Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, the show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 103 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA Educational Series to 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.

Brandon Pierpont and Daniel Honan, the Founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, discuss their many learnings from Paint Boss Live 2025. Paint Boss Live was a 9 hour digital mastermind featuring over 20 leading experts in the painting space. Tune in for some incredible takeaways on how to profitably and sustainably scale your painting business!

If you want to ask him questions related to anything in this podcast series, you can do so in our exclusive Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum on Facebook. Just search for “Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum” on Facebook and request to join the group, or type in the URL Facebook.com/groups/PainterMarketingMastermind. There you can ask them questions directly by tagging him with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

What’s going on, Daniel? How’s it going, Brandon? Good, man. Good. So, what did you think of the event? I thought it was awesome. There was so much packed into that day. I was exhausted. I was brain dead by the end of that day.

Just so much great information, so many great speakers. It was great. Yeah, it was killer, man. The uh. The Paintballs Live 2025, it was an almost 9 hour event. I think we had, I think over 20 speakers, industry experts come and join us over a period of, you know, close to 9 hours and And uh covered just kind of anything and everything you could want to know for how to profitably scale a painting company. Yeah. If you weren’t there, you should have a little FOMO right now. There is a, there is a inability to, to get the recording, um, so you can send me an email if you hear this, Brandon at paintermarketingpros.

com about that. But if you weren’t there, you should have a little FOMO. Be, be tuned in for the next one because it was phenomenal. Yeah, it was, it was, it was really impressive. I mean, I definitely have some favorites, uh, but it was all, it was all great stuff. Um, personally, my favorite presentation, I think was Chris Elliott’s on considerations on switching into commercial painting. I’ve never heard someone take that approach on especially the financial aspect, which I really loved how he dived into the the details on what to expect financially speaking when switching into commercial painting.

That was, I think that was my One of my favorites. Yeah, I really like that. She’s not my favorite. Yeah, well, it’s a, it’s not an uncommon or, you know, novel topic, you know, do, do we move from residential to commercial? What does that look like? But it’s typically OK, how is the, the estimating process different? How do you actually break in, you know, who do you who do you speak with? How do you get in at bat there? And then there is some discussion of kind of cash flow cycles, but I don’t think, I don’t think I had ever heard it broken down the way that Chris did, to the point he even mentioned transitioning from cash to accrual based accounting.

Which I thought that was, was we killing really, really thinking this thing through. Yeah, and it was all spot on too. I mean, from what I’ve seen a lot of folks that are familiar with the residential side of things, it’s a lot different going into commercial, and I thought he did an excellent job breaking that down. Yeah. Yeah, and I also liked how he wasn’t just focused on, OK, here’s what you do, he also focused on, do you actually want to do it, because here, here are the pros and here are the cons, and if you do, if you are going to do it.

Then here’s what you need to know or else you’re going to fail. One of those things being you have to stick with it and it’s going to suck. It’s basically for him, it’s basically starting another business. Yeah, it’s it’s a completely different animal, residential repaint, you’re used to getting your cash, a good part of it up front and then paid immediately after you’re done, commercial, not like that at all. Oftentimes not getting paid up front, oftentimes not getting paid until 30, 60, 90 days after you completed the project and maybe even held some cash and retainage for even longer after that.

So completely different on cash flow. So you really have to have your financials dialed in so that you understand. The, uh, if you’re profitable or not, because you’re not gonna have much cash flow. Cash flow is terrible, but you want to understand if you’re profitable on those projects still, so you get to have accrual based books set up so you match up your income and your expenses in the same period in the same month, and you gotta have that accrual uh bookkeeping, which is huge, not needed for residential, but it is absolutely needed for commercial and uh he’s exactly right on that.

And then just the whole invoicing process, it’s way different, um, even payroll can be different sometimes if you’re doing government work and you have to do, um, you have to do certified payroll, prevailing wage certified payroll. So a lot of nuances with the commercial uh financial considerations. Yeah, I really like going into that depth too, because I think one of the, one of the things that’s frustrated me and one of, one of the reasons I created this podcast and I tried to do it a little differently is I feel like there’s so much surface level information out there, you know, a little sound bites or, or kind of, hey, this is what you should do, but not enough instruction on how to actually do it, how to actually dive into the weeds and get it done and and what to do when you encounter ABC obstacle.

