Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over $1 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.

Guys, you were here, you were tuned in for the profitable painters winter work formula, and we’re gonna talk about how you can make this your best winter ever. Uh, this is not uh platitudes, these are not guesses. I have been doing this over a decade. I’ve seen these strategies absolutely work. I’m gonna give you a brief overview of what I’m gonna be covering later on in the program. I’m gonna hand it off to the capable Mr. Brandon Pierpont, and he’s going to introduce himself here momentarily. So the things that I’m gonna cover.

Uh, are making sure that you’re clear on your goals for the winter, critical timing, pricing your services correctly for the winter months, managing crews wisely, closing leads profitably, tapping into your most reliable resources for winter work, operational marketing and ramping up B2B efforts and also targeting commercial work. And so I’ve got a lot to cover in a short period of time, uh, you know, we originally slated this thing for an hour and a half, um, so we may run a little bit over, but I’m gonna try to be as concise as I can.

And I would like to bring up here my good friend, uh, with the best name ever, Mr. Brandon Pierrepont. Brandon, take it away, buddy. You’re not biased at all, right? Uh, yeah, I like the name Brandon too. So, uh, nice to meet you guys, really excited to run this, run this webinar with Brandon, uh, founder of Painter Marketing Pro has been heavily involved in marketing for painting contractors for half a decade. Uh, a little over half a decade I’ve been doing that, so not quite as long as Brandon, but in the space, uh, for a minute, and then heavily involved with the PCA Paty Contractors Association, serve a lot on a lot of their committees.

We’ve, uh, painter Marin Pros actually has, has been a marketing agency for the PCA directly. I don’t know of any other agencies that they’ve hired, uh, so that’s pretty neat. Uh, bestselling author. I’ve written two books, one of which was the number one Amazon bestseller, uh, run a podcast called Paint Mary Mastermind podcast, and then proudly served in the Florida Army National Guard. Very excited for this webinar. Awesome buddy we’re glad to have you here. So who’s a little short guy? Uh, my name is Brandon Lewis.

I grew up in Arab, Alabama, uh, dirt poor. My father, you know, couldn’t read or write. I had clubfoot facial deformities. I often tell people, uh, you can take the boy out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the boy. And so if I ever sound a little bit like a rednecked is because I am. And uh friends make a big difference to me. Relationships are very important if you look on this uh screen, um, I’ve just got been so blessed my entire life, uh, with great friends, um, and a and a wonderful legacy of 212 years of helping painting contractors achieve greater success.

I’m a Christian. Uh, that is a picture of me and my beautiful daughter, uh, being baptized. I think it’s probably the most important thing you can do in your life as a father, uh, some of my fraternity brothers of all ages, uh, and then like many of you, uh, who want to realize the American dream, uh, a picture of the house I built out in the woods, most of you are striving toward some sort of. Goal in your life, in your career, painting, uh, for some of you it it it’s getting a place that everyone can call home and staying there for some of you it’s making a mark on your community like what I do with the Tennessee conservative news.

Uh, but I show all this to you just to remind you that um there’s an end to this stuff, right? The reason we work so hard is for the people that we support and help and the relationships we build and at the end of our lives that’s what we really value most. So if you would look at your painting company as an opportunity to make that stuff happen, that would be. Great. On the professional side, I’ve worked with 224 painters in 27 different countries over the last decade, uh, and I built and sold my own large painting business, uh, and started in 29 and sold it when the economy was still soft.

So I’ve been through this stuff before and I have seen it done, uh, just about everywhere. So the first thing I’m gonna get into guys. He’s talking about properly staging for a profitable winner, uh, profitably staging, that means getting everything ready so that if and when you go get work, you find work in the winter, you can actually make something of it. So the first thing I would ask you very simply is, are you clear on your goals? Just being busy is a poor man’s goal. You will hear painters say this all the time.

Oh, I just want to be busy this winter. Well, that is a poor man’s goal. If you ask most painters at the end of the day, go to the paint store about 25:27, 100:27. Ask, ask the painters that show up bedraggled if they’ve been busy, and they’ll say yes. But that does not mean that they are wealthy. It does not mean that their day to day life is where they want it to be. So it is very important when you set goals to really have specific goals. So here’s some that I would like for y’all to keep in mind for the rest of this training you want to have higher monthly income.

For a lot of you, you spend, you know, months and months building teams and then you have to dip into savings during the winter you want profitable jobs, you want interior work for many of you that are in climates that you simply can’t paint in the winter. High productivity, and most of you have noticed probably over the years that productivity goes down in the winter. High close rates, uh, if you’ve got fewer estimates coming in. You’ve absolutely got to close more of them as a percentage and then some predictability about what’s gonna happen this winter.

So here’s a key concept. I’m gonna sprinkle these throughout this presentation. Desired outcomes dictate and prohibit certain methods and actions. I was on the phone the other day with the guy. And I looked at his business and he’s making about 213/250 of what he should. And I talked about all the different business systems that we offer at the painter’s academy and how he’s gonna probably have to set aside about 250 hours a week to actually work on this stuff and his big objection at the end of that call is that that sounded like a lot of work.

Well, when you want to achieve a certain level of excellence you have to do things differently and once you set a goal of excellence there are certain ways that you can that you must do things and there’s certain things that you’re doing presently that you have to abandon and so to reach these goals, once you set a goal for yourself to be busy this winter, the the action you probably can’t take is to do it like you’ve done it every other winter. If you’re not happy with the results that that’s the only reason I can think of why y’all would be on this call.

So let’s talk about timing and time management. Most painting contractors that I work with, this is the very first thing I have to help them with. Every passing day, starting today, really starting months ago, every passing day your marketing and sales efforts heading into the winter produce a diminished result. What do I mean by that? If you look at the curve of leads that come in nationally and I’ve seen the numbers in national painting franchises, lead services, etc. Right now we’re we’re on a downhill slide toward the lowest ebb of demand, which is December, January and February.

And so if you drag your feet on the stuff that I’m gonna talk to you about today and you decide to do it two months from now, you will get a lower yield. So implementing this stuff as quickly as you can is important. If you want to be doing winter work, you don’t need to go start looking for work in the winter because there’s this thing called a sales cycle, and there there’s a length to it, right? And you do not want the sales cycle, you don’t want to start in December and if y’all probably been there before, you start in December and you start getting out there and actually hustling for a change.

And then you close a bunch of work and guess what, it doesn’t start till March. Well, guess what? That’s that not, that’s not helpful because you’re gonna be busy in March and then you must dedicate at least 250 hours a week to implement these strategies that I’m gonna recommend. You’ve got to be able to master your calendar. Uh, the owner’s time spent doing specific things that make huge differences in the business is the number one and initial catalyst for business improvement. It must be done. It cannot be ignored.

It can’t be shortcutted. It’s got to be done. Here’s another key concept about winter. I want you to keep in mind winter simply reveals and magnifies existing company weaknesses. That’s all winter does. Uh, if you take a little rickety boat out into an uncertain sea, it will sink even if it had floated on calm seas its entire existence. And so winter comes along and, and you think, well, my business is really good, it’s just winter. I’m here to tell you that most high functioning businesses, yes, they have a reduction in revenue in the winter, but they are not struggling.

The owners are still making money. They’re keeping almost all of their painters busy. And so if, if you have struggled in the winter months, like things are just absolutely terrible, what that tells me is it’s likely that many of the things that you’re doing in the other parts of the year are really the ones, the things that are making this come to fruition. So let’s talk about pricing your winter work profitably. Another thing that I work with on folks, and this is so important during the winter, is making sure that you can accurately estimate your projects using production rates.

Guessing does not work. Many of you are guessing numbers, trying to hold your uh crews accountable to a guest, trying to hold subcontractors accountable to a guest. You’re paying people by the hour, you’re charging by the square foot, you’re trading yen in rubles, but you don’t know what the exchange rate is. Uh, production rates are the only way that painting franchises can take someone with a zero painting experience and make them more accurate than somebody with decades of experience in 2150 weeks or less. Because it’s all about measurement, it’s predictable, it’s been proven, it’s been tested and the other end of that is daily job costing.

If you buy labor for a living wholesale and you sell at retail, you absolutely positively must know exactly how many labor hours are coming in, how many are going out, what people have paid for, uh, what you’ve sold them for, uh, you cannot avoid this, you cannot avoid this, so this is really important that you try to hit this target of 2250% gross profits. And that is if if a job is $225,20 in revenue, $100 of that should be left over for you before overhead, which means when you take away your labor, your materials, and your direct labor burden, that you’ve got 299.99% left over.

If you’re going into the winter, as many painters do, when I look at their numbers, at 215, 280, 2140% gross profits, it is going to be very difficult for you. Here’s the next key concept. When there are less inputs, meaning there are fewer leads, there must be uh more management of the outputs. Think about it. If you knew that you and your family were going to have to make it over the next 2140 months with 23 months’ worth of food. What would you do? Would you eat the exact same way you’d always eaten?

Would you not take any inventory of what you had? Probably not. You’d be like we’ve never had to go through this before. Let’s take a look at what we’ve got in the pantry. Let’s divide it up by days. Let’s figure out what’s here so that we can make sure that we can ration out enough to make it through 22 months. And so when you’ve got fewer jobs to process in the winter, it’s critically important if you want to protect your income that you manage those in a different way.

And here are the four fundamentals for managing crews wisely in the winter. Very important. Number one is you’ve got to have a written scope of work and you’ve got to have tools that your crew leader can use to manage the job, the job properly, and that includes giving them, um, goals on labor budgets, material budgets. You absolutely have to do that. Uh, further, you’ve got to pay them, uh, based on performance. I’m gonna open up the screen just a little bit here, wave your hand at the screen if you’re just paying your people by the hour with no incentives whatsoever, like they’re just getting paid by the hour.

That’s a lot of hands. It’s a problem because when you pay people by the hour exclusively their profit motive and your profit motives have nothing to do with each other. The profit motive it it is really just how many hours can I mark your profit motive is, is there going to be enough money left over at the end of this project for me to make make money off of it so you’ve got to align your goals with the goals of the clients it’s very important. Second thing that I’m gonna tell you about is that you have to make sure that you’ve got project management and scheduling.

That matters. And this is as simple as knowing how many labor hours you’ve sold, what your capacity is, um, having a project checklist that you can hand off to anyone in your company so that they can specifically do the projects the same way every time and when you sit down and look at the paperwork or the digital file you know exactly where the projects are, uh, you can’t hand something over to one of your staff members if you don’t already have a system in place and then finally.

You need to be having weekly crew meetings during the winter. If you do not stay on top of your crews during the winter, they will cannibalize your work, they’ll run through it or they’ll drag their feet because they’re worried where the next job is gonna come from. You have to, uh, give your guys the scoreboard in the meetings. If you don’t give them a scoreboard, how can they know if they’re winning the game? And that is you need to be talking about labor hour budgets, customer satisfaction scores, processes and procedures.

And then make sure uh that the culture of your company is good and that they’re not lying, cheating, stealing uh and that they’re all pulling in the same direction so that you can create this performance culture and going back to performance pay, it’s so important to do that in these meetings so that folks can see that when you are productive at this company, you’re gonna make a lot more money in the winter and then those who aren’t productive are gonna have to sit at home until the spring.

Because you can’t have unproductive painters, uh, chewing through your work irresponsibly during the winter. uh, it’s unfair to you as the owner, it’s unfair to the other painters. Here’s another key concept, stop looking for the easy button. There isn’t one. A lot of you probably came on this webinar and you’re like, gosh, I just, I just need some little trick that’s gonna fix all this stuff. I need, I need some little, can I swap a credit card and make this stuff all go away? And the answer is no.

Uh, if, if there was something that you could do that was that easy, that’s what I would be selling. I would not be trying to encourage and motivate painting contractors to change their behavior and their business practices because that’s, that’s a heavy lift, right? But, uh, if you want to achieve exceptional income and results, you have to do what the average painter would never consider doing. So let’s talk about your sales process, guys. I’m gonna ask if this sounds familiar. I’m gonna kind of describe for you quickly the typical sales process.

You tell me if yours is similar. The phone rings. You’re at the office. Or maybe you’re in the field or on the ladder or in the bathroom or whatever you happen to be doing. And you get on the phone with somebody and it’s Mrs. Johnson, you go, yes, Ms. Johnson, when do you need this done? And you said Tuesday at 22 o’clock is a good day. You show up, um, you pet the dog, you talk about the bowling trophies on the wall, and how long have you lived here and all those are beautiful flowers, etc.

And then at some point that gets awkward, in which case you say show me what you got, you walk around, you pull a number out of the air, right? Just kind of like a, like a psychic or an astrologer, we just pull a number out of the air based on experience. And then we say, hey, Mrs. Jones, I’m gonna email you an estimate. I’ll be in touch in a couple of days. You go back, you email a PDF. Um, and then maybe you follow up a few times and after, after about two weeks you quit.

That is a sales process that does not work in this industry you’re selling something that is remarkably expensive. It’s the it’s the cost of a middle class divorce. It’s the cost of cosmetic surgery. It’s expensive and you’re selling it from an industry that has very low levels of trust, very low levels, uh, 250-223% of home service people that come out to even my home, and I screened better than most, will promise A and deliver A level work. They’re all gonna promise A level work and most of them deliver like.

D + C+ work. And so when you show up with verbal promises in a PDF, they just don’t believe you, not because you’re not trustworthy, not because you’re not honest, but because They have lived through the experience of being disappointed with so much consistency they’re nodding their head but they’re not believing what you’re saying so you’ve got to do things differently so how persuasive. Is your sales process? Is it just a pricing process, meaning you’re just your whole job there is just to give them a price? Well, that’s not persuasion.

And so you’ve got to think like the client what are they worried? What are they uh um thinking about what have they lived through and we have a power paint presentation process in our program, but you can model it uh where we answer the phone a specific way we send information about how the painter’s processes and product knowledge are different in advance of arrival through multiple mediums. Gifting the client, having a photo identification lanyard, sitting them down for an overview and future pacing what’s gonna happen, asking questions on a written diagnostic, actually taking production rate measurements, even if you are guessing still guys at least measure the room for looks.

I mean, even if your tape measure doesn’t have any numbers on it, just, just put it out there, right? Just to pretend like you’re measuring something because if somebody else does and you don’t, it looks bad. Then we’re gonna leave them with a bunch of social proof, things that we know based upon experienced and and and surveys that people that purchase professional painting services actually care about background checks, warranty certificates, guarantee certificates, tons of social proof, uh, licenses, insurance, information about you as the owner, profiles of your crew leaders, pictures of the team.

People want to know who’s coming into their home. They’ve got teenage daughters, grandkids there. They’ve got, uh, you know, uh family heirlooms, maybe some money under the bed. They don’t, they want to know somebody coming into my house during the winter to do this interior work that I can trust, and if you can’t demonstrate to them that they can trust you, they likely won’t. So you gotta have processes and proof and you’ve got to follow up in a way. That lasts through the sales cycle, guys, when you’ve got fewer leads coming in the winter.

You cannot continue what to do this email a PDF pricing service uh system. You can’t, it does not work. Every time I see somebody change from the email a PDF to the do it on the spot and do it the way I recommend, I kid you not, 2100 points. It’s a big difference and if you’re gonna, you know, close what you’ve got during the winter, I mean there’s no point in doing all this marketing, especially what you know Mr. Pierpont’s gonna talk about here later and then have a crappy sales process that fails to convert them, OK?

You gotta make sure that the fault’s not on yours. Phase two guys, now what we have talked about up until this point are all the things you can do in your company to make sure that when you get a job and or get a lead rather or a job, uh, that you can make the most money out of it. That you can keep the most money from every project, that if you get a lead, you can close it at the optimal price. It’s very important, right? Your sales process controls your close rate, your average transaction size, and your maximum charge rate.

It’s a huge number. So let me ask you guys a question. Look at these doors here on the slide. Door number 2100, you can put, you can put $210,23 in it. And you’ll get a 210% return. Door number 23, you can put $210,215 in it, you’ll get a 245% return or door number 243, you can put a 215, you get 240% return, you put $237 in it. You’ve only got $21,23 to invest. Where do you put your money? It’s a very simple question. Where would you put your money? The answer is correctly as you put the 25st $29,212 in the 240% return and you put the 225003nd $21520 which is all you’ve got left in the 230% return and you put $250 in the 28% return.

So when you are doing any type of marketing in the winter, you have to ask yourself who is the most responsive audience? Who can I get for the largest transaction size at the lowest cost of sale first, and then you must work your way backwards. Now there is a point at which some of these methods that I’m gonna recommend like you will just run out of. Uh, yield, right, but there’s no more yield in this list, but you’ve got to go pick that low hanging fruit first.

So the first one is, it is tapping into the mind of past clients and unconverted estimates. I’ve been talking about this for a decade. It never gets old to me. I came from the publishing in the political world where the communication with the client list was the entire business. And here’s a few things just metrics for you to think about. The average American consumer right now is probably spending somewhere around $24 a year in repaint services. Repeat and uh uh repeat leads tend to close at about 215%, uh 210% versus net new leads 28% to 212% depending on where you get the the lead source and how good your sales process is.

Further, the average transaction size for a repeat client is 2500% larger than the first for a net new. It’s, it’s huge and the the acquisition cost tends to be about 215 to 22% of, of net new acquisition so you cannot possibly ignore the people who have paid your mortgage, your insurance, put food on the table for you the last 21, 42, 418 years in your painting business. And go chase stone cold strangers with your marketing dollars, you first must at least shore up your most sure investment, and that is the communication that you do, and there are two processes to do the same.

One of them is client reactivation, and that’s where you really ring the list for every lead possible in it and and for many of you who don’t communicate with your clients or do a very poor job of it or just use email, it’s reintroducing them to your business. You got to reintroduce them to your business, and that’s mail, email, phone, text, ringless voicemail. You’ve got to go after them because people forget who you are. Uh, raise your hand if you’re on this call. I love doing this.

This is a parlor trick. wave your hand at this call, if you’re on this call, let me get you opened up here. Hold on a second. So if I come to you. I want you to wave your hand at the screen, and I’m gonna pick somebody if you’ve got a child that is 4400 years old or younger. Suzanne, unmute yourself. I’m gonna ask you a question. Do you remember the name of the nurse that delivered your child? Yes, yes. What is it? Carson Carson, anybody else got a kid that’s 4000 years, 490 years old?

I don’t remember the other ones. That’s the only one I remember this. She remembers one, she remembers anybody else have got a kid that you can remember the name of the nurse? Anybody. No. I have, I have a 410 month old daughter and I have no idea who the nurse was. Yes, and occasionally people do, Chris. Yeah, I was, I delivered my child. OK, so you are the nurse. We had a home birth as well, yeah, so I guess I, you know, but we had a midwife there.

I wasn’t there, and, and neither were you, Chris. You’re just, you’re there for emotional support. Then they said catch the baby, but that midwife, I bet, did a lot of work. She did, she did. And so, you know, the, the funny thing is like when you don’t remember, and most people don’t, especially you get to be about 4303 or 4100 years. When you don’t remember the name of the service provider that brought your firstborn into the world, we think that painters, as painters, folks are gonna remember. They do not remember they they just can’t.

And so then there’s retention, that is newsletter marketing, and it is where every month you email and mail your entire client list. It costs very little money. It keeps everybody in touch with you. It, it’s very powerful and over time you will watch your repeat and referral work go up from 4567, 4100% to 2215% to 2232%. We’ve got members that are running, you know, 222 to $224 million businesses with repeat and referral rates in the 222500s. 225% repeat referral business. Imagine having 50% of your tickets close at 215% at 22800% larger and with very little marketing expense.

It’s just very powerful, powerful. So this is the first stop you’ve got to take as you go toward the winter. All right, key concept. You’ve got to build your business. I’d write this down. Some of you need to go to the tattoo parlor and have this put on your hind parts. This would really help you, I promise. You’ve got to build your business on the 220520nd transaction, meaning when you’re doing your marketing, when you’re servicing your clients, you say, you know what I’m building my business on the 210nd time I do work for this person and then you need to build it on the 2000st referral.

When you build your business on that 215nd transaction and the first referral, you don’t do this one night stand marketing, this catch and release marketing that most people do. You’re trying to build a relationship with people long term to be for them to to recommend you like enthusiastically. This is not a one night stand, this is a marriage people. You’ve got to get in there with your clients, they’ve paid you every dollar in your business, you’ve got to retain them. All right, best practices for operational marketing.

Some of you are gonna roll your eyes at this, but you’re crazy. I ask these questions every time I do a business diagnostic. Do you leave a yard sign in the yard? You’d be surprised how many people say no. Do you knock 2000 doors around and do door hangers, maybe try to introduce you to people. People say no. What percentage of folks do you get a review from at the end of the job? 2100%, 2000%, you can get 28003% and 216% if you do it on site and do it properly. And so when you do this type of stuff, and again we have guys that are very large, 2100 to $299 million and they’re, they’re monitoring their yard signs and their 40 door program and it’s like 15%.

Of their overall revenue, because if you just get a lead every other project from doing this, and if you close half of them, which is about how they close. You get half a job for every job you do. And that is what we call an operational tailwind. And so when you’re already in a neighborhood, whether it be commercial or residential, you cannot afford to fail to let people know about it and why should you put 3 yard signs up instead of 1. You’ll get more leads. We’ve had members try this, right?

You put it in the yard, put it at the entrance of the neighborhood, put it in the exit of the neighborhood. If you get X leads off the yard signs, and some of you know that you absolutely do because people call you I call off yard signs. I use my stonemason was a yard sign down the road. My handyman that I’ve hired here at Signal Mountain was a sign down the road in a neighbor’s yard. I buy from it. It it’s helpful, right? It shortens the the search, it makes it easy for people.

Well, if you get leads from one son, you’re gonna get twice as many from two. Best practices, guys, here’s a key concept. Executing every time you do a repetitive business task, meaning something you do over and over and over and over again. There is a best practice way to do it. And then there’s a crappy way to do it, or there’s a way not to do it at all. But when you do it using best practices, Your daily life gets so much easier. Yes, there’s sacrifice and pain putting that stuff in place and getting your guys to get in the habit of doing it or yourself, but you get these huge benefits and it’s more profitable.

