Welcome to the Painter Marketing mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over one million and annual revenue. I’m your host Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular pc, a educational series, learn do grow marketing for painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in north America and learning from their experiences this special in person recording of the painter marketing mastermind podcast, we host guest Jason phillips live at the P. C. A expo 2022. Jason is the founder and owner of phillips home improvements, a residential painting company based in metropolitan Dallas texas that currently does over $8 million in annual revenue while growing phillips home improvements. Jason has had to grow as a person and entrepreneur. In order for his company to succeed, Jason has identified three primary stages in a painting businesses growth journey and in this episode he outlines what painting company owners must do to move from one stage to the next. Jason is an advanced certified human behavior consultant and he shares how business owners can use personality tests to not only put the right people in the right seats at their painting company, but also to connect motivate and inspire their employees to reach their fullest potential if you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this podcast and how you can use them to grow your painting business, visit Painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast for free training as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again that you are l is painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast. We have a very special episode of the Painter Marketing Mastermind podcast. Today we are shooting live at the P. C. A expo and we have Jason phillips. Jason, Thank you for joining us today. It’s my pleasure to be here. Brandon. So Jason, tell us a little bit about your company phillips. Home improvements. Well Phillip phillips home improvements were located in Dallas texas and we serve uh most of Dallas fort Worth. We’ve been doing that for 25 years. We’re celebrating our 25th year anniversary this month. It’s pretty exciting. Time for my team. Thank you very proud of my team. We primarily uh provide homeowners. Our customer is 100% homeowners and we repaint interior exterior, replace a lot of rotten wood on the outside and replace roofs and gutters as well. Excellent. So you guys are 100% residential, primarily painting um do a couple other services. What what’s your side? What’s your revenue range right now? Right now? This year we’re tracking it for eight million, which is so small. You guys are kind of a startup company at this point. Well, you know, we’re we’re doing alright. We’re yeah, good for you man. Well, congratulations, that’s incredible. So I guess you were at the pc expo Pc is being nice enough to host this podcast and produce it for us. So maybe we can start with that kind of talk a little bit. I know you gave a presentation, what have you gotten from the expo I want to tell you what, there’s a there’s an energy and a synergy in this community right now and I believe the you know the leadership, the whole Pc a team is just really delivered an amazing event. I’m I’m sure there’s a lot of anxiety after, you know, skipping it last year. Hey wow, is it gonna are people gonna come back, they’re gonna show up and when I when I showed up there was just people in life everywhere. People networking, I was like, oh man, this feels really good. Yeah, I think, I think people are even more excited to get back together now I think because of last year because it was it was great, the content being shared last year was great but it’s obviously not the same as being in person. For sure, headaches though, not drinking so much. Yeah, that’s yeah, there was a lot of that last night. Yeah, so but you know the although there’s such value delivered by the presenters, I love it but but even the golden nuggets that you get in networking in between events at lunch at break after hours are just invaluable. Yeah, I think that networking is incredible. The peer to peer, like you said, the breakout sessions have been amazing. The only complaint I’ve even heard from anybody was that there there’s too much good content, right? And you just can’t take it all in, you can’t go to everything. But the peer to peer networking, the peer to peer learning, the brain melts sessions were literally the round table, sit down. Well, hey how are you guys doing this or how are you doing that? And just seeing the, the exchange of ideas between fellow contractors is, it’s awesome. It’s incredible. You know, the I I those are my favorite, some of my favorite times, I wanna say definitely my favorite time, but it’s like okay, I can go pick an exact topic that I that’s my pain point right now and you just go pick your table and sit down and join in and and, and wow and ask questions. It’s, you can’t get that very easily online. You can ask some general question in a forum or whatever and you’re gonna get, you know who you’re talking to and you’re gonna get all kinds of answers or maybe no answers and, or troll and, and uh I mean I’ve been in this industry a long time, there’s there’s a lot of misinformation and bad advice out there as well and you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta be very careful now when you’re sitting and talking to one of your peers at the brain meld and you tell you present a problem to him, and he’s like, oh yeah, let me tell you what happened to us man, we lost so much money that did not work, but here’s what did is currently working for us on our team and when you can, that gives you confidence to to take a step of faith and sometimes you need to take a bold move and you can have confidence to step forward and try something out. Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I actually saw, I ran a couple of the brain melts sessions and just moderated them and I actually saw a couple instances where someone made a serious business decision right there and they just sort of needed that, that affirmation that push in the right direction, that, you know, you’ve been thinking about it, do it now, and and the commitment I saw it made it was it was great. Absolutely. You know, the probably the one piece of advice I find myself giving painters more more than other trades. I mean, I mean, you know, other trades and I go to a lot of industry events across the board and the one thing that I see painters constantly doing is underselling their project, their pricing is just too low and you know, you, you they count their gross profit as their prophet and man, you’ve got to look at so much more and you’ve got to you’ve got to be confident in what you’re selling. You need a sales process but man know your value and sell it with confidence that you know the guys that think that they’re uh well Jason I can’t raise my prices. My closing rate’s gonna I won’t sell any jobs. You know they’re they’re literally I’ll tell you real quick just a quick little there last year in our pricing system we had made some mods to it and our cabinet pricing uh in the system Had an error in it and it was pricing our cabinets like 35% higher than they than what we planned. Right. Well our people didn’t even know it and they were just selling them at the same rate anyways. What does that tell you? That tells you the mindset of your sales people. Now I’ll say this everybody uses estimators in in in this arena in in painting and I understand when you’re in commercial you’re estimating things but when it comes to residential, I don’t give estimates. I don’t recommend giving estimates. I recommend having sales people that deliver world class presentations with a proposal that’s good down to the penny and there’s there’s a difference in mindset there and when when you have a good sales process you can sell your value. When you sell higher you can you can retain hire and retain higher paid better people that are gonna then wow your customers even more and you can raise your price more. I wanna I wanna dive into that because I’m not even sure, I entirely understand that. And I think that this this sounds like a really great topic. So when you say you don’t have them provide estimates, you have them them run through a sales process that really focuses on the value down to the penny. What does that mean? Exactly. Well, you know, so many, so many painters, they’re gonna show up and and they’re going to walk around and we’re gonna do this, we’re the best here, oh my gosh, we’re the best. It’s it’s like there’s a premium, it’s gonna shine. You know, and I can’t remember the sales trainers name way back in the day he said, here’s what you do when some when when when your sales people, I just want you to your mind just start saying, I doubt that. No, I doubt that. I’m like Wow that’s what I had been doing. I’ve been doing, you know 80% of the talking instead of instead of 20% of the talking and letting the customer do the talking. What we do is we walk around, we’re