And I think Chris did a good job in a very tight time frame. I think his presentation was only 5003 minutes long. Of actually diving into how you need to actually think through this entire thing. Not just a residential to commercial, OK, make sure that you know that the cash flow cycle is longer and you have to have cash on hand and also the, the way of winning the projects is a little bit different. The projects are longer and bigger ticket. I think we all know that, but he went, you know, 23 levels deeper than that. Yes.

And one thing he focused on too was the customer avatar. You know, this, this, it’s the same kind of, kind of focus as the residential painting company, it says, oh, who do you serve? Oh, I serve everyone in this area. You don’t, you shouldn’t. Maybe you do, you probably shouldn’t. You should probably have a little bit more of a defined avatar, and Chris did a really good job of breaking down commercial, like, who are you actually gonna commercials this incredibly broad term commercial painting, who are you actually gonna be targeting?

Yeah, yeah, that’s key. I mean. Sometimes people say commercial and they’re doing government work, so that’s You know, so that’s a whole different beast than working just literally B2B, like business to business, your business, your painting business is painting and IHOP or whatever, or are you working under a general contractor? That’s two different ways like B2B versus general contractor work completely different in terms of a lot of the financial considerations, but who your customers are. Are you working, are you getting folks, you know, getting other businesses to sign up with you or are you working under a GC?

Way different. And yeah, there’s so many, uh, so much variability on the commercial side of things, um, compared to the residential. Yeah, and what’s gonna appeal to your, your target avatar, you know, if it’s retail. Versus warehouses they’re probably gonna be focused on different things you know how much of a risk of business interruptions does your service pose? How important is timeliness versus budget those things are not gonna be the same. Love it. So another, another presentation that I really liked was Danny Kerr, so he actually kicked off the day, Breakthrough Academy.

Uh, title of his presentation was Mastering the Contractor Growth Model. And he really, really dove into the, the roles, um, hiring effectively, compensation, motivation, actually having an organizational chart, a dashboard that you can review and know your numbers and know everything about your business. And I think the the focus of Paint Boss Live was not. Just on scaling, there’s so much of that in the industry and I’m a marketer, so unfortunately, a lot of that comes from, um, other marketers, not from me, some from me, but, uh.

Daniel, the, uh, the marketing industry in general, the kind of Grant Carno and 10X, you know, hey, we’re gonna scale to the moon. But if you actually do that and you just focus on sales, it doesn’t actually work like another one of those things, you know, it’s, it’s the nice sound bite, it’s the nice kind of surface level stuff, but it’s like, OK, cool, I’m gonna put on my 10x hat and I’m gonna go 10x my sales, and then my life’s gonna become a living hell. My clients are gonna hate me.

My deliverables are gonna fall apart. I might need a bunch of one star reviews because I don’t actually know how to do it, um, because I don’t have the ops to support it. So Danny did a really good job diving into that breakthrough academy. It’s obviously what they focus on, but how to actually scale profitably and sustainably so that you build a business. You don’t say, hey, look, I went, look, my, I went from 1 to 5 million and now I’m now I’m at a 0. Cause I grew I grew too fast and I didn’t have the systems in place.

Yeah, one of the things, so the, the data dashboard that Danny mentions in his presentation. It reminds me of data risk, which is one of the factors. If you’re looking at your business and wondering how much is it worth, one of the detractors or one of the things that lowers the the the value of your business. is what’s called data risk, and one of the things for data risk is basically, do you have a centralized place where you can go one place to know all your numbers of your business, whether it’s the The financial numbers or maybe it’s the the sales marketing numbers.

All in one place so you don’t have to go to 53 different places to pull this data together. Um, and this is something that, you know, I experienced going through this um exercise of evaluating how much is my, my business is worth at the uh acquisition. com workshop, I think you went to as well. That they kind of took, took us through that. So that’s, that’s what that reminded me when he was talking about um the dashboard and making sure you have a dashboard for your business. It’s important for you to be able to make decisions, but also just for the value of your business, if you’re ever looking to sell at some point, um, making sure you have your a dashboard and your, your data together, which a lot of, a lot of businesses don’t, uh, don’t have that.

