Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over one million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA 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. Our guest today is Garrett. Mark Tell Garrett runs two day painting based in waukesha Wisconsin. He graduated in 2014 with a masters in management and business. He’s a big believer that you should outsource jobs like marketing and accounting and he’s also a direct mail expert and even on the second company that runs direct mail for the trades called trades fix direct mail marketing. If you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this podcast and how you can use them to grow your painting business, visit painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast for free training as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company that you are all again is painter marketing pros dot com slash podcast. Alright, today we’re speaking with Garrett martel of today painting Garrett, Thanks for joining the painter Marketing Mastermind podcast man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I guess give us a little bit of background about you and about two day painting. Uh yeah, so I um, started to day painting in 2014. I actually started a college pro in 2012. I did a franchise program for a summer and I learned a little bit about the painting business. Uh, and then I got my masters in management and marketing and graduated and started my own business in 2014, 2 day painting. Uh, no money to my name, opened up a $10,000 credit card, bought a 93 Plymouth with a wooden ladder rack and basically just door knocked my way too, To do what a quarter million that year. And uh after that, we just continue to grow and now we’re doing over $5 million dollars in revenue. And uh, I also started a business tone in charleston south Carolina where we, um, uh, and as a way to keep our painters busy over the winter time period, give them a home for the ones we can’t keep busy and overall it’s just, it’s a really fun city. You know, I really enjoy it there and it’s fun to start up another branch. That’s interesting, man. Yeah, because we, whenever we’re speaking with owners who are in the Northern States, it’s definitely something I like to cover. You know how you’re handling winter, You’re the first person who, who’s basically providing another home for your painters. How did you choose charleston south Carolina? Uh, well, I like charleston the area in general. It’s um it’s a good scene that I like to be a part of, but there’s also, you know, a good amount of wealth down there and uh it’s warm year round so we can paint and I thought it would be a good market where I’d be able to find enough work to keep my people busy, love it. So you’ve gone from starting to day painting seven years ago, I guess about seven years ago To over five million, you know, that’s some pretty impressive growth. What what do you attribute that growth too? Overall just creating, you know, good systems, putting good people in place, uh you know, and consistently scaling a little bit every year, consistently adding people to the team, recruiting a little bit, adding a sales rep and figuring out and learning what works through all aspects of the business and um eventually just kind of started perfecting almost as much as possible and uh mhm you get to the point where you can continue to scale. So let’s talk for a second about the systems if you’re okay with that, because I know, you know, a lot of companies that’s something that they struggle with and kind of getting caught in the rat race caught in the day to day and and sort of seeing this, you know, vision of what they want their business to be and then the reality is very different, I guess, what are the most important systems? How did you go about creating those and what advice would you have for for painting companies that don’t have all those systems in place currently. So that’s a good question. Um, it depends on the size of your company and what you’re looking to attain. Um, but if you’re looking at girl passed a million, million and half dollars mark, you really need solid sale systems number one, you need to be able to teach someone else how to sell consistently how to create the right price points. You know, um, you know, have the most success of closing most jobs at home, set the right expectations, you know, right? The detailed proposals and you know, overall just teach them ways of be able to get around excuses and objections so that they can be successful. Um, you need me on various management systems to make sure that you have quality control in the field that, you know, your employees or subcontractors are doing what they’re supposed to do, that you’re scheduling jobs correctly, communicating with customers on a regular basis. Um, you know, fielding all the calls and emails the way that they should be so that you can convert leads and you know, take care of your customers well. And just every aspect of the business has various systems that when you, you know, most painters business owners, they just do it all at the top of your head and you know, you know, that’s not efficient, but it seems daunting to create all these checklists and all these various things to make sure that everything is being accomplished. Uh but really, um if you’re going to grow past the point where you’re doing it all in your head, you have to create these and you gotta be able to bring in other people and be able to teach them to do the job successfully and consistently. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, man. So for the owner who is currently doing a lot of this, maybe, maybe the owner, maybe his wife is conducting the sales and he’s still, you know, maybe in the field painting or maybe he’s just overseeing some crews. What’s step one, What should, what should he be outsourcing first? Um Well, I would have them so many painters, they don’t outsource anything. They think that they’re better, they’re going to save money by doing it themselves and that’s not usually the case, the various aspects of your business, you should outsource. I think marketing is one of them, I think of bookkeeping is another one I think, um uh, figuring out, you know, obviously the right software for your business, you know, is um, you know, another thing to get in place and really there’s a lot of tasks that you just don’t have to do and how you’re the right consultant, you know, talk to the right person, what an area that you need, helping, you know, it’s going to cost you a lot more to learn the hard way by figuring it out yourself than just to get advice from somebody that knows what they’re doing and can, you know, has been through it all. Yeah, so I’m interested in this this outsourcing the marketing I guess. How did you go about selecting who are or company you’re going to outsource that to and and um you know, what did you outsource first? What was your process like there? Um So in the very beginning I tended to actually do most of it myself. Like I think a lot of uh business owners do and you kind of, you know, trial and air and maybe you learn the hard way um you know, or you hire someone in as a marketing coordinator or on a small business and you’re paying them more labor than you’re actually spending an ad spend, you know, additionally and uh You know, it doesn’t make sense for most small businesses, you know, sure if we’re a large corporation with their own marketing department, that’s one thing. But you know, in the scope of it, you know, even me as a $5 million dollar business, I’m a small business, you know, especially according to government will move very small business, you know, there’s a lot of functions that can be outsourced much more efficiently and with higher quality control, then, you know, uh it’s hard to really manage an employee, you know, you can tell them to do better the next time, but if you hire someone that really knows what they’re doing and they really messed something up. Well at least there’s some accountability there, you know, so there’s a lot of advantages to also are saying, you know, especially in marketing, you know, I’m certain aspects of marketing like you know, get good social media posts, you know, you know, make sure you have a good website of course, you know, add pictures to it. Um You know, job sites that you’re doing, but when it comes to, you know, pay per click ads, there’s a lot of different vendors like yourself, you know, that would be a much more efficient and higher quality situation than trying to learn it yourself or hire someone who’s not an expert, you know, as an employee or you know, um you know, I do uh I do some direct mail management as a small hobby business myself and for example with my clients, They would have to pay a lot more than what it would cost me because by the time they hire an individual printer, which I probably have not negotiated that strongly to print their pieces. You know, they’re going to pay more than what I would pay printing and bulk, they’re going to pay more for their list. You know, just getting a one off small list and trying to find a vendor that can get you an accurate one they’re going to pay more for their male health services and a lot of the times you can get the expertise from someone that knows like me and you compared to, yeah, I’m trying to figure out yourself and likely pay more in the long run. So bookkeeping is another one. You know, it’s gonna be a lot of effort to try to learn how to keep your books a lot of and you can also use that relatively inexpensively and have it managed at a much higher level than what you could do yourself. Yeah. And the book came bookkeeping especially, you know, C. P. A. Is more likely to find your tax breaks and ultimately could end up saving you money in addition a whole lot of time. I like that a lot. So I do want to kind of dive into this direct mail business. I know you you it kind of told me before we start the podcast, you’re running this separate business. And direct mail I think is fascinating. I think it’s it’s under appreciated by a lot of companies. I think it it was the thing and then it wasn’t the thing. And personally I think it is the thing again because a lot of people still think, you know it isn’t the thing. So it’s really under your life. Can you kind of walk me through I guess just your thoughts on direct mail, how you started it and and and what what you think it