like selling them on us before we even know we can meet their need. And so we have a specific process, we’re evaluating their need and we’re as we walk around for instance, on the outside of the house, right? And and asking questions and really getting to know them and their values their needs and their wants and but what happens is when you don’t have a good sales process that that builds value, you’re left with nothing other than to sell on price. And that’s what everybody, that’s what so many people do is they’re competing on price and they they think that people want the lowest price, you know what what people, you know, if people if if everybody wanted the uh the the lowest price, they would probably buy everything at Dollar General or the dollar store, right? There’s a reason why some people are gonna drive a Kia and some people are gonna drive a Mercedes, they see value somewhere. They’re the same cars. Just get you from Point A to point B. How does Mercedes do that? Is their car have a better reliability record? Come on, let’s look at land, let’s look at land rover, right? It’s it’s not it’s not about quality, it’s about experience. And and we sell so many times we sell features, oh we’re gonna scrape it this good, we’re gonna do that. Those things are important but but we spend so much time on that instead of saying, you know what, we’re gonna come in here, don’t worry about it, we’re gonna take it, we’re gonna make it look beautiful, you’re not gonna have any headaches, it’s gonna be the easiest process ever. And and we, you know, we address what their real concerns are the the homeowners, their real concerns are, man, someone’s gonna come in here do a, do a crappy job, mess up something in my house, leave a mess, run off and not come back. That’s, those are typical fears that they have or hey, we painted at the wrong color, right? That’s a, that’s a fear too. But you can, you know, put up some samples. That’s pretty easy. But, but we were not really addressing and understanding the persona of our, of our client. Yeah. So Jason, let me ask you this what, what is and I know it’s gonna vary by project type, but what is an average ticket price for you? What’s, what’s an average sales price for you? So, so our average painting project is only like $5500. Which depending on what part of the country you’re in that could be small, it could be big in ways, you know, I’m kind of jealous of the guys in parts of the country where the homes don’t have any brick and they’re all siding would multicolor everywhere. Our houses are almost exclusively brick in in north texas. So you get a little bit of siding and some eaves and such. So the tickets aren’t high, but you know what they are. There’s the cookie cutter jobs they’re easy to do. You know the right customer segments? Easy to please. But it’s interesting though because you say, you know, because we’re around a bunch of painting company owners and we’re used to sometimes, sometimes 7000, sometimes 24,000 is the average ticket value, say only 5500. But for the homeowner, 5500 is a lot of money. So when you say, you know, we’re going in and ultimately what they’re most focused on is not the lowest price. I 100% agree with you because they’re already spending 5500. So if someone comes in and you know, the, the typical chuck in a truck, but doesn’t even need to be that bad to somebody who maybe hasn’t quite demonstrate that level of care hasn’t gone through the consultative sales process. You just walked us through and says, well, I can do it for 4500, they’re probably going to pay, especially if you have any, anyone kind of the right customer segment right there, The 5500 to know it’s done. It’s about peace of mind. We’re selling, you know, peace of mind. This is your home. You gave your blood sweat and tears just just to build to carry your wife across the threshold and put your key in the front door and, and it’s your baby man. You don’t want someone to come in there and trash it. There’s a lot invested there. And, and when they, when, when you build trust and credibility with them. Yeah, it’s, it’s really no big deal. That’s I’m happy as a, as a homeowner now granted, granted, it’s, it’s all when you have a big home or small home, whatever it’s money is, is, uh, it’s relevant what you’re spending, right? And, and so many times we get scared, Oh man, I’ve never even quote this big, I’ve never given a quote and you’re scared to deliver something that big, right. What you gotta do man, you gotta practice it in the classroom, practice it with someone and you just, hey, we can do all of that for only this amount of money or this or, you know, 10 to 50 or as little as uh, 205 a month, which one of those best fits your budget? Yeah, yeah. You giving them those options, kind of puts them in the driver’s seat and now they’re, they, they feel like they’re selecting it, you’re not kind of forcing it on them. And absolutely, and you’re uncovering a couple things with a cash buyer or their payment buyer. So, you know which way to go, right? There’s a number of things that you’re doing when you present a payment with a price. Yeah, absolutely. I love that man. So you stole my power point. You must have because when I, when I actually, I gave a presentation and in my presentation, I said, you’re not selling paint, you’re selling peace of mind. So I’m following in your footsteps, trying to follow in your footsteps here, man. So you gave a presentation and you were kind of talking me through what you had spoken about and I know it resonated with a lot of people here at the expo, but a lot of people listening aren’t here. Can we kind of get into what you presented on? Absolutely. I presume I presented on what I what I call contractor prison. And I shared with with uh the the attendees, the uh three different phases that I called and I showed them the graph of my revenue over the years, Phase one, phase two and phase three of my business. And how at any phase you can end up in contractor prison. And and it’s, it’s kind of like this when I started my company knocking on doors, I came from a previous company that was shutting down and I was six weeks behind on pay, literally my wife and I were going to our parents houses and they were giving us groceries from their pantry. Okay. We had a little daughter and I mean through, through a miraculous series of events, I just, I felt a call to raise the bar in my community for, for employees like me, for homeowners who weren’t getting what they deserve the value they deserved. And even for the workers in the field, mainly subcontractors in texas that were just mistreated, which is a whole other story, but so I just went, I went out knocking on doors one day and 1, 1997 March one sunny saturday. I went knocked on 300 doors and one day made four appointments. Came back, sold three of them on the spot. Uh, sold the fourth one on monday took the deposit from the first job went and bought a power washer because my crew didn’t have power washer. Anyways, that’s, that’s kind of a story. But you know, and and it goes along that, that because there’s really not a school where you go get the NBA for running a painting company and everybody, nobody dreams of becoming a painter. You end up as a paint company or a paint contractor. Maybe maybe you come through a heritage line, your your your family or, or, or maybe you’re a salesperson, you’re like, hey, I can do this better or the boss makes too much money. I want to make that money or, or you’re a trades person and you’re like, I don’t, I don’t like the way this business is run, I wanna do this for me. And you, you take either, you know, a selling skill or a trade skill and you’re going to go into business, but now you have no business skill, you’re an amateur. Okay. But guess, but guess what? People do it every day, It’s like the sea turtles going out going, you know, the little baby sea turtles and, and all the birds are just coming and scooping them up and one in 1000 survives. That’s what that’s what this is like. Right. And so so so you go out and you start you’ve got you’ve got time but you’ve got no money and so you’re you don’t have freedom. So you go out and you work hard and you you make things happen, you sell some jobs, you get some stuff done and boy the money starts flowing in and it feels good you can put dinner on the table and shoes on the kids feet and and but now your time you’re bankrupt. You have no extra time. And and I think guys can relate working weekends, long hours and uh you know coming home late, maybe wife and kids are in the bed dinner sitting in the microwave cold with a paper towel on and you you go and have dinner then then go to bed and get up and do it again the next day. How long can you do that? Right. And I came to a crossroads in my life after after about 18 months of business. I’m like dude I can’t keep doing this. I mean I’m meeting the bills and save a little money. That’s great, okay I got the wife and the suv but guess what? My kids are gonna not even gonna know me, I’ve got to make a decision. I’ve either gotta pull back make less and be miserable or I need to build a team. So I set out to build a team of people and uh again I’ve never done that before. Nobody taught me how to do that. But I built a team and it got me to the next level, but I didn’t do a great job doing it. And so you know, boom, you know, the very next year popped over a million and a half. And then we went up, we hovered for several years in this, in this, you know, 2 to 3 million range to 3. 