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 episode 2, Mark will cover the most important lessons he’s learned over the past 30 years in the industry, including the most common mistakes painting companies make and how you can avoid them.

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.

Welcome back, Mark. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I’m excited. I’m excited for this episode. Uh, the 313 years is a long time to be in the same industry, so you probably have some battle scars. Yes. Many scars, many mistakes. I feel like in, in looking topically at what we’re gonna talk about, I was like, mistakes, this is, this is an easy one.

There’s probably too many for me to fit into this short time frame, um, but I have some good ones, I think, to, to review with you. It’s, yeah, I think the I, I’m a big podcast listener in addition to running this podcast, and I think something’s either working for you or it’s working on you. And so when things are, are a complete disaster, uh, you know, let’s say we create a new initiative and, and try something and realized we had overlooked, you know, maybe reality in some way.

Uh, I try to think, OK, it’s working on me because at the end of the day as a business owner, you are almost, you’re almost the product because how good you are is how good your business is. That’s 303% true, and whatever your present reality is in the business, that has been manifested from everything that you are and that you’re doing. And so if it’s not working exactly how you want it to work, whether it’s processes or profit or or different things that you have in place, happy customers, happy employees, it is symptomatic of you as the owner.

And what you’re manifesting has to adjust in in order for you to reach the level of success that you want. 21000%. So the, uh, let’s get into some of these, I guess. I don’t, I don’t know how you want to approach it. So I probably logically will approach it on my current painting journey, and I still feel like I’m, I’m maybe halfway through my painting journey. Uh, I feel like my first major mistake was a process mistake. I, I started out or processes, I should say. I started out just reacting to what the market needed.

You know, I wanted to make money, so I would rush to customers, try my best to get jobs, do the jobs as well as I could, and rinse and repeat. And there wasn’t a lot of process involved. There wasn’t uh really detailed marketing in place where I was dialed in and I was measuring things that were happening. There certainly wasn’t a sales process. You know, now I do sales training, but then it was like I would show up and the accomplishment was like to provide an estimate.

Did I, would I be able to give them a price and, and for something that they really wanted done and hopefully I could achieve it at that price. And I don’t want to say it was complete guessing, even from the beginning, I was, I was using. Um, a lot of the production rates from PC PDCA at the time. Um, but there wasn’t a heavy system in place. We would get to production and it was just kind of fast and furious. Uh, I mentioned we started out in the 21250st 21500 months.

We pretty much became over a million dollar company. And back then, that was a, that was a big threshold to me. And I, but yeah, I, it still is, but I raced to hit that total revenue number. Without really having a strong foundation, you know, if, if each of your departments doesn’t have, if there’s not heavy in process, you’re gonna falter. And so some of the ways that it really hurt me was scheduling. So right away, scheduling was a nightmare because we didn’t really have a system in place.

Right away, um, sales became a nightmare. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I was landing maybe jobs that other people didn’t want to do. For certain reasons. Maybe that was that customer that was definitely gonna make us better, or that project that was actually misquoted because it led to a lot more work than what it looked like on the surface. Yeah, I was just making a lot of rookie mistakes across the board, um, in the marketing realm, you know, back then there was Yellow Pages, and it was a printed telephone book, and they would come to your office and You know, how, how early can you get in that section, you know, could be in the front of the section, could you be a colored ad and the, the market a painting, yes, yes, AAAA one painting.

And so it, it became like the the sales pitch for every salesperson I met with was. Well, this is gonna cost you $21500 and you get a job for $21000. You really only need to get one job for this to make sense. So go ahead and do this, right? And that’s the standard and people probably still hear that today, but it’s, it’s just not the way you should be analyzing your, your marketing spend. And at that point, I was doing things fast and furiously in marketing and I was overspending.

You know, my CPE was too high and my return on investment wasn’t high enough, um, and, and it was just messy. So, so we got there, but I almost describe it as like the wheels were ready to fall off, like we’re just going really fast and it and mechanically we weren’t built to really run that race. So if I can talk to my younger self, I would say, take a breath. Grow this thing incrementally, be process driven, you know, it’s not enough to read the books. Yes, I was reading Eyth Manager.

I was doing these things and a lot of people out there fall into, you know, fear of missing out and this analysis process, they learn everything, they study everything, but learning it is great, it’s different than implementing it. So, to learn it may take you a minute or an hour or a week, but to implement it may take you a lifetime. So start implementing it a little bit at a time. And when I say implementing it, creating processes for each of your departments that are built to last.

You know, when I started my business and it was literally me putting flyers in mailboxes, doing the sales appointment, doing the painting, it was me. To grow it into a $2118.5 or $212 million a year residential painting business. You have to have systems that are built to last, and you can start putting those systems in place when you’re really, really small, and just nurture them as you grow. So everything that we do now is department driven, you know, was this handled by marketing? What are the metrics, what are the key scores?

How do we see winning and losing in marketing? Then it gets passed to sales. How do you actually execute a sales appointment? What does a great one look like? What does a lousy one look like? What does winning and losing look like? what does production look like? What’s a great customer experience from beginning to end look like? What’s a lousy customer experience look like? How does every teammate know what winning and losing looks like? In either a metric or some type of outcome that’s obvious for them.

Then you kick it to accounting. You know, what are the numbers I should be looking at so I can make actionable decisions, not just all the numbers there are to look at which make my head spin. You know, what are my actionable numbers that I should be looking at focusing on every week, every month? Um, HR. Hiring people so critical. How you recruit and how you hire people is, is another mistake I made. I didn’t focus on that until many years into the business. If you start by focusing on your processes and by focusing on how specifically how you recruit and hire people, your growth is gonna, you’ll have a higher growth trajectory.