Um, they don’t have a clear one place to go to have all their data in one place. Yeah, 100%. Uh, and since you wanted to call me out, Daniel, about me, me, uh, pushing the sales, so I, I also presented at Paint Boss Live and my focus, uh, for people who want to listen to the recording was really on. I’m breaking down the many different types of marketing that is currently available, I feel like it’s a labyrinth of confusion and potentially purposely created to be so for people because then if nobody knows what to do then they’re just gonna have to pay people to do it for them so we talked about direct mail, Google paper click ads, Google local service ads, uh, websites, search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, Facebook ads, uh, print ads, billboard, TV, radio, kind of, you name it, we talked about it.

And how you should be thinking about it, the pros, the cons, the investment required for those, and at what point in your life cycle journey of your business, AKA what’s your revenue range, should you actually be seriously debating each of these different channels. So if you ever find yourself confused or thinking, hey, should I do this or should I do that in terms of my marketing, might be a presentation worth checking out. Yeah, I loved how you broke it down by revenue level. Like this is what you should focus on when you’re You know, start up to 500,000 or whatever the range was for the startups.

And then at the next stage, what should you focus on? I think that was really helpful, like as a blueprint for folks on where, where should you put your attention. And uh also really thought it was interesting, you know, Google ads was something that you were kind of Discouraging, at least, especially for smaller businesses, um, because they just don’t have the funds to be able to compete with some somebody like Angie’s List or, you know, the folks that are purchasing Google Ads, whereas Google LSA, that is something that you definitely want to look into.

And it’s it’s a mistake I see often um looking at the financials, a lot of people putting, still putting money into or Google ads, but not Google LSA. Yeah, and I think there are just a lot of errors, errors being made just cause people don’t understand the ecosystem, because it is difficult to understand it, so. It’s not difficult, it’s complicated. There’s just a lot of moving pieces there. So I think that was good. Uh, Jason Phillips, he runs Contractor Freedom. He runs Phillip Home Improvements. He gave the first keynote presentation at this year’s PCA Expo.

He came in, discussed his sales program. Uh, I have been to one of those sales boot camps. They’re absolutely phenomenal. He made an offer. So that offer, uh, would be in the recording. I don’t know whether it will be applicable if you watch the recording or not, but he made an offer, but Uh, he shared some good stuff in terms of, of how to sell effectively. It was fairly brief, but Jason always drops value. We had Janelle Role, uh, Rael. Rael. I told you her name is pronounced Roll.

Which is a shame because I’ve been talking with Janelle for years, and then she came on and said, hey, I’m Janelle Radel. It’s like, dang. So yeah, I, I noticed that I was like, wow, Brandon really set me up for success on that one. I definitely confirmed with you before I, uh, you said her name it’s Rodel, right? You know, yeah, yeah, it’s Rodel. And then I and I introduce her right then she like. Yeah, uh, my name is Raidel, like, oh, OK, yeah, it was super awkward, super awkward.

So did the recording just to see that, but the, but yeah, she talked about the benefits of the PCA made an offer for for discounted um PCA membership, and, and that was really phenomenal. But I think a lot of, a lot of even current PCA members don’t fully leverage it anywhere near what they should. So I I always appreciate when she gets on and share some of that stuff. Yeah, and uh. Like the PCA, it’s it’s getting better and better every year, like the this last event, the Broadmoor.

It’s amazing. And, and it’s hard to top because the one in Orlando last year was, was pretty good. I mean it’s really good. And the fact that they were able to top Orlando’s event was impressive, so. Yeah, I’m excited for it to be back in Orlando though, cause I’m sure you are as well. Seeing that you live there. Yeah, to drive down the street, it’s nice. Yeah, it’s pretty nice. So I don’t think I got into the, into the metrics, should have when we started this podcast.

So we had, we had almost 900 people register for it, which was pretty neat. We had 489 people show up, it’s a lot, had almost 500 people show up to this thing, uh, and, and had, uh, I think 258 people, I think, live at one point. So we had 400, again, it was almost a 9 hour event. And almost 205 people kind of in and out throughout the throughout the event. We had a schedule posted so people could come for the events that they wanted to see. But it was, I don’t think we ever went below 120, 130.