5 million range. And I hit this other plateau, which I’m in phase two. So, you know, face to my business. I’m not, I’m not, I’m definitely not painting. I never did do the painting. I don’t, I don’t know how to paint. Okay. I can tell you how to paint. I cannot do it. No. Okay. But but at that point I’m no longer I’m no longer doing the sales either. So I’m not painting, I’m not doing the sales, you know, and what I call phase two at this point I have I have a sales team, have people running the project and scheduling projects and answering the phones and and doing the bookkeeping. I was focusing on managing the sales team and doing the marketing because that’s what that’s what I was drawn to. That’s what I was good and comfortable with. And so I hired out to my weakness and the things I really didn’t want to do. I hired people to do those things, right. And so, so, but, but I got to the spot where there’s only so many people I can manage well and I and so I’ve got a bunch of people again the company’s growing money, money is flowing in well. But guess what? Jason ends up in contractor prison again money in no time. Okay. So I’m at this level too. So it’s a management issue. That’s right. People problems, people are the best and worst part of running a business in my opinion for me. Right. And so but guess what the onus to do to do well at that is on me as the leader. Right? And so I literally man, I’m just like man, okay I can’t do this, I’ve got to do something different. So I wrote out my work chart, you know, typical organizational chart, put the boxes out, you know who’s the president? Well that’s me, who’s the sales manager, Well that’s me, you know who’s the production manager. I really need a better person in that role I needed with all the computers and automation systems I’d set up. There’s no cloud hosting back then. Okay. Everything was on my local service. I need an I. T. Guy to continue to develop the crm that I’d written and and and a marketing manager and I just I put my name in all those boxes and and and and then other people’s names and I just man I just laid my hand on that on that page and I just prayed God I need help and this and within 12 months I had every one of those rules filled and boom, I entered, I entered phase three of my business and, and the curve started going up and all of a sudden, you know the money is better and I get time money and freedom like never before, that’s what I want to see these painting contractors achieve that. You’ve got hung, I’ve met so many hungry young people and not just the young people are hungry, okay, But I’ve met so many people here that are hungry and there’s no one, not only say no one, there’s not enough people there to show them the way the right way that really have the battle scars. There’s a lot of people trying, you know, there’s a, there’s an old saying, you know, hey, if you can’t do teach, if you can’t teach, teach gym A. K. A. Jack Black said that anyways in the movie. So when I, we joke about it, but, but but it’s true, there’s a lot of misinformation. I wanna learn from the guy who’s been through it. I wanna, I wanna, you know, I wanna, I wanna learn how to fight from the guy who’s got a few scars on his face, right? And so because because because the road to success is paved with bricks of failure, there’s nobody that hasn’t had to conquer failure. And when you’re, when you’re standing on the top man, you’re not standing on a, on a bundle of on a bunch of successes. You’re standing on a mountain of failures and that’s that’s the difference. And so uh wow I’ve got, I mean I’ve made pretty much every stupid move in the book okay through the years but fortunately I learned that I had one of my friends the other day, he said this like you know, you only step in paint once, okay. He’s like, you only make those big mistakes once. Okay. That’s true. He’s like you can have that Jason okay. You know I thought was pretty clever. I guess I just did steal it from him, right? I guess I can give him credit for will raise about born painting reno Yeah, he’s a good buddy, awesome guy, awesome guy. So anyways, you know when you, when you get to this point, but now your skills at each level, the difference is it’s never about working harder. Here’s the deal, working harder is not scalable. Working harder systems are scalable but it’s beyond that it’s the mindset of the owner that is scalable. The first thing to, to that that I don’t wanna say the first thing one of the keys to go from each level. Obviously automation are great and they’re important, right? But at the end of the day like phase one I was so you would ask me on the street, Jason, what do you do? I’m a paint contractor or I’m a painting gutter contractor, whatever I’m a contractor. Okay. When I got to phase two and had a whole sales team, I’m focusing on sales and marketing. Guess what? Hey Jason, what do you do? I have a sales marketing company that does painting and home improvements. The mindset was sales and marketing not the thing, it was the sales and marketing of the thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing painting or gutters or swimming pools or washing windows. It’s the same concept business. And, and so so from from there, you know, doing the thing, focusing on the thing, talking about paints and primers and application techniques, all this stuff is very important and you better get that stuff down, you better do it. Well, there’s nothing else beyond it’s gonna work. That’s the foundation, right? But then you got to get good at the sales and marketing. But now to go to the next level, you have to be able to develop leaders and managers and if you as an owner, don’t purposefully work on becoming a better, a good, a great leader. You’re, you’re, you’re not going to, uh, you’re, you’re not going to hire and retain people that are going somewhere and that are going to go somewhere with you and you’re just gonna have a revolving door of people and you’re going to stagnate and, and you know, john Maxwell, tell you this all day long, the law of the lid. Okay. The everything rises and falls on leadership and I know that’s one of those soft fuzzy things and you know what is leadership? Is that the nice guy? Am I the nice boss that everybody loves me? But gosh, we don’t get anything done or I’m the boss and I, it’s, I’m with the hammers my way or the highway. You know, neither of those are good leaders are are good leaders. And so so when you work on your leadership skills, you can, you can build a team, you can build a great team. And the foundation for all of this is Trust. Trust is the currency, the currency of business with your customers externally. But with your employees internally, you know, it’s like, hey, we’ve got to meet budget. Hey, let’s water that paint down. Nobody’s gonna see the customer’s not gonna know it’s just gonna last just as long we eventually customers gonna find out when that paint fails later you’ll be gone. But guess what? Your employees saw that your employees see what you’re doing? People do not want to work for a company that doesn’t operate with integrity. My hiring manager sees it all the time. People that are the people that are making good money at their current jobs. They come in. Hey, why are you looking for another job? Well and then they’ll start my boss, Our owner does X, Y and Z. And I just can’t, I just can’t work for someone like that. We see it all the time. and guess what? Today in the in the day of the great resignation and and you know ghosting and people have choices, this is this is a job applicants, jobseeker’s market and if we don’t become better leaders and craft a vision for a company that’s very clear, we heard this in opening day, uh what was it Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning while time was blowing by, we heard the opening, the opening segments were awesome. But you know if we don’t craft a vision that that has a paints a better picture that can connect our vision of success for the future with with our employees, our team’s vision of success for the future. If those if they can’t see those things hooked together and married together, they’re just gonna be with you for a period of time, they’re gonna go somewhere else. And there’s a there’s a great way I mean to I want, I want someone to say wow, I wanna man, I hope they hire me, I want this job, not just not just for the money man, I want to be on that team. I see opportunity to grow, that’s the kind of culture and people I want to be a part of, if that’s what we’ve