It’s gonna happen faster for you and just have a better business for it. So what are the systems in place to recruit people? Is it happening 213 days a year? What does your hiring process look like? Is it more than, hey, we really need someone, so we get someone in for an interview, and then we set them loose to work. It has to be very detailed and method, methodical if you want to attract winners and maintain winners on your team. And then You know, finally, service and maintenance work.

I mean, in, in residential repaint, we overlook maintenance work as, as a rule. You know, I’ve looked to people all over the country to try to see who has a great maintenance program, and I haven’t seen one yet. And so we started developing, you know, maintenance for us, uh, years ago, and it’s worked really well. I want to be your painting contractor for life. It doesn’t mean I want to see you in 213 or 2199 years. I want to see you next spring. I want to see you again in the winter.

I want to see you in the fall. I wanna help you. There’s certainly things that I can do as a painting contractor to maintain that home. And I think we mentioned these in in the first episode a bit, but simple things from gutter cleanings to soft washes, to touch up painting, um, to carpentry work, to inspections where you’re measuring moisture on the exterior of a house. Or you’re looking for cracks and deterioration on the interior of the house. Those are all things that could be put into a formalized maintenance program.

So those are the main departments, the way I see it. You have marketing, you have sales, you have production, you have HR, you have accounting, and you have maintenance and service. And you have to get dialed in on the processes and the scores, the scoreboards for each of those departments. So I totally missed that. It took me probably 15 years to to start really figuring out that I had to get better process wise. Yeah, man, that was a lot. That was a lot. That was a lot. So the, let’s, let’s, um, let’s dive into a couple of things here.

So we, we have marketing, sales, production, HR, accounting, and then the maintenance program, maintenance service. For somebody listening to this, where would they start if they think they’re kind of in the position you are where it’s a little bit of a free for all? Would you prioritize certain departments over others? Yes, I would prioritize production and sales. And if I think about it, if you look at your business as a machine, as your machine grows, who are you gonna hire? You’re gonna hire more painters, and you’re gonna hire more salespeople.

You could be a $25 million painting business, and how many people do you think you have working in marketing? 1, maybe 2. OK. How many painters do you have? How, how many more painters do you need at 20 million than you would at 500,5003? A lot more. How many more salespeople will you need? A lot more. So those are the two departments that are constantly gonna have to hire more people. And so if that’s the case, don’t I want to get dialed in as quickly as possible on the processes in those two departments if that’s where most of the people work.

That’s why I would start there. I don’t want to say that. One department is more significant than another. I mean, these are all gears. You should picture your business machine as gears that work together. And if one gear is faulty and is not working right, it’s gonna negatively affect the whole machine. If you, if your HR is not recruiting and bringing through great people, then production is gonna really falter, and so is sales. If sales can’t sell, production doesn’t have enough to do. If production is lousy at what they do, there’s gonna be too much burden put on marketing, because now you’re not getting enough repeat and referral business, which marketing needs.

To stay within winning numbers. Sure. So it all fits together. So I would start in Production and then sales. And so production, what are some of the big things that you should look at? You should be looking at how you create an amazing customer experience. It starts with scheduling. We often jump right to pre-job meeting, but it really starts with scheduling. So what happens the moment a person signs a contract and gives you a deposit? You have to have touch points with that customer. Um, I think Jason Phillips, my friend Jason Phillips, refers to this as hugs, or at one point he was referring to it as hugs.

It means touch points where you’re in my future calendar, and once a week, we are touching you either via email, phone, or text message or a combination of those to say, hey, you’re on our radar, your project is getting ready to launch. OK. So scheduling is critical. Secondly, how you start the job. Pre-job meetings, I’m not gonna go deep in that here. Everyone does them. Some companies do them better than others, but think in terms of creating processes, you want to have checklists for every single thing that you do.

How you’re communicating with the customer on the first day on the job should be in a checklist format. How you’re executing every day on the job. Are you empowering your customers? Are you deputizing them to help you in the management of the project? Let’s face it, in residential repaint, The quality of the interaction with the customer is in large part due to the customer’s expectations. So, in other words, we could perform at the same level for 10 different customers, and the customer who’s kind of like just happy to change the color, or they’re happy that we’re there, we’re gonna feel like a level 10 to them, just by showing up.

But the customer who really is really, really picky and is challenging, they might see the same job that got a level 10 for the last 5 customers. Now that job may feel like a 4 or 5 to them. So I want to know right from the beginning what my customers’ expectations are. I want to know every day, how are we doing with their expectations and how do you do that? You do that with 5 minute check-ins from your crew leader. You do that by asking them to complain to you. You say right in the pre-job meeting, I wanna have all A’s on my report card.

I want to do the best possible job here. In order to do that, I need to communicate with you. I need you to be comfortable telling me anything that you see that you need corrected or any questions, concerns, anything you have. We have to have communication. This is the format with which we’ll do that. And just set a process that allows that to happen each and every day. You know, in our business, we want the crew leader to communicate every single day with the customer. We also want the office.

As support to communicate every single day with the customer. And we find that with those two, you know, communication channels, we get pretty immediate feedback from most clients and it allows us to really give a great experience to them. Um. The same thing how you finish a job matters, right? How you finish a day matters, and there they should be checklist driven processes. So I would say in production, those are the main things that you would do right away. This way, as you hire crew 2, crew 3, crew 203, crew 5, they’re following the same system.