takes to do it right. Yeah, definitely. And direct mail is one of those things that it doesn’t work for everybody and doesn’t work in every area. Um, different markets perform differently, you know, from my research, some markets absolutely kill it. Other markets struggle to create a positive return on investment. And just like any marketing forum, any industry, it’s all different. You know, one area, who knows, maybe you’re killing a whole advisor, Maybe there’s no competition and you’re just getting really cheap leads for me. I’m not, not a fan of Home Advisor personally, I’d rather all not competing rather, you know, grow the brand and there’s a lot of benefits to either doing your own pay per click or your own. Um, you know, uh, other forms of advertising, but every area performs different. And direct mail is one of those things that it has a lot of scalability advantages that most other forms do not have because you can mask target an area and get in front of people to a higher level. Um, and you can really take advantage of a particular geographic and grow your business, especially if you’re a small market and you know, you’re trying to grow your business, but you can only get 10 leads a week from paper click. Yeah. You know, and other forms well. Now, either you can scale the direct mail business much more efficiently. I will, direct mail has other benefits, like branding. You know, you got constantly get your name in front of people. I think the low hanging fruit for most painting business owners is google Adwords and pay per click and I think that has the spot in most painting business owners marketing platforms. I think there’s a lot of advantages there. You can, as long as you have a smart person managing the campaign, you know, you’re not being ridiculous. Bumper click, you know, odds are, you know, you can convert them, you know, the clicks that come in, odds are you’re gonna be able to be profitable on that and you can get the people actively searching for you, which everybody uses their smartphones. Now I type in something your need for almost everything that I do nowadays, it’s very powerful. Yeah, but with google, you know, you do have a lot of other painters on there, you know, you have all the home advisers and the phone tax, you know, trying to get, you know, first page yelps and everything else and it’s difficult to be a strong S EO as a small company, you know? Um, so I mean I love to talk to you more about that later, but with paper click, you can get in front of everyone, you could probably do it at a very profitable level. So I’m a big fan of pay per click. I uh, personally I’ve not had that much success with social media myself, but in other painters I have. Um, but I definitely don’t utilize that as nearly as good as I should be. But it would direct mail If you can test it out and you can get a rate of, let’s say every 400 people or 300 people that give you a call for a lead. Usually leads tend to be stronger than in some other forms because personally I love, you do get more often, you know, a little bit on the older side of clientele and a lot of my old clients are less likely to shop around. They’ve likely have been burned by a bad contractor in the past and our overall are closing rates are a little bit higher than with, you know like some of the other forms like facebook leads and you can target to a decent level too. So you can, you can target quite as high as some digital forms. But what you can do is uh you know, eliminate home values under a certain age, you can make sure they only target single family homes owner occupied, verified homeowners. You can target by age of home or by income level too if you like. I usually don’t target as much by income level because I like my retirees. The clients are awesome for me. Uh but overall you can target a decent amount and if you can consistently get 3 to 400 every one person for 3 to 400 cards you’re spending on average, let’s say 30 35 cents a card And you get one out of 400, you’re spending $120 to $140 on that lead. And if you have a market size of, let’s say 100,000 people that you can hit on every six week basis or so out of every 400 people giving you a call. You know, that is a Some quick math, that’s about 250 leads over that six week period. Well enough to keep 2-3 estimators busy on your team. You can scale very quickly with direct mail for the business that’s looking to grow and really capitalize on the market. Um, What I recommend for a lot of small businesses is don’t do direct mail until you have a decent sized budget. You know, you can send to at least 10,000 homes, you know, and you really want to start scaling your business. Start with a good digital campaign, you know, start with uh, you know, pay per click and the stuff that’s not going to cost you a lot of money to print and buy a list and all the other stuff And you can usually sustain most businesses under $1 million dollars in painting industry can sustain their business through a strong digital platform and an efficient level. Yeah, that was super helpful. So kind of build your presence online, get those leads in that way, you won’t maybe get as many, but you can get it with a much lower budget convert until