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.

In this series titled “Success Frameworks”, Mark DeFrancesco of MDF Painting will be discussing his journey from young painter to veteran business guru.  It is a 5-part series.

In this episode, episode 1, Mark will be discussing his journey into the painting industry and the many unique advantages this industry provides.

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.

Thanks for joining us, Mark. Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Yeah, we’ve been, we’ve been talking about setting this up for quite some time, so I’m pumped that we’re doing it. Yeah. Uh, so, Mark, today we are going to be kind of getting the background.

So your, your journey into painting, and I know I know a little bit about it. I’m excited for the audience to hear it. Uh, and then, and then we’ll dive into what you’ve learned, kind of a broad topic. So my journey into painting is probably the unexpected journey. You know, I don’t come from a family of painters or even contractors for that matter. So I’m a first generation painter. And while I was in college, my roommate, uh, was from Lexington, Mass. I was up at Boston College, and his father was a house builder, and he had this like.

I went to Boston College, yeah, undergrad and grad at BC. Uh, I like Notre Dame. So mark that, hey, this was a great podcast, man. No, we have to end it here. That’s that’s it we’re all out of time, so appreciate having you, man. I will say in my years at BC we won quite a few of those games, and I, and I did go out to South Bend. So now that I know we have to catch some games together. Uh, in fact, Notre Dame is coming up to BC this fall, so if you’re around, I do have nice tickets right behind the, uh, Notre Dame bench.

My sister actually went to Boston College, so there’s a nice rivalry. I didn’t see that with a smile. That was kind of a grimace when, when you said that, but definitely a little Catholic university rivalry. So while at BC, my, it’s actually my freshman roommate, uh, his dad was a house builder. And he talked about, hey, let’s do some painting, you can make some good money. And it, it kind of sparked my interest because I was just looking to make money. And I was a lifeguard at the time, and I remem and I was very entrepreneurial.

I was that kid who was selling baseball cards and snap bracelets. It’s in, in elementary school. In fact, I was trying to save money to buy a Joe Montana rookie car, which I believe was $213 back then. I was probably 214 or 217 years old. And that’s probably where my story starts. And I remember bringing in like little packs of cards to school and those bracelets and all these little trinkets I would sell. And after a few months, I think the school realized that kids were just spending all their lunch money.

You know, back then you actually brought, you know, nickels and quarters and dollars into school, and they would spend it with me and not eat lunch. So they ended up, the, the principal actually sent home like this notice to all the parents that, hey, this was off limits now, nothing could be sold in school. And so that kind of ended my business for a while. I had to do business out of school hours. But I raised the money. I raised the money. to get the Joe Montana rookie card.

And I guess that was the beginning of me just doing entrepreneurial things. So, as even a high school guy, I played a lot of sports, but I always did, I worked, you know, I had a, I was bussing tables. I worked at Subway. I worked at Lowe’s as a cashier. You know, I did a lot of things just in part-time jobs, and I fell on to being a lifeguard. And that was a big thing. So I was a lifeguard most summers at the beach, loved everything about it.

It was great. Uh, but I wanted to make more money. So that freshman summer, I started also painting. And so I was not only painting houses, I was also a lifeguard and, and I actually just started moonlighting on my own with like my own business. I had some people I found that were painters that were older than me, and they knew what they were doing. And I was kind of selling their services in a way. So that was my beginning. And it didn’t stop. That first summer was really, really hard on me, to be honest with you.

And I think I left that summer thinking, Wow, I don’t know if I’m gonna do this again. And I did a little bit over the course of the next 218 years. And then when I finished my grad work, I was supposed to go to law school, or at least that was kind of in the agenda for me. And I really hesitated. I wasn’t in love with the idea of going. And my lifting partner at the time was really brilliant guy. He was a, a 212 L. and, uh, one of my other roommates was also at a really great university.

And, and I had done the LSATs and all that, but I just was hesitant inside. And I wanted to start internet businesses. This was at the time, I don’t think Facebook had even started yet, but it was right around that time. Amazon was losing money every quarter, but they were still, you know, this big, big business on, on the stock market exchange. And so I decided I was going to do MDF painting officially. And just do something that I knew because I knew I could make money.

The first summer I made $30,000 just moonlighting painting, whereas I made, I think, $3000 lifeguarding that whole summer. So it was, there was a huge amount of money back then. Yeah, it’s wild, man. And that was the beginning. So then after I finished my grad degree and just did it full time, I think we hit a million in about 18 months or so. So we were pretty fast to To getting volume. Um, and when, what year was this? This was in the mid 90s, so I started in ’95 and then around 113s where it really started to become, you know, a full-time endeavor.

I probably, Mark, I’m probably pushing you on this, but do you Have any recollection of what the average job size was, average ticket value? Back then, the top size was smaller. I mean, I was, again, I had no business. And, you know, I would, I would show up at people’s houses and they would say, who are, you know, who are you? Are you the boss? How many? They would quiz me, like, how long have you been in business? How many painters do you have? Like, I finally Started just telling people that it was my dad’s business.

And my dad, my dad did have a business. He sold medical supplies, um, to universities and places like that. And, and he was in the medical supply business. So I was always around a small business, which I think helped me a lot. I learned a lot of business from my dad, but I never, he never had anything to do with painting. Um, so I would eventually like after a couple of months, I just started saying, yes, it’s my dad’s business. And they’re like, Oh, that, that makes some sense.

You know, come on in. Let’s look at this. And So at that point, um, I was doing small jobs, like I’ll stay in your deck, I’ll paint the fence, you want to do a bedroom, we’ll do a bedroom. Like jobs no one wanted to do. You have an aluminum sided house, but there were old windows in it. And back in New England, I mean, this your exteriors get battered, you know, the temperature changes between the seasons and the moisture. So we, you’d have a lot of times old wooden windows, and they needed to be reglazed.