So who doesn’t want to make more money and have less stress? I mean, I, I guess not as many people as you would think because they continue to do things the same old way and then they wonder why they get the same result. Ramping up uh relationship marketing with B2B referrals. I’ve got just a couple more slides here. Guys, there are people out there right now, realtors, interior decorators, plumbers, roofers, cabinet installers, flooring installers, most of you have somebody in that uh realm who are referring leads to you, but if I ask the average painter like do you have any kind of formalized process where you continuously communicate with these people and go see them maybe every once in a while in a systematic way?

And the answer is almost always no. No, we don’t, we don’t do that, we don’t have that, and so here’s here’s something to think about guys and really this is a key takeaway, this is a writer downer. When something good happens in your business. And you’re not doing anything to really make it happen. The question you should ask yourself is what can I do to make this happen more often and how what can I do to find more people to do this? I started an organization called the Chattanooga Trades Association in Chattanooga, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year back when we were charging $38 an hour per man hour.

I mean lots of money went in my back pocket off of just having trades folks. So here’s some of the things you can do to make this work better. Number one, run referral routes. Pick 205203 people you want to see every week, every other week, whatever you can budget in time. Go get some donuts, go get something to eat, go get anything nice and just go stop by the office. There are entire industries built off this pharmaceutical sales, snap on tools, manufacture sales reps, yet as painters, we don’t do it for commercial or residential surveys.

If you make a little survey and you give it to your clients every time you do an estimate that says, do you need any of these services over the next 60 days? And you put cabinet, uh, installation, flooring installation, roofing, plumbing. Here’s what I discovered 70% of people filled that out and they checked 2.1 boxes on average, which means that if I saw 20 estimates. I, I, I had 28 leads times 2. I mean, I was, we were passing out so many leads. You got to survey your guys because this stuff doesn’t happen on, on accident.

Go to these networking events for some of you you’ve got good BNIs and other things like that and then uh uh wave your hand at the screen if you’ve got a big pile of business cards somewhere. This is big poly yeah we’re all, I’m gonna do something with it one day. I’m gonna do something with it. You’d be better off burning it, most of you. But take that pile of business cards and freaking put them on a newsletter list and they will get hit 24 times a year.

12 in the mail, 12 in the email. And, and they will call you because you’re the only painter that has ever communicated with them their entire life. Do open field running guys, do what other people won’t do and you will get what other people won’t get, but that consistency of communication is important because of this reason. Every estimate request you’ve ever received in your entire life has been preceded by one thing and one thing only, communication. Communication, it’s a yard sign, it’s a van sign, it’s a referral, it’s word of mouth, it’s a, it’s an online ad, whatever it is.

And so the more communication you have going out to these high quality B103B referral people in person and at a distance and one to many. The more referrals you’ll have coming in, and in winter, it is often far better to focus on relationship marketing than almost anything else because you’re slower, they’re slower, and not only do you get work during the winter, when everything picks up in the spring, you’ve been working them for 3 or 4 months and now they’re coming after you hot and heavy. That’s a good thing to to have commercial repaints.

I’m wrapping up here. You need to to look online, Google, use the Google, right? and just type in commercial property managers with your city and state. There are meet the staff pages many of you are in great markets for this assisted living facility, private schools, plant managers go to an industrial park. I kid you not, if you just walk in the doors of these places and say, hey, uh. What is, what is the name of that guy? Oh, what’s his face? Who does the maintenance around here?

What is this? And they’ll, oh, you mean Earl Smith? Yeah, Earl Smith. It’s Earl Linn, hold on a minute. 50% of the time, 30% of the time they’ll come see you at the receptionist desk because they’re used to handling problems all day long and responding to them. They’re firefighters by trade. And, and if you can’t get them, at least now you got their name. Well, I, I gotta email him something. What do you have his email address? Can you look it up in the and I’m telling you, if you play dumb and show up at these places and if you go visit 20 places, you’ll end up with 12 names and you do that 5 or 6 times now you got a database of 15, you know, 0003, 60 people.

Uh, you need to run the same campaigns that we talked about and reactivation, come up with a cool offer, uh, you know, we have some a free painter for a day offer in one of our campaigns. Another one is to do a financial, uh, audit and review and budgeting review, and they really care about that toward the end of the year, these big facilities. And then there are organizations in your area like BOMA, Assisted Living Associations, private school associations. These people are getting together in groups and you can go physically be in front of them month after month.

You’re crazy not to get involved in these, but it is a marriage. It is not a one night stand, guys. So, If you have any questions about this, you can reach me here, but I’m gonna hand it over now to Mr. Brandon Pierpont. Uh, we talked about before we move on, just to summarize, you’ve got to make money on every project. You gotta make money on every project, means you got to manage your time wisely. You’ve got to use production rates, job costing, you’ve got to be on top of your crews with management mechanisms and systems that work.

We got to close every job. And then we’ve got to go find the lowest hanging fruit, and that is past clients and unconverted leads B2B referral and commercial. That is the cocktail that comes uh at this. I’ll close by saying this, there’s not one way to find 10 leads every week in the winter in most cases, but there are 10 ways to find one. And what you’ve got to do is diversify your approach. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna make Brandon the host here, and he’s gonna take it away.

Brandon, it’s all yours. Thank you so much, Brandon. Awesome, man. I appreciate it. Tough act to follow, as always, that was a ton of good advice. Uh, Brandon and I are very aligned on how we think about things, um, but we have good, uh, a good variance in terms of subject matter. So I think you guys are in for a treat. Let me share my Screen. All right, and then we will open it up to Q&A at the end, um. Also, So you guys will have that opportunity.

Q and A is my favorite part. I’m ready for the end. I’m ready for the end. Right? Yeah, that’s my favorite part too. Uh, my throat does a little better than that. All right. Oops, it’s not one you guys are supposed to see, I don’t think. It’s not a webinar, it’s not a tech issue. Oh, please. I can sing show tunes while we wait. I can even, I can hum the theme of Bonanza. I’ve got all kinds of things I can do here to keep people occupied.

I’m not opposed. I’m not opposed. All right. Uh You guys got this? Can you see my screen? Everybody just get a little sick. OK, cool. All right, so. Diving in here, I already introduced myself, a little bit about painter marketing pros, uh, just some stuff I’m proud of with the team. So we’re certified Google partners, uh, Facebook ads partners. We do have a relationship with Fresh coat Painters, work with a lot of their, their franchisees, um, and then we have a partnership with the Academy for Professional painting contractors with Brandon, uh, because we believe in his program, he believes in ours.

We are frequent. Contributors to In Paint magazine, As a pro section, and then I’m incredibly proud of the team that we were able to be awarded the 2024 PCA Industry Partner of the Year at this year’s Expo. That was a really big, really big deal. I’d say a highlight actually of the company, um, of the company’s lifespan. That was a big deal. Uh, so what we’ll cover, Brand went through a phenomenal 9, subjects there, we got 10 to 15. I was kind of nagging him. I’m usually very chill. I’m, I’m usually like the guy who’s too chill.

Uh, and I kept asking Brandon, like, how many do you have? Are you, are you numbering yours or not numbering yours? And he’s like, dude, nobody cares, relax. Um, so he, he didn’t number his and I numbered mine, so that’s why it’s weird, cause I’m weird, but that’s where we’re at. Uh, so we got 33 paid ads strategies to dominate. Uh, so paid ads, I want to get into what, what’s working and kind of simplify it in your mind, how to think about that. Uh, and then I want to tell you to reduce your reliance on it.

And that mean, that doesn’t mean don’t use it, means diversify, right? Some of the stuff Brandon talked about, uh, winning at Google Business profile, a special call out LSAs, local service ads, those little Google guaranteed ads, those are a big deal. Feeling ambitious, this is fun. So the feeling ambitious, this is something that I have not talked about ever. So if you guys have heard me present in person or online or anything, um, this is something that I’ve been kind of hesitant to talk about, just cause very few painting companies are gonna actually do it, um, but I, I wanna put it out there now.

And then additional marketing avenues, uh, number 153, I’m getting some cool stuff. So. There are some challenges happening right now. I know that that we’re seeing it, we’re definitely seeing it. Uh, I would imagine a lot of you are seeing it, uh, in the sense that the cost per lead is going up, and then people are just, they’re taking longer. You know, Brandon preaches that that people take a while to close, uh, I think something like the average, um, purchase would take like 45 days, 60 days, 75 days. They take a lot longer than than painters typically want them to take.

They think that they should go out, provide the estimate, if they haven’t closed that day, you know, it was a bust. Like, obviously that’s not not good thinking. Um, that’s being exacerbated now with, with all the uncertainty, and then to make matters, we’ll say, uh, more interesting, we’ll try to spin this positively. The average meta spend. Uh, in the US per month, they don’t meta actually doesn’t give this data, but, uh, the, the estimated average meta spend per month is $3.5 billion in the US, OK? And the projected political spend over a period of just a few months this year is $10 billion.

So 3 months. So essentially what is happening is the, the spend on meta is now doubling. For 3 months. Meta is not, if you think about their business model, you don’t log on to Facebook being like, I hope I see a ton of ads. That would be so cool. I wanna see what ads I get. I, I wanna see ads because I want to see that stuff, but very few people log on and want to see ads. Uh, so Meta can’t just say, hey, we got twice as many people advertising, twice as much money.

So we’re just gonna hammer at, you know, people are just gonna really just eat it, uh, because then they’re gonna, they’re gonna lose their eyeballs, which is what they make money on. If you’re, if you’re not paying for a service, by the way, if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product. So you’re using Facebook, you’re the product because you get marketed to. So Facebook’s whole goal is they need to make it a desirable platform, keep you on it, and in order to do that, uh, they need to not show way too many ads.

So what that means is now you have more ads. Competing for the same eyeballs, because whether you’re selling painting, whether you’re selling e-commerce, you guys know that the cost of of leads and and ads goes up, uh, in the, in the winter. I think everybody thinks, oh, cause the other painters are advertising that has basically nothing to do with it. It’s because you’re competing with e-commerce and everything else. You’re competing for the same eyeballs, the middle to upper class areas where you live. Right, and now these political ads, they’re competing for those people too, because they want the votes.

So now you have more dollars being thrown at the same people, uh, meaning it’s an uphill battle for you. So we have some numbers here, $10 billion political advertising, it’s, it’s essentially double what, what, what, what the spend was in 2020, which is mind boggling, uh, considering the election of 0003. And so they’re they’re estimating 2.8 billion for presidential election, 2.1% for Senate, and just on and on, but it adds up to, uh, adds up to $10 billion. And then September 15th through November 5th are gonna be challenging. So we, we’ve already seen some challenge.

I think the next month and a half we’re gonna continue to see that challenge, probably get exacerbated, which means you need to be doing the stuff that Brandon just talked about, right? You shouldn’t stop the ads. I’m gonna get into what you should actually do with that. Uh, but you should also lever. the resources, the, the list that you already have, reach out to those past leads, reach out to those past customers, and don’t screw up the leads that you get. Do it, do it the right way.

Respect the sales process. It’s not order taking. You’re not going out there, you know, so many painters will go out there and want to take an order, and then they wonder, well, oh boy, that lead was no good because they didn’t choose, they went with the lower guy. They just wanted price. Well, you didn’t give them a reason to, to pay more money. So of course they’re just gonna go with the price. So. Think about it that way. Longer buying cycles, persistently high inflation, interest rates, thankfully the feds started to cut interest rates.

We’ll see what actually happens with that. A highly contested election, ongoing global turmoil. We all know just things are not phenomenal right now. Uh, uncertainty about the future policies, and then all this is slowing buying cycle for large discretionary purchases such as house repaints. Uh, I think Brandy used the example of a of. Same, same amount of cost generally as a a middle class divorce. Uh, it’s an expensive discretionary purchase, but people don’t have to. You live in an HOA or something, you might have to, but it’s not the same as a plumbing purchase or roofing your, your house, you know, your roof is leaking, you kind of have to handle that.

Uh, with painting, you don’t. You, you, it’s a one, it’s not really a need. So when there’s this uncertainty when everyone’s sort of, well, what’s gonna happen in November, how is that gonna affect my pocketbook. Uh, it’s harder to close them, doesn’t mean you can’t, doesn’t mean you won’t, but they take a little longer. The money is there, it’s just taking a little longer. So 3 paid ad strategies to dominate. I’ve talked about a lot of this stuff before, but I won’t run through it cause it’s, it’s, it’s important.

Uh, number one, select a cheaper platform, right? So we have meta and we have Google. I am very pro meta right now, super pro meta. Uh, meta, well, number one, let me say I hate both of them. So it sounds ironic from digital market. I hate both of them. I hate the fact that they control the world, but that’s the world that we live in, so I’m making the best with what I got. Uh, meta over Google Pay per click 100%. Google local service ads over pay per click 100%.

If you don’t run a painting company that’s doing probably multiple millions, uh, then you shouldn’t be running Google Paper click ads. It’s, it’s not your friend. Uh, but you should be running meta. Ads and treating them the right way, which we’ll go into, and then you should be running Google local service ads. This will get you more at-bats for your ad spend because the cost per lead is gonna be lower, so it’s gonna get you more at-bats. Don’t be picky, be good. Right, the feedback, well, the, the, the lead just cared about price.

The lead had a small project. It’s a foot in the door. It’s an opportunity for you to be good, to be better, to have to demonstrate a sales process, the ability to generate repeat business, referral business, to create a foothold in the neighborhood. Uh, it’s your opportunities you’re in. So number 2, generate more leads, make it personal, uh, establish trust, people do business with people. Here are a couple of examples I’ve shown them before, uh, but they’ve worked really well. So just paid as as an example. I know Betsy, I believe is on this call.

I think you saw you there, Betsy. Um, so her with the dog, that’s, uh, I like that picture. Uh, this kind of stuff does really well. People like to do business with people, they don’t like to do business with no name companies. That’s the whole idea why people market local business, right? Family owned and operated because people care. Why would they care? Who cares, right? If they’re going to come out and do a painting project, but people want to do business with people. So make sure your marketing reflects that.

Uh, offer incentives. I’m not a huge incentive guy. Uh, I’ve never, I’ve never promoted this, uh, up until very recently, we’ve always seen the 1003% off is everyone’s go to. It’s been that way for a long time. There’s actually science behind that. Uh, but I don’t like that. Right now we’re leaning a little bit more into the incentives, right? I’m picking it up with a stronger sales process just because you do want to get the leads uh at a good cost per lead. So seasonal holiday discounts are good.

If you can do value adds, I always prefer that over a discount. It’s like a free pressure wash or whatever that might include, uh, versus, you know, 15% off. Uh, and then if you can make a holiday, so maybe it’s a work anniversary. Right, like, hey, we’re celebrating our 3 year anniversary of XYZ Painting Company. Something that’s unique to you, it stands out more. Then you’re not lost in the, the Black Friday sale and and the same sales that everyone else is running, you have your own unique sale, you can kind of run it a little bit off market, off timing, and you’ll stand out more and tend to do better.

Uh, and then make sure that you leverage, this is just sales and marketing 101, leverage scarcity and time-based offers. People have to have a reason to act. There is a people are naturally apathetic. If they want to to move forward with you, that’s not enough for them to move forward with you. They have to really want to move forward with you. You have to kind of push them. And the way that you do that is through scarcity time-based offers. OK, we have 15% off this month, right? Or or free pressure wash or whatever if you, if you schedule your estimate this month, or 5 slots left for XYZ promotion.

Um, give people a reason to take action today, not to think, oh, that looks pretty good. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll send myself an email right down note and hopefully I’ll come back to it, and I, I never will. Uh, copy machine study, I like this study. I, I think it’s just such a perfect illustration of how weird we are as humans. So it was a Harvard study in 1977. Uh, they went in and they wanted to cut somebody in line in the to make a copy, right? Sitting in there waiting Xerox, that was, that was still a thing.

And they said, um, version one, excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? That’s what they, they said to try to butt in line. Uh, 60% of people let them skip the line. Version 2, excuse me, I have 0003 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush. OK, that’s a logical reason. I’m in a rush. 5 pages, not that many pages. I’m in a rush. 94%, you kind of have to, it’s almost hard to say no to that, right? Uh, that’s a real reason. Version 3, excuse me, I have 80093 pages.

May I use a Xerox machine because I have to make copies. That’s not a real reason. That’s a that’s a pretend reason. Are you using the Xerox machine cause you need to to get like a drink of water? Of course you’re using the Xerox machine to get copies cause that’s the only thing that that Xerox machine is doing for people. But just using the word because gave people uh as as much incentive to let you cut as a real reason. I’m in a rush. It really helped me.

I don’t have that much time. Uh, and all that is to say, when you create these holidays, it’s your 80083 year anniversary. It’s Bob the stimator’s birthday. It’s whatever, have a because and then a whatever, and it’s, it might seem kind of silly, but it’s gonna work as well as actually like a Black Friday or something that people accept as a normal reason. That’s the, the lesson there. Uh, understand who you’re attracting. So when you run ads, let’s say, let’s go with the discount offer here is a really good, really good example.

When you run ads with a discount, you are naturally going to attract people who want a discount. They say 80073% off. This is why I’ve been opposed to them, uh basically always, and I’ll go back to that stance in, in like 80063 months. This is why you attract those kind of people, because they’re, it’s the messaging, right? Your messaging attracts who who you’re who’s reading it and who actually moves forward with it. That’s OK as long as you understand that and you are good at selling, right? If you actually have a dial in sales process, you go in, this person wants a deal.

Great, I’m going to have a really good repeat and referral business. I’m going to go in and I’m going to make this person an offer to introduce me to friends and family, and this person will get even more off their paint project because I know that’s important to them. Right now I’m gonna turn that one lead into more leads, that’s fine. It’s the game that I understand that I’m playing, but don’t run a 80053% off go and be like, oh, that person cared about price. Of course I cared about price.

That’s how you brought them in. So I understand the marketing and the sales, it’s all tied together. Uh, and then holistic marketing works best. So very, very often people want to find this silver bullet, uh, and with limited marketing budgets, a lot of painting companies do have smaller marketing budgets, we have some, some uh colleagues running. Uh, marketing for roofing companies, right, plumbing, HVAC, uh, things like that. They, it’s not uncommon for them to have a $80043,80033 or more budget, monthly budget. There’s a lot more you can do with ads and things like that when you have it.

Uh, if you’re working with a 80023 $80013 a month budget, you need to be more limited, uh, but you can still pick up the phone and call. You can text, you can pair with social posts, you can layer layer with a strong organic presence, and you can do offline things. So door hangers, direct mail, call text, email marketing with a specific group of people. Right, a specific group of people. So for example, if you’ve had, if you have a customer list, as you’ve been in business for 80003 number of years, you can create an audience on Facebook.

You can advertise directly to that customer list, and then you can cold call, it’s not cold calling, even because it’s your customer list. You can call and reactivate that customer list. Now they’re seeing your ad, you’re calling them, and you can do, you can either do door hangers, you can send them mail, but you’re now in their ecosystem in a variety of different ways, and there’s something. Psychologically magical when you do that. When people see you here and there and there, they’re much more prone to move forward than if they just see you in that one medium.

So it’s hyper targeted omnipresent marketing. You can do this with not past customers, just, hey, these are neighborhoods that I really like, I want to grow my business in. So I’m gonna market to them online. I’m gonna market to them offline. I’m going to do door hangers. I’m gonna do direct mail. I’m gonna do all these things, and all of a sudden you’re just in their mind, right? You’re just sitting there in their mind. You do that for an extended period of time, it absolutely 2115% works. And then number 2132, make leads more valuable.

So speed to lead, always be fast on that lead. You must have a CRM of some kind, uh, because you should be in contact with that lead within 212 seconds. Whether they come through SEO, whether they come through a paid ad, however they get there, you need to be in touch with them immediately. If you’re asleep, you still need to be in touch with them immediately. Uh, provide a world class experience. The standard like person not picking up the phone. Um, what do you think that that that tells the homeowner, if you’re not willing or able to pick up the phone when they want to inquire about giving you money, then how are you going to treat them when they want to inquire about you coming back and and fixing something?

It’s a concern, right? You’d be less, you’d be even less incentivized to pick up the phone then. Uh, so that’s the impression that is given by a lot of companies. Uh, business hours, have your business hours be 214/212500 and use a call center. People should always have the ability to get in touch with you. Uh, make it easy. This is an example workflow we use. We use a CRM called Go High Level. Um, this is for a new lead. It comes in. We’re going to text, we’re going to call, uh, you can do a voicemail, ringless voicemail, as Brandon talked about, and then we’re actually gonna force, force an automated outbound call.

So it’s gonna call you. It’s gonna be a little robot, prompts you to press one, and then you’re gonna actually, we’re gonna kind of force you to do your job. Um Give people a variety of different ways to move forward with you. So, give them a self-book option. Some people want to text, they’re comfortable with texting. Some people want you to call them or they want to call you. Some people, usually older people would maybe be more comfortable with email. Uh, and then some people want to self-book.

They don’t want anyone on the phone. They’re busy, they just want to find a slot. So ensure that in that messaging, you have the ability where they can just go ahead and get on your, get on your calendar, right? Don’t worry about pre-qualifying. Like, well, I want to make sure they’re qualified. You can call them after they book. Just get them on the calendar and if if qualification has been a big issue for you, you can, you can qualify later. Um, have multiple, that’s multiple communication channels to answer the phone, stick it out.

So 215 year follow up, that’s our, our drip, right? When we have the CRM it will follow up for 2130 year, uh, not one week. I think if you guys kind of think about how often do you follow up, it’s very rare for painting companies to follow up much more than maybe 5 weeks. And that’s kind of crazy when you think about how long it usually takes a homeowner to make a major decision, which means a lot of homeowners are just sort of left with nobody. But I’ve gone through thumbtack and Angie, and that’s how you can see how a lot of these, not, not all sophisticated contractors are working.