got to create now. There’s also a bunch of big promises in the home improvement industry, construction, oh yeah coming here, you can make all this money boom boom boom and it’s all, you know then they changed the game on you. I literally a couple years ago I had one of the guys uh leave, uh I was really sad to see him leave, but this company made him uh he was he was one of my project managers and another company um offered him a ton of money and I’m like dude they’re giving you in salary more than that you’re earning here in salary and incentives and everything and I’m like, you know, I said dude I’m not, I don’t wanna hold you back man. And and I said, look if anything ever doesn’t work work out, give me a call and about nine months went by and he and he called me, he’s like he’s like yeah Jason it was terrible. He said, you know, three weeks after I got there, they changed the game on me, all the expectations were changed, I didn’t make anywhere near the money. They guaranteed me, turned out to be like 100% commission job and they’re all this other stuff. So he said would you please hire me back? I said absolutely, come on, you know, and and so but there’s a lot of misinformation out there, but but becoming a leader, people want to, people want to follow a leader and be on a team of people that they trust worthy, worthy leader, an incredible leader and in credibility and trust are two different things. Trust means man, I’m going to follow you to the end of the earth, I believe you’re going to act in my best interest and credibility is I do what I say I’m going to do and I know I can depend on this person because they always follow through and there’s a lot of great leaders and especially people in this business man, they have the best intentions and the follow through is terrible and and so their credibility is diminished and you can hear that you can hear the evidence of this when someone is very beloved by their team, but they’re Well, yeah, yeah, I know, but he, you know, he doesn’t do that. I know it’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll we’ll help out and they start they start closing the gap for you on your weaknesses when you’re not delivering as a leader and of course we all blindsides and things were not, you know, none of us are perfect, right? And thank God for people like like that. But as a leader, we need to be constantly building trust, extending trust, earning trust and building credibility with our people and that’s just an absolute key to building a team that you’re gonna grow and sustain into into the future. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s great. I think happy, happy employees, good employees make happy customers and vice versa and you kind of going through that consultative sales process that you discussed and the fact that the lowest price really shouldn’t be why you win jobs or how you’re trying to win jobs because you’re selling peace of mind. Well, that’s trust they trust that you’re gonna come in there, get the job done right? Not ruin their house, not steal their jewelry, not, you know, mess up their color match. You’re gonna do the job and they don’t have to worry about it. You’re selling them. Trust that’s right. So when you go through these three, you call them contractor, prisons, contractor, prison, contractor prison. So you have, you have the three different stages. You have one, you’re a painting contractor, right? And then to your basically wore a sales and marketing company that that does painting offers painting services. Three are you a leadership company? How would you define that? A people development company, People development company. And honestly, what is leadership? It’s people development people develop. And you Jason before this were telling me something that I did not know what it is. But I’m sure a lot of people would be interested. You are a certified human behavior consultant. Yes, That seems incredibly complicated to talk to us. It does. Okay. So basically, I’ve been through, uh, two different disk certifications. Disc personality profiles. A lot of guys have heard of it. Some of you haven’t, but, but uh, you take your personality assessment. It’s a basically a little questionnaire. It’s not a test, there’s no pass or fail and it identifies whether things that you are drawn to and things you tend to avoid and you know, we’re all unique creatures created differently. And when we begin to understand things that we kind of deep down know about ourselves, but we’ve never um read about ourselves and verbalized and thought through and had a conversation with ourselves about and with our spouse about we began to see, yeah, I really do hate doing that man. I do hate doing accounting. Yes. I need to hire someone to do that. I love doing sales and marketing. I’m gonna hire someone to do that accounting. So what we do a lot of those things already. But the the key is this is, you know, we tend to hire people that think like us and none of us are well rounded individuals. And so what happens is when we build a team of all the same people, we may share the same values, but when, which is great. Okay. But when we build a team of people that their that their uh their internal wiring is all the same. We end up with a lopsided team and on any team you need all the different players, you need the catchers to catch and the kickers to kick right and they can tell you how great you’re doing exactly. And we and we love that right. We love that. Exactly. So when when you when you begin to see that what I don’t I don’t need a well rounded individuals, I don’t need individuals like me, I need a well rounded team, I need people that can think ahead of me or think differently than me and help me avoid blindsides. And so 11 of the on my team, on my leadership team, the person that is most dissimilar to me is my head accountant and you know, I rubbed her wrong a lot of the way a lot of the time it’s, it’s tough to deal with me because she, you know, she likes, she communicates one way and that’s not my communication language. Okay. But guess what when when when I began learning about personality profiles and there’s other systems, there’s instagram a lot of people like in the Myers Briggs and the Colby A index and uh I love disc for a reason that it’s simple, it’s a simple system. It’s simple not only for me to learn and grasp and an instant I can look at someone’s graph and know how to interact with them, but it’s also easy for me to transfer that and teach it to my team and for them to get it and to be operating with that so that the language of disk and personality profiles is through my whole team and and this isn’t, this isn’t some weird touchy feely thing. I’m talking real communication skills that really I’m telling you guys if you’re listening to this disc profiles have transformed not only my leadership, not only my company but my parenting and even my marriage, okay. And I began to appreciate and realize, man, I need this person over here. That doesn’t that that doesn’t think like me because I’m gonna make a mistake and they’re there and I trust them, we have trust and I know they’re looking out for my back and when she speaks up, I want to hear it. I mean, I always agree with what she says, but a lot of times like, oh man, I’m so glad she said that I didn’t think of that and and appreciating people. So and when you learn disc you you you learn how to communicate and adapt your communication style to more effectively talk to others and so, you know, a good, a good example of that is uh if you want to give affirmation to someone for instance, right? Um you tell someone like, dude, you won, you’re a killer, you’re a rock star, okay? And guys that have a high dominance factor, a high d they love to hear that, right? Hi eyes as well, right? High eyes. They love, they love to get noticed. They’re the most friendly friendly people in the world to make a friend everywhere they go. And they love prestige and flashy clothes and all that stuff. Right? Well then how about the people, those are not the people that are gonna thrive in your accounting department. Yeah, okay, guys, you know what, you know what you want, an accounting department and here’s what I tell my accounting when I when I when I want to affirm my accountants here here’s what I say to them, you’re like a metronome. You don’t miss a beat. Everybody every bills paid on time, every every penny is accounted for and nobody ever has a late paycheck because they value accuracy internally. They don’t just like accuracy. They have an internal need for accuracy. You know I have an internal need for winning and control and and everybody has their different internal needs right? And when you understand that i when I when I want to appreciate someone, I want to say it in a way that that matters to them. I really want to I really want it to mean something to them. And so I want to use language that that that they that goes beyond their ears and speaks to their heart. That’s incredible. Yeah. This this idea of