So I would get those jobs that was like, don’t touch the house, but reglaze 30 windows where you’re scraping away the old glaze. You’re resetting glazing points, reglazing it, prime, things like that that were really labor intensive. And I was cheap because I was new and I didn’t know any better. So, I would say average job size. I don’t have that in a spreadsheet somewhere, but I would say it was under $3000 if I had to guess. So I wanted to, Mark, I wanted to bring that up just because I think it’s a million dollars in 1995 is not a million dollars now.

And so I think even now, you know, if somebody says, Hey, I start a painting company today, 18 months from now, I’m at a million dollars, it’s impressive. It’s a lot more impressive in 1995. Well, it was fast and furious. The good part about it was it was a top end number and it was something that I always had as as a short goal in mind that would say go do a million because not many people were doing a million. And I remember my accountant at the time, who was a friend of mine, a CPA, he bought me a bottle of champagne, and he said, when we hit a million, we’re gonna open this champagne, and he was my best friend’s older brother.

And when I hit a million, I was actually losing money. Because I was doing everything wrong and it was a negative. I remember, I remember calling him and I was like, I want to take this champagne and smash it over your head, you know, and he’s like, what? But it was just fast and furious. I really didn’t have business systems in place. It was just a race to see what we could do. And I, I’m very competitive and I always have been. And I think that came out for me, and that’s what I loved about the business.

Uh, another thing that was fortunate for me was early in my career, somewhere around 2000 to maybe 2001, I met Kevin Nolan of Nolan Painting. And, you know, he probably doesn’t know me, but he’s had an enormous impact on what we do. So, he was speaking for, uh, PDCA. It was PDCA back then, um, a local event and somehow it came across my radar. I don’t know if I saw it in a Sherwin Williams or what. But it was in Westchester County, which is pretty darn close to Connecticut.

And, and I headed down and I watched him speak for a couple of hours, and I think he talked about hiring process or something like that. It was pretty basic, but for me, it was like a light bulb went off because there were systems there. And at that point, his brother, I believe his name is Brian, had just started with him, and they were doing this thing called Summit, which was a consulting type of firm. So I jumped into that right away. And I was probably one of their first clients.

I was not in it for a long time. It was short stay, unfortunately, but I did learn a lot of things. And, and some of this, the business fundamentals, uh, even now for how we operate, especially our crews and our job sites, I think a lot of that, um, I, I lean on Nolan to say, hey, we want to be the best in our area in terms of customer service to the customer on the job site. And then what I also noticed from them is they had systems and SOPs for everything.

So right away, you’re trying to tighten up every system. Um, Yeah, that’s the beginning of my journey. Easy to miss that when you’re starting out, you’re just grinding and getting it done, but at the end of the day, you’ll burn yourself out, you’ll lose money. Uh, Mark, I realized I put the cart before the horse a little bit here. Can you, can you introduce your company a little bit about your company, maybe rough size of your business, where you’re located, what you specialize in? Yes. So our company’s primarily a residential painting business.

We’re solely in the state of Connecticut. Uh, we might have an occasional job that’s outside of our borders. Uh, in Connecticut, if you drive an hour and a half in any direction, you end up in a different state. You end up in New York, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island. So sometimes we have past customers that have a second home somewhere and we’ll go and help them out, but 98% of our business is in the state. And 86% of our business is residential repaint as of last year, 33% was commercial repaint.

We don’t do new construction, uh, with the exception of one GC relationship that I have that does commercial construction, and I’ll help them out if they need something cause we have great rapport for 20 years. Um. We’re really a sales and marketing business. I feel like that’s always been at the forefront. We talked about this earlier about how I like to play offense, and those are two of the departments that are offensive departments in this type of business. So I really geek out on sales stuff and marketing stuff.

Um, the size of us now, we’re between 5 and 6 million. We have been for a few years. Um, for us, the breakout point is to go up to the 10 million threshold. Um, and it’s, it’s not really a system thing, it’s a personnel issue. So we’re a W-2 business now, and as our crew leaders turn into team leaders, you know, it, it gives us the ability to do a lot more. Um, the seasonality, and we’re up in New England, in the Northeast, and so we have a, a seasonal business.

In the winter, there’s just a lot less work being done. Obviously, we do interior painting, um, but it’s a much slower season from December through the first half of March. And so that’s something that I’ve been battling for 30 years, you know, and, and there’s no quick solution to it. There’s certain things that we do to try to mitigate that, that have helped us, you know, become good at the game over the years. You just discuss a little bit about us in terms of Salespeople, uh, right now we currently have 6 salespeople.

One is a sales coordinator. We have, um, a dozen or so crew leaders, a couple carpenter leaders, and then painters, you know, we have quite a bit when we’re busy, we have around 30 painters. In addition to all of our crew leaders who are all full-time working painters. They’re lead forming. Mark, you just have to sell 4 to 103 million of holiday lights. That’s it. If I sell 4 to 5 million of holiday lights, then I’m all set. Then it’s the 10 million number. So we’re just starting at the holiday lights this year.

I’m super excited about it cause I just feel like it’s a value add for everyone. You know, our past customers love it. In fact, my little suitcase, uh, things just arrived, the, the little showpieces that you can show them what the lights actually look like. But I think I have small expectations for that. If we can do 200 or 300,000 this year, I’ll be, I’ll be super happy with it. Um, it, it’s meant to help the crews. If I can buy a week and a half for my CLs on the beginning of that season, of that winter season, maybe a week and a half on the end of that winter season, I could shrink the winter a bit just to help people, really.