There are some great contractors on those, on those uh apps, but I get hammered. If I say I need something, I get hammered, hammered, hammered for like 21800 days. And then it’s just G. Nobody cares about my money anymore. Nobody, it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t done the project. If somebody just sent me a message like 210520 days later, they would almost certainly get it cause nobody else is around. So it’s just, it’s wild. Don’t don’t just keep running in circles. Make sure you have some system for automatically following up on those leads, and then give your proposals on site, you know, Brandon talked about like the the mailing, the PDF.

Obviously it’s not what you wanna do. Uh, give it on site gives you the ability to objection handle. It’s not being pushy, you’re actually obligated. If you run a, a company that provides a good service that that takes care of your clients, doesn’t screw them. You were obligated to do everything you can to get that homeowner to move forward with you, because if you do not, odds are are more likely than not that they’re going to have a bad experience just based on the home services industry in general.

So it’s not being pushy, it’s actually being negligent and harmful to your customer if you don’t have a dialed in sales process. Now, if you run a company that is bad, you need to just fix that company, right? You need to figure out why that is the case and fix it. Uh, and position your service as an investment, not a cost. So right now, when money is on people’s minds, when it’s inflation. Uh, when it’s, you know, what’s going to happen with the economic policies, you have to, you have to switch, they’re already thinking about money more than usual.

So now you need to really focus on how this is an investment, right? This is ultimately going to save the money. It’s going to preserve the home is the biggest investment, and this is going to allow them to preserve it. That, that dialogue, those words that need to be in your sales messaging that has to be discussed. It’s the elephant in the room. You need to turn it to your side, because it’s being thought about whether you want it to be or not. All right, longer timeline to close.

View your leads on a rolling 90 day basis. So, again, same concept of following up, it’s a lead came in, they didn’t close in 2 days, therefore they weren’t a good lead. View it on a rolling, rolling 90 day basis. So that means every month, at the end of the month, go back and see how those leads did, but then incorporate the, the lease from the previous two months. So you’re just tracking these 3 month cycles on how it’s doing. Now, if you’re not reaching out, if there’s if there’s absolutely nothing you do after a week or two.

This is, you might as well just look at it as the month because you’re not going to be closing those from 1 or 2 months ago because you’re not doing anything. But if you’re, if you’re actively following up, if you have automations in place and then you pick up the phone and you’re calling, you know, every week, every 1003 weeks, touching base, you’re gonna see a lot of those from 2 months, 3 months ago, are going to close, especially cause no one else is following up. You’re the only one. Uh, and then follow up is critical.

So longer buying cycles, lack of a yes does not mean a no. If they didn’t tell you no, then you should be following up. If they didn’t tell you no, if you haven’t driven by their house and it was an exterior paint project and you see it’s already done, if you don’t definitively know that you lost that that project, then you should be following up because it is still an active lead. It’s an active lead until they tell you no. Uh, so have automations follow up for a year, do manual phone calls.

It’s very important to combine the manual and the automated, and then direct mail. You sending direct mail follow up, um, either before or after or both, uh, is really good. And then finally, further monetization, so repeat business referrals and then beginning reviews, right? The, the review is going to, it becomes another sales asset for you, becomes another form of marketing, get really good at getting those reviews. You get them before you ever leave the property. Uh, you, we have automation for following up. There’s tactics for following up, but you should have gotten it before you ever left.

When you’re doing the punch list, then you get the review. Uh, OK. Number 11, reduced reliance on paid ads. That was the longest one. That was a big one. so this is back up. So reduce reliance on paid ads. So you should be running any form of marketing that’s making you money, you should be doing it. You should know how much it costs you to perform a project. You should factor in things like the cost for your estimator. I’m, I personally am big on commission only pay. A lot, a lot of you may be conducting your own estimates, um, but if you’re paying someone, I really like commission, commission only pay.

I don’t know why you wouldn’t do that. Uh, but factor all that stuff in, even if you are doing only commission, it’s, you’re gonna pay for gas. There’s gonna be other things that you’re gonna factor it all in. And then make sure you’re getting the ROI that you need to get. You need the job costs. You need to know your gross margin by project, and if it’s working, do it. Do it and do as much of it as you can and keep doing more things because you’re making money.

So it doesn’t really make sense to stop unless you can’t hire the labor or like Brandon showed that door example, if it’s just, hey, we just don’t have the people, we only have this amount of money, so we’re going to pick the highest, the highest return on investment activities that we can do. Uh, but you want to diversify. You want to diversify because Google, Facebook, they have a nasty habit of changing their algorithms, and they don’t tell you that they’re gonna do it. So just go in, they change it.

And then we’re we’re left kind of scrambling figuring that out. That affects paid ads a lot faster than it affects SEO. Google had a, I think it, I don’t think it was intentional, uh, I think a junior developer was pushing out an update. They accidentally released their algorithm. I believe in March of this year, accidentally, they’ve never released it. There are 1,000,000,000 thousands of ranking factors. There’s, there’s, I think it’s like 23,000, maybe 993,000 ranking factors, tons, a lot of ranking factors, about 10 to 20 actually moved the needle. There’s a lot of ranking factors, a lot of things that Google said don’t matter.

They said this is no longer relevant. Well, they were lying. See my previous point about I don’t like men on Google very much. They were absolutely lying. Uh, but it doesn’t change, right? So they’re saying these things are evolving, they’re not. The fundamentals are the same for search engine, even. When we see this. Even when we see what’s called search generative experience, if you, I love this now. I absolutely in the beginning, I didn’t, I didn’t like it that much. I thought it was kind of weird.

Um, I love it. It gives me the answer to what I want a lot faster. So this is examples of how to hire a professional house painter. It is still in beta. So if you’re not seeing it or certain searches, you’re not seeing it, but Google is moving to AI bar. I mean it it’s what’s going to happen. Uh, but they will take this, and then the traditional content marketing, which is what you should be doing with helpful blogs and, and good content on your site, they will essentially gather that information, compile it from trusted sites, give you the answer.

So here’s how to hire a professional house painter, they’re going to give me what I want. What I don’t actually want is to go click to a bunch of links, right? And then go to websites and that’s, that’s SEO is to get me on your site cause you, you wrote what I, you know, checklist for hiring a professional house painter. And now I’m looking for a house painter, and I, I come on your site and I’m like, oh that was a really good checklist. Maybe I should hire this company.

Um, this is doing the same thing, but you can see down here. That this is where they’re pulling it from. So there’s a painting company here, there’s a painting, these, these all look like painting companies. So they wrote articles that Google thought were good enough, SEO wise to to compile, and Google is essentially giving them credit. So now that I look through this, I might want to go deeper. I’m gonna click on one of those. The point is, SEO is not going away. It’s not changing the face.

The interface, the dashboard is changing, but the fundamentals they remain the same. Paid ads is not going away either, but it changes faster. So you have to be building the fundamentals with the with the organic SEO and the Google Business profile SCO. The fact of marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Uh, you got to be thinking right now we’re talking about this winter, right? The stuff we’re going to do, stuff we’re giving you will help you this winter. But quite frankly, you should be thinking about next winter.

Right, it’s middle of September, right now I would want you actually think about next winter, do this, but also be thinking about next winter. What does that look like for you? Uh, winning at Google Business profile. So number 12. Uh, Google, Google Business profile, fill it out, play the game, um, fully complete there, they have product cards, uh, anytime Google gives you an opportunity to fill something out, uh, whether it’s whether it’s their FAQ on their Google chat or whether they have the little product cards, you can productize your services and write about interior painting and call it a product, play their game, fill it out as much as you can.

This is tied to LSA it’s very important, but in January of this year, they rolled out something I call the openness update. Uh, where definitively if you mark your Google Business profiles open 24/7, you will be prioritized in off hours. So if another company says 9 to 5 and then someone’s on there searching at 7 because they’re they’re home from work and they’re realizing they need to get their house painted, you’re going to be more likely to show up. All the fundamentals of Google Business profile local SCO are going to come into play, so someone close could still rank above you if they’re doing a much better job, but it’s a big factor.

So market is 153/7. And if you, if, if you don’t have a call center hiring, all you have to do is get someone to answer the phone off hours and you can do that without getting in any trouble with Google. Uh, and then answer, be sure to answer all that. It’s tied to LA I got a bonus come for you guys at the end. Uh, ongoing Google Business profile optimizations. So this is a lot of stuff we do. Some of it’s a little bit, a little bit beyond the scope of this, um, but what you want to do is you want to fill out the full profile, you want to post to it at least once a week.

So put up a post. It can be a picture of your crew, it can be a picture of a project, it can just be really any kind of message and then generate reviews that’s massive, and then respond to your reviews. Good, bad, indifferent. Respond to your reviews as quickly as you can, uh, because Google and people want to see that responsiveness. Uh, this goes Thi this is a video? No, it’s OK. All right. Uh, number 13, Google local services, this is the future of Google. So we saw search generative experience, the dashboard, the interface of Google’s SEO is changing.

Google is very heavily moving their development and their their product road map, and clearly their focus into LSAs, into that Google guaranteed with the checkmark. It’s absolutely the future. In the marketing world, we, we know that. Uh, so that means if you’re not running Google local service ads, you need to be doing it. It’s not an option. And if, if you say, well, those leads are too small, I, I don’t like them, I don’t care, because if you don’t run them, you’re gonna get left behind. Um, so LSA is being pushed by Google.

Google also, it’s, it’s a little bit like a drug dealer, they, they kind of gave it, you could dispute it and basically win all your disputes. You didn’t like the lead, the lead lead wasn’t a real league. OK, Google will give you your money back, no problem. Google’s taking that back. They’re they’re automating and they’re gonna decide whether or not to give you the money back. So you’re, you’re gonna get the money back less frequently is what that means, uh, cause Google’s gonna want to keep the money.

And then not only that, right now you’re paying per lead still. So it’s someone on Google searching for a house painter, maybe it’s $50 that’s Awesome. A $50 Google lead is awesome. It’s showing up at the top of the search results. That will not last. Google hasn’t said this. It’s my prediction. I feel very confident in it. That will not last. It will eventually move, I believe, to a pay per click model similar to Google Ads, and then you’re rather than looking at a $50 lead, maybe a $150 lead, maybe a $250 lead.

So I would go in, I would start building up dominance there right now as quickly as you can cause it is the future. Uh, brand name searches of people searching for XYZ painting company that didn’t used to show up on local services. If you search for painter near me, that would show up. But XYZ Painting Company, they wouldn’t do it. Now they’re doing it. So there’s all kinds of signals that Google wants to push this more and more and more because it’s gonna become a moneymaking machine for them.

Um, how to win here? This is tied to your Google Business profile. So back to that being strong, important for organic, that’s the baseline for your local local service ad account. It’s tied to your Google Business profile. So treat that well, optimize it, um, be as strong as you can there, generate reviews consistently and it’s gonna give you a head start on your LSA, uh, post, post weekly upload photos weekly, generate reviews consistently through the actual LSA. So if you get a lead through LSA, then get the review through LSA.

Right, you can actually do that and you can still request a review through your Google Business profile, but get it on the LSA. Answer leads. So we, we run LSA um for all of our partners, and, and I get BCC on the emails. So I get a god, god awful amount of these emails every Monday, be like, hey, here’s your, here’s your uh LSA update for the past week, and I brow browse through them, right? cause I just get like a time they fill up my inbox so I start looking at them, and it’s usually.

25, some will be 0, some will be like 323, and a large percentage of those are unanswered, like the vast majority of them are unanswered. So install the app on your phone, make sure you answer it. If you don’t answer it, call back through the app, because again, that’s how you play this game. Google has put a check mark. They said, you’re Google guarantee, we approve of this company. If people are trying to get in touch with you and you don’t pick up the phone, And you don’t call them back.

Google’s not gonna keep saying we approve of this company. So you have to think about it from Google’s eyes, and if you, if you see the missed call and you say, well, it’s OK, I’ll call him back from from my um work line. Then Google doesn’t know you called them back. So you have to call them back through the app. So Google says, OK, like, good job, we know that you got in touch with that lead. You didn’t leave them high and dry when we gave you a thumbs up, cause that makes us look bad.

Um, again, Google wants LSAs to work. They want people to adopt it. They’re not gonna adopt it if they keep calling and and companies don’t answer the phone. Uh, all right, good. So feeling ambitious, and I’ll kind of expedite this cause I know we’re running over, but feeling ambitious. So this is next level stuff. Uh, this is next level stuff. We’re gonna start rolling out. I had a, had a conversation with, with one of our top partners about this. Um, videos are the future. So videos are the future of SEO, uh, if you, I know Brandon’s doing, doing YouTube, um, walking with Brandon.

How many of you guys have seen the Walking with Brandon thing? I assume a lot of you guys have seen, I, I like those. Um, so walking with Brandon, this stuff is the future. So Google, when, when you conduct searches, you know, you’ve probably seen YouTube links or show up more and more YouTube links are showing up on that first page. Google owns YouTube, so the same company, but more and more of those YouTube links are showing up on the first page. What you can do with videos, you can actually create it, you host it on YouTube and then you embed it into your site.

So you almost get a double. A double boost, because it’s more likely to rank that page on your site, but the video on its own can rank as a YouTube. So you have kind of like two bites at the apple there, uh, with video, and people just love video. They resonate with it, they respond to it, um, they, they trust you more, and again it’s all about creating that market of one. So when you show up, you and Chuck in a truck, well, they haven’t, they haven’t seen Chuck in a ruck, they’ve seen you.

Uh, so leverage and paid ads, but also in SEO paid ads works really well. YouTube search results are increasing, video is the future here, uh, and it makes you the authority, so it makes, makes people know, like and trust you, uh, you become a marketed one. A lot of our um partners aren’t that comfortable on video. That’s OK. If you’re not that comfortable on video, maybe your estimator is, right? Doesn’t necessarily need to be you as the owner. It can be someone else representing your company who can be doing this.

But, but video, if you can adopt that, it will help. Now, here’s the really fun part and and the part that I talked with our partner about, so you can create, uh, this is what a funnel looks like. And so this is now we start to get into more strict marketing, this is what a funnel looks like. So rather than running. An ad, uh, which is what the 99.99% of painting companies do. It’s what we do for our partners, uh, cause this is next level stuff. We we’ll run the ad and we’ll say, hey, we, we have an offer, you know, get 15% off, hey, looking for a house painter near you.

That that’s the offer ad. That’s the bottom here, right? So you’re like, hey, I just met you, let’s get married. Do you want to get married? You cool if you give me like 80? That’s what that ad is. It works cause that’s the only thing the industry runs, but to the next level. you create videos, you create educational and entertaining videos for impressions, right? So this is an example of what I do with this is the Painter Mark and Mastermind podcast. released like 140, 140 episodes or something I be doing it for like 3 years.

People follow me, they listen, there’s no real call to action, there’s no salesy push, there’s nothing. And then they’ll come in. And who are they gonna partner with? Right? When they’ve been listening, they’ve been following this actionable advice for like 2 years, they were a small company, they grew, now they’re at almost a million, like, Brandon, man, it’s time. I’ve been listening. I’ve never talked with them, but they’ve heard me for 2 years, right? That’s what you guys can be doing in your space. So you create an education or entertaining video talking about different things, like a walking with Brandon would be a good example of how of how he’s uh adopting that.

You run it. You, you create a small ad budget because when you run ads for impressions or different types of ads you can run, impressions is the cheapest, uh, so you run it for impressions, and there’s no call to action. There’s no, no nothing. There’s no book a call, there’s no set estimate, nothing. But what Facebook’s doing is it’s actually tracking how, how much of the video people watch. And so then you take, OK, people watch over 50% of the video, and I’m giving away the farm here guys, like this is, if you take this and you use it, it’s awesome.

So then people watch over 23% of the video. And then you run another video, and you’re only targeting that people, so it’s retargeting. So now you have an audience that Facebook Facebook knows cause you can do all this in the back end, and you’re not retarding them with with something a little bit more salesy. Now it’s testimonials, it’s story brand videos, something a little bit more about your company, they’re getting to know you better. You track who watches that, and now you come at them with an offer, and your cost per lead goes way down, your close rate goes way up, but this is a multi-step funnel.

It takes time, it takes some investment on the front, and it takes the willingness to do video and really go outside the comfort zone. So this is the next level stuff I wanted to drop, uh, cause some of you might want to actually think about doing something like this. Uh, and then additional marketing, um, avenues, so grassroots sponsorships, things like little leagues, uh, churches, local local events or local farmers market, whatever, sponsoring that stuff is really good because Google likes to see industry and location specific back links.

Google knows that’s a local thing that you’re getting a link from it. It’s going to help you. There’s Was to research it, you know, go online and actually figure out if that link is worth anything. Figure out if you’ll actually get a link when you do the sponsorship. But when you get those links, that’s gonna help your SEO and then you pair it with, let’s say a, a banner on, on, you know, the fence with a little league or you’re in the bulletin for the church or There’s something else that’s going to trickle in some leads.

It won’t be a massive influx of leads, but it’s gonna trickle in some leads, and it’s all about, it’s all about creating this online offline ecosystem where you’re getting more and more leads and and just growing your overall presence. So this is excellent for your SEO create a multiple of these more fishing lines and and you add a bunch of little things like this over and over and over again. And all of a sudden your winter, your winter months start to look a whole lot better, and you’re not as reliant on on the paid ads and the cost really going up, and then texting and calling people.

So I went to a um I’m a big fan of Alex Rmozi. I, I talk about it. I feel like nobody really knows who I’m talking about when I say that. Uh, he’s very big in the marketing world, um, not as big in the painting world, but he’s written a couple books, $100 million dollar offers, $100 million leads, he runs a podcast, runs, runs a private equity firm. And uh I met him in person. It was like a real, it’s like meeting a hero, it’s a big deal to me.

Talked to him for 10 minutes, like 3 weeks ago, um. And he, he talked about Like texting people, right? I met a couple people who were actually, uh, they run tree companies, so tree service companies. I met a couple guys there and they’re doing pretty big things. And they’re growing their business through texting. So texting is often overlooked, it’s neglected, uh, you can still do it. There’s more rules around it with 10 DLC you need to actually make sure people have a check actually opt into text messaging and things that you can do, do it.

But there are rules, there are rules around it that you need to abide by, but it is a phenomenal outside the box way of marketing, but you also have to know a little bit about what you’re doing. I have a little hint here, building an accidental space. That’s something one of the tree guys showed me. He had like an opt here. Click here to opt out and he purposely kind of messed it up. Uh, he, he put it like a space in it in between a word, like opt out like O space PT and it makes it look like someone just typed it look like the person screwed it up, you know, machines don’t screw up like that, and his deliverability went way higher.

So again, I’m probably Going too far with this, but I’m giving you guys some some stuff that’s above and beyond what I typically do. Uh, and then calling people, so picking up the phone, calling people to say, well, I don’t want a cold call. If they, if they’re your client, if you’ve done business with them, if you were in their house 3 years ago, if they were a lead and you reached out and you talked to them before, it’s not cold calling. That’s not what the def definition of cold calling is.

So pick up the phone, call people, because that works. Uh, bonuses. So that was, again, I was kind of being OCD about the numbers. So that was 10 to 15. Then I got some bonuses. Be aggressive with your marketing, be contrarian. A lot of the most successful people have made the majority of their wealth in downturns. Uh, so be contrarian, when there’s a downturn or there’s winter, it’s your opportunity to recruit labor. If you’ve ever, well, I can’t find enough painters, I can’t find enough work. If you’re the company that when they’re getting laid off by other companies, you pull them in and say, hey, I got work for you, who do you think they’re going to be loyal to?

Right? So if you’re wanting to make big gains, recruit labor, keep that labor and take, take market share, right? Take market share, go out and market aggressively and other companies aren’t. And all of a sudden you can dominate certain neighborhoods. If you have a road map for for where you want to expand geographically in your area, uh, account for cash flow, don’t go, don’t go bankrupt, right? So you do need to account for cash flow. You have to actually sit down, know your numbers, do the math, and make sure that you’re making a smart bet on this stuff.

Uh sell as an investment, not a cost. We talked about that. You need to pitch this as an investment. They are thinking about the money, I promise you that. And then reinstate lost Google Business profile reviews. A lot of you, I know I have, I’ve probably noticed your reviews are disappearing. It’s insane. Google is just wiping them off the face of the earth. I think we had like 45 or something 43 star reviews, uh, at painter marketing pros, we went down to 15, maybe. Uh, I went through this process and now we’re, we went to 40.

Uh, now they’re starting to take them off again. So now we’re at 37. So it’s their algorithm is going out of control with the spam. Uh, I do have a method. Uh, it was gonna be a lot to include here. There’s a lot of steps. There’s a video tutorial, uh, it’s a whole thing, but this is my offer to you guys. So if you, if you book a strategy session here, uh, you’re gonna get the strategy sessions, we’re gonna meet with you and actually talk about what you should be doing this winter.

Uh, we’re going to give you that full Google Business profile review, reinstatement, cheat sheet and video training, uh, which if you lost a lot of reviews, that would be a good thing to have. And then the, we’re gonna create. We’re gonna do this for you for free. We’re gonna create a custom QR happiness card uh template for your painting company. So something you can hand out to generate those reviews at the end of your projects and be sure you’re getting at least 1 out of 3 projects giving you a 5-star review.

Brandon that’s what I got, man. I think you’re on mute. I, I think that was great. Good everybody give well you can’t, I would say give them a round of applause, but we couldn’t hear you because you’re all muted. Uh, all right, I see some folks clapping. Hey guys, let’s, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and just go and so we can take questions here, uh, and there are two ways that we can take questions. Now listen, some of you got to go places, that’s fine. I’ll hang out here as long as people have questions because I’ve got nothing better to do.

