needs to be cleaned out. And boy, I’ve done everything in the world, just drag my feet on it. But I’m down to one bay. So I’m making progress. I just, uh, and so sometimes when you don’t want to do something, you just have to set aside two or three hours a week or a month and just freaking sit down and, and say I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do this thing.

I’m just gonna log time doing it and when you log time doing something after a while, especially if it’s a problem or a leverage point, things improve. And so George, I’d be happy to take a look at anything you got and um, I’ll shoot you straight and in the end, you know, whatever you wanna do is up to you one more thing following up with outlaw precision painting about the marketing messaging. Marketing is a leading indicator of success, right? So it depends on what kind of marketing you’re speaking to.

You should be doing organic marketing and putting stuff out there, um, to plant the seed. So for people to buy from you later, a big mistake painting contractors make is they wait until they run out of leads and they think, oh my gosh, I should start marketing. That’s the most expensive and back backwards way to do marketing. You should be marketing before. I’ve got a slogan for outlaw precision painting. I mean, just in keeping with the name, it should be from prisons to painting straight to you.

I don’t know. Uh, I don’t know if, if you should say that or not. Probably not. Um, establishing trust. We don’t background check our painters. It’s in the name. Uh, I’m just joking. That’s a hard one. Um, all right, guys. Well, we appreciate your time. Thanks for tuning in. Again, this recording is gonna be available in the Facebook group. We’re gonna put it out, uh, to our list as well. Brandon. Thank you. This was incredible. Um Glad we got to do this together. There will be more coming from, from Brandon and I so stay tuned.

We got a dynamic duo going on here and thank you all for joining us. Am I Batman or Robin? I, I’ll be Robin if I have to. It’s OK. We’re joint batman. There’s no Robin. All right guys. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next time 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. com/podcast for free training as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company.

Again, that URL is painter, marketing pros.com/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. com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business until next time, keep growing.