One thing I haven’t heard much of, this is a little bit gone off track here, but I’ve heard much of it, so it’s this is a little bit theory, but I’m willing to bet if executed correctly, holiday lights could be An awesome mechanism to increase repeat business, repeat and referral business, especially because the kinds of clients that are gonna be buying holiday light services are typically your higher-end homes. Give stay in front of them like a maintenance so we have something called uh MDF Care, um, basically modeled after AppleCare, and it’s about creating.

You know, a world where painting is an ongoing service, not just something that gets done when you want to change the color of your house or you have peeling paint. It’s something that should happen as natural maintenance. It’s taking painting and making it maintenance for residential homeowners. And for us that looks like interior touch ups or honeydew list in the winter, primarily. Exterior touch up and honeydew lists in the summer, primarily, um, gutter cleanings in the fall. For us, it’s after Thanksgiving, and it’s part of the country, and soft washes and or low pressure washes in the spring.

And now holiday lights could be added to that mix. So it allows for like a 5th maintenance or service item. So when I talk about a service department, that’s what I mean. I don’t mean customer service. I mean that type of ongoing maintenance service, essentially an independent product. Correct. Yeah, I love it. OK, so you started, you were making sales, you were being Kind of, I guess viewed critically in a way, you’re a bit younger, so you’re being grilled, interviewed, like, is this a real business? Eventually you said, hey, my dad, it’s a, it’s a smart move.

My dad owns a business. Don’t worry, I’m just here helping. Um, that all went well. You, you were very aggressive in your growth, uh, going, I don’t know what that would be today, maybe going to 1.5 million or so, um, if not more, and In, um, 18, maybe 63 million in 18 months you weren’t making money, you were losing money, um, and then you went to, you met Kevin Nolan at a PCA that was PDCA, uh, event, started learning some systems, and you kind of saw, I like to say you saw what was possible.

I think in an instance like that, your eyes were sort of open. So when you see those systems, you go and, and it might even be something kind of minute, maybe even not the most important part of the business, but the takeaway was what mattered to you. What did you then implement first? Where do you, what did you focus on systematizing first? That’s a great question. Um, There were so many things. I mean, I mean, I’m a bit manic, so I started to just want to get better on everything.

I mean, even now, we have 4 core values. One of them is improve or die, which is my way of saying constant and never ending improvement. So when I tell you, Brandon, that every single year, I was taking like our call intake form and editing it, like in the slower times and every single thing that we did. I mean, right away, I wanted to have good um production processes. So I think I dialed in on that first. So we were heavily focused on the pre-job meeting. I created all the checklists.

I re-edited the checklist 30 times, you know, over the course of years. That was big for me. Don’t forget, in the beginning, even at a million, 1.5 million, I was doing everything. So I was selling everything. I was also managing everything. When I say that, I say that loosely. I was there for every pre-job meeting, and then after that, I was kind of like a ghost. I was there if there was a fire to be put out, or if I was in the area and I could stop in.

But we became really good at the trade because I’m a little bit OCD or a lot OCD and I was very meticulous. And back then, um, That was, I was OK with being very demanding. I was not married. I did not have children. I was living at home. Um, in fact, I laugh about it because MDF was literally like a 10 by 10 bedroom in my parents’ house. Back then, it was like an answering machine fax thing that would ring, and it was like positioned on this old steam radiator, and the thing would ring and like wake me up in my bed, I could roll over and hit my head on the desk type of thing.

So, and my, my mother still lives in the same house. So I tell her I’m like, I wanna, I’m gonna take all this stuff and like put it like museum things like the old desk and the thing like don’t ever get rid of that stuff. So for me, starting that way, I would just wake up and eat, sleep, and live it. And, you know, so what was implemented first, everything was implemented at once. For marketing, it was guerrilla marketing. I was a madman. I would wear a backpack and take some water with me, and I would just go put stuff in.

I mean, I did everything illegal. I would put things in mailboxes, I would put signs anywhere. I remember one time I put We were past the statute of limitations for this stuff, I think. So yeah, we’ve gone past the statute of limitation, but they would call and everybody was pretty friendly and DOTs and government people call and say, hey, you overdid it here, and we would say, oh my God, we’re so sorry we didn’t realize we had a team that did that. We’ll go out and take it down.

And I was really. You know, so I’m, I’m a short guy, so I would have to bring like a little step ladder that I would jump out of the car with and get up on a telephone pole and get it just high enough so, you know, a six-foot guy couldn’t rip it down. And then I would be like a phantom and go to the next spot. And I had some signs that stayed up actually for years. Uh, and, and I’m not recommending this, but the mentality is important to have this guerrilla marketing mentality that says, hey, we’re gonna do everything we can possibly do, and we’re gonna start to see what sticks and what works you do more of, what doesn’t work, you do less of.

Now, back then, I wasn’t dialed in enough to really get my attribution right. So in marketing, I think I was in the step of, I’m aggressive, I’m a madman, I want to compete with everyone. In the sales game, I was the sales guy, and this is kind of embarrassing because now I coach sales to a lot of people, and I think that we’re really dialed in on sales. I’m really proud of how we do it. But when in the beginning, when it was me doing it, it was all just on my My energy as the owner, let’s call it a charisma and a talent.

That’s how a lot of successful entrepreneurs, I guess so. I mean, I, I think I just needed to make the sale and I cared about people and I cared about our reputation. So for me, it was pretty easy to go in and try to identify what do you really want, you know, and I didn’t have all these awesome tools that my salespeople have now, but they just want paint. They just want paint at the lowest price. That’s all that they. Well, you know, and that’s what this comes out on the surface, but right away, even intuitively as a college kid, I knew that it was diff they wanted something other than just paint.

And I knew that what, what was the question I could ask behind the question or really, how can I help you now. So I have this operating system in my head, in my subconscious that would run all the time and it was always, how can I help you now? How can I help you now? So in any sales appointment, it was like, yeah, I’m hearing you, you want this painted this and that, but really what’s the most important factor to you? Price. OK. Well, if, if you’re saying if I wasn’t exactly $1 cheaper, you’d never hire me?