It was an awesome event. Yeah, it’s impressive, like almost 50% sure, right, right? Like 900 people showed up, 400. It was a little over 50%, yeah. His solid Some really good panels. So I led the, the residential painting success panel. We had Juan Vasquez, Mark DiFrancesco, Mike Sutton Shane Fast on there. Uh, that was really, that was really interesting cause they It’s always nice when you kind of preach to the industry about certain things, and, and I think some people kind of tune you out like, OK, whatever. Um, but then these people who, who are doing quite a few, Mike Sutton, he’s doing over 15 million, and they get on there and they start talking about, oh yeah, lead flow is down or was down in, in 2024 has been kind of down to all uncertainty and whatnot, but yet their close rates higher, their average ticket price is higher, their revenue is higher, and their profit margins are higher.

And they start getting into, they work their list, reach out to leads, they refine the sales process, a lot of the stuff that that we talk about and we hear people talk about all the time. So that that panel was really, really good. Yeah, I like what uh Mark DiFransco said on that topic of You know, this year for some folks, the economy seems a little shaky, especially February seemed to be down in Leeds. And he was saying like, I just focus on what my team is doing, what our metrics are.

And I know that I only have a small market share in my area. I mean, I have a, he’s and he’s a large business, I think he does multiple millions. I’m not sure exactly how much he’s doing, but 5.5 million. Yeah, so he has a large painting business, but he’s still, even though he’s doing $205 million or whatever it is, he still only has a small market share in in where he, the area he is in I believe New York area. And uh So even though the overall economy is down, You know, there’s plenty of people still getting painting done, and he has a very small.

You know, market share in that area. And so if he just focuses on what he does in his metrics, and reaching out and doing all the actions or marketing actions. You know, he’ll be OK if he keeps focused on not being worried about what’s going on in the big overall economy and all that stuff. So that’s what I, I really liked what he brought up there on, on the topic of the economy. Yeah, you can only focus on, you can only control the input, like we all focus on the output, but we actually have zero control over the output.

All we can control is the input. I think that was really good and I also like his focus and everyone on the panel’s focus on the data, so knowing their numbers, how many leads did they get? How many did they quote? What was their close rate? What, what was their average ticket value? What was their gross profit? What is their repeat and referral rate? You know, how many, how many referrals are they getting for each project? How much, how common is repeat business for them? So I think drilling into this stuff, so many, so many painting companies, it’s kind of like hand to mouth, right?

It’s kind of like a, like an employee who. Who isn’t making a ton of money and just needs that payment as, as, you know, it’s the situation, the vast majority, I’d say of the nation needs that payment to make their rent payment, or their mortgage and, you know, they’re one or two paychecks away from being in a really tight spot. That’s how a lot of painting companies act with the leads. You know, to say I I need the lead hand to mouth, but there’s no real focus on repeat business, referral business, refining the sales system, improving the close rate, you know, peppering the neighborhood when you actually go out there.

How do you take it and build an ecosystem versus just more leads, more leads, more leads all leads are down. I’m in trouble. Mhm. So I really like that because what leads go down for everybody, right leads up and they flow and and everyone is affected by the economy or by what’s happening, but the, the people that we had on that panel, there’s some, they’re thriving and they, they broke down why. Yeah, it was good. And After that panel, that’s when uh John McFarland covered basically his performance pay system, which I thought was really interesting.

The title of it was, you get what you pay for, and he was, his whole thing was, he wants to pay his team. You know, is, the more he pays his team, the better from his perspective, like he wanted to pay them as much as he could. And the way he does this is basically sets up a a performance pay system where they kind of, uh, they can make as much money as they can if they provide an efficient and high quality product, and they’re, they come in under budget on their projects, and he’s going to pay them what he budgeted for that project.

And I think this, I’ve seen a lot of painting businesses employ performance pay into their businesses and it’s, it’s um When it’s done right, it can have a huge impact on the organization. And one of the things I liked about this presentation that he did was he went through the things, not just going through like, oh, this is great if you implement it, but he went through like, If you don’t watch out for these things, you’re going to have a rough time. So he, he went through the common pitfalls of implementing a performance pay system, and it basically came down to, you got to do the hard work upfront before you implement the performance pay system to really make sure your, your production processes are dialed in.

So making sure you’re doing production rate estimating or time-based estimating. So that you can develop a work order that has budget hours for your team to hit and to make sure everyone is bought into those production rates before, you know, they’re going to be paid off performance for them. So you got to get buy-in from your team on that, and then you. You know, he, he even did a test run for one crew for a couple of months to make sure that everything was running smoothly before he, you know, did it broadly for his company.