an internal need matching the job role. Not not what kind of job do you want or what do you think you’d be good at or what’s your experience? But literally the core of your being what what do you need? I mean that’s that’s powerful and and a disc profile within just a few minutes can tell that and here’s the thing we as as business owners, as employers, the onus is on us to gain this expertise because when you have a workforce out there that’s wanting a job, they have not been taught this, they have not been taught this. And guess what? You hire a great person. There are values fit and you love them and and you value them and you put them in a role in which they in which they experienced some type of cognitive dissonance. Okay. They’re gonna fail and you may break a relationship and but guess what? Everybody loses. When you hire a new employee and you have to fire them, they lose, you lose and you both starting over and maybe even lost your spring wave of business if you did it at the wrong time of year. Right? And so it’s I mean it’s just it’s it’s it’s transformational. I’ll give an example of when I say cognitive dissonance, you know, a good example of cognitive dissonance is when you’re doing something that’s different than it causes internal stress. For instance, let’s say you consider yourself an honest person, right? And you’re working a job and your boss makes you lie on some tax paperwork to save taxes and you don’t feel good about lying, but you don’t lose your job. You know, if you don’t, you’re gonna get fired. So you do it a few times. And so there’s this turmoil that builds up, right? You’re I’m an honest person, I’m having to lie. So either give in eventually quit burnout whatever or go home and take it out on your spouse. So uh here’s an example of that. That’s more of a moral issue. Let’s talk about. Not a moral issue. Okay. We my company we we have discovered that uh I studied are dissatisfied customers. No I can’t please everybody. I wish I could. We tried to but I I looked at a 100 dissatisfied customers. And sorry not 120 Of 20 dissatisfied customers. Only one of them. The original appointment. We met with both husband and wife. All of the other 19. We met with one party. Okay. And so part of part of our sales process when we’re setting appointments is we want to meet with both parties And we’re not just there. Oh we want to they want to meet with both parties, twist our arm and get the sale. Okay. Yeah. Are closing rate is 50% higher when we have both parties. That’s true. You know what’s also true? What’s also true is that our customer satisfaction is greatly improved when we have both parties there because you get to answer all the questions. I mean whoever has put a paint color on and got yelled at because they put the wrong color on but then the other spouse signed off on it. I’m sure it’s pretty much having to pretty much every painter out there right? And so part of our scripting all to circle back around to this whole cognitive distance thing right? Is when our project consultants not estimators, our project consultants knock on the front door and they’ll knock on the door. Um Hi Mr smith. Hey Mr smith. I’m Jason with phillips. Home improvement. I wanna thank you so much for inviting us, inviting us out to your home today. Um Hey my um my paperwork this third party thing over here my paperwork says I’m supposed to be meeting with you and mrs smith. Is she available? Oh great. Could you go get her? Okay. Someone with a high d. No problem asking that question. Someone with a low D. On the disc profile. That question scares the crud out of them. They won’t do it, they won’t do it. I need them to do it for my customer satisfaction and for my profit. I need them to ask that question. So if you don’t have certain disc profiles you’re not going to succeed in my sales process. And when you start understanding these things that each of your roles have needs I need someone that needs to win in that role that’s not afraid to ask what are difficult questions. The thing is it’s not a difficult question to them. It’s no big deal. No big deal. They already already told the call center that they’re gonna meet that both parties are gonna be there. Of course I expect them to be there. And then other people. Oh no I can’t ask that. Right And so anyway just a short example but that is all across the spectrum in every position. Now you go put one of those people in your accounting office and ask them, ask them to act like a metronome, metronome week after week after week they’re gonna they’re gonna slit the wrist so to say right, you know what I mean? And so that’s it’s transformational. So that’s if you want to become a great leader and build a team, learning and implementing a personality profile system throughout your hiring and and management leadership, all of that, all your processes that has to be part of your company. Yeah, I love, you know, I run a marketing agency, we do sales and marketing and a couple of things you just said, they’re getting me really fired up, you know, you you name them something different. I think that that’s super important. You know, project consultants they’re going and they’re learning the needs and they’re making sure you guys are the right fit for their needs, they’re not going to force and paint down people’s throats and saying, you know, here here’s the price, take it or leave it walk out the door. I did my job. You know, hopefully they hopefully they choose us, hopefully the boss made us look good enough that, you know, it’s not really my problem. Uh And then this third party thing that was kind of a cool mental little mental hack like, oh hey, well, you know, kind of push, I’m not asking you to do this third party thing. This checklist is actually, well actually this is how it’s supposed to go. You know that’s a little bit right. It’s the paper’s fault. Like this is what the paper tells us. We must do. Exactly yeah. Um I want to kind of dive into into a little more depth going back to the three stages that you talked about. I think it’s so interesting. And one of the things that I always try to try to kind of drill into on this podcast is super actionable items and I think you’ve given us a lot of super actionable items with this personality personality profiling and how you kind of build out the orC chart that way. But let’s sort of walk through the steps because you said you didn’t have a background in leadership. You may, I’m not sure whether you have a background in sales and marketing before, but for somebody who is in phase one there, a painting contractor, maybe they don’t have a background in sales and marketing, Maybe they don’t have a background really in, in leadership and people development, how do they move from 1 to 2? How do they move from 2 to 3? Okay, that’s great. So the first thing is you have to take responsibility as an owner. All progress starts with facing the truth and you need to realize, look this is on me, if this is going to improve, its on me and I need to work smarter, not harder. You know, we say that all the time and then you know what we end up doing, we go work harder or try to work all weekend, that’s the smarter way to do it. Yeah exactly. So the only way to, to work smarter is to get smarter and the only way to get smarter is to read books and oh guess what attend seminars like the pc a pc expo experts. Okay right and and those thing and you and you know read books, listen to audible, go to seminars, connect with people and and you start your oh and that’s a great one absolutely and so you know and you begin to get exposed to new ideas like oh I never thought about that way, oh my gosh why didn’t I hear this before ah ha those things and and and you can take those back, I call, I call those golden nuggets and you know you end up like you mentioned earlier, you end up, you come to, you take pages of notes and get information overload at these events and so one of one of the things that I always do is on, when I go back to the airport to go home, I start boiling it all down. This is what I need to, this is what I got to go back and do when I get home. The other stuff it’s in my notes for later, I’ve earmarked it, I’ve tagged out of whatever I can find it, but this is what I need to act on because this is gonna move the needle for my team for my time, money and freedom for my stakeholders, which are my family and my employees and even my customers, so you boil so you actually have a process because I struggle with this, you know, I I go to these seminars and try to the self development and and then it is kind of try to chase everything and you end up accomplishing nothing. What’s your process like that? You, you sift through the notes, Do you, do you set any kind of time constraint on yourself? Do you say I’m gonna choose three things or one thing or how does that work? I try to limit it to three max, I mean when you get a good idea, sometimes those good ideas are are very easy to do, but sometimes it impacts changes on the whole team and you know, one