And although they’ll have different talents and skills, you should be able to give the customer a similar customer experience. You don’t want to have 10 different crews that give the customer a different experience every time. This is why we’re solely W-2 right now. And I, I’ve been a um You know, I, I’ve been on a subcontractor model in the past. I did have subs for approximately 10 years, and there are pros and cons to the two models. We’re not going to discuss that here, but find a way, whether you’re on a submodel or a direct employee model to make sure that there’s processes and checklists in place inside the field.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think, uh, the idea of focusing on it, on the process from how many people are gonna be in each department, you know, it’s kind of a, a really critical number. Because you don’t want to scale chaos and so productions and sales are gonna scale, and then production is also gonna be, and even sales is gonna be the customer experience. So I also don’t want to scale garbage and burn your reputation. And, and it’s also costing you money. So, you know, one is offensive and one is defensive.

So your your your production is defense. So if you can get the job done on time. And so it’s happy and under. I I remember Kevin Dolan 25 years ago saying happy and under, happy and under, and it’s, and it’s that simple. It’s happy and under. Is the customer happy and is under on job hours? If you do that, the system creates money, which you need to continue to propagate the system, right? And so in sales, it’s offense. If you become really good at the same day clothes, you can charge more money per man hour, which most people don’t realize, but that’s a critical element to being successful in this business, is charging more money per man hour.

He who charges the most per man hour could pay his painters the best. He who pays his painters the best can have the best painters. He who has the best painters will have the best reputation. So, these things fit together, but sales is an offensive-minded department. And so the sooner you become great at that, your charge rate goes up, you produce more same day closes, and you give production better and better jobs to work with. You also help marketing. So as you know, as, you know, a marketing guru, if you, if you’re feeding leads to a terrible sales organization, no type of marketing is gonna work well, right?

You’re even trying to help your clients be like, let me give you the basis of trying to have some type of sales process, because otherwise it’s wasteful of resources to just feed more leads into a really poor sales system. So getting really dialed in in salesmanship. Matters. And it took me a long time to do this. I probably have read 50 books on salesmanship over the years, and I’ve, I’ve gone through painstaking lengths to create videos and information about it because I wanted to train my own team.

And I know that when you train people, you have to do it in a systematic way. I can’t just have Johnny ride along with me for two weeks, and all of a sudden he’s a salesman. And then a year and a half later, have Tim ride along with me and he’s a salesman. It, it’ll be two different things, osmosis. Yes, osmosis does not work for this, you know, and or listen, if you’re gonna have one estimator that’s like your your son-in-law, maybe, maybe we could do this, and it’s an ongoing, but if you have real employees, you have to have a system, you have to have training, you know, workbooks and videos and checklists in a system they could actually follow so that everyone could become great eventually at the system.

So in salesmanship, it’s about prepositioning. It’s about, and I’ll just give it a quick, should I give it a quick rundown? Is it. So the process there should be strong on prepositioning, reaching out to the customer before you actually physically meet them to show credibility, OK? It should be obviously showing up on time, looking the part, being friendly, thanking them, maybe give them a gift. You want to set an agenda every time. People get, when someone comes to give them a quote, a contractor, it’s they don’t know what they’re gonna get.

Like the doorbell rings, and they had, it’s, it’s not always this defined professional process. It could be a guy who’s gonna text message them a price, or it could be someone super, super professional. You want it to be super professional if it’s you. So set the agenda. This is what I have planned for us today to get the most out of our meeting. And then you ask a lot of questions. You want to be consultative. How can I help a person solve their problem unless I ask a lot of questions and listen.

So asking and listening is a massive part of a great sales process. Another thing that has to happen in the same day close is you have to be able to create a price. So there is Paint scout, there’s Estimate Rocket, there is a myriad of different softwares you can buy. You can also do it by hand. You could do it on pen and paper, you could do it in a computer, right? But you have to have production rates that multiply into a charge rate so you can actually give a price, so that you look at something and you could say, hey, this is $10,000.

So that has to be part of your process. And then finally, you have to be able to have a, a closing conversation with them. You have to close them. And that comes from being able to present the price in such a way that it solves their needs, right? and fixes everything they need fixed, not just from a scope standpoint, but really solving what they really want. OK. And then it has to be able to walk them through a conversation that basically holds their hand and helps them make the best buying decision for them.

You don’t ever sell anyone anything. You can help them make a good buying decision. All right? And you position yourself to be the solution, to be what they buy. And so when those things are dialed in, And I should, you know, mention follow up. Follow up is part of selling. So is prospecting. Those are also part of being a really professional salesperson, but those are all system driven. So when you create a process, whether it’s my process or someone else’s or your own, have a process and immediately start coaching people in the process.

And you know how you’ll know if the process is good? If you win. So if sales people can be happy about going to work every day. And they could make really good money and the customers are happy, then you won. And production, if the crew leaders could make really good money and the projects come out really nice and they last a long time and the customers are happy, you’ve won. And so sometimes we overcomplicate it, but we oftentimes miss just setting up a process, right? Yeah, so this is, um, it’s a big, big problem in the industry and I think you’re focused there on the preposition, so people have to know I can trust you.

That’s for painter marketing Pros, we, we built the CRM and the sales system to help with that because we built that 5 years ago and we rolled out with all of our partners, uh, but it makes such a, such an impact. And Mark, yeah, like you said, marketing, good marketing. Will not overcome a horrific sales process. The only way to compete at that point is you get the lead, you show up hopefully on time or close on time. You haven’t communicated at all. Uh, you are a commodity at best at that point because you haven’t differentiated and so of course the only way you win the job is you compete on price and now you run a low profit organization and that’s just a.

That’s a stressful, not very fun life. Well, it’s a recipe to go out of business. And so, and you really like you have multiple stakeholders, your stakeholders are your employees, they’re your customers, and internally, it’s yourself and building your wealth into ownership, right? So if you’re not serving the employees, you really can’t serve the customers and if the customers aren’t served well, you’re not going to be profitable. So it all is very interconnected and I don’t want to jump deep into like marketing. I know that’s your wheelhouse, but, but I will say this, strong sales allows you to have a lot more.