So he had a lot of really good practical advice on implementing a performance based system that I thought was really valuable. Yeah, it was really good. You can’t, once you set other people’s finances up on your, you know, on on your numbers, your numbers better be right. They better be super dialed in, otherwise you’re setting your team up for failure and that would not be, or you’re setting yourself up to lose a lot of money, cause you’re just not doing it correctly. So there are a lot of issues.

Daniel, we, you and I were talking about shooting this podcast episode. And I remember thinking like it it’s like what are we gonna talk about, right? And and like, OK, we’re gonna recap this event. Now that we’re actually doing it. I don’t wanna do it for everything. Like every event. I’m sitting here, you’re saying, you’re breaking down all the stuff. I was there the whole time. It was almost a 9 hour event. I’m there the whole time and you’re breaking all this stuff down. And I feel like I’m learning more, like it’s, you know, it’s becoming more organized in my head, the takeaways.

Yeah, it might just be a good. It it’s hard to like during the day of like there’s so much just constant. It to to kind of reflect on it is Is uh is, is good, you know, to, to retain the things that are actually impactful like, and then, cause whenever I go to an event like a You know, a conference or something, whether it’s for painting businesses or for accounting. It’s always just like, it’s like we’re drinking from a fire hose, and you kind of need some time to process it and think about it, to really, OK, what do I really need to do and come away with like a few takeaways that you can implement.

That’s always the hardest part is distilling all the information down. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, man. So there was the, there was a Women and Paint panel. So Michael Chaney, she did a phenomenal job moderating this panel. She’s leader of Women and Paint. We had Corey Leister. Lacey Ilsley, Maggie Keper, and Sarah Ross on the panel, um, that was an interesting one. See that one kind of kind of went all over and really interesting direction. So they talked about transparency, how transparent should you be with your team, kind of the pros and cons and how they think about that and and what it’s caused.

Impostor syndrome, I think we’ve all struggled with that at times. Um, I could see how as a female in the trades, it would be potentially even more challenging there, uh, how they’re shifting with trends. So in terms of of product or service delivery or or other technical trends that they’re seeing, how they’re actually shifting and adapting their business to take advantage of that, all the way into, you know, some more. Um, entrepreneurial habit type stuff like morning routines, you know, to set yourself up for success, which I know I need a little work on, so I enjoyed that piece.

Do you need help uh dialing in your morning routine? A little bit. Yeah, it’s a little inconsistent. It’s a little inconsistent. The kids, the kids wake me up sometimes, and I feel like that, you know, like the, the, the entrepreneur that I have in my head, that doesn’t happen. So yeah, I’d say I need a little work dialing in my morning routine. All right. Cool. Well I’m big enough to admit I’m not perfect, Daniel. it’s OK. It’s OK. I was just, I was just clarifying. I didn’t know which part.

Yeah, the, the morning routine part, the morning routine part would be good. Um, some days it’s great, some days not as great as I wish it were. And then, uh, Sorry, go ahead. I’ll just say um Michael Or Hickman also did his, his little piece that was, that was really uh I really enjoyed that. His, his commercial was really good too, like his, it was really. It’s really, uh, is, is your family hate you because you work all the time? Yeah. And then he, he comes with the, the fireman he uh helmet and um.

He was trying to show his board, but the, the Zoom kind of screwed him up on that, but he, he handled it like a pro. It was, it was good stuff. But his events actually has an event coming up here soon as well. Um, he’s, he’s always doing great events. Uh, I know he helps a lot of painting businesses. You know, get beyond that 1 million mark, um, and scale their business up, so. Yeah, yeah, he did a great job. It’s edutainment. He understands that to educate, you kind of have to entertain people as well, so they want to listen to you.

So he’s, he does a really good job with the edutainment. And then John from Paint Scout, he came on, he did a phenomenal job talking about how to, how to century, uh, grow your revenue and what that actually looks like, um, broke down. It’s gonna seem pretty simple, but he broke it down and then, and then broke it down a lot further into how to actually achieve these things and the different levers that you can pull, uh, so you can increase your job value, you can conduct more estimates, and you can increase your win rate.