Well, no, I’m not saying that, you know, maybe well I care about this. Oh, let’s talk about that. Let me tease that out. What, what does this look like? I care about quality or I care about how long it lasts, or I care about the material. I care about who’s actually applying the paint, so I feel safe. And I was pretty Good at going 2nd, 3, 73th level with customers without even knowing it. You know, Nolan didn’t teach me that. No one taught me that. That was just being in person and knowing I have to help you.

But I also knew very early on intuitively that if I could find out what you really wanted, Brandon, and then come back up to your door a half hour later and say, I got it. This is exactly what you wanted. It’s $3000. Let’s do this. I can land a lot of business. And I was fortunate that that worked. I wouldn’t say that’s, I hope my sales people don’t listen to this podcast, but it’s so far away from what we do now, where it’s such so strategic and there’s so many tools involved, but it’s the beginning of that.

And, um, and I had success with it, even early. And so that was my system there. Production we covered, it was heavy on um pre-job meeting, heavy on post-job meeting, heavy on Daily communication with the customer. So even back then, my office had daily contact with customers every single day, every single customer. And it’s still something we do. You know, we may have 25 customers some days for, for Monday, and we will talk to all 25 from an adminis from an office standpoint. And that happened in the 90s, and it still happens today.

Um so that was pretty dialed in. But I don’t know. I can’t think of like strategically doing one thing first. Yeah, I wanna, I wanna quickly touch on, and I know you’re gonna talk about sales in depth, yeah, in episode 4, but I think it would be easy if somebody hadn’t really studied sales to kind of heard my little joke, basically don’t know what I said, and then they’re hearing you saying kind of the question behind the question or, you know, thing behind the thing, um, so I just want to kind of Point out when people when people say price is the issue or or XYZ is the issue, oftentimes the first objection or the first thing that they say is not actually the thing and so there’s some underlying motive there’s a there’s a, a deeper, um, motive, a deeper concern, deeper fear, deeper desire that you have to pull out of people and sell to, and this is what Mark said came very naturally to him and that he has since then systematized and.

And kind of passed on to his team. And the critical element there though is that talking about price is super important. So the more you can talk about price and the earlier you can talk about price or the money end of things, the more successful you’re going to be in a same day clothes. What I learned and what I didn’t mention is I’m a voracious reader of, of everything. And that I as a kid I wasn’t, but I think it started in college and I was the type who will read um.

I, I mean, I’ll, I, if I found a subject I like, I would read 50 books on it to become better at it. Um, silly things from football to playing cards to all kinds of different interests. Certainly in the business world, I, I go deep. So, I also started my learning, which has never stopped. Even today I’m listening to stuff and reading obsessively. It’s one of the things I love to do. So that helped me a lot because it just broadens your Your awareness, and I think you start to make all these, uh, connections in your brain about things that you’re reading and hearing and studying that are not about the painting industry, but yet when you think about them, they are related to what you’re doing.

You know, I became a huge Tony Robbins guy, you know, and big into that stuff, all kinds of different things. And so there have been a lot of things that have helped me throughout the years, um, but I was, everything I learned or studied, I filtered it back to MDF painting. And how do I get 1% better and that theory of improve or die was there from day one, and constant never ending improvement. So when it comes to sales specifically and being in the the moment of talking about price, I don’t want to lose this point.

I know we’re all over the place or I am. People are really comfortable talking about the money in the past and in the future, and oftentimes not as comfortable talking about the money in terms of right in front of them. What do I mean by that? If someone tells you that price is a factor, I would want to talk about, let’s talk about the last time you had it done. That was 6 years ago. What was the price? How did you feel about the price? What were the other prices?

When you bought that thing, there’s very Grant Cardoneish as well. When you bought that thing 6 years ago, was it a good value? Are you happy you bought it? Would you buy it again? What would you change about it? So that’s where cost can take you. And when it’s uncomfortable to talk about what do you want to spend on this project now, right? That’s, that’s uncomfortable. When we talk about what happened in the past, it’s a lot more comfortable for most people. Sure, most prospects. Also, when we talk about it in terms of the future, it becomes a lot more comfortable.

So those are just salesmanship things that once you start to get good at that, you get really dialed in and you can help people a lot faster. Yeah, I think it, it kind of takes their guard down. Cause otherwise it feels like a trap, right? Like what are you, what are you willing to spend right now? OK, and you’re kind of pigeonholing them, putting them in a corner, but you said you were willing to spend $203. That’s what you just said. Well, and the reason, and then you got to understand, as painting contracts, we have to understand that our prospects feel that way because that’s the reality.

Like most people that are coming to meet them have no clue what they’re doing in terms of giving them an accurate price that’s based on. Time it actually takes to do this, which are your production rates, and a charge rate that provides a livable wage for people and provides profit for the company. Most people don’t have that dialed in that are your competitors. And so you almost can’t blame the prospect for being a little bit standoffish when it comes to talking about that part of the money.

And as you learn about the different personality types that you’ll confront as prospects. You can get really masterful at how you handle different personalities in different ways, and that’s a lot of what I think high-level salesmanship looks like. Yeah. So I, I like to learn a lot as well. I read, listen a lot of podcasts, and I have yet to, to learn from, to meet somebody who’s highly successful, who’s not an avid learner, and I think how you end up tying these things together. Cause when you, you could obviously learning about sales, learning about business, learning about finance, those things are very directly applicable to a company.

It’s not hard to see how that could make your company better, but just having this natural curiosity, how that can tie back, I, I think to an episode of, uh, a podcast I listened to recently where they were talking about Apple’s um $3 trillion playbook and essentially how Apple was the first company to break $3 billion or $3 trillion in in market cap. Um, and they. One of the things that they did, I mean this obviously isn’t the only thing, there were a lot of things, but they had a neat font.