Room to do more in marketing and actually to make more trial and error mistakes, which is part of everybody’s marketing journey. You can’t do marketing and think that you’re only going to do the things that work amazingly well, even if you hire Brandon, and you’re never going to do any of the things that don’t work perfectly because it changes from season to season, it changes from year to year, and it changes geographically. So, so there’s never like one right way. Whenever I hear people jumping on like the next shiny object in marketing.

I’m just saying, be a little bit careful, like, be cautiously optimistic, try it and measure it. And if you’re measuring everything, then you actually know. But going back to the relationship between sales and marketing, because I think it’s absolutely critical. We measure ADL average dollars per lead. This means your total dollar sold in any defined period divided by the number of appointments you ran, the number of estimates, and this is your ADL. So the higher your ADL is, it’s an indicator of how good you are as a salesperson.

Well, the higher the ADL is, the more you can spend in cost per estimate and still be super profitable as a business. So think about it, if you have great salesmanship, you’re more likely to afford things like billboards or television advertising, or things that are like next level that are usually reserved for bigger, badder painting companies, right? And the digital things you’re doing, the print things, you can do more of them, and you could do more of them. I don’t wanna say with more error, but with less of a return and still be super profitable.

And that’s what makes you famous in your market. So no one talks about this, like, everyone is so worried about this is my cost per estimate, this is my return, but part of what’s happening when you’re spending marketing dollars is you’re becoming famous or you’re not. And he who could afford to spend the most will become famous. That’s it. What allows you to spend the most? Having the most past customers, having the highest charge rate, having the best salesmanship, and giving the market what they want. It’s a great cycle.

So if you do all those things right, you can afford to become famous faster and spend more money. People say, how much should I spend in marketing? You should spend as much as you possibly can as long as you’re getting your estimates at your average allowable cost. How do I know my average allowable cost? Well, it’s related to your ADL. Your sales metric. If you don’t know how well you’re selling, then I don’t know. I can’t tell you. If you’re really lousy at selling, maybe you could afford $0003 a lead or $80.

If you’re really great at selling, you might be able to afford $350 per estimate in our business. So processes are everything. And the third, so I would start with production, I’d go to sales next and I’d immediately go to HR. And HR and and some people will say you should start with HR. The only reason I don’t start with HR is again, a $20 million company has one or two people working in their HR department. So, you know, and a lot of stuff is automated now. You have Indeed, you have LinkedIn.

You have uh recruiter boxes changed names 5 different times. There’s a lot of software out there. I use Factorial right now. So I put all my system into factorial software and you’re able to manage Factorial in about 10 hours a week for a company that’s doing over $5 million a year. And that, and that means my company is constantly recruiting and hiring crew leaders, 365 days of the year, and constantly recruiting and hiring salespeople. We try to do. Two sales hiring moments throughout the year, one in the fall and one in the spring, and this is defined, um, training weeks that we put in the schedule to onboard people.

And so throughout the year, we basically hire people to that moment, OK? And we’re doing that all year long and it’s still something that’s managed in 10 hours or so a week of administrative management. But that’s super critical. Like if you’re not, we have 13 step process for how we hire every position. And from a phone screening to drug test, background check, homework assignments, personality quiz, in-person, multiple in-person meetings, group interview, check with their past employer. If it sounds complicated, it’s not complicated, it’s simple, but there’s a lot to it.

And it takes a long time to implement. I’m not gonna lie to you, I don’t want to deceive you. Start. You, you have to start. Things that are worthwhile, they take time and energy and effort. So the sooner you get started, The easier the path will be for you. Yeah, 3%. So Mark, you’ve, you’ve said a lot of good sales stuff, really good stuff, and I think you said a couple of things that you just kind of almost presumed or assumed and, and I just want to highlight them, because I think they’re so important.

So you had mentioned same day clothes, you know, like closing in the home. I think that that’s something that most people don’t even try to do. They’re just gonna go home and they’re gonna email the estimate or go back to the office, email 24, 48 hours later. Obviously, that’s wrong for all kinds of reasons, and I know we’re not super diving into sales right now. Uh, you talked about, we mentioned the, the prepositioning. You also mentioned providing a gift to somebody which obviously could trigger the law of reciprocity.

It’s a very strong law in our DNA. If somebody gives us something we feel obligated to, to kind of repay that debt, I think they’re, I think they’re evolutionary reasons for that. Uh, what, can you dive into what you mean? What, what gift are you giving? Who are you giving it to? What does that look like? So what we do right now for the gifts, so the gifting was really hard for me because I’m not great at getting gifts. I prefer not to get gifts. I, um, birthdays, things like that.

I’m just like, it’s about my family. It’s about it’s about let’s do something. It’s not really about me. Um, and I’ve kind of always been that way. So I don’t love getting gifts. I’m also not great at giving gifts, the flip side of that. So I’ve, but actually in my business, I’ve been giving out gifts since I started. I used to give out these weird t-shirts that, so we’re in Connecticut, and on the back of it, it would have, this is totally probably illegal, but I would have the Yukon Husky logo because UConn basketball was always good in, in our state.

You’ve been in partnership with them since the beginning. Yes, from the beginning, I’ve been in partnership with them. Um, and then I’d have my. logo. And I would give out these t-shirts that said, I support two winning local teams. And I don’t know where this came from, but I was just young and hungry and doing anything. And so I bought these t-shirts, super cheap and I gave out thousands and thousands and thousands of t-shirts. So, a couple of years ago, I actually met someone that was wearing my t-shirt, and it was like the coolest moment.