So there’s essentially three different ways that You can dial up your revenue and And then he, he drilled into those pretty, pretty significantly, showing the different levers, and I think business, it’s easy to get confused and kind of this elabyrinth. We all have a million things pulling at us every single day, a million considerations, questions, sometimes we’re uncertain about things that we’re doing. And you kind of lose sight of the fundamentals. So when there’s a presentation like, hey, you want to grow your revenue, here are the levers that you can pull.

OK, if you want to, if you want to pull this lever, well, you could charge more, you could upsell, you could do all these different, you know, kind of sub levers, and all of a sudden the business isn’t, it’s not so complicated anymore. What we need to do, we just need to figure out how to do those things. So I thought that was a good breakdown. Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of what Russell Peach said during the alternative revenue streams panel, because we’re talking about how to add different Service offerings to your painting, like if you’re doing painting, you want to add Christmas lights or flooring or whatever.

But he was saying before you even do that, you need to take a look at your, your painting business and see how can you just improve that. So try to do. You know, more of what you’re doing better, you know, focus on more and better, um. And and that that kind of ties into what John Bryant was saying, it’s like, hey, if you want to make more money, you know, take a look at your pricing, take a look at getting that average job size up. But there’s different ways I’ve seen folks do this is You know, um, Trying to have like the good better best option.

Have you, have you heard about this? I’m sure you have like 3 options for the same, like if you want to do an extra year, you have a good, better, uh, yeah, good, better, and best option for like different um Paint quality like. The highest paint quality and the best and then like the standard paint quality and the good and maybe different uh Um, different coat, different amount of coats, but you basically give the The clients an option on those three different choices there. So there’s different ways you can improve your current painting business before thinking about adding on something else, but we did have that alternative revenue panels panel that did really dive into how if you determine like, oh for sure, I want to add a different service on, they gave some really good information that was Paul Ballack, Nick Kelly, Russell Peach, Will Reyes.

And uh it basically came down to three things. So you got to have the right systems in place. I can’t remember his name, um. It was, it was Daniel, yeah. That’s right. Uh, so, yeah, I lied. Right, yeah, um, so. Yeah, 2000 things you got to focus on before implementing another revenue stream, before you look at, you know, implementing flooring or implementing Christmas lights or whatever you want to do, take a look at the systems that you need and identify, OK, what do we actually have to plug in, what processes do we need to have this.

Basically different division, uh, or potentially even different business, which a lot of these folks had actually started a spinoff, another business. So you gotta have the, the processes, systems in place, then you gotta have the people, cause maybe you know how to do. Flooring, but do you have someone, someone else I can help you actually do the production on that? Um, so you have to get another subcontractor, what do you gotta do? So you gotta have the people in place, and then you have to have the capital, the, the money, you know, to actually invest in cause you’re gonna have to, a lot of these, um, I think all of them actually uh started a slightly like a a different company with a new set of branding.

And it was like for um for peach painting, for example, it’s like a peach with a paintbrush in his hand, but then he added flooring and then they added like a some sort of flooring identification, but it’s very similar branding so you have to re redo your branding, you have to have another marketing effort, so you got to have some capital plus you might need some additional tools to do that service, you know, for flooring or for Christmas lights, maybe you need something else, so. You gotta have those 211 things in place, uh, systems, people, and capital before venturing into that.

That’s an alternative revenue route. Yeah, it was, it was kind of similar to Chris Elliott’s presentation, you know, I think it’s, it, it’s some of the stuff shiny object. I like all the residents, oh man, those commercial commercial jobs, they’re doing 2500K, 2500k commercial. I want to go do commercial. I’m done with these 25K 22025K, 205K residential projects. Or man, if I, if I were, I go into these homes and I realize, oh, they need flooring, they need siding, they need whatever, I should just start another division, and I should just sell it to them while I’m there.

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but there are a lot of considerations that factor in. You have to be really calculated and strategic how you do it, and also make sure you actually are running your own business. That you currently have the right way, because if you, if you have kind of a a business that’s maybe not as efficient or run as tightly as it should be, and then you add a second, you’re gonna basically 22025x your problems. Yeah. Yeah, it’s It’s the like you said, the shiny object syndrome.