Uh, so if you’ve got a question, there are two ways we can do this. Either you click the little show your hand button, which is probably more effective, but for those of you who don’t know how to do that, can’t figure it out, if you will wave your hand at the screen and if I see it, if it’s violently waved, I will come to you. Pete, I see that’s not violent enough, but at least I could see you. Pete, go ahead. OK. Uh, yeah, I had a question on responding to Google reviews and like is there a time limit to do that cause I have a few that I didn’t respond to, but they’re like.

You know, 9 months, a year ago. No, there’s not, there’s not a time limit to respond to Google reviews. No, if you have any, so what we’ll do when, when we have a painting company come on board, we’ll actually go back and any reviews they haven’t responded to for the past 12 months, we will. We’ll respond to it. So you should, you should definitely always respond to it. And there’s no time limit on that. Another quick question is, is it better to have a Google service area or a location?

I mean, we’re a service business, so. If you’re, uh, it’s better to have a physical office and a location, much, much, much, much better for your SML. Very few companies do that. In which case you need to list it as a service area because people are not coming to your house. Thank you. Thank you. Good questions, Pete. Other questions, either click the raise your hand button or wave your hand crazily at the screen. All right, Maurice. We’re coming to you That’s from, uh, some people call me a space cowboy for those of you that aren’t that old.

Go ahead, Maurice. Yes, sir. Thank you. Uh, yeah, so, um, I heard him mention that it’s, it’s really important, actually critical to respond back through Google, uh, through the app. But lately, I would say like in the past month, they’ve had some type of glitch on their app, uh, where the leads aren’t coming through and I keep calling, they keep telling me I have to go to the uh You know, to the, the desktop version and just get the number and call the, you know, the lead back, but I mean, I thought they’d have it fixed by now, but the issue has been going on for quite a while now.

If you’re facing the issue, other people are facing the issue as well. So just do it if you can. If you can’t, then obviously you just want that lead. You can’t go through the app. Google, uh, Google does not care about you. I, I wouldn’t even worry about calling them, man. It’ll it’ll get resolved when it gets resolved. OK, thank you. All right, we got Logan, Logan, if you’ll unmute yourself, go ahead, sir. Perfect, I appreciate it. So, my question for you guys is, uh, when doing cold reach out to, say, larger commercial work, like uh commercial property managers, etc.

um, do you guys have a favorite practice that you’d like to do? I know it’s just doing the things that other painting contractors doesn’t, don’t wanna do, but is there anything specific for tips you might might have for us? OK, I’ll take this one. I’m actually gonna do an entire workshop we’ve created, I don’t know, probably close to a dozen commercial repaint acquisition programs over the last decade. It’s, it’s something we focus on intensely, um, so the first thing like I mentioned you gotta make a list, right?

You gotta make a list, uh. The the victory goes to the people that show up and when you show up in an office, when you call them, email them, you just hang in there with them, it works. I kid you not, you could take a cocktail napkin and put on a Sharpie. We need some commercial painting work, Logan, and your phone number, copy that thing on a copier and if you mailed it to enough people, you would get a phone call because people have very low expectations for painting contractors.

Should you do it like that? Of course not. So here are a few things that that I think are good introductory uh moves. I’m gonna give away some things that we do. We have this, we have this campaign called a foot in the door campaign. And what we do is we buy these large foam foots and we put the company name on them and then we put a box together and it’s got socks and toenail polish and everything that would have to do with feet. It’s very dorky.

And we have these big red boxes and we stopped by and there’s a big letter I’m just trying to get my foot in the door and these maintenance managers and facility people think it’s freaking hilarious. And we just simply get in front of them, any excuse to have a face to face interaction with another human. And the other thing you have to remember is that Old corporate marketing is boring as hell. And like most of you, I kid you not, I could take your websites right now and whatever you’re talking to your computers about your customers about, and I could rearrange the names and the phone numbers and then make no damn difference, you know, in business for 40 years, high quality painters, we treat you like family.

I could go there’s like 25003 things like it’s all it’s all people say. And so you’ve got to say things a different way if you want to be heard because you gotta shake people out of their beta mode. Uh, further, again, these guys are like sitting ducks in many of these organizations. I mean, there are organizations that have seriously taken 1520, 30, 50 prospects that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and put them in a room. And all you gotta do is go drive and physically be there, add them to your newsletter list, and then things will happen.

And so the main thing I would say the main thing about going after commercial work is you have to calendar 8 to 4 hours a week and either do it weekly or biweekly. I’m going to see 15 people. Uh, before lunch or 10 people or whatever you can get on Thursdays from 8 to 12 o’clock and if you just consistently get in front of those folks and then communicate with them in other methods, uh, consistently, you will get that work. I’ve never seen someone who did that not be successful, not once, not ever.

Now I’ve seen a bunch of people be lazy and not do any of it, in which case they weren’t very successful, but if you just get in front of them, Logan. And if you got a decent sales process, I promise you free painter for a day doing diagnostics, uh, anything you wanna do, uh, really makes a huge difference. I mean just getting in front of them is, but you gotta be systematic about it. It’s like going to the gym or going to church or anything else that you do with regularity that you think is important.

If you do it with regularity, you will get the result. So this is uh this is kind of an aside here, Brandon, but I, I wanna mention it cause of your cause of the red shoebox. Uh, so this was a letter, this was something I received, like a, like a bright blue thing, uh, and then it came with this, it’s so cool, I saved it. I saved cool marketing, came with this, it’s a video letter, right, so these things. Right here with fiscal, just wanted to stop by and say hello.

is selling me, he created a little intro, you know, just for me, a couple like 53 seconds, 15 seconds, and then he kind of puts his hands up and now he’s got this, this reel that he’s created that he’s gonna send to everybody. And you can create things like this for, for property managers, for, for people like that. But it super stands out. The important part of doing stuff like that’s what Brandon’s saying is the follow up. You don’t send it, and I’m like, oh, well, cool. I, I stood out.

Yeah, that guy stood out and then he sent me an email and he said, hey, I just want to make sure you got the shiny letter I sent. It’s like, what shiny letter? And I went and found it, but his mistake is he hasn’t follow up since. He hasn’t called, he hasn’t done any, this guy should be on me until I’m on a call with him. Exactly. So you gotta, you gotta follow up. You gotta get, but even boring marketing consistently applied and directly works. It’s, it’s better, it’s better that it be both, but I mean just the consistency is, is critical, but.

They even have people that have hit a lick at it like I’ll I’ll coach them and I can’t get them to do it and I can’t get them to do it and then one month they do it, then they quit for 2 months and then 1 month they do it and then they quit for 2 months. Well, 18 months later they got $400,000 a year worth of commercial work. I’m telling you very little effort produces big results in commercial, uh, because nobody else is marketing to them. You ask most of these guys that are sitting in a basement, their names Earl, and they’re by the boiler and the only person that ever calls them complains.

And when you show up, if you ask them how when’s the last time a painter stopped by to see you, they will say never. Because painters don’t market it, they stay at home and hope the phone rings in most cases. Other questions, moving on to other topics, other questions, wave your hand at the screen or click the old yellow hand button. Whichever you prefer, we’ve worn them down, Brandon. They’re, they’re tired. They’re dying. We promise an hour we’re still here almost 90 minutes here we go. All right, angel, go ahead, sir.

Hi, I just had a quick question about, uh, well, AI is the future. Of pretty much everything, but I had, I was just wondering how Google, uh Facebook treat, uh, you know, the copy created through AI such as Chad GPT. That’s a good question. Yeah, it’s a great question. So, you can create content through AI, but then you must know how to human edit it. You must. That’s the, that’s the part. So there have been multiple updates that have rolled out this year where sites that that are doing really well just got annihilated.

And so you can’t, what you can’t do is say, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna just create tons and tons of content. I’m gonna create a machine, an unnaturally large amount of content. Can’t do that. It has to be natural looking. You can use AI to assist you in the copy. At some point here, you’d be negligent not to. Because like you said, everything’s moving in that direction, you should use tech. But you have to go and you have to human edit it, and you have to make it helpful.

That’s what Google cares the most about. They care that it’s helpful that people want to read it. If it’s just a machine spitting out and you just think, well, I’ll dominate cause I’ll, I’m gonna have a website with 10,303 pages. Now every single service and service here, every kind of keyword combination you could possibly want, I’m gonna have a page for it. Google will annihilate you if you do that. So you have to be careful, you have to be paced, and you have to know what you’re doing.

Very good. Then Then, are you the guy that came up with the diagram? I’ve often wanted to speak with you. Go ahead. I can, I can with what. Then, I apologize it’s it’s my redneck humor and my voice. I’m sorry. Here we go. So I have a question. Um, my painters, I do the marketing for the painter, uh, contractors, so. Uh, they’re afraid to put a sign on the, on the properties, uh, but they, um, have a, um, vans, uh, staying next to the, uh, in the house.

Would you suggest to add the, uh, signs on the, on the yard, uh, anyway? Yes, yes, I’ll tell you how much of how enthusiastic I am about signs work. I mean bandit signs even you’ll get 100, they’re so cheap. You go to cheapyard signs.com. I just bought, I, you know, used to buy a bunch of yard signs in politics and recently, you know, got involved in a few elections here around the primary in Tennessee and uh you can get them 567 bucks, you buy 100 of them, you could stick them all over your county.

Now here’s the thing, people often say. Uh, well, the HOAs don’t allow it or my municipality won’t allow that. People always look for the exceptions in order to form rules about how they run their company, and that’s not what you do. You go do what is the best thing every time, and when there is an exception, you begrudgingly accept it. But here in Chattanooga, for example, if you put out yard signs and uh if you don’t take them up, they give you a $215 fine. I didn’t care cause I got so many leads off yard signs, so I get these solicitations in the mail for $232 and I just pay them.

And if I put out 22 signs, I bet I’d get one solicitation and so I made more money. Off the leads and I paid in the solicitation penalties. So yeah, put those things out. I push back on that. Yeah, you can, but I’m gonna disagree, but go ahead. I mean who’s picking up all your trash all over the yard? I mean, like they do that in my town and it drives me insane. It’s like I know I mean you’re not, you’re not that’s not a good partner in the community.

Yeah, well, we just disagree, man. I, I, I look at the marketing results. I don’t look at my feelings when you go to the bank account, you know, go to the bank and say, Well, here’s how I feel about something. It doesn’t change the balance of dam lit, but the, the numbers do. And so that’s why I always worked for the numbers and you know there’s all there’s 24,22500 reasons not to be assertive and aggressive in marketing. I’m not saying you should, you know, uh, put them in people’s yards that aren’t asking for them or aren’t clients, obviously you can’t do that, but you know, the general thoroughfares, places like that where where they’re already up, I just, I’m just very recalcitrant.

I’m like that maybe, maybe somebody that that uh does roadside service will eventually get those up. Daniel, go ahead buddy. Yeah, those yards, I just want to ask, are you doing like a different design, like something with with just like painting and the phone number, are you using your logo, you know, if it’s too small and they’re driving by, they’re not going to see it, so it kind of has to be catchy or something. Yeah, and and often and it’s crazy a lot of these, they’re so hard to read a lot of these what I would call blind lead generation signs work very well and that’s just where you put I mean you’ll see them tree work and a phone number.

People don’t really care about your brand because they don’t know what your brand is anyway. They don’t know what your brand is, they have no idea. They just know that they need somebody to do it now later they will do their research, later they will look into things, um, but honestly when when you’re when you’ve got a plumbing leak. And it’s been going on for a while and you see a sign that says plumbing and a phone number you’re just like I, I’ve got a need and so your job, uh, often I’ll, I’ll give you an example, um, you’re not a rainmaker as a painting contractor, you are a rain barrel, meaning that you cannot force someone to to want to purchase your services.

All you can really do is harness the organic demand of of what is is being asked for. That’s all you can do. And so, and if you put out a rain barrel and it rained yesterday, you don’t get yesterday’s rain. You can only catch the rain that comes in and so Dan, uh, uh, as long as you the more places you can put messages, uh, in front of a good audiences, uh, the more likely you, you can, you can get enough leads to sustain you. And so what I see most often is that painting contractors are not nearly as diversified or as assertive or aggressive in their marketing.

And the other thing I see that they do is they, they put it in the wrong place or either they stretch their marketing budget too thin over too broad of an audience. And so what you want to do is go 25 mile deep and 430 inch wide in highly lucrative markets, and you don’t have to have a big budget to uh have a big brand, you don’t. If, if I can get one other quick question, uh, uh, I put on the chat button so I respond. It was just on a texting app because you mentioned earlier about texting clients as one form of uh communication.

My CRM will do one at a time using Twilio, but it, it won’t send out a blast. Like you can send out an email blast, but you can’t send out a text blast. Is there another way to get around that? I, what’s your favorite text mass text app? I’ve got a few that I, that our memberships use and that I use, but what do you, what do you like? I like clicksend. Click clicksan yeah. Text magic, a lot of our guys have used, although they’ve become more difficult to work with, um, I use the fixture funnel which it connects to InfusionSoft.

I mean, they’ve all got their quirks, um, so you just got to see which one works for you. Robert Collins, coming to you, buddy. Hey there, um, yeah, actually, so I’m coming back to my question, I was asking you guys. Right, about referral bonuses for clients. So we have a uh a referral program for all of our clients, anybody that has done work for us or sent us a business, we send them a $15 gift card to a restaurant, and it’s very labor intensive. Uh, I do it manually right now.

Currently, and I’m wondering if you guys know of a service that we could punch in the client’s information because we already have their address, etc. uh, where we could actually have a mail out or something there of this sort where we prepay for it, um, and then after that it’s, you know, it goes out to them just as a thank you. For the referral. So there are lots I mean if you just type in gift card mailing service there’ll be 2800 of them on Google so I mean there’s not, there’s no shortage of them, uh, but the thing I would say about that that that that I push back on is is twofold.

Number one is people think a referral program is what happens after the referral comes in. Which means if you didn’t do anything to make the referral come in, like if you don’t focus on the things that make the referral happen but you only focus on the things that after the referral has happened, you will get much, much fewer referrals. It is the communication and the relationship that generates the referral. If you have good communication and good relationship and you never give them a single solitary spiff ever for any reason.

You will get more referrals than if you gave them $20520 per referral, but there’s none of this communication or relationships, so the the the chotchke or the gift is like of almost no importance. What is of importance is the communication and the consistency in the relationship. And the other thing I would say is this, um, not everything in your business is gonna be automated and a lot of things need to be highly personal because if you’ve got somebody who sends you referrals and they’re freaking sending you $10,000 15,000, $100,000 a year worth of referrals.

You better write a handwritten note, put them in your newsletter, go by and see them. And so I would just, if, if you don’t do it, it’s automated. If you don’t do it, it’s automated. So if you’ve got an assistant or somebody that can come in once a week and get that stuff done, hire an administrative assistant, put together a list of like tasks that recur on a repetitive, uh, basis, 8003 hours, 16 hours a week you can get that stuff done, but I’m, I’m a big fan in this space of being highly personal and professional.

Uh, because the people that do that just make more money, uh, so I would, you know, the, the, the relationship part is important the, the referral and what you give them is, uh, less important, and I would say, you know, the more personal the gift can be, uh, the better, the more endearing it is, the better. OK, thank you, thanks for your time. I get, I get those. I hate that crap every, every year around Christmas, all these vendors send me. Impersonal garbage and I don’t like a lot of clutter and I usually just throw it right in the trash, uh, because I I’d rather just have a note, right?

And a lot of people don’t need a bunch of stuff, uh, and so what they really want is to be appreciated for for the business or what they send you. Other questions. Other questions before we hop off here guys, you’ve been very kind to hang in here this long. It’s a big group for how how much over time we’ve run. Well, when we, we hit our limit like it was, we told them 100 people because it’s all we can have on Zoom and it stayed at 99 for about an hour and 15 minutes.

That’s pretty good. Um, anybody else, we got one last one. There’s always a a a straggler Ryan, go ahead. I got one I got. Oh, we got Balding’s got one and Ryan’s got one too. So as soon as you say we’re leaving, that’s when they ask the questions. Go ahead, Mike. Hey, what’s up, Brandon? Got a question for you. I love the, I love the little secret stuff you’re putting in on uh making video of, you know, like a long-term play, and we’ve actually gotten way more skilled at producing videos that are, that are decent and not terrible.

Um, how do we, you know, functionally, how does that work? We have a YouTube channel, you, uh, edit, post the videos on YouTube, you embed them in your site, like, what are, what are, you know, just like a quick like 32nd spiel on, on how to functionally do that. Yeah, I mean, you just nailed it, right? So you created a channel, uploaded to YouTube, you embed on the site through an iFrame. So what whatever you use on it I think you guys are on WordPress, you create an iFrame, put it on there, and then just, and, and you link to the YouTube.

Um, and then you obviously put in like the correct alt tags and things like that for the video, uh, not to like go insane, but there’s a video schema that you’re gonna want to mark it up with video schema for the SEO on the page. Uh, so there’s like a couple action items that you’re gonna want to take. Uh, I would recommend pairing it with email marketing. So I would send out an email talking about the video and then drive people to the page, cause that can tangentially improve your SEO when you, when you release a new video, put on a page and then drive traffic to it cause it shows it’s a signal to Google like, oh people are going to this page, watching this video.

Um, it’s not like a direct ranking factor, but it’s an indirect ranking factor that helps. And one other thing you might consider doing Mike, well, there’s two other things I would recommend. Number one is when y’all are making videos, make sure that the title of your YouTube video is actually something someone will search for when they’re trying to buy. So for example, if you’re painting cabinets and you do a time lapse video, somebody painting cabinets. You don’t need to put, uh, we had a great time painting Mrs.

Smith’s cabinets because nobody’s ever gonna look for that. What you want to put is cabinet painting Chattanooga, Tennessee and when somebody looks for cabinet painting Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then you put it on your uh blog for that same search term, and then I would also recommend, uh, that you. You get you can either get the video transcribed, uh, I think Google provides a transcription and to use that as copy underneath the video, you may have to format it a little bit and if you speak redneck like I do, you may have to edit it quite a bit, uh, but if you speak the King’s English, it’ll mainly come out just fine.

You can have AI AI edit that if you actually go to the Painter Marketing Pro’s website, and you click into our podcast, we, we transcribe. I don’t really bother editing it much cause we hide it, but you can also hide it where, where someone has to click like the read more, and it opens it all up and we just have like a god awful amount of content cause it will transcribe the podcast. But yeah, then it’s Google’s reading it, their their bots are reading all that stuff.

Yeah, certainly. OK, Ryan. You gotta unmute yourself. OK. Thank you guys. Uh, I enjoyed it today. My, my question was, is with With postcard mailing to residential? Is that, have you ever heard any science behind what day, what week, what month? And I know like a month would depend on the, probably on the part of the country you’re in, but like is there a day that where I could expect to get better results than another day? I’ve never heard anybody say that. Well, now there, I have read studies about business B2B mail like when people process things, it’s it’s uh it’s been the same since the beginning of time.

It’s almost like the middle of the week Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is always better than Monday, Friday, uh, a lot of times in political mail when you do political mail you hitting the mailbox which you can barely damn do anymore. I’m just telling here’s the other thing, give up. The post is so slow right now. It’s the slowest it’s been in American history. Crap gets, I mean, it’s just the postal service is a wreck and it ain’t even matter if you red tag it, which you don’t know what it is and all that you need to know, but this stuff does not get there on time.

But it used to be that you’d mail stuff on, you know, for it to land on Saturdays because people have more discretionary time over the weekend to read it, uh, but I don’t think it, it, it matters much anymore. It’s far more, so there’s there’s 4 things that matter, right? There’s the market. Who you go after there’s the message what you say, there’s the medium and that’s the way you say what you say it through and then there’s the timing and everybody gets all caught up with the timing and the medium and they never think anything about the message that resonates or the people they’re going after and that’s the first two stops and so what I would, you know, a more important thing is who do you target and affluent people and highly compact neighborhoods that are old.

Those are the folks you go after and uh and to sit on them if you got a limited budget and you can only mail so much or do any type of marketing, pick three high-end neighborhoods that have 2500 people in them and freaking live with them until they buy or until they die. And if they die, you, you mark to the person that moves in the house next, right? And you just keep after them and you sit on them and you will start seeing results. It’s when people try to, you know, hit a lick all over the place and they don’t pick a market and stick with them that they, they don’t get a good ROI.

So that’s what I’d say about that. Can you give an example of what you believe a good messages. Well, you know, here’s here’s a few just based upon research, and these are headlines, right? I can’t, you know, speak an entire sales letter, the background checked painters you can trust. Uh, area’s strongest 5 year ironclad workmanship guarantee. Uh, here’s another one. Uh, What your seven neighbors are saying about ABC painting and and make it all social proof, I mean things like that that are a little different. It doesn’t need to say interior painting exterior painting, pressure washing, cabinet staining in business for 30 years, BBB certified, like all the crap you see that is so redundant, uh, but yeah, just messages that that talk about the things that they they care about clean courteous painters you can trust, because we know what they care about but we so often fail to say it, um.

Other questions, other questions. Thank you. Going once Going to us We are adjourned. We’re adjourned. This meeting is over. Guys, thank you all for coming. I appreciate you very much. If you have any questions after this, if you’ll email Brandon at paintersacademy. com, I will reply back with a voice note or you can email Brandon at paintermarketingpros.com. Uh, and he will reply with, with AI email or, or he will, he will reply with AI. It’s not even gonna be him. It’s a robot. Nobody, and I’m just joking.

He’s not gonna do that. It hurt his rankings, uh, but nonetheless. Uh, if you reply, send that, and you can call us 423-800-0520. We will answer our phones and get back to you. We are humans that just work with painting contractors, uh, and so guys, I appreciate you. Until next time, it’s Brandon and Brandon signing off. We’ll see you next time. Brandon squared. That’s right. Thanks everyone. See you guys. 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 paintermarketingpros.

com/podcast for free training, as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again, that URL is paintermarketingpros.com/podcast. Hey there painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback, let us know how we did. And also, if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at paintermarketingpros. 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.

Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over $1 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.