I was like, I thought everyone just threw those away. And, uh, and they were just out and about wearing the t-shirts. So I’ve always given something. We, I had a friend who was on, um, one of these bakery shows. She had started a bakery, like a local friend, and she became famous on Cupcake Wars or something like that. And, uh, she would make cookies for me that looked like my logo. So then I started giving out cookies when she was really famous. Uh, in our local area.

And then, uh, we’ve now morphed to gift cards. So we went to dog treats, we went to coloring books for kids, uh, which we liked, but it was a little bit hard to manage just because, you know, do you have kids? Do you have dogs? We didn’t want to become creepy with people. You know, here, I see you have 5 kids. I brought all these coloring books in my clown mask, you know, we, we hop out of the van, got all the coloring books. But you know what it was too, we were giving out cookies with little stickers.

I mean, you could give out anything and the the idea is to keep it small. It was always under $5 even when it was a t-shirt, um, and I don’t think it matters so much, but sales people think it does, right? And they start saying, well, I gave them um cookies with a with a sticker, an MDF sticker, and they said, I’m gluten free, I don’t want that. I would never eat that poison or something. And now the whole meeting is thrown off a little bit and the vibe is wrong, so.

I think it’s a bit of an excuse cause I’ve given people cookies and they say I can’t eat that, and I just smile and say, I understand, I’m watching my way too or something, you know, it’s a cute gesture, and but the thought still counts. So what we do now is we do Amazon gift cards, $5 each, and we put our logo on them. And you can buy these in bulk from Amazon directly, and they’ll print your logo on it, and it’s $5. And it’s easy for our people to carry around when they were having dog treats and cookies and all kinds of things.

It was just one more thing to worry about and sales people need to be focused on the clothes. So we’ve been on the $5 gift cards for probably 2 years, and I feel like it’s uh it works really well. I, I don’t see us moving from that because it’s just a gesture. It just says, hey, we appreciate you having us out. Here, uh, we know you have many contractors to choose from, and we really appreciate being here. Thank you so much. It’s a token of our gratitude, token of our appreciation.

Very simple. Hey, and, and they’re a little stunned. So another thing I like, I don’t want to go deep in my sales process here, but, um, when it stuns them, it’s our moment to say, is there a place we can sit and talk for 5 minutes before we look at everything and before we walk around together. And a lot of times sales people have trouble sitting down with the homeowner, and it’s critical. It’s very hard to have a great consultative conversation without sitting down. It’s hard to have someone sign up for a $5003,000 job standing up.

It just, it just is. Like, look at the statistics, sales statistics, you need to be sitting down. When you buy a car, you go into the separate room, right in the desk and you sit down and you sign the paperwork. When you buy homes or properties, you go sit in the lawyer’s office, right? And you sit down and you sign everything. It’s very odd for you to buy something for $20,000 standing up, walking around in the sun. It just. So the card actually stuns people because they’re not used to getting gifts, and it opens that pathway to say this is how we do it, we’re gonna sit down and people go along with a strong frame.

So again, I keep morphing into sales, but the gifting is uh is important. One thing you also said too which I I really like because I think this is often misunderstood, not even really thought about, is there is no marketing budget. So if you have a marketing budget, so that, so there, and I want to preface that with cash is king. And so if you’re, you don’t have that much cash or a smaller company, if you start pouring a bunch of money into marketing, marketing is really a leading indicator of success.

You don’t give, you know, a bunch of money into ads and then you get the dollars back the same day unless you’re doing e-commerce or something like that. Which we’re not. So marketing is a leading indicator of success. You run out of money, you run out of business and don’t do that. But that being said, if you’re investing into marketing, and let’s say the painter, then there’s production issues, right? Can you actually produce all the work that you’re selling? Do you actually have enough sales people to go out there and bid on all those projects?

But if your marketing is working in the sense that you know your gross profit, you know, you talked about your average dollar per lead. You understand what you can pay to acquire a customer on average and still be profitable. Then your marketing budget isn’t a budget. It’s just whatever your business can sustain. How many, however many sales people you have, how, you know, whatever channels are working, how how many dollars can you put behind that channel before you maybe see diminishing returns? Uh, can your production team keep up if you’re starting to have to schedule people 3456 weeks out, your close rate’s gonna decline.

But this, this idea that’s so prevalent in the painting space, like, hey, I need, I need 10X. 0 we tried this one thing and it was only 5X. That was garbage. That was terrible. It, it’s so it’s just so wrong. So I’m glad that you brought that up. So, I mean, two other things I want to point out because I think they’re powerful and it’s a simple concept and people hear me talk about this and they’re blown away, but it’s super simple. Your whole business is a machine that a dollar comes into, you spend a dollar on the front end, and at the end, we don’t know what the heck is gonna come out of it, honestly, and we’re, and so here’s the thing.

If at the end of that $1 being spent, $1.20 comes out of the machine, you’ll probably become very wealthy. If you could do this for a long time, and it sounds like, oh, that should be so easy to do, right? It only happens if all the departments are in alignment, and if the processes are tight and things are working in synergy. It is very, very, very easy to put a dollar in and have 5003 cents come out. And if you put $1 in, and 98 cents comes out, You’ll be bankrupt. Yeah.

So the difference between bankruptcy and wealth is razor thin here, and it sometimes is unfair to one specific portion of your business, like you could be doing well in marketing. Believe it or not, and losing money because the machine is not functioning properly, has nothing to do with marketing, or the salesmanship is great, but the machine is broken. So unless you have synergy in all these departments working together, It’s gonna be painful. And that’s why I think focusing on processes early and often and all the time is important.