I know that I fell victim to that. It’s like, oh, that’d be cool to add and you just think it’s going to be a simple thing to add on and then you’re going to roll out a marketing company, I think at one point. Yeah, I was gonna compete directly with you and uh painter’s marketing. Yeah. Uh, no, it’s, it’s easy to, to do, um. And You just got to really make sure you’re really prepared and serious about doing it because it’s the grass is always greener. It’s always, oh man, if we just had added flooring, man, that would be so much better because our average job size would go up.

But there’s a whole bunch of issues that you’re not looking at realizing probably upfront that you just need to make sure you’re aware of before diving in, uh, which is why I love, I love that panel. I love Chris Elliott’s, uh, and even um, John McFarlane’s as well, because, you know, performance pay is not a panacea. There’s a lot of work you gotta to do upfront to make sure that thing’s gonna go correctly, but once it’s done correctly, performance pay is great, but you gotta do the hard work up front to to get it set up.

So Daniel, I’m OK. I’m OK being humble. I don’t know what that word that you said is. Panacea I just made it up. I thought it sounded cool. It sounded so cool. I’ll have to look it up. Yeah, have to look up that word. I’m sure I just, I just coined that just now, so it’s not gonna be you know, it’s fairly apparent what the word means, but I’m sure there are a lot like if I don’t know the word, there are probably a lot of people who just are filling in the blanks in context, so I just want to let everyone else know that I have no idea what they just said, so we’re on the same page on that one.

And then some people, there will be some people who are very familiar with the word and they’re like, oh, I thought this guy was smart, he’s an idiot, and uh that’ll be my last podcast episode. And there’s how we lost a couple of subscribers. Right. And then there, there was, uh, so Lisa Hudson, she actually closed out the day for us, so she’s the president of Fresh Coat Painters. We have a close relationship with Lisa. Uh, Painter Marin Prose works with a substantial number of Fresh Coat franchisees, uh, so I’m, I, I, Lisa and I communicate quite frequently.

And she talked about Uh, essentially building a roadmap for success, so, so some of the core tenets that Freshcoat teaches, and just for a little bit, a little context here, so Fresh Coat painters grew substantially in 22025, and that was not the case for many of the painting franchise franchises, especially some of the bigger ones. So Fresh coat painters are a significant franchise over 22025 franchisees. They grew significantly in 2024 with her at the helm. And so she talked about kind of how do you make that happen. So she talked about the, the brand roadmap, uh, SOPs for scale, the way that they handle leads and actually close the projects and so some of the, some of the kind of insider tips from Fresh Coat franchise, one of the most successful franchises in the, in the country.

Uh, so that was a really cool way to end the day. Yes, sir. And uh I also did a presentation. I don’t know if you’re, I remember I blacked out for that one. Uh, you skipped over, so I just thought you just don’t want to talk about it, but yeah. No, I realize we’re friends would be like, man, that was awkward. Those guys really don’t like each other. I did, I did a presentation and It was, it was really interesting, I think, you know, um, so basically I just talked about how to Look at your numbers Uh, especially the, the gross profit, the customer acquisition cost ratio, I hit that pretty hard.

Which is basically comparing your gross profit and your customer acquisition, which is your marketing and your sales, and getting that ratio dialed in 3 to 1 ratio or better, then talked a bit about cash flow, how to improve your cash flow, how to, uh, also looking out for taxes as well, because once you get your, your numbers dialed in, then the thing you got to worry about is taxes. And I think a lot of people feel like they don’t have They can’t impact on how much they pay in taxes, but that’s not true, especially for a business owner, there’s a lot of leverage you can pull to to reduce your, your taxes in a legal way, um, and, uh.

Yeah, yeah, Daniel, Daniel created a full second set of books for me, a painter Marketing Pros. So if you become friends with Daniel, who’ll legally create a completely a completely new set of books for you. Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I literally just got off a call with somebody who their former accountant was just creating expenses in their books to reduce their was that not tied to like an actual recording was of any kind. Yeah, because the painting business owner I was talking to was like, yeah, I did $160,000 in net profit last year.

I was like, oh wow, that’s awesome. It’s great. So we looked at his books together, and it said 5000. We’re like, It’s a little weird you’re saying. So we digged into it with them and turns out there was like a $205,000 Just made up expense, just plugged in there. Uh, it was obviously just it wasn’t coming from anywhere, so. He had to, uh, to talk to his accountant and fire him for, and he had done that for a couple of years in a row, just like making up expenses and um it’s it’s it’s just weird because you don’t need an accountant, he was paying the guy like uh $1400 a month or something like that.