They had different kinds of font, whereas PCs, computers used to just have just generic font. They didn’t have different options, and that came from Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy class. In school, he developed a passion for different fonts and then he brought, like who would think a calligraphy class would ever add any value to a $3 trillion company, but it did. So the these just most random of things can be incorporated. I, I love that. And with the people that I coach, I really encourage them to read and I tell them to read things that are of interest to them.

I love history. So a lot of times I’m reading about historical moments or historical events and figures and, and leadership. Um, I love sports. I’m a huge sports guy, um, Boston College, not Notre Dame fan. That’s gonna get weaved in a lot over this series, but, um, but. I read biography because I enjoy that. And so I, I was never, like I never liked the New England Patriots, believe it or not, I’m always, I’m a diehard 49er fan. So I started with the Joe Montana and the Bill Walsh and the, you know, Jerry Rice’s of the world, but I jumped over to reading a lot about Tom Brady and studying him and studying Bill Belichick and all these different people.

And You start to take little pieces from everywhere and make what you’re doing better, because your business is relationships, your business is performance and specifically efficient performance. So, you have to be efficient in marketing, you have to be efficient in sales, you have to be efficient in production. And you have to be efficient also in how you hire people and what process you bring them through. And if you can get those things right, just those things, everything else will fall into place, um, but that’s easier said than done.

There’s a lot to it. Goodness gracious, right? So many, I feel like entrepreneurship business is the ultimate sport. It is, you’ll never, you’ll never perfect it. Yeah, and if you do it right, the game really never ends. You know, it ends if you go out of business and you don’t have cash flow. But if you can keep cash flow, what you can do just never really ends. And in this, at some point, I realized this is my opus, meaning this is the thing that I am just gonna work on and make better and better.

So a lot of people say to me, Well, are you coaching now? We see all your stuff on social media. Yes, I’ve been coaching for a while, but I just enjoy helping other people that I look at as my peers around the country. My passion is for growing my business every single day, and I am excited about what MDF’s painting is doing even 30 years later now, which is fun, cause I see us in the middle of our journey, not toward the end of our journey. Yeah, 100%. You have big ambitions for it.

Yes, you’re gonna hit those. Let’s get it let’s get a little bit into the industry, cause I know we were, we were speaking a little bit um about how the fact that the painting industry is a bit unique. That there are a lot of advantages. I think there are people generally fall into one of two camps, kind of the accidental painting company owner like yours or, you know, multi-generational, like, hey, my family’s in the trades, my my dad ran a painting company, uh, but a lot of the, the highly successful, um, podcast guests that I’ve had were were accidental ones, right, where they just kind of found it.

So what, what do you think is so attractive about this industry? Well, there’s low barriers to entry, so that’s one thing that’s attractive and not attractive. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but my, when I was doing my grad work and um And, and I was creating officially MDF to launch it, cause I knew I was gonna take a break and not go to law school. Um, it was literally like buying some nice resume paper and printing out, I thought it was fancy. I went to Staples, so the printing was a little bit better, and printing out some past jobs and making almost like a, I call it the fat book now, but essentially a book that Was our resume that would show more about our jobs and the different things that we do, why we think we’re, we’re better than the competition.

And I think that was the biggest thing I had to produce. Then I showed up at people’s houses. I mean, I started with absolutely nothing. I was at BC selling T-shirts out of a box. Literally, and use that money to buy a couple 32s and a 40-foot ladder. Um, I was borrowing my dad’s van that he used to make deliveries for medical supplies. And so I would take the van at 13 a.m. and get it back to him by about 8:30 so he could do his day. And then I would use it to pick up supplies and men and material in the, in the afternoon and then I would go sell all day in my car.

So have you ever, did, did you ever hustle CDs? I feel like I didn’t hustle CDs. I see. Yes. I should have, uh, but, but I missed opportunity. If I have to go back in time, I, I, um, so it was really a a shoestring. Like I didn’t think about it logically at that time. I just thought like this is the thing I’m in. I can go sell a $5000 job, which seemed like a big deal back then, right? And I can make a little bit of money on it, and I could do it again and again and again.

And I like being with the customers. I think I like that dopamine hit from selling them, from being them to say, hey, we want you, kid, we, we’re gonna hire you. We like all this stuff. You know, we met with all these other people and you seem dialed in. You seem like you’ll care about this project more than someone else. So that part of it I enjoyed and it certainly buoyed me up. But right away, I was, um, reliant on labor, right? So even though in the beginning I did paint a lot of the smaller side projects, I would always call it side work, um, just to hustle money.

I did a lot of that myself. I pretty much always had a crew of 2 or 3, even from the very beginning, that was working for me. So I had to deal with having a 100% accountability fall on me even though I wasn’t on the job for 10 hours a day. And as a, you know, a 1718, 19 year old kid, That’s a lot. Yeah, for sure, man. The, uh, I, I, and man, we are going everywhere, but that’s what’s part of what’s gonna make this series so good cause we’ll get back on track here with, with the question, but I want to dive into the sales thing.

So you said you, you got a dopamine hit when you would sell, you get a little dopamine hit, they picked you, it feels really good, but you, you’ve been coaching sales now for some time. And as we both know, there are a lot of people who really dread sales. What’s your recommendation for people who are listening, say, well, maybe Mark gets a dopamine hit. I’ve gone out there, I’ve tried, I’ve made sales, and I hated it. So my recommendation is actually fairly simple and the same for people that get the dopamine hit and for people who hates sales, hire other people to do it as soon as possible, but get them put into a real dialed-in system.