One of our core values is improve or die. And that’s my way of saying, look at your damn processes every single day. Look at yourselves as individuals every day and figure out how to get a little bit better. So, I have good, I have really good processes now at MDF painting, but in 20 years, they’ll be way better. Because I’ve just decided that that’s our operating system. We have to get these incrementally better. So think about that, a dollar in equals what amount out? It doesn’t have to be scary, but if you’re not seeing it equal positive money out, you have the best market in the world, the best sales in the world, it’s not gonna work for you.

Something else is wrong. And the other thing is what you mentioned, building with blocks is how I define it. The the only limit you have to the amount of leads you could take in is how you built this machine. And you can’t have too many salespeople, not enough painters, or too many painters and not enough salespeople, or too many leads and not enough salespeople. So they all have to fit together. So the sooner you realize how many leads equals one salesperson equals how many painters, the better off you’ll be.

And I call those blocks. So for us, it’s approximately 600 leads, equals 1 sales per person, equals, you know, 2.5 crews in our world right now, because of our seasonality. Everybody’s seasonality is different. If you have a wider season, it’s less crews. So those are things I don’t want to go deep in right now, but until you figure out the alignment of your blocks, you’ll never be super profitable, because that’s how you grow the right way. You incrementally raise each of the blocks. If I take in 20% more leads, I have to have more sales capacity.

With more sales capacity, you have to have more production capacity. I like that. I’ve not heard it laid out exactly like that. This 600 leads, one salesperson, 2.5 crews, and it’s gonna change by time of year. I think very, very small percentage of our listeners probably have that those metrics dialed in, but they could easily dial them in, and if they do, they’ll start to live by them. Those are the things that you do your quarterly planning with, your annual planning, like, that’s how you grow a profitable business.

I mean there there’s no other way in this realm. And I, I love when I talked to um clients of mine who are booked so far out, and they’re proud of this, and I’m like, listen, you have not enough production. So like your machine is playing great offense, but there’s no defense here, and defense wins championships, brother. So you better figure it out. Like, I don’t want to be like 0003 weeks out. That’s insane to me unless I built this machine that doesn’t want to do volume. Otherwise, like if my marketing and my sales is working at that level, I better be recruiting and hiring and creating a great system for painters to go win at.

Or if I’m not, I’ve got to dial back. Eventually, if you operate out of sync like that, you’ll you’ll evaporate profit. You just won’t be profitable. Yeah. So, Mark, we’ve talked about process, haven’t talked a ton about people, you mentioned it, and it’s a little bit of a trick question because obviously. HR having a process there, a strong process will help you get better people, but there’s this, you know, is it good people or good processes? Obviously you need both over time. Which one do you think should be prioritized first?

Well, I mean, prevailing business wisdom would tell you that the asses in the seats are probably a little bit more important than the seat itself. So I would say the people are the most important, but it’s, it’s a trick question because you have to have both. Yeah. So you, you can’t just put a person in there when there’s no seat and there’s no process in place. So I think you have to work on both. It’s easier to put the system and process in place and continue to perfect and edit the system.

Then it is to find the perfect person. Sure. So, I hear people say my whole business changed when I got into personality profiling or something like that. And yes and no. There’s some truth to that because there’s very rare, it’s very rare in my experience that you have stars like star performers, and you’re right, if you can get 1 or 2 or 3 stars, it could change your your business future. So how do you get 1 or 2 or 3 stars? It’s a volume game. This is like the NFL draft or something, like, everybody thinks they’re gonna be great, and then it’s a very small percentage of people go to the Hall of Fame.

So if you’re only hiring one painter at a time, And you get one salesperson every 3 or 4 or 5 years. What are the chances you have a high performing sales team? Think about this. Like, if I have no sales people, and I put all my eggs in this one salesperson basket, and I have this one salesperson who I call an estimator, and then I suffered through him for 18.53 or 4 years cause he’s not as good at selling as I am. This sounds like a common story for many of our listeners.

That’s like you had one chance at getting that star quarterback. So you just went out there and took 1 guy out of a million and you thought you were, it was gonna work. It doesn’t work that way. So like, yes, you should have personality profiles in place. Yes, you can have a defined hiring process, but it’s volume. It’s volume, baby. Hire, do open houses, bring in 20 painters, test them all, make them do circle tests, make them go and do job trials for a day. And if you, if you test 100 painters, you’ll get 5 really good ones.

If you test 10 painters, you might get 0. If you like salespeople are the best because we’re so anti-hiring salespeople as a, as an industry. It’s so scary for us because we have no process. And it’s like, go hire 10 of them. Well, 10, what would I do with 23? Go hire, don’t hire one at a time. Like in every I preach this every day to people that I coach, hire in multiples, hire 2 at a time. If you’re gonna go through training, why would I want to go through training and have one person in the room when I could do the exact same training and have 6 people in the room.

Well, I don’t have enough leads. Call Brandon and get more leads. I mean, really, like, teach them to prospect and follow up and do the system right, and they’re not gonna be doing 5 or 2000 leads a day. I’m sorry, they’re gonna be doing 2250. So dial it back and, you know, make more money. I mean, it’s about profit at the end of the day, so. It’s about the asses, the people themselves, the personnel. It’s about the seats, it’s about the process, but in order to get the right people, I firmly believe you have to go through people.

You, you can’t, it’s like the person who’s like, I’m gonna have my dream wife. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna get my dream life by having one date with one person, one time, and that’s it. What’s the likelihood that that is your ideal person? I, I mean, I just don’t buy that. Maybe this isn’t reality TV. This is your business, this is your life. Like, test some people out. So when I have 2500 sales people come through my door, I’ll be a massively successful sales organization. I just have to withstand becoming good at recruiting, hiring and training.