And just anybody listening, you don’t need an accountant to do tax fraud for you. You can do that on your own completely. It’s pretty easy, just make shit up. And uh it’s all you gotta do. So, yeah, if you’re paying the accountant, hopefully they’re they’re. They’re coming up with legal ways to reduce your taxes and and and supporting you in that way and keep you, keep you out of trouble and saving you money that way. The line item is tax reduction expense for $155,000. It occurred on December 11th. Right. Exactly.

Start looking at the numbers. This is gonna be too high. OK. And then we, we heard from Nice job. So Sam Andrews came on, talked about how to leverage your, your online reputation, build trust, with more jobs. So that was, that was an interesting presentation. I actually didn’t know Nice job does as much as it does do, uh, and kind of the effectiveness of the widget, and they brought in some pretty cool stats. About how it works and just reviews in general and how to win there.

So you don’t have to use a nice job to benefit from that presentation, but I was impressed. Yeah, it was a it was a good event, man. Yeah, it was good stuff. When is the next one? I don’t know. I don’t know. So we, we were. It’s a lot, dude, it’s a lot, you know, putting on these events, it, it, it requires a lot from the team. There’s a whole lot of of um back end effort that goes into this. I think it, it goes really well.

I mean, having 500, just about 500 people show up throughout the day. And the amount of value that was delivered, I feel really good about it. Maybe in like 5 months, maybe a similar event, might do, might do kind of a smaller one a few months from now. Play it by ear, yeah. It’s exciting. Yeah, I also wanna, you know, since, since this, this whole podcast episode is about the event, I’ll thank our sponsors again. So we had uh Painter Mar Pros and bookkeeping for painters or the platinum sponsors.

Gold sponsors were Breakthrough Academy and Paint Scout, and then silver was contractor Freedom, painter Growth and nice job, and then our bronze sponsors were Sherwin Williams, Academy for Professional Painting Contractors, and drip jobs. So it was a pretty heavy roster in terms of the sponsorships and the quality of the people that showed up. Yeah, it was, yeah, definitely big thanks to all the sponsors. Yeah, yeah, so. Cool, man. Well, I’m looking forward to hopefully getting some feedback from this podcast episode. You wanna, what are your thoughts, I guess, as we kind of transition toward the end of this episode on 2025, kind of what we took away, you know, it’s called Paint Boss Live 2025.

The focus was really on profitability, scaling profitably, you know, building a solid, unshakeable painting company. But a lot of it also was focused on, hey, what are we gonna do this year? What do you see happening this year? I don’t know. I’m not really good at predicting things, unless it comes to tax projections. I’m good at that, but I would say for 2025, I think a big theme out of this was do the work, you got to do the work. Like you can’t just, oh, I’m gonna tack on another alternative revenue stream or I’m gonna start a performance pay and just like implement it now or, you know, I’m, I’m gonna make more money.

You gotta, you have to do the work to, to make things happen. Um, don’t worry about the overall economy, just do what you need to do to What actions do you need to take, what processes do you need to implement, what people do you need to get to, to help you out. Um, so you had to do the work to make things happen in 2025. So that was a, that was like a theme that I kind of sensed through this whole paint boss live event and uh I think that will be great advice for anybody trying to succeed in 2025. Yeah.

I love it. I think that I, I sense that as well. I sense a lot of intentionality. So knowing the numbers but then also planning so so we talk a lot about oh OK what’s, what do you want your revenue to be OK then how many leads do you need close rate? I mean that that’s how a lot of people sort of talk about planning, but this was another level of, of even to the point the Chris Elliot example we might have to move from cash based to accrual accounting and here’s why do we want to do that?

Are we OK with that? So I mean it’s. Really putting the building blocks in place so that when you actually decide to do something, whether it be an alternative revenue stream, moving into commercial or or whatever else, you maximize your odds of success. Yeah, do the work, know your numbers. As a second, yeah, that works, that works, and then, uh, map it all out. I guess. Yeah, yeah, I think through everything. So, Daniel, I appreciate you, man. You’re a phenomenal co-host. I’m glad we were able to throw this event together.

Yeah, I had a great time. I appreciate, appreciate the opportunity, Brandon. Love it. Thanks, man.

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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.