of the things as, as you, as you start getting excited and you, you start getting value from these podcasts and events and all that stuff, you get excited as a leader, especially when you’ve got people in place and you start making little elbow room in your schedule, you’re not constantly doing the thing okay? And you can begin working on your business and not in your business now you get excited and you go back home and you take off sprinting and your people can’t keep up and you get too far in the distance to them, I’ve made this mistake, you’re excited. You run so far off. They’re like, dude, we’re just trying to, we’re just trying to get through the day. Come on, Jason. So a lot of ideas, I don’t even introduce them as much as it pains me. I know it’s a great idea, but the time is not right for my team. They’re not ready to act upon it or to even think about it. So I just, I put in my file sometimes I’ll put a reminder date for a month, six months a year down the road, you know, come back on my radar and I’ll say, is this the time right now? Maybe it is. Yeah. And so you have to, you have to gain a patience in implementing things because your people just can’t move as fast as you can because they are doing the thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you you um you’re very cognizant of your people. You know, when you, you’ve said a couple of things that have really stood out to me that the one obviously when the one of your employees, it sounds like it was a good employee had what was supposedly a higher paying job offer and you actually encourage their employee to go take it. How many people, you know how many, how many bosses period, how many painting company owners would really do that, That would be that’s a hard thing to do. It’s really hard. But man, if I care about him, I don’t wanna hold him back and I literally could not pay him what they were, what they were promising him. I don’t want to hold him and his family back. I care about these people. Yeah. And then he comes back and, and ultimately is more loyal, other employees, other other people who interact with you vendors, anybody who interact with you who sees that kind of character and how you treat people like you said, trust now they trust that you are going to take care of them that you are. So it’s not always just about the one employee, it’s about the other employees who are watching what you’re doing. Like you said with the diluting the paint, maybe the customer doesn’t know, but people are watching you and now you have an integrity issue. They don’t trust you. If you’re gonna not take care of the customer odds are you really are going to take care of them either. Absolutely. At the end of the day, it’s dog eat dog? It’s me versus we now, you know, the flip side, the flip side of this is when, when you, uh, have a toxic employee, can we talk about that for a second please? Okay. It’s very common for a company to have a top performer that is Prima donna. Okay, a toxic employee. And, and you feel like you can’t, you’ve tried and tried to get them to, to be a good team player, but they don’t care. They know better. They demand more time, more money and you’ve got all kinds of people trying to, you know, make up for all their shortcomings and, and you know, hey, sometimes you, when, when someone’s really good at something, you carve things off their plate and you and you let them do what they’re really good at. I’m talking about the attitude. I’m talking about the attitude and, and when you, I see, I’ve seen this in myself and I’ve seen this in far too many business owners. We tolerate toxic employees because who’s gonna replace their revenue or who’s going to do their job or gosh, that means I’m going back into contractor prison because I’m gonna have to do their job. But guess what? That’s a cancer that’s growing in your company. You’re already in contract or prison right now with that and it’s, it’s tough to limit to eliminate a toxic employee. Again, of course, you always want to try to rescue the situation, but sometimes it’s gone too far or they don’t, they just will never come around, right. Maybe you, maybe you were not a good leader when you hired them. Okay, fine and you maybe you’re responsible for that situation probably you are. And as a leader regardless, You should take more than your share of the responsibility, but they’re too slow and it’s not just about the headache that they personally endure and dealing with this toxic employee, it’s their team, Their team is doing things to try to keep keep the ball rolling and keep the customer happy when this other person isn’t doing their part. And guess what? A players don’t, don’t wanna don’t wanna be around that. And when when when a when an engaged excited employee sees mediocrity or worse toxicity tolerated on your team, they’re demoralized. They’re gonna, their their performance is gonna go down and then they’re just gonna leave and you’re gonna lose them. You cannot tolerate a toxic culture, toxic person on your team. So some people need to, I mean, I hate to say this. I value people, but you got to fire someone sometimes and and we tend to, we tend to care about this one. Oh well they have a family. Yes, they do. And they should be having a better attitude. I can’t take more responsibility for their family than they take. And guess what? I’ve got all these other stakeholders and that’s injuring them. My job is to protect all of them and not just this one person. If you can’t get better, you gotta go, do you have any sort of a system for when someone does seem like they’re becoming a toxic employee. Any kind of a probationary period or anything that you run them through or do you sit down and have a talk with them or what do you do? Okay, so basically, um yeah, my leaders at work handle all that and uh first of all, we have weekly uh meetings with everybody in their reports, have weekly one on one is just a short one on ones. And uh then uh if if it really gets to the point where there needs to be disciplinary action, we have a we have a formal process for that, you know, verbal documented written. We have, you know, Class A and Class B. Infractions, things like that, and you hate to deal with that when I said people are the best and the worst part of doing that. That that’s it. But but it all comes down to me, if did I maybe did I hire the wrong person? Maybe I did. Did did I fail to train them, right? Did I fail to set the right expectations? Did I fail to empower them and give them the tools that they need? Did I allow their frustration to build? Because I’m terrible at communicating with them? I mean, if you look at 10 reasons why something fails in hiring an employee, probably nine of them are are the manager leader’s fault, not the employee’s fault. Yeah. The there’s been a lot of talk at this expo that if you have business problems, you have personal problems and ultimately it’s a reflection of you as a leader and who you are and one of the great things that I’ve enjoyed interacting with with everyone who’s here is this idea of extreme accountability you don’t hear like, well, if I had this or well this person know it’s your, if you own the company, I don’t care how outside of your control it, it could be a snowstorm came if it doesn’t matter, it’s your fault. That’s, that’s how I think the most successful entrepreneurs that I’ve ever interacted with, they own everything. And that’s a hard thing to do and that’s why you’re doing. When you go interact and review your 20 dissatisfied customer who wants to do that, who wants to go visit what are essentially failures. I go stare them in the face and then you found out a super important trend. You know, they’re almost, almost all of them had only one party there, but that’s an uncomfortable thing to do. Most people again, you hire people that you don’t always gel with perfectly because they’re very different from you. So there’s natural friction, hard thing to do. They probably don’t just tell you how great you are all day every day. You’ve built such a great conversation. You’re so smart. You know, they’re probably gonna say Jason that was, that was dumb, You shouldn’t do that, right? And thank God for that. Yeah, so you have to, these people think differently than you, what do they say at the water cooler. You know, you know what I mean? You need to create a safe environment, an emotionally safe environment where your people can tell you the truth. Yeah. As a business owner, you really want the truth. You can’t fix something. That’s not the truth. And if you don’t create an emotionally safe environment where people can disagree with you and have healthy conflict, if you don’t have any conflict, healthy conflict going on, everybody’s just trying to pacify or they’re just trying to keep their department happy and their silos in your company. And you know, if you’re if you’re a small company right now listening to this, some of this may not seem relevant to you. But if you will commit now to to growing as a leader and growing your