Guys, you were here, you were tuned in for the profitable painters winter work formula, and we’re gonna talk about how you can make this your best winter ever. Uh, this is not uh platitudes, these are not guesses. I have been doing this over a decade. I’ve seen these strategies absolutely work. I’m gonna give you a brief overview of what I’m gonna be covering later on in the program. I’m gonna hand it off to the capable Mr. Brandon Pierpont, and he’s going to introduce himself here momentarily. So the things that I’m gonna cover.

Uh, are making sure that you’re clear on your goals for the winter, critical timing, pricing your services correctly for the winter months, managing crews wisely, closing leads profitably, tapping into your most reliable resources for winter work, operational marketing and ramping up B2B efforts and also targeting commercial work. And so I’ve got a lot to cover in a short period of time, uh, you know, we originally slated this thing for an hour and a half, um, so we may run a little bit over, but I’m gonna try to be as concise as I can.

And I would like to bring up here my good friend, uh, with the best name ever, Mr. Brandon Pierrepont. Brandon, take it away, buddy. You’re not biased at all, right? Uh, yeah, I like the name Brandon too. So, uh, nice to meet you guys, really excited to run this, run this webinar with Brandon, uh, founder of Painter Marketing Pro has been heavily involved in marketing for painting contractors for half a decade. Uh, a little over half a decade I’ve been doing that, so not quite as long as Brandon, but in the space, uh, for a minute, and then heavily involved with the PCA Paty Contractors Association, serve a lot on a lot of their committees.

We’ve, uh, painter Marin Pros actually has, has been a marketing agency for the PCA directly. I don’t know of any other agencies that they’ve hired, uh, so that’s pretty neat. Uh, bestselling author. I’ve written two books, one of which was the number one Amazon bestseller, uh, run a podcast called Paint Mary Mastermind podcast, and then proudly served in the Florida Army National Guard. Very excited for this webinar. Awesome buddy we’re glad to have you here. So who’s a little short guy? Uh, my name is Brandon Lewis.

I grew up in Arab, Alabama, uh, dirt poor. My father, you know, couldn’t read or write. I had clubfoot facial deformities. I often tell people, uh, you can take the boy out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the boy. And so if I ever sound a little bit like a rednecked is because I am. And uh friends make a big difference to me. Relationships are very important if you look on this uh screen, um, I’ve just got been so blessed my entire life, uh, with great friends, um, and a and a wonderful legacy of 212 years of helping painting contractors achieve greater success.

I’m a Christian. Uh, that is a picture of me and my beautiful daughter, uh, being baptized. I think it’s probably the most important thing you can do in your life as a father, uh, some of my fraternity brothers of all ages, uh, and then like many of you, uh, who want to realize the American dream, uh, a picture of the house I built out in the woods, most of you are striving toward some sort of. Goal in your life, in your career, painting, uh, for some of you it it it’s getting a place that everyone can call home and staying there for some of you it’s making a mark on your community like what I do with the Tennessee conservative news.

Uh, but I show all this to you just to remind you that um there’s an end to this stuff, right? The reason we work so hard is for the people that we support and help and the relationships we build and at the end of our lives that’s what we really value most. So if you would look at your painting company as an opportunity to make that stuff happen, that would be. Great. On the professional side, I’ve worked with 224 painters in 27 different countries over the last decade, uh, and I built and sold my own large painting business, uh, and started in 29 and sold it when the economy was still soft.

So I’ve been through this stuff before and I have seen it done, uh, just about everywhere. So the first thing I’m gonna get into guys. He’s talking about properly staging for a profitable winner, uh, profitably staging, that means getting everything ready so that if and when you go get work, you find work in the winter, you can actually make something of it. So the first thing I would ask you very simply is, are you clear on your goals? Just being busy is a poor man’s goal. You will hear painters say this all the time.

Oh, I just want to be busy this winter. Well, that is a poor man’s goal. If you ask most painters at the end of the day, go to the paint store about 25:27, 100:27. Ask, ask the painters that show up bedraggled if they’ve been busy, and they’ll say yes. But that does not mean that they are wealthy. It does not mean that their day to day life is where they want it to be. So it is very important when you set goals to really have specific goals. So here’s some that I would like for y’all to keep in mind for the rest of this training you want to have higher monthly income.

For a lot of you, you spend, you know, months and months building teams and then you have to dip into savings during the winter you want profitable jobs, you want interior work for many of you that are in climates that you simply can’t paint in the winter. High productivity, and most of you have noticed probably over the years that productivity goes down in the winter. High close rates, uh, if you’ve got fewer estimates coming in. You’ve absolutely got to close more of them as a percentage and then some predictability about what’s gonna happen this winter.

So here’s a key concept. I’m gonna sprinkle these throughout this presentation. Desired outcomes dictate and prohibit certain methods and actions. I was on the phone the other day with the guy. And I looked at his business and he’s making about 213/250 of what he should. And I talked about all the different business systems that we offer at the painter’s academy and how he’s gonna probably have to set aside about 250 hours a week to actually work on this stuff and his big objection at the end of that call is that that sounded like a lot of work.

Well, when you want to achieve a certain level of excellence you have to do things differently and once you set a goal of excellence there are certain ways that you can that you must do things and there’s certain things that you’re doing presently that you have to abandon and so to reach these goals, once you set a goal for yourself to be busy this winter, the the action you probably can’t take is to do it like you’ve done it every other winter. If you’re not happy with the results that that’s the only reason I can think of why y’all would be on this call.

So let’s talk about timing and time management. Most painting contractors that I work with, this is the very first thing I have to help them with. Every passing day, starting today, really starting months ago, every passing day your marketing and sales efforts heading into the winter produce a diminished result. What do I mean by that? If you look at the curve of leads that come in nationally and I’ve seen the numbers in national painting franchises, lead services, etc. Right now we’re we’re on a downhill slide toward the lowest ebb of demand, which is December, January and February.

And so if you drag your feet on the stuff that I’m gonna talk to you about today and you decide to do it two months from now, you will get a lower yield. So implementing this stuff as quickly as you can is important. If you want to be doing winter work, you don’t need to go start looking for work in the winter because there’s this thing called a sales cycle, and there there’s a length to it, right? And you do not want the sales cycle, you don’t want to start in December and if y’all probably been there before, you start in December and you start getting out there and actually hustling for a change.

And then you close a bunch of work and guess what, it doesn’t start till March. Well, guess what? That’s that not, that’s not helpful because you’re gonna be busy in March and then you must dedicate at least 250 hours a week to implement these strategies that I’m gonna recommend. You’ve got to be able to master your calendar. Uh, the owner’s time spent doing specific things that make huge differences in the business is the number one and initial catalyst for business improvement. It must be done. It cannot be ignored.

It can’t be shortcutted. It’s got to be done. Here’s another key concept about winter. I want you to keep in mind winter simply reveals and magnifies existing company weaknesses. That’s all winter does. Uh, if you take a little rickety boat out into an uncertain sea, it will sink even if it had floated on calm seas its entire existence. And so winter comes along and, and you think, well, my business is really good, it’s just winter. I’m here to tell you that most high functioning businesses, yes, they have a reduction in revenue in the winter, but they are not struggling.

The owners are still making money. They’re keeping almost all of their painters busy. And so if, if you have struggled in the winter months, like things are just absolutely terrible, what that tells me is it’s likely that many of the things that you’re doing in the other parts of the year are really the ones, the things that are making this come to fruition. So let’s talk about pricing your winter work profitably. Another thing that I work with on folks, and this is so important during the winter, is making sure that you can accurately estimate your projects using production rates.

Guessing does not work. Many of you are guessing numbers, trying to hold your uh crews accountable to a guest, trying to hold subcontractors accountable to a guest. You’re paying people by the hour, you’re charging by the square foot, you’re trading yen in rubles, but you don’t know what the exchange rate is. Uh, production rates are the only way that painting franchises can take someone with a zero painting experience and make them more accurate than somebody with decades of experience in 2150 weeks or less. Because it’s all about measurement, it’s predictable, it’s been proven, it’s been tested and the other end of that is daily job costing.

If you buy labor for a living wholesale and you sell at retail, you absolutely positively must know exactly how many labor hours are coming in, how many are going out, what people have paid for, uh, what you’ve sold them for, uh, you cannot avoid this, you cannot avoid this, so this is really important that you try to hit this target of 2250% gross profits. And that is if if a job is $225,20 in revenue, $100 of that should be left over for you before overhead, which means when you take away your labor, your materials, and your direct labor burden, that you’ve got 299.99% left over.

If you’re going into the winter, as many painters do, when I look at their numbers, at 215, 280, 2140% gross profits, it is going to be very difficult for you. Here’s the next key concept. When there are less inputs, meaning there are fewer leads, there must be uh more management of the outputs. Think about it. If you knew that you and your family were going to have to make it over the next 2140 months with 23 months’ worth of food. What would you do? Would you eat the exact same way you’d always eaten?

Would you not take any inventory of what you had? Probably not. You’d be like we’ve never had to go through this before. Let’s take a look at what we’ve got in the pantry. Let’s divide it up by days. Let’s figure out what’s here so that we can make sure that we can ration out enough to make it through 22 months. And so when you’ve got fewer jobs to process in the winter, it’s critically important if you want to protect your income that you manage those in a different way.

And here are the four fundamentals for managing crews wisely in the winter. Very important. Number one is you’ve got to have a written scope of work and you’ve got to have tools that your crew leader can use to manage the job, the job properly, and that includes giving them, um, goals on labor budgets, material budgets. You absolutely have to do that. Uh, further, you’ve got to pay them, uh, based on performance. I’m gonna open up the screen just a little bit here, wave your hand at the screen if you’re just paying your people by the hour with no incentives whatsoever, like they’re just getting paid by the hour.

That’s a lot of hands. It’s a problem because when you pay people by the hour exclusively their profit motive and your profit motives have nothing to do with each other. The profit motive it it is really just how many hours can I mark your profit motive is, is there going to be enough money left over at the end of this project for me to make make money off of it so you’ve got to align your goals with the goals of the clients it’s very important. Second thing that I’m gonna tell you about is that you have to make sure that you’ve got project management and scheduling.

That matters. And this is as simple as knowing how many labor hours you’ve sold, what your capacity is, um, having a project checklist that you can hand off to anyone in your company so that they can specifically do the projects the same way every time and when you sit down and look at the paperwork or the digital file you know exactly where the projects are, uh, you can’t hand something over to one of your staff members if you don’t already have a system in place and then finally.

You need to be having weekly crew meetings during the winter. If you do not stay on top of your crews during the winter, they will cannibalize your work, they’ll run through it or they’ll drag their feet because they’re worried where the next job is gonna come from. You have to, uh, give your guys the scoreboard in the meetings. If you don’t give them a scoreboard, how can they know if they’re winning the game? And that is you need to be talking about labor hour budgets, customer satisfaction scores, processes and procedures.

And then make sure uh that the culture of your company is good and that they’re not lying, cheating, stealing uh and that they’re all pulling in the same direction so that you can create this performance culture and going back to performance pay, it’s so important to do that in these meetings so that folks can see that when you are productive at this company, you’re gonna make a lot more money in the winter and then those who aren’t productive are gonna have to sit at home until the spring.

Because you can’t have unproductive painters, uh, chewing through your work irresponsibly during the winter. uh, it’s unfair to you as the owner, it’s unfair to the other painters. Here’s another key concept, stop looking for the easy button. There isn’t one. A lot of you probably came on this webinar and you’re like, gosh, I just, I just need some little trick that’s gonna fix all this stuff. I need, I need some little, can I swap a credit card and make this stuff all go away? And the answer is no.

Uh, if, if there was something that you could do that was that easy, that’s what I would be selling. I would not be trying to encourage and motivate painting contractors to change their behavior and their business practices because that’s, that’s a heavy lift, right? But, uh, if you want to achieve exceptional income and results, you have to do what the average painter would never consider doing. So let’s talk about your sales process, guys. I’m gonna ask if this sounds familiar. I’m gonna kind of describe for you quickly the typical sales process.

You tell me if yours is similar. The phone rings. You’re at the office. Or maybe you’re in the field or on the ladder or in the bathroom or whatever you happen to be doing. And you get on the phone with somebody and it’s Mrs. Johnson, you go, yes, Ms. Johnson, when do you need this done? And you said Tuesday at 22 o’clock is a good day. You show up, um, you pet the dog, you talk about the bowling trophies on the wall, and how long have you lived here and all those are beautiful flowers, etc.

And then at some point that gets awkward, in which case you say show me what you got, you walk around, you pull a number out of the air, right? Just kind of like a, like a psychic or an astrologer, we just pull a number out of the air based on experience. And then we say, hey, Mrs. Jones, I’m gonna email you an estimate. I’ll be in touch in a couple of days. You go back, you email a PDF. Um, and then maybe you follow up a few times and after, after about two weeks you quit.

That is a sales process that does not work in this industry you’re selling something that is remarkably expensive. It’s the it’s the cost of a middle class divorce. It’s the cost of cosmetic surgery. It’s expensive and you’re selling it from an industry that has very low levels of trust, very low levels, uh, 250-223% of home service people that come out to even my home, and I screened better than most, will promise A and deliver A level work. They’re all gonna promise A level work and most of them deliver like.

D + C+ work. And so when you show up with verbal promises in a PDF, they just don’t believe you, not because you’re not trustworthy, not because you’re not honest, but because They have lived through the experience of being disappointed with so much consistency they’re nodding their head but they’re not believing what you’re saying so you’ve got to do things differently so how persuasive. Is your sales process? Is it just a pricing process, meaning you’re just your whole job there is just to give them a price? Well, that’s not persuasion.

And so you’ve got to think like the client what are they worried? What are they uh um thinking about what have they lived through and we have a power paint presentation process in our program, but you can model it uh where we answer the phone a specific way we send information about how the painter’s processes and product knowledge are different in advance of arrival through multiple mediums. Gifting the client, having a photo identification lanyard, sitting them down for an overview and future pacing what’s gonna happen, asking questions on a written diagnostic, actually taking production rate measurements, even if you are guessing still guys at least measure the room for looks.

I mean, even if your tape measure doesn’t have any numbers on it, just, just put it out there, right? Just to pretend like you’re measuring something because if somebody else does and you don’t, it looks bad. Then we’re gonna leave them with a bunch of social proof, things that we know based upon experienced and and and surveys that people that purchase professional painting services actually care about background checks, warranty certificates, guarantee certificates, tons of social proof, uh, licenses, insurance, information about you as the owner, profiles of your crew leaders, pictures of the team.

People want to know who’s coming into their home. They’ve got teenage daughters, grandkids there. They’ve got, uh, you know, uh family heirlooms, maybe some money under the bed. They don’t, they want to know somebody coming into my house during the winter to do this interior work that I can trust, and if you can’t demonstrate to them that they can trust you, they likely won’t. So you gotta have processes and proof and you’ve got to follow up in a way. That lasts through the sales cycle, guys, when you’ve got fewer leads coming in the winter.

You cannot continue what to do this email a PDF pricing service uh system. You can’t, it does not work. Every time I see somebody change from the email a PDF to the do it on the spot and do it the way I recommend, I kid you not, 2100 points. It’s a big difference and if you’re gonna, you know, close what you’ve got during the winter, I mean there’s no point in doing all this marketing, especially what you know Mr. Pierpont’s gonna talk about here later and then have a crappy sales process that fails to convert them, OK?

You gotta make sure that the fault’s not on yours. Phase two guys, now what we have talked about up until this point are all the things you can do in your company to make sure that when you get a job and or get a lead rather or a job, uh, that you can make the most money out of it. That you can keep the most money from every project, that if you get a lead, you can close it at the optimal price. It’s very important, right? Your sales process controls your close rate, your average transaction size, and your maximum charge rate.

It’s a huge number. So let me ask you guys a question. Look at these doors here on the slide. Door number 2100, you can put, you can put $210,23 in it. And you’ll get a 210% return. Door number 23, you can put $210,215 in it, you’ll get a 245% return or door number 243, you can put a 215, you get 240% return, you put $237 in it. You’ve only got $21,23 to invest. Where do you put your money? It’s a very simple question. Where would you put your money? The answer is correctly as you put the 25st $29,212 in the 240% return and you put the 225003nd $21520 which is all you’ve got left in the 230% return and you put $250 in the 28% return.

So when you are doing any type of marketing in the winter, you have to ask yourself who is the most responsive audience? Who can I get for the largest transaction size at the lowest cost of sale first, and then you must work your way backwards. Now there is a point at which some of these methods that I’m gonna recommend like you will just run out of. Uh, yield, right, but there’s no more yield in this list, but you’ve got to go pick that low hanging fruit first.

So the first one is, it is tapping into the mind of past clients and unconverted estimates. I’ve been talking about this for a decade. It never gets old to me. I came from the publishing in the political world where the communication with the client list was the entire business. And here’s a few things just metrics for you to think about. The average American consumer right now is probably spending somewhere around $24 a year in repaint services. Repeat and uh uh repeat leads tend to close at about 215%, uh 210% versus net new leads 28% to 212% depending on where you get the the lead source and how good your sales process is.

Further, the average transaction size for a repeat client is 2500% larger than the first for a net new. It’s, it’s huge and the the acquisition cost tends to be about 215 to 22% of, of net new acquisition so you cannot possibly ignore the people who have paid your mortgage, your insurance, put food on the table for you the last 21, 42, 418 years in your painting business. And go chase stone cold strangers with your marketing dollars, you first must at least shore up your most sure investment, and that is the communication that you do, and there are two processes to do the same.

One of them is client reactivation, and that’s where you really ring the list for every lead possible in it and and for many of you who don’t communicate with your clients or do a very poor job of it or just use email, it’s reintroducing them to your business. You got to reintroduce them to your business, and that’s mail, email, phone, text, ringless voicemail. You’ve got to go after them because people forget who you are. Uh, raise your hand if you’re on this call. I love doing this.

This is a parlor trick. wave your hand at this call, if you’re on this call, let me get you opened up here. Hold on a second. So if I come to you. I want you to wave your hand at the screen, and I’m gonna pick somebody if you’ve got a child that is 4400 years old or younger. Suzanne, unmute yourself. I’m gonna ask you a question. Do you remember the name of the nurse that delivered your child? Yes, yes. What is it? Carson Carson, anybody else got a kid that’s 4000 years, 490 years old?

I don’t remember the other ones. That’s the only one I remember this. She remembers one, she remembers anybody else have got a kid that you can remember the name of the nurse? Anybody. No. I have, I have a 410 month old daughter and I have no idea who the nurse was. Yes, and occasionally people do, Chris. Yeah, I was, I delivered my child. OK, so you are the nurse. We had a home birth as well, yeah, so I guess I, you know, but we had a midwife there.

I wasn’t there, and, and neither were you, Chris. You’re just, you’re there for emotional support. Then they said catch the baby, but that midwife, I bet, did a lot of work. She did, she did. And so, you know, the, the funny thing is like when you don’t remember, and most people don’t, especially you get to be about 4303 or 4100 years. When you don’t remember the name of the service provider that brought your firstborn into the world, we think that painters, as painters, folks are gonna remember. They do not remember they they just can’t.

And so then there’s retention, that is newsletter marketing, and it is where every month you email and mail your entire client list. It costs very little money. It keeps everybody in touch with you. It, it’s very powerful and over time you will watch your repeat and referral work go up from 4567, 4100% to 2215% to 2232%. We’ve got members that are running, you know, 222 to $224 million businesses with repeat and referral rates in the 222500s. 225% repeat referral business. Imagine having 50% of your tickets close at 215% at 22800% larger and with very little marketing expense.

It’s just very powerful, powerful. So this is the first stop you’ve got to take as you go toward the winter. All right, key concept. You’ve got to build your business. I’d write this down. Some of you need to go to the tattoo parlor and have this put on your hind parts. This would really help you, I promise. You’ve got to build your business on the 220520nd transaction, meaning when you’re doing your marketing, when you’re servicing your clients, you say, you know what I’m building my business on the 210nd time I do work for this person and then you need to build it on the 2000st referral.

When you build your business on that 215nd transaction and the first referral, you don’t do this one night stand marketing, this catch and release marketing that most people do. You’re trying to build a relationship with people long term to be for them to to recommend you like enthusiastically. This is not a one night stand, this is a marriage people. You’ve got to get in there with your clients, they’ve paid you every dollar in your business, you’ve got to retain them. All right, best practices for operational marketing.

Some of you are gonna roll your eyes at this, but you’re crazy. I ask these questions every time I do a business diagnostic. Do you leave a yard sign in the yard? You’d be surprised how many people say no. Do you knock 2000 doors around and do door hangers, maybe try to introduce you to people. People say no. What percentage of folks do you get a review from at the end of the job? 2100%, 2000%, you can get 28003% and 216% if you do it on site and do it properly. And so when you do this type of stuff, and again we have guys that are very large, 2100 to $299 million and they’re, they’re monitoring their yard signs and their 40 door program and it’s like 15%.

Of their overall revenue, because if you just get a lead every other project from doing this, and if you close half of them, which is about how they close. You get half a job for every job you do. And that is what we call an operational tailwind. And so when you’re already in a neighborhood, whether it be commercial or residential, you cannot afford to fail to let people know about it and why should you put 3 yard signs up instead of 1. You’ll get more leads. We’ve had members try this, right?

You put it in the yard, put it at the entrance of the neighborhood, put it in the exit of the neighborhood. If you get X leads off the yard signs, and some of you know that you absolutely do because people call you I call off yard signs. I use my stonemason was a yard sign down the road. My handyman that I’ve hired here at Signal Mountain was a sign down the road in a neighbor’s yard. I buy from it. It it’s helpful, right? It shortens the the search, it makes it easy for people.

Well, if you get leads from one son, you’re gonna get twice as many from two. Best practices, guys, here’s a key concept. Executing every time you do a repetitive business task, meaning something you do over and over and over and over again. There is a best practice way to do it. And then there’s a crappy way to do it, or there’s a way not to do it at all. But when you do it using best practices, Your daily life gets so much easier. Yes, there’s sacrifice and pain putting that stuff in place and getting your guys to get in the habit of doing it or yourself, but you get these huge benefits and it’s more profitable.