Right away. So that, so, so there’s two parts to this. First, recruit and hire them properly. And everyone messes this up because As painters, everything’s fast and furious. We’re, we’re the ultimate small business, right? Well, I just described starting on a shoestring with no money. And so it’s really hard to manage all the different things that are happening fast and furiously and then have a really great hiring process. Like right now, we recruit 33 days of the year for salespeople, whether or not we need them, and we have a 13-step hiring process that involves in-person meetings, phone meetings, you know, personality quizzes, drug tests, background check, group interviews, uh, a, a trial.

They actually watch some of my videos and get like this learning smash, and then they have to do a Zoom call with us to see if they have what I call the stuff. So, I have a pretty dialed-in process to try to onboard one person. And that’s hard for people that don’t have any of that, so you have to go get those processes and implement them. So I think recruiting hiring is one, and then the second part is training them. But my advice is the same for the person who loves sales, gets the dopamine hit, thinks they’re the best in the world at it, or the guy who dreads doing it.

And the answer is the same for both, get someone else to do it. Now, for the guy who dreads doing it, maybe you’re getting two other guys to do it. And you watch them compete against each other. For the guy who loves doing it, maybe you have somebody compete against you for a while. And it was a very humbling moment, but one, and we’ll talk about this later in, in my journey, cause it’s been a lot of moments where I failed big time. And it’s taught me, obviously, you learn a lot more when you fail than when you succeed at things.

And there was an aha moment when I hired a salesperson that outsold me. And at that moment I was like, OK, I’m not God’s gift to the sales, uh, to salesmanship. I’m just a guy who’s excited about painting, who’s kind of aggressive, and has gotten lucky a whole bunch of times because I have passion for what I’m doing. And when I saw someone else who was really a salesperson take an early version of what I now teach or process and go and kill it above me, it was like completely eye-opening.

And I realized like my role has to be the owner. Like you, you can’t build a $20 or $30 million dollar business if you’re selling. I it’s just not really feasible. If you love to sell, you don’t have to drop it overnight, but my one of my big regrets so far, and I don’t have really regrets, is that I didn’t give up the sales end of my business to other people sooner. And I, and I still enjoy it. It’s still my favorite part of the business, um. I don’t do it at all.

I haven’t done it in a few years. And this, I wish I had made that move earlier. I think that business would be much further along right now. It’s hard to, especially the thing that you enjoy, it’s hard to give it up. Yeah. And if you don’t enjoy it. You know, I think hiring people right away is smart, but you have to be able to delegate them closely rather than just abdicate full responsibility to them. So another thing I’ve seen happen, so there’s two types of people that come to me for coaching that fail.

One of them wants to just, they have this fear of missing out, and they want to see what I’m doing and then just kind of not really implement it. And they’re like consummate learners, but they don’t implement. And I think it’s because they try to take it on and do it themselves, and they already have a big enough job. Like they’re already working 90 hours a week. If you’re working more than 40 hours a week, you have to recalibrate and look at what you’re doing because if you have a business with 2 or 3 people in it, maybe 90 hours could help drive the business.

But if you have a business that has 1020, 43, 50 people in it, and you’re working 90, you’re doing it wrong. Because like, you’re not moving the needle far enough by you, you individually killing yourself to make the business really better. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work. You’re actually hurting the business. So, and most people get stuck in this trap where they don’t realize that because what got them success early on was working all the time, and then they’re just, they don’t want to give up things. So, when you’re ready to delegate that out, I think it, especially in the beginning, you need to make sure that it’s done in your name the way you want it done.

And for, for me, for salesmanship, that means you have to bring in a program of coaching them. And it’s not only an onboarding time, which for us is 2.5 weeks, that’s like an orientation period in a training like a 210, 26 hours a week training, but it’s also ongoing training every single week forever. And so, I mean, we use my videos. I created all my stuff for my team. It’s been later on, the last few years that I’ve shared it with other painting contractors, but it was designed and produced for my people, so that I wouldn’t have to say the same thing 27,220 times in a row.

I could just film it and use it. So I’m in training every single week with guys, and I’m watching myself train them on a video. It’s kind of weird. Uh, but then we’re discussing it, we’re role playing, we’re doing things, and that never goes away. And, and I think if you do that, plus you do ride alongs and just be a good coach and manager of these people, it will take off. So I see either owners try to take it on themselves, do it themselves, doesn’t work, and then I see them just abdicate it.

Here’s the thing in a box, go do it because you said you sold Windows or you said you sold solar somewhere else. It’s absolutely not gonna work. You’ve got to keep them close to you and you’ve got to develop it. Maybe in 21 or 23 years and you have a sales manager and someone else, then maybe it could work without you at all. But in the beginning, you have to nurture that. And those are the two common mistakes I see with people I try to try to help. Yeah, that makes sense.

Appreciate you sharing all that. The uh OK, so going back to what makes the painting industry a bit unique, what makes it attractive, we talked about low barriers to entry, so it’s a pro and a con, you can get started without much, but so can all of your, you know, would be competitors. Yeah, another pro is that the labor, it’s you’re selling labor and the labor is local. Right now. So you would say that’s a pro in that you’re not competing with the world. Yeah, you can’t be outsourced in the way that accounting services or some other clerical services have been being outsourced since the 73s, probably and before.

So ours is one of the later ones. I mean, I do think robots are going to come in. Sooner than we think, you know, they’re already starting. I, I know a lot of residential guys say, well, it’ll never happen in residential, but it’ll happen in residential. Um, it’s just a matter of time. But I think that that is a benefit that for the most part, if I’m gonna paint someone’s house, the people that are gonna show up at 27 a.m. to paint that house have to be sleeping the night before in the locale in order to get to the house at 28 a.m.