you’re at probably above a million and then start maybe leaning heavily into direct mail would be your advice. My advice is test every different medium and see which is the best for you. Really track your data. You know, put a different call, tracking number on everything that you do listen to the calls that your office staff is taking. One thing, a lot of clients they lie about where they found you. There would be like, oh, I saw your truck or uh, I was referred by a friend but maybe they were, but what they actually called you up was a direct mail piece, you know, and they call that call tracking number, that’s what got them to call. So really track your data well attracted by zip code. And then you can actually attribute your spend on a zip code level, especially with direct mail. You can see, okay, how much money you guys spend on that zip code? How many pieces were sent out? How many lives did I get? How many of them are those turned into estimates how many of those turned into sales and you can, you notice that some of your zip codes in areas perform much much better than others and some marketing and some zip codes perform really well. And sometimes they don’t, you’re not booking the jobs that you know perform off of that lead source. So what I recommend is um No small businesses. Yeah start with the digital side but start testing out some different stuff. You know put $10,000 in this Form. $10,000 in that form. Um talk to an expert like Brandon who can guide you and hopefully prevent you from making some mistakes and uh you know then track your data well and that’ll give you an answer and want to continue and what what to push. Yeah it makes sense man. I find it interesting this idea that a lot of clients lie about where they found you. I wonder why that is you have any theories or you broke up a bit there. So I didn’t hear uh sorry about that. I said I I find it really interesting this this idea that clients are lying you know kind of about where they found you. Do you have any theories about why they do that? I do. And I was surprised at how much they lied as well. I thought would be like one here there but it’s a good like 30-50% of people that call that tell you a different heat source and people love seeing refer girl because they feel like a better deal or come out to the appointment because you know they feel like you’re more connected if you’re doing like their neighboring that and a lot of people we’ll just say that and then you know, you could ask and be like, oh this is someone at work and maybe they did honestly get a referral, but my opinion, that’s not what made them give you a call. What made them give you a call is maybe that ad they saw on facebook, that direct mail or maybe, you know, you know, they’re searching painters near me back. Oh, I’ve heard of this guy, you know, like I recognize this its name, you know, in my opinion, deserves the credit for the lead. Uh and Mhm. Yeah, it’s just it’s it’s fascinating how often um often I see that that is really, that is really, really interesting. Yeah, there’s a, a phrase I’ve heard, I don’t throw it around too much. It’s a bit uh you know, uh rough I guess, but buyers are liars. You know, sometimes when, when someone comes through they’re not gonna tell you tell you everything. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s probably this idea that that well that you, you know, you’re friends with them are acquainted to them so you need to make sure they get special treatment as opposed to oh your marketing campaign work and maybe they just, maybe they almost just don’t even want to admit that the marketing campaign worked. You know, because they’re, you know, some people have this idea that oh that makes them look like a sucker that fell for fell for something as opposed another smarter than that. Just their frontal, it’s just fascinating. I got uh I just started my business in charleston and um I just started marketing, so really done any work there and I already got a couple of people like, oh yes, my friend referred me to you, I’m like, oh really, your friend in Wisconsin, wow. Yeah, my friend in Wisconsin, that’s great, that’s funny. So I I want to touch base on this, you know, this PPC, the google ads, I think it’s great advice. You know, we we have found that for some markets like you said, you know, different things work in different markets and PPC and some markets is absolutely fantastic and other markets, facebook ads tend to outperform, but one thing that we have noticed consistently for a lot of painting companies is they don’t recognize how important the inbound sales processes. So they’ll have these leads come in and they’re not, you know, they don’t have a system to follow up appropriately, you know how you’ve been talking about having those processes that you can train someone on your team to sell. Can you talk through how you what’s your system like when a lead enters your world? What happens, yep, so I mean they call and we always say, you know, thank you for calling to day painting, you know, this is Garrett uh and psychologically homie, I help you is kind of seen as in genuine do a lot of people. So psychologically people like to see gratitude, so that’s why we start