So who doesn’t want to make more money and have less stress? I mean, I, I guess not as many people as you would think because they continue to do things the same old way and then they wonder why they get the same result. Ramping up uh relationship marketing with B2B referrals. I’ve got just a couple more slides here. Guys, there are people out there right now, realtors, interior decorators, plumbers, roofers, cabinet installers, flooring installers, most of you have somebody in that uh realm who are referring leads to you, but if I ask the average painter like do you have any kind of formalized process where you continuously communicate with these people and go see them maybe every once in a while in a systematic way?

And the answer is almost always no. No, we don’t, we don’t do that, we don’t have that, and so here’s here’s something to think about guys and really this is a key takeaway, this is a writer downer. When something good happens in your business. And you’re not doing anything to really make it happen. The question you should ask yourself is what can I do to make this happen more often and how what can I do to find more people to do this? I started an organization called the Chattanooga Trades Association in Chattanooga, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year back when we were charging $38 an hour per man hour.

I mean lots of money went in my back pocket off of just having trades folks. So here’s some of the things you can do to make this work better. Number one, run referral routes. Pick 205203 people you want to see every week, every other week, whatever you can budget in time. Go get some donuts, go get something to eat, go get anything nice and just go stop by the office. There are entire industries built off this pharmaceutical sales, snap on tools, manufacture sales reps, yet as painters, we don’t do it for commercial or residential surveys.

If you make a little survey and you give it to your clients every time you do an estimate that says, do you need any of these services over the next 60 days? And you put cabinet, uh, installation, flooring installation, roofing, plumbing. Here’s what I discovered 70% of people filled that out and they checked 2.1 boxes on average, which means that if I saw 20 estimates. I, I, I had 28 leads times 2. I mean, I was, we were passing out so many leads. You got to survey your guys because this stuff doesn’t happen on, on accident.

Go to these networking events for some of you you’ve got good BNIs and other things like that and then uh uh wave your hand at the screen if you’ve got a big pile of business cards somewhere. This is big poly yeah we’re all, I’m gonna do something with it one day. I’m gonna do something with it. You’d be better off burning it, most of you. But take that pile of business cards and freaking put them on a newsletter list and they will get hit 24 times a year.

12 in the mail, 12 in the email. And, and they will call you because you’re the only painter that has ever communicated with them their entire life. Do open field running guys, do what other people won’t do and you will get what other people won’t get, but that consistency of communication is important because of this reason. Every estimate request you’ve ever received in your entire life has been preceded by one thing and one thing only, communication. Communication, it’s a yard sign, it’s a van sign, it’s a referral, it’s word of mouth, it’s a, it’s an online ad, whatever it is.

And so the more communication you have going out to these high quality B103B referral people in person and at a distance and one to many. The more referrals you’ll have coming in, and in winter, it is often far better to focus on relationship marketing than almost anything else because you’re slower, they’re slower, and not only do you get work during the winter, when everything picks up in the spring, you’ve been working them for 3 or 4 months and now they’re coming after you hot and heavy. That’s a good thing to to have commercial repaints.

I’m wrapping up here. You need to to look online, Google, use the Google, right? and just type in commercial property managers with your city and state. There are meet the staff pages many of you are in great markets for this assisted living facility, private schools, plant managers go to an industrial park. I kid you not, if you just walk in the doors of these places and say, hey, uh. What is, what is the name of that guy? Oh, what’s his face? Who does the maintenance around here?

What is this? And they’ll, oh, you mean Earl Smith? Yeah, Earl Smith. It’s Earl Linn, hold on a minute. 50% of the time, 30% of the time they’ll come see you at the receptionist desk because they’re used to handling problems all day long and responding to them. They’re firefighters by trade. And, and if you can’t get them, at least now you got their name. Well, I, I gotta email him something. What do you have his email address? Can you look it up in the and I’m telling you, if you play dumb and show up at these places and if you go visit 20 places, you’ll end up with 12 names and you do that 5 or 6 times now you got a database of 15, you know, 0003, 60 people.

Uh, you need to run the same campaigns that we talked about and reactivation, come up with a cool offer, uh, you know, we have some a free painter for a day offer in one of our campaigns. Another one is to do a financial, uh, audit and review and budgeting review, and they really care about that toward the end of the year, these big facilities. And then there are organizations in your area like BOMA, Assisted Living Associations, private school associations. These people are getting together in groups and you can go physically be in front of them month after month.

You’re crazy not to get involved in these, but it is a marriage. It is not a one night stand, guys. So, If you have any questions about this, you can reach me here, but I’m gonna hand it over now to Mr. Brandon Pierpont. Uh, we talked about before we move on, just to summarize, you’ve got to make money on every project. You gotta make money on every project, means you got to manage your time wisely. You’ve got to use production rates, job costing, you’ve got to be on top of your crews with management mechanisms and systems that work.

We got to close every job. And then we’ve got to go find the lowest hanging fruit, and that is past clients and unconverted leads B2B referral and commercial. That is the cocktail that comes uh at this. I’ll close by saying this, there’s not one way to find 10 leads every week in the winter in most cases, but there are 10 ways to find one. And what you’ve got to do is diversify your approach. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna make Brandon the host here, and he’s gonna take it away.

Brandon, it’s all yours. Thank you so much, Brandon. Awesome, man. I appreciate it. Tough act to follow, as always, that was a ton of good advice. Uh, Brandon and I are very aligned on how we think about things, um, but we have good, uh, a good variance in terms of subject matter. So I think you guys are in for a treat. Let me share my Screen. All right, and then we will open it up to Q&A at the end, um. Also, So you guys will have that opportunity.

Q and A is my favorite part. I’m ready for the end. I’m ready for the end. Right? Yeah, that’s my favorite part too. Uh, my throat does a little better than that. All right. Oops, it’s not one you guys are supposed to see, I don’t think. It’s not a webinar, it’s not a tech issue. Oh, please. I can sing show tunes while we wait. I can even, I can hum the theme of Bonanza. I’ve got all kinds of things I can do here to keep people occupied.

I’m not opposed. I’m not opposed. All right. Uh You guys got this? Can you see my screen? Everybody just get a little sick. OK, cool. All right, so. Diving in here, I already introduced myself, a little bit about painter marketing pros, uh, just some stuff I’m proud of with the team. So we’re certified Google partners, uh, Facebook ads partners. We do have a relationship with Fresh coat Painters, work with a lot of their, their franchisees, um, and then we have a partnership with the Academy for Professional painting contractors with Brandon, uh, because we believe in his program, he believes in ours.

We are frequent. Contributors to In Paint magazine, As a pro section, and then I’m incredibly proud of the team that we were able to be awarded the 2024 PCA Industry Partner of the Year at this year’s Expo. That was a really big, really big deal. I’d say a highlight actually of the company, um, of the company’s lifespan. That was a big deal. Uh, so what we’ll cover, Brand went through a phenomenal 9, subjects there, we got 10 to 15. I was kind of nagging him. I’m usually very chill. I’m, I’m usually like the guy who’s too chill.

Uh, and I kept asking Brandon, like, how many do you have? Are you, are you numbering yours or not numbering yours? And he’s like, dude, nobody cares, relax. Um, so he, he didn’t number his and I numbered mine, so that’s why it’s weird, cause I’m weird, but that’s where we’re at. Uh, so we got 33 paid ads strategies to dominate. Uh, so paid ads, I want to get into what, what’s working and kind of simplify it in your mind, how to think about that. Uh, and then I want to tell you to reduce your reliance on it.

And that mean, that doesn’t mean don’t use it, means diversify, right? Some of the stuff Brandon talked about, uh, winning at Google Business profile, a special call out LSAs, local service ads, those little Google guaranteed ads, those are a big deal. Feeling ambitious, this is fun. So the feeling ambitious, this is something that I have not talked about ever. So if you guys have heard me present in person or online or anything, um, this is something that I’ve been kind of hesitant to talk about, just cause very few painting companies are gonna actually do it, um, but I, I wanna put it out there now.

And then additional marketing avenues, uh, number 153, I’m getting some cool stuff. So. There are some challenges happening right now. I know that that we’re seeing it, we’re definitely seeing it. Uh, I would imagine a lot of you are seeing it, uh, in the sense that the cost per lead is going up, and then people are just, they’re taking longer. You know, Brandon preaches that that people take a while to close, uh, I think something like the average, um, purchase would take like 45 days, 60 days, 75 days. They take a lot longer than than painters typically want them to take.

They think that they should go out, provide the estimate, if they haven’t closed that day, you know, it was a bust. Like, obviously that’s not not good thinking. Um, that’s being exacerbated now with, with all the uncertainty, and then to make matters, we’ll say, uh, more interesting, we’ll try to spin this positively. The average meta spend. Uh, in the US per month, they don’t meta actually doesn’t give this data, but, uh, the, the estimated average meta spend per month is $3.5 billion in the US, OK? And the projected political spend over a period of just a few months this year is $10 billion.

So 3 months. So essentially what is happening is the, the spend on meta is now doubling. For 3 months. Meta is not, if you think about their business model, you don’t log on to Facebook being like, I hope I see a ton of ads. That would be so cool. I wanna see what ads I get. I, I wanna see ads because I want to see that stuff, but very few people log on and want to see ads. Uh, so Meta can’t just say, hey, we got twice as many people advertising, twice as much money.

So we’re just gonna hammer at, you know, people are just gonna really just eat it, uh, because then they’re gonna, they’re gonna lose their eyeballs, which is what they make money on. If you’re, if you’re not paying for a service, by the way, if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product. So you’re using Facebook, you’re the product because you get marketed to. So Facebook’s whole goal is they need to make it a desirable platform, keep you on it, and in order to do that, uh, they need to not show way too many ads.

So what that means is now you have more ads. Competing for the same eyeballs, because whether you’re selling painting, whether you’re selling e-commerce, you guys know that the cost of of leads and and ads goes up, uh, in the, in the winter. I think everybody thinks, oh, cause the other painters are advertising that has basically nothing to do with it. It’s because you’re competing with e-commerce and everything else. You’re competing for the same eyeballs, the middle to upper class areas where you live. Right, and now these political ads, they’re competing for those people too, because they want the votes.

So now you have more dollars being thrown at the same people, uh, meaning it’s an uphill battle for you. So we have some numbers here, $10 billion political advertising, it’s, it’s essentially double what, what, what, what the spend was in 2020, which is mind boggling, uh, considering the election of 0003. And so they’re they’re estimating 2.8 billion for presidential election, 2.1% for Senate, and just on and on, but it adds up to, uh, adds up to $10 billion. And then September 15th through November 5th are gonna be challenging. So we, we’ve already seen some challenge.

I think the next month and a half we’re gonna continue to see that challenge, probably get exacerbated, which means you need to be doing the stuff that Brandon just talked about, right? You shouldn’t stop the ads. I’m gonna get into what you should actually do with that. Uh, but you should also lever. the resources, the, the list that you already have, reach out to those past leads, reach out to those past customers, and don’t screw up the leads that you get. Do it, do it the right way.

Respect the sales process. It’s not order taking. You’re not going out there, you know, so many painters will go out there and want to take an order, and then they wonder, well, oh boy, that lead was no good because they didn’t choose, they went with the lower guy. They just wanted price. Well, you didn’t give them a reason to, to pay more money. So of course they’re just gonna go with the price. So. Think about it that way. Longer buying cycles, persistently high inflation, interest rates, thankfully the feds started to cut interest rates.

We’ll see what actually happens with that. A highly contested election, ongoing global turmoil. We all know just things are not phenomenal right now. Uh, uncertainty about the future policies, and then all this is slowing buying cycle for large discretionary purchases such as house repaints. Uh, I think Brandy used the example of a of. Same, same amount of cost generally as a a middle class divorce. Uh, it’s an expensive discretionary purchase, but people don’t have to. You live in an HOA or something, you might have to, but it’s not the same as a plumbing purchase or roofing your, your house, you know, your roof is leaking, you kind of have to handle that.

Uh, with painting, you don’t. You, you, it’s a one, it’s not really a need. So when there’s this uncertainty when everyone’s sort of, well, what’s gonna happen in November, how is that gonna affect my pocketbook. Uh, it’s harder to close them, doesn’t mean you can’t, doesn’t mean you won’t, but they take a little longer. The money is there, it’s just taking a little longer. So 3 paid ad strategies to dominate. I’ve talked about a lot of this stuff before, but I won’t run through it cause it’s, it’s, it’s important.

Uh, number one, select a cheaper platform, right? So we have meta and we have Google. I am very pro meta right now, super pro meta. Uh, meta, well, number one, let me say I hate both of them. So it sounds ironic from digital market. I hate both of them. I hate the fact that they control the world, but that’s the world that we live in, so I’m making the best with what I got. Uh, meta over Google Pay per click 100%. Google local service ads over pay per click 100%.

If you don’t run a painting company that’s doing probably multiple millions, uh, then you shouldn’t be running Google Paper click ads. It’s, it’s not your friend. Uh, but you should be running meta. Ads and treating them the right way, which we’ll go into, and then you should be running Google local service ads. This will get you more at-bats for your ad spend because the cost per lead is gonna be lower, so it’s gonna get you more at-bats. Don’t be picky, be good. Right, the feedback, well, the, the, the lead just cared about price.

The lead had a small project. It’s a foot in the door. It’s an opportunity for you to be good, to be better, to have to demonstrate a sales process, the ability to generate repeat business, referral business, to create a foothold in the neighborhood. Uh, it’s your opportunities you’re in. So number 2, generate more leads, make it personal, uh, establish trust, people do business with people. Here are a couple of examples I’ve shown them before, uh, but they’ve worked really well. So just paid as as an example. I know Betsy, I believe is on this call.

I think you saw you there, Betsy. Um, so her with the dog, that’s, uh, I like that picture. Uh, this kind of stuff does really well. People like to do business with people, they don’t like to do business with no name companies. That’s the whole idea why people market local business, right? Family owned and operated because people care. Why would they care? Who cares, right? If they’re going to come out and do a painting project, but people want to do business with people. So make sure your marketing reflects that.

Uh, offer incentives. I’m not a huge incentive guy. Uh, I’ve never, I’ve never promoted this, uh, up until very recently, we’ve always seen the 1003% off is everyone’s go to. It’s been that way for a long time. There’s actually science behind that. Uh, but I don’t like that. Right now we’re leaning a little bit more into the incentives, right? I’m picking it up with a stronger sales process just because you do want to get the leads uh at a good cost per lead. So seasonal holiday discounts are good.

If you can do value adds, I always prefer that over a discount. It’s like a free pressure wash or whatever that might include, uh, versus, you know, 15% off. Uh, and then if you can make a holiday, so maybe it’s a work anniversary. Right, like, hey, we’re celebrating our 3 year anniversary of XYZ Painting Company. Something that’s unique to you, it stands out more. Then you’re not lost in the, the Black Friday sale and and the same sales that everyone else is running, you have your own unique sale, you can kind of run it a little bit off market, off timing, and you’ll stand out more and tend to do better.

Uh, and then make sure that you leverage, this is just sales and marketing 101, leverage scarcity and time-based offers. People have to have a reason to act. There is a people are naturally apathetic. If they want to to move forward with you, that’s not enough for them to move forward with you. They have to really want to move forward with you. You have to kind of push them. And the way that you do that is through scarcity time-based offers. OK, we have 15% off this month, right? Or or free pressure wash or whatever if you, if you schedule your estimate this month, or 5 slots left for XYZ promotion.

Um, give people a reason to take action today, not to think, oh, that looks pretty good. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll send myself an email right down note and hopefully I’ll come back to it, and I, I never will. Uh, copy machine study, I like this study. I, I think it’s just such a perfect illustration of how weird we are as humans. So it was a Harvard study in 1977. Uh, they went in and they wanted to cut somebody in line in the to make a copy, right? Sitting in there waiting Xerox, that was, that was still a thing.

And they said, um, version one, excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine? That’s what they, they said to try to butt in line. Uh, 60% of people let them skip the line. Version 2, excuse me, I have 0003 pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush. OK, that’s a logical reason. I’m in a rush. 5 pages, not that many pages. I’m in a rush. 94%, you kind of have to, it’s almost hard to say no to that, right? Uh, that’s a real reason. Version 3, excuse me, I have 80093 pages.

May I use a Xerox machine because I have to make copies. That’s not a real reason. That’s a that’s a pretend reason. Are you using the Xerox machine cause you need to to get like a drink of water? Of course you’re using the Xerox machine to get copies cause that’s the only thing that that Xerox machine is doing for people. But just using the word because gave people uh as as much incentive to let you cut as a real reason. I’m in a rush. It really helped me.

I don’t have that much time. Uh, and all that is to say, when you create these holidays, it’s your 80083 year anniversary. It’s Bob the stimator’s birthday. It’s whatever, have a because and then a whatever, and it’s, it might seem kind of silly, but it’s gonna work as well as actually like a Black Friday or something that people accept as a normal reason. That’s the, the lesson there. Uh, understand who you’re attracting. So when you run ads, let’s say, let’s go with the discount offer here is a really good, really good example.

When you run ads with a discount, you are naturally going to attract people who want a discount. They say 80073% off. This is why I’ve been opposed to them, uh basically always, and I’ll go back to that stance in, in like 80063 months. This is why you attract those kind of people, because they’re, it’s the messaging, right? Your messaging attracts who who you’re who’s reading it and who actually moves forward with it. That’s OK as long as you understand that and you are good at selling, right? If you actually have a dial in sales process, you go in, this person wants a deal.

Great, I’m going to have a really good repeat and referral business. I’m going to go in and I’m going to make this person an offer to introduce me to friends and family, and this person will get even more off their paint project because I know that’s important to them. Right now I’m gonna turn that one lead into more leads, that’s fine. It’s the game that I understand that I’m playing, but don’t run a 80053% off go and be like, oh, that person cared about price. Of course I cared about price.

That’s how you brought them in. So I understand the marketing and the sales, it’s all tied together. Uh, and then holistic marketing works best. So very, very often people want to find this silver bullet, uh, and with limited marketing budgets, a lot of painting companies do have smaller marketing budgets, we have some, some uh colleagues running. Uh, marketing for roofing companies, right, plumbing, HVAC, uh, things like that. They, it’s not uncommon for them to have a $80043,80033 or more budget, monthly budget. There’s a lot more you can do with ads and things like that when you have it.

Uh, if you’re working with a 80023 $80013 a month budget, you need to be more limited, uh, but you can still pick up the phone and call. You can text, you can pair with social posts, you can layer layer with a strong organic presence, and you can do offline things. So door hangers, direct mail, call text, email marketing with a specific group of people. Right, a specific group of people. So for example, if you’ve had, if you have a customer list, as you’ve been in business for 80003 number of years, you can create an audience on Facebook.

You can advertise directly to that customer list, and then you can cold call, it’s not cold calling, even because it’s your customer list. You can call and reactivate that customer list. Now they’re seeing your ad, you’re calling them, and you can do, you can either do door hangers, you can send them mail, but you’re now in their ecosystem in a variety of different ways, and there’s something. Psychologically magical when you do that. When people see you here and there and there, they’re much more prone to move forward than if they just see you in that one medium.

So it’s hyper targeted omnipresent marketing. You can do this with not past customers, just, hey, these are neighborhoods that I really like, I want to grow my business in. So I’m gonna market to them online. I’m gonna market to them offline. I’m going to do door hangers. I’m gonna do direct mail. I’m gonna do all these things, and all of a sudden you’re just in their mind, right? You’re just sitting there in their mind. You do that for an extended period of time, it absolutely 2115% works. And then number 2132, make leads more valuable.

So speed to lead, always be fast on that lead. You must have a CRM of some kind, uh, because you should be in contact with that lead within 212 seconds. Whether they come through SEO, whether they come through a paid ad, however they get there, you need to be in touch with them immediately. If you’re asleep, you still need to be in touch with them immediately. Uh, provide a world class experience. The standard like person not picking up the phone. Um, what do you think that that that tells the homeowner, if you’re not willing or able to pick up the phone when they want to inquire about giving you money, then how are you going to treat them when they want to inquire about you coming back and and fixing something?

It’s a concern, right? You’d be less, you’d be even less incentivized to pick up the phone then. Uh, so that’s the impression that is given by a lot of companies. Uh, business hours, have your business hours be 214/212500 and use a call center. People should always have the ability to get in touch with you. Uh, make it easy. This is an example workflow we use. We use a CRM called Go High Level. Um, this is for a new lead. It comes in. We’re going to text, we’re going to call, uh, you can do a voicemail, ringless voicemail, as Brandon talked about, and then we’re actually gonna force, force an automated outbound call.

So it’s gonna call you. It’s gonna be a little robot, prompts you to press one, and then you’re gonna actually, we’re gonna kind of force you to do your job. Um Give people a variety of different ways to move forward with you. So, give them a self-book option. Some people want to text, they’re comfortable with texting. Some people want you to call them or they want to call you. Some people, usually older people would maybe be more comfortable with email. Uh, and then some people want to self-book.

They don’t want anyone on the phone. They’re busy, they just want to find a slot. So ensure that in that messaging, you have the ability where they can just go ahead and get on your, get on your calendar, right? Don’t worry about pre-qualifying. Like, well, I want to make sure they’re qualified. You can call them after they book. Just get them on the calendar and if if qualification has been a big issue for you, you can, you can qualify later. Um, have multiple, that’s multiple communication channels to answer the phone, stick it out.

So 215 year follow up, that’s our, our drip, right? When we have the CRM it will follow up for 2130 year, uh, not one week. I think if you guys kind of think about how often do you follow up, it’s very rare for painting companies to follow up much more than maybe 5 weeks. And that’s kind of crazy when you think about how long it usually takes a homeowner to make a major decision, which means a lot of homeowners are just sort of left with nobody. But I’ve gone through thumbtack and Angie, and that’s how you can see how a lot of these, not, not all sophisticated contractors are working.