communication skills, uh then it’s going to help you build a better team. Then when you have a team um power that team with to work a system and do things in a systematic way and that way they’re not left trying to figure out how to reinvent the wheel constantly in their department. We call that freelancing when you don’t have a solid way of doing things, everybody just freelances, not because they don’t want to do it your way, but because you don’t have a way or your way is your the big thing, you have to realize in going from level one, phase one to phase two and phase one, your entire Crm business operating systems in your brain. It’s all right there and you can do it quick. you can do a quick, guess what to write it down and to train someone how to do it? It’s gonna take, take you five times as long, twice as much, or 10 times whatever it takes, significantly more effort to empower the next person than it does just take the tool from them and do it yourself. But guess what, when you, every time you’re doing the thing, you prolonging your stay in contractor prison and you’re also inhibiting the growth and opportunity of your people. Yeah, kind of this idea of, of sort of slowing down to speed up or almost kind of taking a step back and and accepting the fact that you’re going to slow down for a second, but ultimately you’re gonna leapfrog now. Absolutely, yes, yeah, I, like when you were talking about the phase is one of the things you mentioned was you really were focused on the mental aspect of it, you know, and I think entrepreneurship in general, that’s really important, but kind of, because you you just mentioned if you’re a smaller company right now, some of it might not seem relevant if you’re a small company, it’s all 100% relevant because if you’re listening to this, then odds are that you don’t always want to stay a really small company or you probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, So you should already in your mind if you’re in phase one, you should be in phase two, that should already be there. Right. Is this how you think about, is that kind of how you operate or what are you, what are your thoughts? So if if we can, if here’s here as business owners, we tend to fight the fires that are burning today. Yeah. We, what we really need to do is anticipate the fires that could happen tomorrow and go go prevent those fires. And there’s been times in my career when I’ve done that and then there’s been times in my career where I’m like, man, I should have done this 18 months ago. Yeah, 12 months ago, 24 months ago. And if I can, that’s why it’s important to learn from the guy who’s ahead of you. He’s been doing it longer. Maybe he’s been doing it less time. But for whatever reason he’s ahead of you doesn’t matter necessarily how long he’s been in business. If you can learn from that, that will save you time. You know, one of the, one of the first speakers talked about collapsing the amount of time in which you can make money Okay on day one. If you can shrink the learning by learning from someone else. But here’s, here’s the problem, most people that I find that are that, that start their businesses painters, their drivers, I can do it. I don’t need anybody. I can figure it out. I’ve got a lot of bravado. Okay? And, and that gets you launched. but it also locks you in contractor prison. So you have to change that mindset instead of I like to say I was constantly reinventing the wheel because gosh I could do it. You can do it doesn’t matter all the research you can yeah E. O. S all that stuff. It doesn’t matter. You you got it you better understand this right? And so and so when you when you and when I when I when I decided to do E. O. S. You know what I did? I signed up and I learned and I became an implementer and then I implemented on my own team. Okay. Not saying that was the right or wrong thing to do but that’s my mindset. I can do this and that in some ways that’s very good but sometimes you need to hire the expert. Sometimes you need to become the expert and sometimes you need to learn just just enough so you can hire the expert and spot the fakers. You just want to come in and take your money. I think that’s yeah I think that’s important. You get burned. If you just try to pass it off you going back to that responsibility. Extreme accountability. You can’t be ignorant. I don’t think you can be extremely ignorant of any aspect of your business. I think you need to be a jack of all trades and a master of a select few. Absolutely yes that’s a great way to say that. Yeah, thanks Jason from you. I’ll take it man. I appreciate that. Yeah. Um so I wanna, I wanna go again. I’ve not done this. So I’m really curious about this that the personality profile systems using disk. If if someone’s listening and they’re like man, yeah, that that makes a lot of sense or you know, have people actually enrolls that they’re naturally driven, you know that that actually naturally resonate with them. How do they, how do they implement it? You know, let’s say they go take the test. What do you actually do in terms of hiring? Well you only hire people who who fit certain personality profiles as your accounting or as your as your marketing or as your sales or as your painters. And does it after you hire them. Does it does it affect promotions or how do you do it? So first of all you can’t, you you can’t legally use this to exclude someone from a position. Okay, so um, but you can be honest with people, hey, people with this profile typically succeed in this position at my company over here, not in this one. You take the time to explain that to them. They might, yeah, I really don’t want this job now after talking to you. I mean we care about our applicants. The people we don’t hire jennifer actually spends time uh helping them understand it. So that if this, if this isn’t the right fit for them, that they can help, you know, she can make them better just by interacting with her for a few moments. She deeply cares about people. And so the here’s the place to start with disc. Get one, Take it yourself, read it thoroughly, read it, read it again tomorrow, read it again in three days, read it again in 15 days and 30 days. Do space repetition and begin to digest it and learn it, have your spouse do it and then have all your employees do it and make sure they read it. And then, and then comparing them. Let me tell you what I did at the time. Um Revenue wise, when I did this, my company was almost twice the size it is now revenue wise. And that’s phase four, which we’ll talk about another time. Okay, Alright, by choice. Phase four by choice. Okay. So I gave everybody on my team this profile And at the time I had 18 sales reps and I compared their graphs. If you’ve ever seen a disk. It’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a column chart bar chart with four, right? For those of you who, who, who can’t just listening right now. Um And I began to just without looking at the name on them, I began to put them in piles according to what looks similar. Okay. And I looked through this one stack over here. I’m like, oh man, those are all my sales guys that closed the deals and but they can’t get the details right this stack over here. These are the guys that they’re closing rate is horrible. But their job profitability is awesome and their customers love them. And at that time my sales people also ran the projects and it became very clear these people over here need to be my project managers and these people over here need to be my sales people. And so I created to specialist roles, salespeople, project consultants and project managers completely separate roles. And that coupled with that I put in a selling system at the same time I raised my prices 20% raise my closing rate. 20%. Okay. Raised my rate. You know, over the next couple of years our customer satisfaction went through the roof. My team. My team earned the uh uh torch award for ethics in business by the Better Business Bureau, the Dallas Business Journal. And got awarded for the top 100 customer satisfaction leader in the nation and all because of starting to place priority on values and putting people in the right seats. And and it’s just, it’s, it’s an amazing thing. And that cake starts to rise. It’s just amazing. And I am in the people business, the people development business. And when you’re young and small, you just think about pleasing that customer. You’re thinking about doing the thing and I’m not saying you gotta think to where I’m at? But you just need to think a couple steps of where you’re at currently? That’s all you gotta do before thinking we had tim Perriman Perriman painting and remodeling. Oh, he’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, he was very much, he said he’s in the people business and he happens to paint very similar philosophy uh, to what you have here. So you, you know, one of the things um, that you, you had kind of spoken about was, you know, obviously hiring people, um, using this profile, you just kind of walk