with thank you instead of how can I help you. Um but uh but yeah, you need those, you need to build the answer the phone in a positive manner. A lot of the times sometimes people buy off the first impression and that makes a big difference. So you want to be bubbly, you want to be knowledgeable, you want to be friendly, you want ideally answer the phone or get back to the form, fill as quickly as possible. And the biggest mistake I see a lot of painters make is uh they don’t qualify, you know, I mean, I’m sorry, they qualify too much. Sometimes they think that they can no one a painter or when a customer is going to buy their service by just asking a couple questions or maybe they’re not in a super wealthy neighborhood and they’re eliminating a lot of leads that come through. If you’re a one man show when you have way too many beads that you can handle. You know, and you have too many people calling you and you want to eliminates master mitts and yes, you know, they can choose which ones that you want to do, but if you’re trying to grow a business, you don’t have a limited lead flow. You’re spending a lot of money in advertising to get those leads don’t pre qualify after leads off the door, you know, go do the point that, you know, I mean, I get it if it’s not your service or out of your area or you know, maybe, yeah, he can set some expectations about ballpark pricing, you know, But, you know, you’re not going to be able to tell if a customer is going to buy over the phone because this unrealistic, you know, you might have a guess, it might be, you know, right half the time, but overall you’re better off just treating every lead like gold treating every lead, you know, maybe a the minimum job size and if they’re under that, then that might pre qualify them otherwise, feel them higher sales are up. You know, if you want to grow your business, higher sales are up, feel the stuff or, you know, Yeah, yeah, simply don’t take on more off more leads if you physically can’t handle that many leads. Yeah. At that point, yeah, I think that’s great advice that, you know, if you’re it’s kind of, you have to be forward thinking. So if you if you think you have too many leads and you just kind of throwing them away what we’ve talked about is raise your prices, you know, so you get, you know, throwing away that way, don’t just disqualify them immediately because then you’re gonna get higher margin jobs, you want to lose him that way. And I really like this idea of not just, you know, not not discarding leads to quickly, you know, because sometimes people will seem like they’re not the great the best lead. Maybe it’s not a great neighborhood, but they need a full interior and exterior paint job, you know, it ends up being a great lead. Um That’s great. I do wanna, you know, kind of go back to this direct mail if for any painting companies that are listening to this and they, you know, you obviously have a lot of experience in it and you have a company, is there a way that they can get more information about this or contact you? So you could potentially help them definitely. Um they can definitely go to trade fix dot com or to change dot comments, middle form bill or they can contact me on my cell phone number 26247396 to 7. And I can really walk them through the pros and cons of the program. I mean how we do it and overall, most direct mail, most people don’t do it correctly and that’s the reason why most who don’t think it works. They think E G M is the way to go, which is normally not the case. That’s the director of what the USPS pushes and they basically sent to every home on a poster. You’re not really targeting that. Well, you’re actually paying more per piece posted wise. For whatever reason, it’s cheaper to target if you do it right. Um, and uh you’re, you’re hitting renters, you’re hitting apartment complexes, you’re hitting low income homes, you know, you’re hitting, you know, people that aren’t gonna buy. So it’s difficult to get a positive return on investment, the post office, it’s easy for them. It’s probable for them. That’s what they like to push. But, um, if you’re smart about it, you know, and you get a list and you, you know, figure out, okay, we’re the optimal homes and what neighborhoods and what routes and no, okay, how many homes do I need to hit a certain, So your rate and that route and you find two no list, you can save money on postage. You know, you can spend them both the same amount of printing it anyways. But you’re going to eliminate homes and uh, what I do is I helped, you know, kind of talk people through that and see if it’s a good solution for their business and then help them find a list, help them design a piece, you know, print, um, with my other clients and my own companies so they can get bulk saving, uh, printing prices and then we manage the logistics and get it off the door and make sure that they had homes on time. That’s great. Really? Yeah. And that, you know, that kind of upfront targeting will help them avoid this, this fear that a lot of companies have getting these bad leads that are wasting their time? You’re handling that on the front end, which I think is great. What is the biggest struggle for your company right now? Uh, the