, right? And so, that sounds crazy, but in 22, like, how many businesses are getting completely outsourced and with AI, I mean, you even have the medical profession is getting more and more outsourced, which is something people would have thought would never have gotten outsourced. I went to a, um, and I mean this is only one example. It’s it’s more outsourced than this, but I went to a doctor recently and there was a Filipino on a computer monitor taking notes, and she was substituting, she was, she was a nurse in the Philippines, substituting for an American nurse that would have normally been sitting there. Yeah.

And that’s the wave of the future. And, and even like the, the more dialed in the science gets, I mean, they’re going to take a drop of your blood and there’s going to be a computer that’s gonna show you all types of different things that a that a human doctor wouldn’t be able to tell you. And it may be happening in a doctor’s office and billing your insurance a certain way, but that’s certainly where we’re going. So with house painting, I still think we have some time left, you know.

Um, I think we have a fair amount, but we, but you see it in all the trades, right? The trades are commanding a higher and higher charge rate than ever before. Obviously, we’re in this period, this post-COVID period of inflation that we’ve been in for a while, and that’s affected things, but it’s not just that, it’s the Dynamics of what’s happening, you know, we have a lot of baby boomers are retiring every single day, and they have been for a while. And so no one knew is coming into this industry from a labor standpoint.

There’s a lot of guys that you know that are owners that are jumping in and using all the newest bells and whistles of software and all that. But the labor force is what gets the jobs done. So, so I think that that’s something critical to think about. Just this fact that the demand is as high as it’s ever been and the supply is lower than it’s been in a while, allows for us to do some pretty special things from a business standpoint and creating profit. But, you know, for, for every business that knows how to do it properly, there’s probably 100 in our segment that are absolutely Making a mess. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s really interesting. The labor being local and the labor being basically by local means it’s limited. I mean that that’s the advantage is that it’s not all over the world and I think oftentimes painting company owners view that as a bad thing, as a disadvantage because it is hard. You said yourself, you know, one of the, one of the limiting things is the team and being able to produce the work to get there. But it can be turned and flipped on its head to being an advantage, but then you have to become more of an employee or subcontractor first kind of business where you, you figure out really how to sell to the labor, how do you make your company and obviously that’s gonna wrap into you being able to have a solid sales process and marketing so you can actually sell for high tickets so you can actually pay your team really well and keep them busy and all that, but actually the shift of the mindset to, hey, if I can sell labor.

Then I can scale my company faster versus I’m gonna scale my company and then I’m just gonna try to find people to get the work done. Right. And I mean, this is Henry Ford. And so like we’re talking about it now, like it’s, like it’s new, but it’s, it’s, you know, over 100 years ago, Henry Ford figured out how to do this assembly model, but he also figured out he needs tens of thousands of workers. And don’t quote me, but in studying him, you know, they were paying a wage that I think was double what people were getting paid.

And all of a sudden, you have thousands of people show up at the gate and they want a job. And their factors are Production. So as owners, I think what we have to do is come up with the most inviting place to work. And this is a new workplace. Like I’ve been in this for 30 years or so. It’s different now than it was. Just the, the economy is completely different. So people are coming to you with less experience and they’re wanting a lot more and they’re used, they grew up in a different way than that generation that worked for you 25 years ago grew up.

And so, You can look at it and say it’s bad because it’s different, or you can embrace it and try to determine what are the things you can put in place and control that will make this the best possible place for them to work. So Henry Ford, he saw the money end of it, and he said, hey, we’re gonna double the wage. And everybody just comes flocking to his door, and he’ll figure it out, and I think you got Dearborn, Michigan, you got things happen. I, I don’t, I’m not a guru of it, but it’s, it’s pretty magical moment, right?

But why did he do that? Because he had processes in place that was gonna be able to fulfill the demand in the marketplace. It’s no different than what we have. The demand is there for all of us. And people say, Well, is it low? What’s happening in politics, the election, this, that, all sort of stuff, tariffs. I don’t care. Like, how many gallons of paint am I spreading relative to what’s being spread in these towns that I work in competed in in Connecticut? Nothing. I mean, I’m a $6 million dollar guy.

Everyone else is, I mean, I’m not saying that that’s the biggest, but that’s one of the larger residential guys in Connecticut, if not the biggest, and I’m still spreading a small percentage of the gallons in every single town I compete in. So maybe things could happen out of my control, but I still can zero in and take a bigger piece of that pie if I’m good at my business. So I never understood when people get so caught up in all the noise that’s out there. Just control what you can control.

And I think making the best place to work for your employees is the number one thing you can do to be set to compete at a higher level in the future. Like Henry Ford would look at this and say, wait, you have too many people wanting to buy this thing, and you guys are complaining because there’s no painters. So pay him double, teach him how to paint and put him out there. Yeah. Problem solved, right? And it’s not that simple, but sometimes we overcomplicate it. Sure. I, I like your focus too on, I mean, I know we’re gonna get into it in episode 5, but this idea of an on-demand economy, everything’s so easy now, you know, we got Uber Eats, DoorDash, Uber, Amazon.

We want this, we have streaming services, this instant gratification all the time. And I think that has created some pretty high expectations for consumers of companies and not realizing not every company is Amazon, um, but it’s the, the, the, the playing field is level, right? Every, every one of your competitors has to deal with those same expectations, so rather than kind of lamenting it. embrace the fact that you understand it, and now you can win at that game because a lot of your competitors won’t even understand it.

They’ll wonder why is this person being so unreasonable? Don’t they understand things happen? Well, maybe, but things generally don’t happen for Amazon. The package usually arrives over and over and over and over and over again when they, you know, somehow freak freakishly, I’ll place an order at 83 a.m. , it’s there at 5. I’m like, is this dude just sitting outside in the van with the stuff? Like, I don’t even under the logistics is just mind boggling and logistics is such a challenging thing. So the, the expectations now are insane. Good.