through how you do that. And you talked about a struggle that I think pretty much every painting company has or at least has at some point, which is this idea of a revolving door people come in, you know, maybe teach them then they leave, come in, leave and you focused on the well being of your employees quite a bit even to the point and I have, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually heard anyone say this to the point that when you, when you give someone an atta boy or an affirmation or you won’t tell them they did a great job. You actually care about how you’re delivering right for, for a lot of people that’s a win, just to even do it, just to even pay attention enough to, to tell every single member of your team, like, hey, great job. Do you think that is why you have loyalty? Do you think it’s that level of connection, that ability to show that you care or is there, is there more that you would offer in terms of employee retention? You know, I wish I was better at showing that I care. But my empathy is very low. No, I mean that like, like when I did, if you’ve ever done the strength finder, there’s like your top 35, number 33 is empathy for me and my wife looked at it and she’s like, Oh, I just thought you were a jerk. I didn’t know that’s the way God made you. But her empathy is like # one or 2 on hers. And so when I see her acting empathetic, it raises, it raises mine. I’m more empathetic when she’s around because I see it, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t notice there’s a difference and it’s not on my radar and once it’s on my radar, heck yeah, I care man. I care about people deeply, but, but why do I have a loyal team, um, when they’re great people, but two, I work hard to earn their trust and it’s not about me, But, but look, if they, if they don’t see something, they want to, they want to be a part of in the future and, and someone that they feel they can trust, act in their best interest, They’re gonna go and I’m very thankful for them and I have a, I mean I’ve got a I’ve got a duty, there’s I’m not I mean everybody’s tempted to you know, to cut a corner or something like that. And sometimes sometimes I make a decision that cost me a lot of money. But if I make that decision, not only can I not sleep at night? If I make the wrong decision, not only can I not sleep at night, but now I’m not who those people need me to be, I’m not gonna let them down. Yeah, trust that integrity. You know the right if you think about the right people that you wanted your company, those people going to value things like that, you know, they’re not they’re just for a buck. Those people you really don’t want to your company anyways. So I wanna, I wanna wrap up here, it’s been about an hour. But I do want to ask you as kind of wanna kind of as one of the premier thought leaders really in this industry. You um a lot of people look up to you, do you see this industry changing? How do you see it changing in the next 5 to 10 years, what can we expect in terms of evolution of painting, we’ll paint technology is going to continue to change but uh you know, it’s not gonna change human behavior of course, you know, rather than flipping the newspaper now we’re scrolling the feed, okay, maybe the attention span is shrunk down more through through everything, but the again I’m speaking towards residential painting, you know, people need someone they can trust to to come and give them peace of mind and take care of their home. And of course, you know, automation is a big key that’s gonna empower people companies to get more done more efficiently, more effectively, but it’s not going to replace that human touch and hey, during covid, you know, zoom, everybody was doing remote presentations and there’s, there’s some people that still are going to prefer to do a remote, get a remote quote price, right? And guess what? We’ve now got that quiver in our arrow, we can now help those people. But what what’s not gonna happen is we’re not just gonna all of a sudden go remote and everything is remote selling. Now I don’t see that happening. It’s the same thing like, you know, some people are loving working remotely at home, but then you’ve got the other people like, no, I hated working at home. I want to be back with my team. Right? Again, it’s what do they want, what do they need internally? And so when we can, now we now have another tool, we can serve people that don’t want to meet with us face to face. I don’t want to take the time we can help them and at least get our foot in the door with, with some, with some software so to say and so, but I see, I see this industry, here’s what I want to see and what I think is happening, I see the sin energy happening. A lot of the young bloods coming in. I’ve always been very technologically advanced and and all of us and probably ahead of most of my peers. But I’ve got these young guys that start off with zap ear and automation and all of that digital automation. I see that coming along other industries, you go like in the roofing industry and the and the and the window industry, those guys are way further ahead in their, in their, in their systems than the painting industry. And I see that changing in this industry and I want to see the painting industry catch up. Yeah. So yeah, don’t embrace the technology changes. If you don’t know it, learn it. Find someone who knows it. Don’t don’t fight it because that is the path that this industry is going. And if you have any doubts, go look at plumbing, look at roofing, look at H Vac, look at where they are, that painting will get there. So you can either kind of get on that boat and take advantage of it or you get left behind. I think absolutely. I mean, it’s like Tiktok. Okay, Should you spend any time on Tiktok? I mean, you’re gonna get your leads from Tiktok, I don’t know. Ask roofers helper. He’s got like a well over a million followers content everywhere. I don’t have that. But if you’ve got a little, if you got a little bandwidth, so some seed there right now it’s the kids. But guess what? The parents are following its aging up. It’s gonna happen. They say that this is the year and we, we see it happening our, our, our, you know, our demographic is primarily on facebook right now. Okay. But where, where is the demographic gonna be in five years? Are you still gonna be on facebook or is it gonna go the way of my space? Right. What’s gonna happen in five years? Well, I want to be there, I already want to be established there in that space before my, before my target audience is there? Right. Yeah. I think that’s a great point. And, and one more, you know, you talked about self development. One more just kind of plug for the P. C. A. But and the expo, I do believe it. We have, uh, one of our clients of painter marketing pros. I think it’s starting a roofing division or separate company. And he told me he actually went to lunch with you and, and you shared all this stuff with him and uh, evangelista. And, and the fact that, that he, he has a successful business, but not anywhere near the revenue that you’re at, not as long as you’re at and it’s just new to roof and the fact that he can go to lunch with you and and just pick your brain. I mean, come to these events, people take advantage of people like Jason phillips, take advantage of of all these thought leaders who have all this experience, who you can sit down and have lunch with and talk to them for an hour. It’s unbelievable. Absolutely know what he’s gonna get to do, he’s gonna get to do it better than me because I had to untangle a mess and he’s and he’s getting to straighten his lines out as he before he, before he goes down the road, pay fewer stupid taxes. I pay some stupid tax. Yeah. So for anyone listening who wants to reach out to you, I know you are a guest on many podcasts. I know you you’re passionate about people helping people. How can they reach out to you? I’m pretty much on every social media platform, but the simplest way is just go to my website, my personal website, it’s Jason w phillips dot com. Have a little subscribe button there. Uh and if you give me your name and email, I’ll connect up with you and send you some information and send you all my social media links, awesome. Well Jason, thank you so much. This was amazing. Thank you for being a guest on the show man. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure if you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this podcast and how you can use them to grow your painting business, visit painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast for free training, as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again that you are l is painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast. Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button, give us your feedback, let us know how we did. And also, if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at Painter marketing pros dot com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business until next time. Keep growing.