biggest struggle is just, you know, um, growing production capacity, you know, I’m balancing it with sales. So I mean like we always try to predict, okay, how many sales are up doing, you know, how many lives do we need, we keep them busy and then maybe production outpaced the sales, maybe dusting on pay sales. And then, you know, we just have, we start getting a backlog. We’ve been able to manage it pretty well, but it’s, I wish we had unlimited pool of painters and labor that was good and quality and every painter in the world does. Uh, and overall there’s a shortage of labor in almost every industry right now, it’s not just painters and complain about it. It’s definitely prevalent in the trades, but there’s not, there’s a lot of work out there and overall there’s not that many people. People are not having kids quite as much. You know, there’s less people entering the population more baby boomers were always going to face a shortage of labor in the industry. It’s just, you know, how can you recruit and retain your talent better and how can you treat your people better? And the biggest thing is honestly charge more to your customers. Most painters are afraid to charge the right prices. If you can charge the right prices, you can pay your people well, you can make decent margins yourself, you can grow your business, it’s worth charging more and having a lower sales ratio and paying more for advertising, getting more leads in the door and actually making good money on, you know, the work that you’re doing? Yeah, there’s a saying, I really like revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. I really like that. And I think this idea too of you’re paying your painters more, but you also have a very growth oriented mindset. So my guess is that when someone comes to work for two day painting and they see future potential, it’s not just a job, there’s potential there for, for them to advance with. Is that accurate or how do you kind of approach that? Yes, there definitely is. We want to create a home for them in many ways. We want to have a positive culture, we want to have growth opportunity, we want to treat everyone respectfully treat everyone right and we wanna have the total package for employees so that they feel happy that they stick around that we can retain and continue to grow. Uh the important thing is um, Yeah, like I mentioned before, you know, like you should not be paying more than 50% of the job and that’s on the high end towards all labor and materials, You should be, I try to keep that between 40 and 45% myself for my projects and That allows you to actually obtain 20, net margins at the end of the year And you really need that in order if you want to scale and actually make money. I’ve, I’ve known a lot of painters in the industry and I looked at their financials and try to help them out and I would identify your pink 70% on average for labor materials. That leaves no money for any actual problem made you know, You can run a $2 million 70% of the job. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think a lot, you know, some painting uh company owners don’t have their numbers as dialed in as they could. And I think if you don’t, if you don’t know your key performance indicators or KPI is if you don’t know your financials, then there’s really no way to grow your business successfully. Um, can you just kind of a fun question, Is there any any marketing uh tactic you’ve tried that has just been a total flop or just, it looked great on paper and it just didn’t work out. Mm. I mean, yeah, we tried a fair amount of things on radio was really not that successful for us. Um, I haven’t heard of a painting, we do some like talk shows and stuff of construction that that, that goes all right. But just a general radio were on the um you know, am talk networks. Uh we tried a bunch of different a little bit with that. Especially during Covid, you know, time period where you can get smoking deals And it went all right during COVID, you know time when we can get prices for, you know, 5% of the normal rate. But besides that, um just quarantine. I mean besides that it’s uh it wasn’t that successful overall. We’ve never had the best book with facebook marketing, you know, spend. Um I know some companies that do very well with it, but those are the ones who in my opinion to build a brand or unique services like cabinets and you know how to videos and you know, building organic organic audience, which can be very powerful. Uh But just putting Facebook ads saying that we’re offering 15% off painting services. You know, I haven’t seen many companies, you know, Well that I mean correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t know if that’s one of your core services. No. Yeah, it is, it is a mixture, you know, in some markets we’ve performed pretty well with that and others. It’s it’s really been needing to go to PPC. You know, it is kind of a we, you know, even with our experience, we still have to test because it is different in every market like you’re saying, Yeah, I agree. And I’ve heard of markets that do very well with facebook advertising and do awful with direct mail or other forms and. Yeah. Yeah it’s just it’s just weird you know