Repeat, recruiting, hiring, training, repeat. And what else? Keeping score. It’s Major League Baseball. Like, if your batting average is that bad, eventually this put you in the minor leagues. That’s it. It’s, it’s driven by a metric on a screen. And so you, you have to take that into account in your business. I know we’re mostly smaller businesses, so we’re less metric driven than maybe Fortune 2500 company. Everybody has a winning losing score. If they lose for too long, you coach them up until you coach them out, and that’s it.

But if you’re not strong enough from recruit, higher train, You’re gonna not make the hard decision of eliminating them from your organization, because it’s costly and in labor and money and time to to bring on a new person. So instead you stay with mediocrity. You have to be willing to shuffle through people to be successful in this business, in my opinion. Yeah, I like the, the building block analogy. I think we get so caught up in our businesses. We think it’s some kind of special, you know, special thing or we’re a special snowflake or whatever it is.

I think if we can. Kind of disconnect, attach and just look at the business as, hey, it’s this machine. It’s got these various cogs, they work together they are we putting in the dollar and getting, you know, $2000 dollars out or not? And then what, what do we need, you know, where, what’s broken? What, what are our weaknesses? And I think it’s, it’s so hard, it’s so hard, and that’s where the quarterly planning, the annual planning, that kind of taking the retreats, taking some time. It’s so hard because we get so caught in the fire in the day to day, uh, to actually look at this objectively.

So another thing about like a a keep an a player. I want to say one more thing about that. Here’s the thing, if you don’t have good recruiting, hiring, training, and you don’t keep score. Which most painting contractors don’t have all that figured out. If you don’t do those things, what happens to an a player if they actually fall on your lap and start working for you? They end up leaving, for sure. So, you don’t have, you know, 218.5 players like to work at places that are dynamic, where they’re appreciated, where their skill set is valued, and where there’s not this atmosphere of mediocrity.

They want other people to be going out there and chasing greatness alongside them. So it’s not just a personality profile. I could have the perfect personality profile. They come to my organization, but if I’m not built to touch greatness as an organization, they will not stay. And I think it’s very simple. Recruit properly, hire properly, train properly, and then keep score. Because when you keep score and someone’s not making the grade, you say, how can I help you make the grade? Essentially, in a lot of different nurturing ways, ongoing training and support.

And if they continually can’t make the grade. They get changed for a new person, and eventually your organization becomes so strong. And one day you wake up and a player stay. And that’s when magic happens. And so it’s, it’s a combination of different things that come together. Yeah, I think the, another point that’s overlooked a lot with the 33 players is they want to be recognized and rewarded and see the upside. And I think if you don’t have a strong system, if you don’t have KPIs, key performance indicators, if you don’t have metrics that you know you’re trying to hit in each of these departments, when someone comes through and they just blow it out of the water, they’re phenomenal.

And then they’re they’re next to somebody who’s subpar, you might not even be distinguishing or treating them differently. And that’s, that’s pretty disheartening for an A player. And so when in a lot of my coaching with owners, I think what’s really valuable is we know what winning and losing scores look like for crew leaders, for, for salespeople, for, for everything, even for marketing department or for HR department. Like it’s not shocking to go through 23 people that are Skilled salespeople before you find a hire that really should be working for you in your painting business.

And that’s 23 qualified people. So people go and they take the easy route of just hiring recruiters and they’re they’re almost every single one of them is disappointed because it takes time and energy and effort to put together that system. So, There’s a lot on process. I have other mistakes, a lot of other mistakes I’ve made, but this is all still just process. Yeah, yeah, we’ve dove it, we’ve dove deep into process. We’ve touched on marketing and sales, and I would say we’ve covered a lot of mistakes in this, just looking at marketing the wrong way, uh, the volume of people you need to come through looking at people the wrong way, looking at your business the wrong way.

Yeah, let’s, we are deep. Let’s come up with some more mistakes. OK, so another mistake is not focusing on profit first. So, massive mistake in 299 and 2009, it almost put me out of business. Profit is the thing that keeps the machine going. It is what allows you to help people. It is not an evil thing. It is not a bad thing. In fact, I would challenge you to say it’s the most important thing. And so if you’re not looking through, looking at your business and operating your business in a framework that says, What is my profit and highly focused on profit.

You, you might be in for a world of her. And a lot of us talk about gross profit margin. Great thing to look at, but it’s not profit. A lot of us talk about, uh, total revenue. Great thing to look at, but it’s not profit. A lot of people talk about their CPE and marketing, a lot of people talk about their close rate in sales, but it’s not profit. So, what I will say to people out there is profit beats everything else. What I mean by that is like I could have the most amazing close rate and still not be profitable.

I can have this amazing CPE. You could be delivering me leads at such a low price and still not have profit. So, how do you get profit? You watch it things like a hawk every single week, you look at the numbers and you find out if you’re profitable or not, and you charge more and spend less. It doesn’t have to be complicated. I mean, what is charging more look like? It looks like having a higher charge rate than you think you need. It looks like increasing your charge rate and never decreasing it incrementally.

It looks like learning to sell high value, low risk. So that the market buys you, you just mentioned, if you don’t differentiate yourself, it’s just a price war. And if you’re gonna be a profitable painter, you’re gonna lose the price war. So if you’re not good in salesmanship, you definitely can’t charge the most and or or even anywhere that makes you profitable, in my opinion. So these things work, they’re interrelated, but charge more, find a way to charge more. In production, get better, be more efficient. So what are you doing to be more efficient on the job?