There are some great contractors on those, on those uh apps, but I get hammered. If I say I need something, I get hammered, hammered, hammered for like 21800 days. And then it’s just G. Nobody cares about my money anymore. Nobody, it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t done the project. If somebody just sent me a message like 210520 days later, they would almost certainly get it cause nobody else is around. So it’s just, it’s wild. Don’t don’t just keep running in circles. Make sure you have some system for automatically following up on those leads, and then give your proposals on site, you know, Brandon talked about like the the mailing, the PDF.

Obviously it’s not what you wanna do. Uh, give it on site gives you the ability to objection handle. It’s not being pushy, you’re actually obligated. If you run a, a company that provides a good service that that takes care of your clients, doesn’t screw them. You were obligated to do everything you can to get that homeowner to move forward with you, because if you do not, odds are are more likely than not that they’re going to have a bad experience just based on the home services industry in general.

So it’s not being pushy, it’s actually being negligent and harmful to your customer if you don’t have a dialed in sales process. Now, if you run a company that is bad, you need to just fix that company, right? You need to figure out why that is the case and fix it. Uh, and position your service as an investment, not a cost. So right now, when money is on people’s minds, when it’s inflation. Uh, when it’s, you know, what’s going to happen with the economic policies, you have to, you have to switch, they’re already thinking about money more than usual.

So now you need to really focus on how this is an investment, right? This is ultimately going to save the money. It’s going to preserve the home is the biggest investment, and this is going to allow them to preserve it. That, that dialogue, those words that need to be in your sales messaging that has to be discussed. It’s the elephant in the room. You need to turn it to your side, because it’s being thought about whether you want it to be or not. All right, longer timeline to close.

View your leads on a rolling 90 day basis. So, again, same concept of following up, it’s a lead came in, they didn’t close in 2 days, therefore they weren’t a good lead. View it on a rolling, rolling 90 day basis. So that means every month, at the end of the month, go back and see how those leads did, but then incorporate the, the lease from the previous two months. So you’re just tracking these 3 month cycles on how it’s doing. Now, if you’re not reaching out, if there’s if there’s absolutely nothing you do after a week or two.

This is, you might as well just look at it as the month because you’re not going to be closing those from 1 or 2 months ago because you’re not doing anything. But if you’re, if you’re actively following up, if you have automations in place and then you pick up the phone and you’re calling, you know, every week, every 1003 weeks, touching base, you’re gonna see a lot of those from 2 months, 3 months ago, are going to close, especially cause no one else is following up. You’re the only one. Uh, and then follow up is critical.

So longer buying cycles, lack of a yes does not mean a no. If they didn’t tell you no, then you should be following up. If they didn’t tell you no, if you haven’t driven by their house and it was an exterior paint project and you see it’s already done, if you don’t definitively know that you lost that that project, then you should be following up because it is still an active lead. It’s an active lead until they tell you no. Uh, so have automations follow up for a year, do manual phone calls.

It’s very important to combine the manual and the automated, and then direct mail. You sending direct mail follow up, um, either before or after or both, uh, is really good. And then finally, further monetization, so repeat business referrals and then beginning reviews, right? The, the review is going to, it becomes another sales asset for you, becomes another form of marketing, get really good at getting those reviews. You get them before you ever leave the property. Uh, you, we have automation for following up. There’s tactics for following up, but you should have gotten it before you ever left.

When you’re doing the punch list, then you get the review. Uh, OK. Number 11, reduced reliance on paid ads. That was the longest one. That was a big one. so this is back up. So reduce reliance on paid ads. So you should be running any form of marketing that’s making you money, you should be doing it. You should know how much it costs you to perform a project. You should factor in things like the cost for your estimator. I’m, I personally am big on commission only pay. A lot, a lot of you may be conducting your own estimates, um, but if you’re paying someone, I really like commission, commission only pay.

I don’t know why you wouldn’t do that. Uh, but factor all that stuff in, even if you are doing only commission, it’s, you’re gonna pay for gas. There’s gonna be other things that you’re gonna factor it all in. And then make sure you’re getting the ROI that you need to get. You need the job costs. You need to know your gross margin by project, and if it’s working, do it. Do it and do as much of it as you can and keep doing more things because you’re making money.

So it doesn’t really make sense to stop unless you can’t hire the labor or like Brandon showed that door example, if it’s just, hey, we just don’t have the people, we only have this amount of money, so we’re going to pick the highest, the highest return on investment activities that we can do. Uh, but you want to diversify. You want to diversify because Google, Facebook, they have a nasty habit of changing their algorithms, and they don’t tell you that they’re gonna do it. So just go in, they change it.

And then we’re we’re left kind of scrambling figuring that out. That affects paid ads a lot faster than it affects SEO. Google had a, I think it, I don’t think it was intentional, uh, I think a junior developer was pushing out an update. They accidentally released their algorithm. I believe in March of this year, accidentally, they’ve never released it. There are 1,000,000,000 thousands of ranking factors. There’s, there’s, I think it’s like 23,000, maybe 993,000 ranking factors, tons, a lot of ranking factors, about 10 to 20 actually moved the needle. There’s a lot of ranking factors, a lot of things that Google said don’t matter.

They said this is no longer relevant. Well, they were lying. See my previous point about I don’t like men on Google very much. They were absolutely lying. Uh, but it doesn’t change, right? So they’re saying these things are evolving, they’re not. The fundamentals are the same for search engine, even. When we see this. Even when we see what’s called search generative experience, if you, I love this now. I absolutely in the beginning, I didn’t, I didn’t like it that much. I thought it was kind of weird.

Um, I love it. It gives me the answer to what I want a lot faster. So this is examples of how to hire a professional house painter. It is still in beta. So if you’re not seeing it or certain searches, you’re not seeing it, but Google is moving to AI bar. I mean it it’s what’s going to happen. Uh, but they will take this, and then the traditional content marketing, which is what you should be doing with helpful blogs and, and good content on your site, they will essentially gather that information, compile it from trusted sites, give you the answer.

So here’s how to hire a professional house painter, they’re going to give me what I want. What I don’t actually want is to go click to a bunch of links, right? And then go to websites and that’s, that’s SEO is to get me on your site cause you, you wrote what I, you know, checklist for hiring a professional house painter. And now I’m looking for a house painter, and I, I come on your site and I’m like, oh that was a really good checklist. Maybe I should hire this company.

Um, this is doing the same thing, but you can see down here. That this is where they’re pulling it from. So there’s a painting company here, there’s a painting, these, these all look like painting companies. So they wrote articles that Google thought were good enough, SEO wise to to compile, and Google is essentially giving them credit. So now that I look through this, I might want to go deeper. I’m gonna click on one of those. The point is, SEO is not going away. It’s not changing the face.

The interface, the dashboard is changing, but the fundamentals they remain the same. Paid ads is not going away either, but it changes faster. So you have to be building the fundamentals with the with the organic SEO and the Google Business profile SCO. The fact of marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Uh, you got to be thinking right now we’re talking about this winter, right? The stuff we’re going to do, stuff we’re giving you will help you this winter. But quite frankly, you should be thinking about next winter.

Right, it’s middle of September, right now I would want you actually think about next winter, do this, but also be thinking about next winter. What does that look like for you? Uh, winning at Google Business profile. So number 12. Uh, Google, Google Business profile, fill it out, play the game, um, fully complete there, they have product cards, uh, anytime Google gives you an opportunity to fill something out, uh, whether it’s whether it’s their FAQ on their Google chat or whether they have the little product cards, you can productize your services and write about interior painting and call it a product, play their game, fill it out as much as you can.

This is tied to LSA it’s very important, but in January of this year, they rolled out something I call the openness update. Uh, where definitively if you mark your Google Business profiles open 24/7, you will be prioritized in off hours. So if another company says 9 to 5 and then someone’s on there searching at 7 because they’re they’re home from work and they’re realizing they need to get their house painted, you’re going to be more likely to show up. All the fundamentals of Google Business profile local SCO are going to come into play, so someone close could still rank above you if they’re doing a much better job, but it’s a big factor.

So market is 153/7. And if you, if, if you don’t have a call center hiring, all you have to do is get someone to answer the phone off hours and you can do that without getting in any trouble with Google. Uh, and then answer, be sure to answer all that. It’s tied to LA I got a bonus come for you guys at the end. Uh, ongoing Google Business profile optimizations. So this is a lot of stuff we do. Some of it’s a little bit, a little bit beyond the scope of this, um, but what you want to do is you want to fill out the full profile, you want to post to it at least once a week.

So put up a post. It can be a picture of your crew, it can be a picture of a project, it can just be really any kind of message and then generate reviews that’s massive, and then respond to your reviews. Good, bad, indifferent. Respond to your reviews as quickly as you can, uh, because Google and people want to see that responsiveness. Uh, this goes Thi this is a video? No, it’s OK. All right. Uh, number 13, Google local services, this is the future of Google. So we saw search generative experience, the dashboard, the interface of Google’s SEO is changing.

Google is very heavily moving their development and their their product road map, and clearly their focus into LSAs, into that Google guaranteed with the checkmark. It’s absolutely the future. In the marketing world, we, we know that. Uh, so that means if you’re not running Google local service ads, you need to be doing it. It’s not an option. And if, if you say, well, those leads are too small, I, I don’t like them, I don’t care, because if you don’t run them, you’re gonna get left behind. Um, so LSA is being pushed by Google.

Google also, it’s, it’s a little bit like a drug dealer, they, they kind of gave it, you could dispute it and basically win all your disputes. You didn’t like the lead, the lead lead wasn’t a real league. OK, Google will give you your money back, no problem. Google’s taking that back. They’re they’re automating and they’re gonna decide whether or not to give you the money back. So you’re, you’re gonna get the money back less frequently is what that means, uh, cause Google’s gonna want to keep the money.

And then not only that, right now you’re paying per lead still. So it’s someone on Google searching for a house painter, maybe it’s $50 that’s Awesome. A $50 Google lead is awesome. It’s showing up at the top of the search results. That will not last. Google hasn’t said this. It’s my prediction. I feel very confident in it. That will not last. It will eventually move, I believe, to a pay per click model similar to Google Ads, and then you’re rather than looking at a $50 lead, maybe a $150 lead, maybe a $250 lead.

So I would go in, I would start building up dominance there right now as quickly as you can cause it is the future. Uh, brand name searches of people searching for XYZ painting company that didn’t used to show up on local services. If you search for painter near me, that would show up. But XYZ Painting Company, they wouldn’t do it. Now they’re doing it. So there’s all kinds of signals that Google wants to push this more and more and more because it’s gonna become a moneymaking machine for them.

Um, how to win here? This is tied to your Google Business profile. So back to that being strong, important for organic, that’s the baseline for your local local service ad account. It’s tied to your Google Business profile. So treat that well, optimize it, um, be as strong as you can there, generate reviews consistently and it’s gonna give you a head start on your LSA, uh, post, post weekly upload photos weekly, generate reviews consistently through the actual LSA. So if you get a lead through LSA, then get the review through LSA.

Right, you can actually do that and you can still request a review through your Google Business profile, but get it on the LSA. Answer leads. So we, we run LSA um for all of our partners, and, and I get BCC on the emails. So I get a god, god awful amount of these emails every Monday, be like, hey, here’s your, here’s your uh LSA update for the past week, and I brow browse through them, right? cause I just get like a time they fill up my inbox so I start looking at them, and it’s usually.

25, some will be 0, some will be like 323, and a large percentage of those are unanswered, like the vast majority of them are unanswered. So install the app on your phone, make sure you answer it. If you don’t answer it, call back through the app, because again, that’s how you play this game. Google has put a check mark. They said, you’re Google guarantee, we approve of this company. If people are trying to get in touch with you and you don’t pick up the phone, And you don’t call them back.

Google’s not gonna keep saying we approve of this company. So you have to think about it from Google’s eyes, and if you, if you see the missed call and you say, well, it’s OK, I’ll call him back from from my um work line. Then Google doesn’t know you called them back. So you have to call them back through the app. So Google says, OK, like, good job, we know that you got in touch with that lead. You didn’t leave them high and dry when we gave you a thumbs up, cause that makes us look bad.

Um, again, Google wants LSAs to work. They want people to adopt it. They’re not gonna adopt it if they keep calling and and companies don’t answer the phone. Uh, all right, good. So feeling ambitious, and I’ll kind of expedite this cause I know we’re running over, but feeling ambitious. So this is next level stuff. Uh, this is next level stuff. We’re gonna start rolling out. I had a, had a conversation with, with one of our top partners about this. Um, videos are the future. So videos are the future of SEO, uh, if you, I know Brandon’s doing, doing YouTube, um, walking with Brandon.

How many of you guys have seen the Walking with Brandon thing? I assume a lot of you guys have seen, I, I like those. Um, so walking with Brandon, this stuff is the future. So Google, when, when you conduct searches, you know, you’ve probably seen YouTube links or show up more and more YouTube links are showing up on that first page. Google owns YouTube, so the same company, but more and more of those YouTube links are showing up on the first page. What you can do with videos, you can actually create it, you host it on YouTube and then you embed it into your site.

So you almost get a double. A double boost, because it’s more likely to rank that page on your site, but the video on its own can rank as a YouTube. So you have kind of like two bites at the apple there, uh, with video, and people just love video. They resonate with it, they respond to it, um, they, they trust you more, and again it’s all about creating that market of one. So when you show up, you and Chuck in a truck, well, they haven’t, they haven’t seen Chuck in a ruck, they’ve seen you.

Uh, so leverage and paid ads, but also in SEO paid ads works really well. YouTube search results are increasing, video is the future here, uh, and it makes you the authority, so it makes, makes people know, like and trust you, uh, you become a marketed one. A lot of our um partners aren’t that comfortable on video. That’s OK. If you’re not that comfortable on video, maybe your estimator is, right? Doesn’t necessarily need to be you as the owner. It can be someone else representing your company who can be doing this.

But, but video, if you can adopt that, it will help. Now, here’s the really fun part and and the part that I talked with our partner about, so you can create, uh, this is what a funnel looks like. And so this is now we start to get into more strict marketing, this is what a funnel looks like. So rather than running. An ad, uh, which is what the 99.99% of painting companies do. It’s what we do for our partners, uh, cause this is next level stuff. We we’ll run the ad and we’ll say, hey, we, we have an offer, you know, get 15% off, hey, looking for a house painter near you.

That that’s the offer ad. That’s the bottom here, right? So you’re like, hey, I just met you, let’s get married. Do you want to get married? You cool if you give me like 80? That’s what that ad is. It works cause that’s the only thing the industry runs, but to the next level. you create videos, you create educational and entertaining videos for impressions, right? So this is an example of what I do with this is the Painter Mark and Mastermind podcast. released like 140, 140 episodes or something I be doing it for like 3 years.

People follow me, they listen, there’s no real call to action, there’s no salesy push, there’s nothing. And then they’ll come in. And who are they gonna partner with? Right? When they’ve been listening, they’ve been following this actionable advice for like 2 years, they were a small company, they grew, now they’re at almost a million, like, Brandon, man, it’s time. I’ve been listening. I’ve never talked with them, but they’ve heard me for 2 years, right? That’s what you guys can be doing in your space. So you create an education or entertaining video talking about different things, like a walking with Brandon would be a good example of how of how he’s uh adopting that.

You run it. You, you create a small ad budget because when you run ads for impressions or different types of ads you can run, impressions is the cheapest, uh, so you run it for impressions, and there’s no call to action. There’s no, no nothing. There’s no book a call, there’s no set estimate, nothing. But what Facebook’s doing is it’s actually tracking how, how much of the video people watch. And so then you take, OK, people watch over 50% of the video, and I’m giving away the farm here guys, like this is, if you take this and you use it, it’s awesome.

So then people watch over 23% of the video. And then you run another video, and you’re only targeting that people, so it’s retargeting. So now you have an audience that Facebook Facebook knows cause you can do all this in the back end, and you’re not retarding them with with something a little bit more salesy. Now it’s testimonials, it’s story brand videos, something a little bit more about your company, they’re getting to know you better. You track who watches that, and now you come at them with an offer, and your cost per lead goes way down, your close rate goes way up, but this is a multi-step funnel.

It takes time, it takes some investment on the front, and it takes the willingness to do video and really go outside the comfort zone. So this is the next level stuff I wanted to drop, uh, cause some of you might want to actually think about doing something like this. Uh, and then additional marketing, um, avenues, so grassroots sponsorships, things like little leagues, uh, churches, local local events or local farmers market, whatever, sponsoring that stuff is really good because Google likes to see industry and location specific back links.

Google knows that’s a local thing that you’re getting a link from it. It’s going to help you. There’s Was to research it, you know, go online and actually figure out if that link is worth anything. Figure out if you’ll actually get a link when you do the sponsorship. But when you get those links, that’s gonna help your SEO and then you pair it with, let’s say a, a banner on, on, you know, the fence with a little league or you’re in the bulletin for the church or There’s something else that’s going to trickle in some leads.

It won’t be a massive influx of leads, but it’s gonna trickle in some leads, and it’s all about, it’s all about creating this online offline ecosystem where you’re getting more and more leads and and just growing your overall presence. So this is excellent for your SEO create a multiple of these more fishing lines and and you add a bunch of little things like this over and over and over again. And all of a sudden your winter, your winter months start to look a whole lot better, and you’re not as reliant on on the paid ads and the cost really going up, and then texting and calling people.

So I went to a um I’m a big fan of Alex Rmozi. I, I talk about it. I feel like nobody really knows who I’m talking about when I say that. Uh, he’s very big in the marketing world, um, not as big in the painting world, but he’s written a couple books, $100 million dollar offers, $100 million leads, he runs a podcast, runs, runs a private equity firm. And uh I met him in person. It was like a real, it’s like meeting a hero, it’s a big deal to me.

Talked to him for 10 minutes, like 3 weeks ago, um. And he, he talked about Like texting people, right? I met a couple people who were actually, uh, they run tree companies, so tree service companies. I met a couple guys there and they’re doing pretty big things. And they’re growing their business through texting. So texting is often overlooked, it’s neglected, uh, you can still do it. There’s more rules around it with 10 DLC you need to actually make sure people have a check actually opt into text messaging and things that you can do, do it.

But there are rules, there are rules around it that you need to abide by, but it is a phenomenal outside the box way of marketing, but you also have to know a little bit about what you’re doing. I have a little hint here, building an accidental space. That’s something one of the tree guys showed me. He had like an opt here. Click here to opt out and he purposely kind of messed it up. Uh, he, he put it like a space in it in between a word, like opt out like O space PT and it makes it look like someone just typed it look like the person screwed it up, you know, machines don’t screw up like that, and his deliverability went way higher.

So again, I’m probably Going too far with this, but I’m giving you guys some some stuff that’s above and beyond what I typically do. Uh, and then calling people, so picking up the phone, calling people to say, well, I don’t want a cold call. If they, if they’re your client, if you’ve done business with them, if you were in their house 3 years ago, if they were a lead and you reached out and you talked to them before, it’s not cold calling. That’s not what the def definition of cold calling is.

So pick up the phone, call people, because that works. Uh, bonuses. So that was, again, I was kind of being OCD about the numbers. So that was 10 to 15. Then I got some bonuses. Be aggressive with your marketing, be contrarian. A lot of the most successful people have made the majority of their wealth in downturns. Uh, so be contrarian, when there’s a downturn or there’s winter, it’s your opportunity to recruit labor. If you’ve ever, well, I can’t find enough painters, I can’t find enough work. If you’re the company that when they’re getting laid off by other companies, you pull them in and say, hey, I got work for you, who do you think they’re going to be loyal to?

Right? So if you’re wanting to make big gains, recruit labor, keep that labor and take, take market share, right? Take market share, go out and market aggressively and other companies aren’t. And all of a sudden you can dominate certain neighborhoods. If you have a road map for for where you want to expand geographically in your area, uh, account for cash flow, don’t go, don’t go bankrupt, right? So you do need to account for cash flow. You have to actually sit down, know your numbers, do the math, and make sure that you’re making a smart bet on this stuff.

Uh sell as an investment, not a cost. We talked about that. You need to pitch this as an investment. They are thinking about the money, I promise you that. And then reinstate lost Google Business profile reviews. A lot of you, I know I have, I’ve probably noticed your reviews are disappearing. It’s insane. Google is just wiping them off the face of the earth. I think we had like 45 or something 43 star reviews, uh, at painter marketing pros, we went down to 15, maybe. Uh, I went through this process and now we’re, we went to 40.

Uh, now they’re starting to take them off again. So now we’re at 37. So it’s their algorithm is going out of control with the spam. Uh, I do have a method. Uh, it was gonna be a lot to include here. There’s a lot of steps. There’s a video tutorial, uh, it’s a whole thing, but this is my offer to you guys. So if you, if you book a strategy session here, uh, you’re gonna get the strategy sessions, we’re gonna meet with you and actually talk about what you should be doing this winter.

Uh, we’re going to give you that full Google Business profile review, reinstatement, cheat sheet and video training, uh, which if you lost a lot of reviews, that would be a good thing to have. And then the, we’re gonna create. We’re gonna do this for you for free. We’re gonna create a custom QR happiness card uh template for your painting company. So something you can hand out to generate those reviews at the end of your projects and be sure you’re getting at least 1 out of 3 projects giving you a 5-star review.

Brandon that’s what I got, man. I think you’re on mute. I, I think that was great. Good everybody give well you can’t, I would say give them a round of applause, but we couldn’t hear you because you’re all muted. Uh, all right, I see some folks clapping. Hey guys, let’s, uh, I’m gonna go ahead and just go and so we can take questions here, uh, and there are two ways that we can take questions. Now listen, some of you got to go places, that’s fine. I’ll hang out here as long as people have questions because I’ve got nothing better to do.