Everything that’s hard, good. I’m so happy it’s hard because it’s hard for everybody else to. Right. And I, I mean, I’m seeing Jacko in my head saying good. And I think that’s really the approach, right? Because when you say that, it forces your mind to think of what could we do? You know, you, as a business owner, you have to live in the place of what could we do now. And that’s where all the possibility is, and that’s where winning lies. And you’re so right, people have a high standard.

Like, if you can make it in a painting business in residential repaint right now in the United States. You’re pretty good at what you do because people expect it now. Like they’ve given a deposit at 11 a.m. and signed a contract, and by about 3 o’clock they’re wondering why they haven’t heard from someone. Why isn’t it? Why, why isn’t the project complete? And but so, and I think part of this is about setting proper. Expectations. And again, I, I go back to salesmanship and a lot of this, but we always want to overpromise, I mean, under promise overperform, under promise, overperform.

People realize, and people like to buy local. I’ve seen that as well. People love buying local in this busy, big economy we have. And, but they like integrity and integrity means I deliver on what I say I’m going to do. That’s it. So if I say I’m going to do ABC and I deliver on ABC, that’s integrity. So I don’t want to say that I do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G when I’m only going to deliver on A and B. And I think that’s where a lot of us, a lot of us tradesmen mess up, is that we may be overpromise and underdeliver.

So especially with what the scheduling process looks like and customer communications, you know, there’s a million softwares out to do it, but people are also kind of becoming a little immune to this. They feel like I’m talking to the robot. I’m getting this in, in AI and for some of our customers, that’s, that upsets them as well, you know, cause they’re like, yeah, you’re communicating with us, but you’re not really. Like, I wanna, I wanna talk to someone. I want to figure it out. So my advice there is just become I’m great.

It’s the same advice I have for how to be a great employer. Figure out 10 ways that you could make, there’s a book, good to great, right? And in that book, I believe he describes all the reasons why people love where they work or the d and the money is not top of the list. It’s like, I think it’s 6th or 7th. It’s down there on the list, right? People like to be appreciated. They like to have someone to talk to that they feel like their thoughts are listened to and heard.

They like all these different things before the money. So are you creating a place that gives them all those things? It’s the same thing with how you handle the customer relationship. You know, what are all the touch points? If I can tell you all the touch points at the point of the close, at the point of the sale, and you love them and you agree with them, then when I execute on those touch points, you’re OK with it. Like we just started our touch points as like, we try to make it funny and fun with like mission control, like a space theme.

So it’s like, we’ve received your project and this is your coordinator on, you know, in mission control, and we’re gonna set you up and your, your project is ready to launch, but we’re looking at the weather, you know, because obviously if you’re doing exterior paint jobs, it’s weather predicated. So the way you handle the customer is critical, but just get creative and make sure that you’re underpromising and then overperforming. Yeah, people really, really like to know what’s happening. And I, I think about the Domino’s Pizza tracker.

I mean, it’s such an absurd thing to have to know and you know, now DoorDash and all these other services offer it, but Domino’s rolled out that, that, uh, pizza tracker so you actually see the stage that your pizza’s in and then, you know, where it’s out for delivery and is it really that crucial to know exactly what’s happening at every moment for your pizza that you know is coming in 20 minutes? It is not, but people just love that. They love to, to feel like they’re in the loop and they know exactly what your company is doing.

It, it’s like that across the board and it’s not going away. I mean, I think of and I’m not a super fast food person, but Chipotle and Starbucks. Even on the app, when you order something online, it shows you preparing it, it’s ready for pickup, and we expect the highest level of customer service, you know, and if you do enough traveling to other places, you’ll see even at luxury hotels and high-end places, the service we have is second to none in the United States. It really is, and our, and you know that that’s your customer base.

So you have to bring it, get creative with it, just don’t overpromise, under promise overperform, and I think you’ll be fine. Yeah, I love it. Uh, Mark, as we come to the wrap up of this first episode, is there anything else you’d like to add? I think we have a lot of episodes to go. I would just say that, you know, the sooner a person embraces, we talk about my journey in the beginning of my journey. I think the sooner that a business owner embraces the fact that building this business is really about growth, not just growth in a financial sense.

In the beginning, you know, a lot of people like to keep score with the dollars and cents. But it’s what you’re gonna become as a human over time, uh, with your interactions with your company because you grow a lot and you invest a lot of your time, energy and self into it. So I would just tell, uh, something I would tell my younger self is probably Take it a day at a time, keep being aggressive, keep, I want to get 1% better mentality, but also know that this is the long game that you’re playing.

You may lose the first quarter, you may lose the second quarter, you may even lose the 3rd and 4th quarters, but as long as you keep playing the game. And keep focusing on getting better and helping people. You have to help your employees and you have to help your customers. And if you’re constantly focused on that, eventually, you can’t lose. And we all know this, like, I’m wearing a wristband that says, fall 7 times stand up 8. I just randomly wearing this. I wear these weird sayings on my wrist, but it’s so true, and I think we forget that because we often think that this has to happen in a certain fiscal year, in a certain quarter, in a certain month, in a certain week.

Just keep fighting and keep getting a little bit better. That’s what I would probably tell my younger self, um, and a lot of other people, because sometimes people don’t, are not wildly successful just because they’ve exited the game, not for any other reason. There’s a lot of you out there that may listen to this, and wildly successful is just around the bend, and you will exit the game before you get there. And that just helps guys like me who are never gonna quit. So just know that now and maybe you won’t exit the game.

Yeah, one of the uh the mantras that I repeated myself for years was the only way I fail is if I quit and I will not quit. Hold on to that for a long time. I love it. Mark, I appreciate you, man. Excited for episode 2. This is a great kickoff to this series. Love you brother. Thank you for doing this. Thank you very much. I appreciate you.

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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 Br*****@******************os.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.