just every market has its own vibe and and its own kind of demographic. Um Do you have, you know I’m actually gonna ask you one more question before that one. Do you how do you see the painting industry evolving? Do you see any clear emerging trends for the future that might kind of disrupt disrupt things? Uh I mean I do I mean there’s some government possible the whole stuff going on, I don’t think it’s going to come to fruition but they might end up banning subcontractors you know throughout the U. S. I don’t think it’s going to happen but that would change things quite a bit. I see um some people in industry think that there’s gonna be consolidation in a way or a lot of like some more major companies taking um more of the market share or you know consolidate, you know holding company type model where they might own a bunch of different companies. Um I think overall the paint industry there’s so much work out there and so much, man, I think all of us will be successful as long as we can manage our own business correctly, you know um put everything in place, put the right systems in place, put the right people in place and charge the right prices and you know we’re in a lucky industry where you know we’re not all competing against each other. We’re competing against our ability to execute our own business model, as far as trends go. I don’t know, there’s some cool stuff like paint spring roll, well it’s out there and some other tools that might help us out in the future, but I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. Yeah, it’s interesting competing against our own ability to run a business. I love that. Uh I love that. Do you have any more advice for other painting company owners? You know, most of, most of the people listening are not going to be at five million, You know, I’m gonna be quite a bit smaller. What advice do you have for them if they want to get to that level. The big thing is have a clear business plan and infrastructure strategy in place. So, you know, think about what each year looks like and who you’re going to need to have in your company and what systems you’re gonna need to create that once you create that, um, you know, infrastructure, let’s say next year, I want to do one million in the next year. Two million in the next year. $3 million. I’m gonna need, you know, these people for the size of business, these people for this and create a large to do list of everything that You’re gonna need to accomplish most businesses, I think 99% of many business owners don’t even have a business plan number one and they don’t have any of that outlined in detail and it’s tough to accomplish something that you don’t have a clear vision on. So I would recommend talking to a consultant or someone who’s strategic and you know, thinking it out, you know, having them review the plan, it’s been an hour or two with them, you know, just picking somebody smart sprain and uh you know, create a good vision for what the next 3 to 5 years is going to look like and now you can really accomplish that. You can figure out what you need to do. Yeah, I love that. And at least in Tampa and I think in a lot of uh you know, medium to bigger markets, the city will provide resources and the location to help small business owners and consulting free of charge. But but I think very few people recognize that those resources exist and don’t take advantage of them. And other thing to network, you know, well go to P. C. A. Events, you know, there’s one in Orlando in March, that’s a big expo I think that’s huge talk to people like myself there in Brandon and other people that are successful in the industry and uh you know, and ask them these questions, figure out what a couple of answers you want to do. And we’re all very open in the painting industry, which is what I love about the paint industry. You go to these events. Nobody hides anything. We’re all willing to help you out. Nobody sees each other as competition. You know, or I’ll just trying to make a living and trying to make ourselves better and uh get involved in the various facebook social media groups and listen to these podcasts and you know better yourself. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s great advice. Do you have any other thing that you’d like to share before we wrap up? Um no, I think that’s uh, I think that’s pretty good. But if anyone ever has any questions, obviously if we reach out to me and I’m happy to share a little bit of my time. Okay, great. Um yeah, I appreciate your time Garrett. This was extremely insightful and congratulations again on your, your success. That’s really exciting man. And I’m excited to watch the direct mail business accelerate just as much as the painting company. I appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, they’re painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button, give us your feedback. Let us know how we did. And also, if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the painter marketing pros website at PainterMarketingPros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon at painter marketing pros dot com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business until next time. Keep growing, mm hmm. Yeah.