Uh, so if you’ve got a question, there are two ways we can do this. Either you click the little show your hand button, which is probably more effective, but for those of you who don’t know how to do that, can’t figure it out, if you will wave your hand at the screen and if I see it, if it’s violently waved, I will come to you. Pete, I see that’s not violent enough, but at least I could see you. Pete, go ahead. OK. Uh, yeah, I had a question on responding to Google reviews and like is there a time limit to do that cause I have a few that I didn’t respond to, but they’re like.

You know, 9 months, a year ago. No, there’s not, there’s not a time limit to respond to Google reviews. No, if you have any, so what we’ll do when, when we have a painting company come on board, we’ll actually go back and any reviews they haven’t responded to for the past 12 months, we will. We’ll respond to it. So you should, you should definitely always respond to it. And there’s no time limit on that. Another quick question is, is it better to have a Google service area or a location?

I mean, we’re a service business, so. If you’re, uh, it’s better to have a physical office and a location, much, much, much, much better for your SML. Very few companies do that. In which case you need to list it as a service area because people are not coming to your house. Thank you. Thank you. Good questions, Pete. Other questions, either click the raise your hand button or wave your hand crazily at the screen. All right, Maurice. We’re coming to you That’s from, uh, some people call me a space cowboy for those of you that aren’t that old.

Go ahead, Maurice. Yes, sir. Thank you. Uh, yeah, so, um, I heard him mention that it’s, it’s really important, actually critical to respond back through Google, uh, through the app. But lately, I would say like in the past month, they’ve had some type of glitch on their app, uh, where the leads aren’t coming through and I keep calling, they keep telling me I have to go to the uh You know, to the, the desktop version and just get the number and call the, you know, the lead back, but I mean, I thought they’d have it fixed by now, but the issue has been going on for quite a while now.

If you’re facing the issue, other people are facing the issue as well. So just do it if you can. If you can’t, then obviously you just want that lead. You can’t go through the app. Google, uh, Google does not care about you. I, I wouldn’t even worry about calling them, man. It’ll it’ll get resolved when it gets resolved. OK, thank you. All right, we got Logan, Logan, if you’ll unmute yourself, go ahead, sir. Perfect, I appreciate it. So, my question for you guys is, uh, when doing cold reach out to, say, larger commercial work, like uh commercial property managers, etc.

um, do you guys have a favorite practice that you’d like to do? I know it’s just doing the things that other painting contractors doesn’t, don’t wanna do, but is there anything specific for tips you might might have for us? OK, I’ll take this one. I’m actually gonna do an entire workshop we’ve created, I don’t know, probably close to a dozen commercial repaint acquisition programs over the last decade. It’s, it’s something we focus on intensely, um, so the first thing like I mentioned you gotta make a list, right?

You gotta make a list, uh. The the victory goes to the people that show up and when you show up in an office, when you call them, email them, you just hang in there with them, it works. I kid you not, you could take a cocktail napkin and put on a Sharpie. We need some commercial painting work, Logan, and your phone number, copy that thing on a copier and if you mailed it to enough people, you would get a phone call because people have very low expectations for painting contractors.

Should you do it like that? Of course not. So here are a few things that that I think are good introductory uh moves. I’m gonna give away some things that we do. We have this, we have this campaign called a foot in the door campaign. And what we do is we buy these large foam foots and we put the company name on them and then we put a box together and it’s got socks and toenail polish and everything that would have to do with feet. It’s very dorky.

And we have these big red boxes and we stopped by and there’s a big letter I’m just trying to get my foot in the door and these maintenance managers and facility people think it’s freaking hilarious. And we just simply get in front of them, any excuse to have a face to face interaction with another human. And the other thing you have to remember is that Old corporate marketing is boring as hell. And like most of you, I kid you not, I could take your websites right now and whatever you’re talking to your computers about your customers about, and I could rearrange the names and the phone numbers and then make no damn difference, you know, in business for 40 years, high quality painters, we treat you like family.

I could go there’s like 25003 things like it’s all it’s all people say. And so you’ve got to say things a different way if you want to be heard because you gotta shake people out of their beta mode. Uh, further, again, these guys are like sitting ducks in many of these organizations. I mean, there are organizations that have seriously taken 1520, 30, 50 prospects that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and put them in a room. And all you gotta do is go drive and physically be there, add them to your newsletter list, and then things will happen.

And so the main thing I would say the main thing about going after commercial work is you have to calendar 8 to 4 hours a week and either do it weekly or biweekly. I’m going to see 15 people. Uh, before lunch or 10 people or whatever you can get on Thursdays from 8 to 12 o’clock and if you just consistently get in front of those folks and then communicate with them in other methods, uh, consistently, you will get that work. I’ve never seen someone who did that not be successful, not once, not ever.

Now I’ve seen a bunch of people be lazy and not do any of it, in which case they weren’t very successful, but if you just get in front of them, Logan. And if you got a decent sales process, I promise you free painter for a day doing diagnostics, uh, anything you wanna do, uh, really makes a huge difference. I mean just getting in front of them is, but you gotta be systematic about it. It’s like going to the gym or going to church or anything else that you do with regularity that you think is important.

If you do it with regularity, you will get the result. So this is uh this is kind of an aside here, Brandon, but I, I wanna mention it cause of your cause of the red shoebox. Uh, so this was a letter, this was something I received, like a, like a bright blue thing, uh, and then it came with this, it’s so cool, I saved it. I saved cool marketing, came with this, it’s a video letter, right, so these things. Right here with fiscal, just wanted to stop by and say hello.

is selling me, he created a little intro, you know, just for me, a couple like 53 seconds, 15 seconds, and then he kind of puts his hands up and now he’s got this, this reel that he’s created that he’s gonna send to everybody. And you can create things like this for, for property managers, for, for people like that. But it super stands out. The important part of doing stuff like that’s what Brandon’s saying is the follow up. You don’t send it, and I’m like, oh, well, cool. I, I stood out.

Yeah, that guy stood out and then he sent me an email and he said, hey, I just want to make sure you got the shiny letter I sent. It’s like, what shiny letter? And I went and found it, but his mistake is he hasn’t follow up since. He hasn’t called, he hasn’t done any, this guy should be on me until I’m on a call with him. Exactly. So you gotta, you gotta follow up. You gotta get, but even boring marketing consistently applied and directly works. It’s, it’s better, it’s better that it be both, but I mean just the consistency is, is critical, but.

They even have people that have hit a lick at it like I’ll I’ll coach them and I can’t get them to do it and I can’t get them to do it and then one month they do it, then they quit for 2 months and then 1 month they do it and then they quit for 2 months. Well, 18 months later they got $400,000 a year worth of commercial work. I’m telling you very little effort produces big results in commercial, uh, because nobody else is marketing to them. You ask most of these guys that are sitting in a basement, their names Earl, and they’re by the boiler and the only person that ever calls them complains.

And when you show up, if you ask them how when’s the last time a painter stopped by to see you, they will say never. Because painters don’t market it, they stay at home and hope the phone rings in most cases. Other questions, moving on to other topics, other questions, wave your hand at the screen or click the old yellow hand button. Whichever you prefer, we’ve worn them down, Brandon. They’re, they’re tired. They’re dying. We promise an hour we’re still here almost 90 minutes here we go. All right, angel, go ahead, sir.

Hi, I just had a quick question about, uh, well, AI is the future. Of pretty much everything, but I had, I was just wondering how Google, uh Facebook treat, uh, you know, the copy created through AI such as Chad GPT. That’s a good question. Yeah, it’s a great question. So, you can create content through AI, but then you must know how to human edit it. You must. That’s the, that’s the part. So there have been multiple updates that have rolled out this year where sites that that are doing really well just got annihilated.

And so you can’t, what you can’t do is say, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna just create tons and tons of content. I’m gonna create a machine, an unnaturally large amount of content. Can’t do that. It has to be natural looking. You can use AI to assist you in the copy. At some point here, you’d be negligent not to. Because like you said, everything’s moving in that direction, you should use tech. But you have to go and you have to human edit it, and you have to make it helpful.

That’s what Google cares the most about. They care that it’s helpful that people want to read it. If it’s just a machine spitting out and you just think, well, I’ll dominate cause I’ll, I’m gonna have a website with 10,303 pages. Now every single service and service here, every kind of keyword combination you could possibly want, I’m gonna have a page for it. Google will annihilate you if you do that. So you have to be careful, you have to be paced, and you have to know what you’re doing.

Very good. Then Then, are you the guy that came up with the diagram? I’ve often wanted to speak with you. Go ahead. I can, I can with what. Then, I apologize it’s it’s my redneck humor and my voice. I’m sorry. Here we go. So I have a question. Um, my painters, I do the marketing for the painter, uh, contractors, so. Uh, they’re afraid to put a sign on the, on the properties, uh, but they, um, have a, um, vans, uh, staying next to the, uh, in the house.

Would you suggest to add the, uh, signs on the, on the yard, uh, anyway? Yes, yes, I’ll tell you how much of how enthusiastic I am about signs work. I mean bandit signs even you’ll get 100, they’re so cheap. You go to cheapyard signs.com. I just bought, I, you know, used to buy a bunch of yard signs in politics and recently, you know, got involved in a few elections here around the primary in Tennessee and uh you can get them 567 bucks, you buy 100 of them, you could stick them all over your county.

Now here’s the thing, people often say. Uh, well, the HOAs don’t allow it or my municipality won’t allow that. People always look for the exceptions in order to form rules about how they run their company, and that’s not what you do. You go do what is the best thing every time, and when there is an exception, you begrudgingly accept it. But here in Chattanooga, for example, if you put out yard signs and uh if you don’t take them up, they give you a $215 fine. I didn’t care cause I got so many leads off yard signs, so I get these solicitations in the mail for $232 and I just pay them.

And if I put out 22 signs, I bet I’d get one solicitation and so I made more money. Off the leads and I paid in the solicitation penalties. So yeah, put those things out. I push back on that. Yeah, you can, but I’m gonna disagree, but go ahead. I mean who’s picking up all your trash all over the yard? I mean, like they do that in my town and it drives me insane. It’s like I know I mean you’re not, you’re not that’s not a good partner in the community.

Yeah, well, we just disagree, man. I, I, I look at the marketing results. I don’t look at my feelings when you go to the bank account, you know, go to the bank and say, Well, here’s how I feel about something. It doesn’t change the balance of dam lit, but the, the numbers do. And so that’s why I always worked for the numbers and you know there’s all there’s 24,22500 reasons not to be assertive and aggressive in marketing. I’m not saying you should, you know, uh, put them in people’s yards that aren’t asking for them or aren’t clients, obviously you can’t do that, but you know, the general thoroughfares, places like that where where they’re already up, I just, I’m just very recalcitrant.

I’m like that maybe, maybe somebody that that uh does roadside service will eventually get those up. Daniel, go ahead buddy. Yeah, those yards, I just want to ask, are you doing like a different design, like something with with just like painting and the phone number, are you using your logo, you know, if it’s too small and they’re driving by, they’re not going to see it, so it kind of has to be catchy or something. Yeah, and and often and it’s crazy a lot of these, they’re so hard to read a lot of these what I would call blind lead generation signs work very well and that’s just where you put I mean you’ll see them tree work and a phone number.

People don’t really care about your brand because they don’t know what your brand is anyway. They don’t know what your brand is, they have no idea. They just know that they need somebody to do it now later they will do their research, later they will look into things, um, but honestly when when you’re when you’ve got a plumbing leak. And it’s been going on for a while and you see a sign that says plumbing and a phone number you’re just like I, I’ve got a need and so your job, uh, often I’ll, I’ll give you an example, um, you’re not a rainmaker as a painting contractor, you are a rain barrel, meaning that you cannot force someone to to want to purchase your services.

All you can really do is harness the organic demand of of what is is being asked for. That’s all you can do. And so, and if you put out a rain barrel and it rained yesterday, you don’t get yesterday’s rain. You can only catch the rain that comes in and so Dan, uh, uh, as long as you the more places you can put messages, uh, in front of a good audiences, uh, the more likely you, you can, you can get enough leads to sustain you. And so what I see most often is that painting contractors are not nearly as diversified or as assertive or aggressive in their marketing.

And the other thing I see that they do is they, they put it in the wrong place or either they stretch their marketing budget too thin over too broad of an audience. And so what you want to do is go 25 mile deep and 430 inch wide in highly lucrative markets, and you don’t have to have a big budget to uh have a big brand, you don’t. If, if I can get one other quick question, uh, uh, I put on the chat button so I respond. It was just on a texting app because you mentioned earlier about texting clients as one form of uh communication.

My CRM will do one at a time using Twilio, but it, it won’t send out a blast. Like you can send out an email blast, but you can’t send out a text blast. Is there another way to get around that? I, what’s your favorite text mass text app? I’ve got a few that I, that our memberships use and that I use, but what do you, what do you like? I like clicksend. Click clicksan yeah. Text magic, a lot of our guys have used, although they’ve become more difficult to work with, um, I use the fixture funnel which it connects to InfusionSoft.

I mean, they’ve all got their quirks, um, so you just got to see which one works for you. Robert Collins, coming to you, buddy. Hey there, um, yeah, actually, so I’m coming back to my question, I was asking you guys. Right, about referral bonuses for clients. So we have a uh a referral program for all of our clients, anybody that has done work for us or sent us a business, we send them a $15 gift card to a restaurant, and it’s very labor intensive. Uh, I do it manually right now.

Currently, and I’m wondering if you guys know of a service that we could punch in the client’s information because we already have their address, etc. uh, where we could actually have a mail out or something there of this sort where we prepay for it, um, and then after that it’s, you know, it goes out to them just as a thank you. For the referral. So there are lots I mean if you just type in gift card mailing service there’ll be 2800 of them on Google so I mean there’s not, there’s no shortage of them, uh, but the thing I would say about that that that that I push back on is is twofold.

Number one is people think a referral program is what happens after the referral comes in. Which means if you didn’t do anything to make the referral come in, like if you don’t focus on the things that make the referral happen but you only focus on the things that after the referral has happened, you will get much, much fewer referrals. It is the communication and the relationship that generates the referral. If you have good communication and good relationship and you never give them a single solitary spiff ever for any reason.

You will get more referrals than if you gave them $20520 per referral, but there’s none of this communication or relationships, so the the the chotchke or the gift is like of almost no importance. What is of importance is the communication and the consistency in the relationship. And the other thing I would say is this, um, not everything in your business is gonna be automated and a lot of things need to be highly personal because if you’ve got somebody who sends you referrals and they’re freaking sending you $10,000 15,000, $100,000 a year worth of referrals.

You better write a handwritten note, put them in your newsletter, go by and see them. And so I would just, if, if you don’t do it, it’s automated. If you don’t do it, it’s automated. So if you’ve got an assistant or somebody that can come in once a week and get that stuff done, hire an administrative assistant, put together a list of like tasks that recur on a repetitive, uh, basis, 8003 hours, 16 hours a week you can get that stuff done, but I’m, I’m a big fan in this space of being highly personal and professional.

Uh, because the people that do that just make more money, uh, so I would, you know, the, the, the relationship part is important the, the referral and what you give them is, uh, less important, and I would say, you know, the more personal the gift can be, uh, the better, the more endearing it is, the better. OK, thank you, thanks for your time. I get, I get those. I hate that crap every, every year around Christmas, all these vendors send me. Impersonal garbage and I don’t like a lot of clutter and I usually just throw it right in the trash, uh, because I I’d rather just have a note, right?

And a lot of people don’t need a bunch of stuff, uh, and so what they really want is to be appreciated for for the business or what they send you. Other questions. Other questions before we hop off here guys, you’ve been very kind to hang in here this long. It’s a big group for how how much over time we’ve run. Well, when we, we hit our limit like it was, we told them 100 people because it’s all we can have on Zoom and it stayed at 99 for about an hour and 15 minutes.

That’s pretty good. Um, anybody else, we got one last one. There’s always a a a straggler Ryan, go ahead. I got one I got. Oh, we got Balding’s got one and Ryan’s got one too. So as soon as you say we’re leaving, that’s when they ask the questions. Go ahead, Mike. Hey, what’s up, Brandon? Got a question for you. I love the, I love the little secret stuff you’re putting in on uh making video of, you know, like a long-term play, and we’ve actually gotten way more skilled at producing videos that are, that are decent and not terrible.

Um, how do we, you know, functionally, how does that work? We have a YouTube channel, you, uh, edit, post the videos on YouTube, you embed them in your site, like, what are, what are, you know, just like a quick like 32nd spiel on, on how to functionally do that. Yeah, I mean, you just nailed it, right? So you created a channel, uploaded to YouTube, you embed on the site through an iFrame. So what whatever you use on it I think you guys are on WordPress, you create an iFrame, put it on there, and then just, and, and you link to the YouTube.

Um, and then you obviously put in like the correct alt tags and things like that for the video, uh, not to like go insane, but there’s a video schema that you’re gonna want to mark it up with video schema for the SEO on the page. Uh, so there’s like a couple action items that you’re gonna want to take. Uh, I would recommend pairing it with email marketing. So I would send out an email talking about the video and then drive people to the page, cause that can tangentially improve your SEO when you, when you release a new video, put on a page and then drive traffic to it cause it shows it’s a signal to Google like, oh people are going to this page, watching this video.

Um, it’s not like a direct ranking factor, but it’s an indirect ranking factor that helps. And one other thing you might consider doing Mike, well, there’s two other things I would recommend. Number one is when y’all are making videos, make sure that the title of your YouTube video is actually something someone will search for when they’re trying to buy. So for example, if you’re painting cabinets and you do a time lapse video, somebody painting cabinets. You don’t need to put, uh, we had a great time painting Mrs.

Smith’s cabinets because nobody’s ever gonna look for that. What you want to put is cabinet painting Chattanooga, Tennessee and when somebody looks for cabinet painting Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then you put it on your uh blog for that same search term, and then I would also recommend, uh, that you. You get you can either get the video transcribed, uh, I think Google provides a transcription and to use that as copy underneath the video, you may have to format it a little bit and if you speak redneck like I do, you may have to edit it quite a bit, uh, but if you speak the King’s English, it’ll mainly come out just fine.

You can have AI AI edit that if you actually go to the Painter Marketing Pro’s website, and you click into our podcast, we, we transcribe. I don’t really bother editing it much cause we hide it, but you can also hide it where, where someone has to click like the read more, and it opens it all up and we just have like a god awful amount of content cause it will transcribe the podcast. But yeah, then it’s Google’s reading it, their their bots are reading all that stuff.

Yeah, certainly. OK, Ryan. You gotta unmute yourself. OK. Thank you guys. Uh, I enjoyed it today. My, my question was, is with With postcard mailing to residential? Is that, have you ever heard any science behind what day, what week, what month? And I know like a month would depend on the, probably on the part of the country you’re in, but like is there a day that where I could expect to get better results than another day? I’ve never heard anybody say that. Well, now there, I have read studies about business B2B mail like when people process things, it’s it’s uh it’s been the same since the beginning of time.

It’s almost like the middle of the week Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is always better than Monday, Friday, uh, a lot of times in political mail when you do political mail you hitting the mailbox which you can barely damn do anymore. I’m just telling here’s the other thing, give up. The post is so slow right now. It’s the slowest it’s been in American history. Crap gets, I mean, it’s just the postal service is a wreck and it ain’t even matter if you red tag it, which you don’t know what it is and all that you need to know, but this stuff does not get there on time.

But it used to be that you’d mail stuff on, you know, for it to land on Saturdays because people have more discretionary time over the weekend to read it, uh, but I don’t think it, it, it matters much anymore. It’s far more, so there’s there’s 4 things that matter, right? There’s the market. Who you go after there’s the message what you say, there’s the medium and that’s the way you say what you say it through and then there’s the timing and everybody gets all caught up with the timing and the medium and they never think anything about the message that resonates or the people they’re going after and that’s the first two stops and so what I would, you know, a more important thing is who do you target and affluent people and highly compact neighborhoods that are old.

Those are the folks you go after and uh and to sit on them if you got a limited budget and you can only mail so much or do any type of marketing, pick three high-end neighborhoods that have 2500 people in them and freaking live with them until they buy or until they die. And if they die, you, you mark to the person that moves in the house next, right? And you just keep after them and you sit on them and you will start seeing results. It’s when people try to, you know, hit a lick all over the place and they don’t pick a market and stick with them that they, they don’t get a good ROI.

So that’s what I’d say about that. Can you give an example of what you believe a good messages. Well, you know, here’s here’s a few just based upon research, and these are headlines, right? I can’t, you know, speak an entire sales letter, the background checked painters you can trust. Uh, area’s strongest 5 year ironclad workmanship guarantee. Uh, here’s another one. Uh, What your seven neighbors are saying about ABC painting and and make it all social proof, I mean things like that that are a little different. It doesn’t need to say interior painting exterior painting, pressure washing, cabinet staining in business for 30 years, BBB certified, like all the crap you see that is so redundant, uh, but yeah, just messages that that talk about the things that they they care about clean courteous painters you can trust, because we know what they care about but we so often fail to say it, um.

Other questions, other questions. Thank you. Going once Going to us We are adjourned. We’re adjourned. This meeting is over. Guys, thank you all for coming. I appreciate you very much. If you have any questions after this, if you’ll email Brandon at paintersacademy. com, I will reply back with a voice note or you can email Brandon at paintermarketingpros.com. Uh, and he will reply with, with AI email or, or he will, he will reply with AI. It’s not even gonna be him. It’s a robot. Nobody, and I’m just joking.

He’s not gonna do that. It hurt his rankings, uh, but nonetheless. Uh, if you reply, send that, and you can call us 423-800-0520. We will answer our phones and get back to you. We are humans that just work with painting contractors, uh, and so guys, I appreciate you. Until next time, it’s Brandon and Brandon signing off. We’ll see you next time. Brandon squared. That’s right. Thanks everyone. See you guys. 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 paintermarketingpros.

com/podcast for free training, as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again, that URL is paintermarketingpros.com/podcast. Hey there painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback, let us know how we did. And also, if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at paintermarketingpros. 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.