You know, and I listened to Nick Slavic and different people, um, the Idaho painter, and there, there’s others that are out there that people really follow that talk about the nuts and bolts of painting. And how can I pick up efficiency. Sometimes we’re hyperfocused on that. We think it picks us up more time than, than we realize and we neglect hiring and sales and marketing. But it is important in production to be efficient and to be able to finish under your job hours. And then if you’re not, you have to evaluate your production rates.

So, we, we start blaming the guys, but maybe the production rates are wrong. So the PCA is a good place to start. They’ve had production rates for 50 years that you can look at and it’s a good average for you to look at. But then I encourage you to time your people and to see where you’re slower and where you’re faster, and then adjust your production rate so that you’re profitable. So charge rate, production rate, and then you’re spending. Get obsessed with your spending. I would look at every single thing you spend, look at all your credit card statements, look at all your chart of accounts, and just say, how can I save money here?

People think I’m crazy, but I just did this with one of my clients. How can I save money here? And your brain is gonna say I can’t. I have to buy that. I have to have that software. I have to do this. We can’t operate without it. It’s not true. Your immediate reaction is not true. Then you have to say, if I had to save money here, what could I do? And you might get a little bit of a different response from yourself internally, but then it’s probably say no, we can’t, we have to spend that money.

And then you say, if someone put a gun to my head and said, you have to not spend that money there, but still have to operate, what could you do? You’ll find something you can do, something small you can do. And if you do this again and again and again across the board, you’ll be wildly profitable. And I call that diamond cutting. You’re, you’re basically reshaping things, you’re polishing, you’re making it better and better and better. Spending less for something that’s gonna deliver at or above what you’re currently getting your deliverables is just smart.

It’s your fiduciary responsibility as the owner to be profitable. People say, what’s my job as the owner? Your job is to be profitable. It’s your only damn job. Do your job, go do your job. How much you spend on QuickBooks matters. How much your CPE matters, how much you’re paying for trucks matters, how much you’re spending in gas matters. Whether or not your jobs are going over or under in hours, it matters. It’s all diamond cutting. If you don’t find it there, you’ll be out of business.

And that’s why so many painters go out of business. So, one mistake I had was not focusing on profit first for a long time. And I come up with one other big mistake, holding on to my personal job too long. So I sold for a long time, surprise, surprise, since I teach sales. I think I’ve done, I estimated one time I did almost 16,000 residential sales appointments. So when I talk about what I’m doing in sales, it’s not because, you know, I wrote a book on it or something, it’s cause I, I do it.

And what did I learn? I learned that I enjoyed it. I would get a dopamine hit every time I sold someone something. I felt like I was winning. I’m very competitive. It fit with that side of my personality. Um, I also felt like I was carrying the business because I very much am a a provider in, in a lot of different ways. Uh, to family, friends, to my employees. So I felt like if I can go close and it’s under my control, I can go win the game for us. Sure.

And that probably helped shape me and build some of what we are, but it also held me back from having a bigger business much sooner. So I met a gentleman who was a roofing contractor and he said to me, tell me about your business. And I was very proud of my business. I just won an award for the Better Business Bureau in the state of Connecticut, uh, for the best customer service of, of all businesses actually in our, in our state. So we’re super proud of that, uh, Superior Service Award.

And I met him at an event and he said, Tell me about your business. I’m very proud of it. And he’s, tell me about what you do in your business. And I’m like, I sell, and I’m selling this, I’m selling that, I’m selling this. And he said, OK, how much would you pay an amazing salesperson? And I think he said something like, would you pay $11,000 an hour to a salesperson? And that’s like $33,000 a week, right? And I said, no. And he said, Well, would you pay $500 an hour to a great salesperson?

And I’m doing the math and I’m saying, OK, that’s $20,000. That’s a million dollars a year. So no, I don’t, I don’t think a great sales, I wouldn’t pay him a million dollars. And then he said, Well, would you pay him $250 an hour? And I’m doing the math and I said, well, it’s $500 right? Maybe they can make $500,000 but I wouldn’t rush to pay him that, right? And he said, so what you’re saying is you’re not that valuable. And I was like, what? And he’s like, well, you’re the best in Connecticut, and you’re not, you wouldn’t pay your, like, so what would you pay someone at least a million dollars to do?

Would you pay him to paint? Would you pay him to be a crew leader? And he goes, there’s one job that can make millions of dollars a year. It’s owner. And he’s like, why don’t you go be the owner? So at that point, he was, I think, doing 18.5 million a year. And he was a local guy, Connecticut guy. Again, roofing is different, so it’s a different profit margin that you’re gonna see him roofing, then you won’t pay it. But long story short, a light bulb went off in my head for a guy who thought I knew everything about everything.

I was like, whoa, I should probably get some sales people. And then as I brought him in and started training him, something amazing happened. My 2nd or 3rd hire was a better salesperson than me. And that really was an aha moment. Sure. So without massive training, without massive industry knowledge, he was better than what I thought I was the best at. So it was humbling. So then I had to try to start to become good at being the owner, and that, so I didn’t start being the owner until really late in this thing.

So I’m still learning to be the owner. Yeah. And so learn to be the owner sooner and give up control of whatever job you think is so important that the business can’t function without you because it’s the wrong way of viewing the business. Every single job in your business could be done better by somebody else as long as you can recruit them, hire them, train them, keep score, and also, Be humble enough to realize that. Yeah, and then you can really go places. So I held on to my job too long.

Bad processes didn’t focus on on profit and held on to my job too long. Those are 3 major mistakes, and yet I’m still here. Yeah, and I’m actually wildly successful. So what that tells you is there’s some room, have some grace for yourself, and there’s a lot of room to grow into this. The moment you start realizing that this could be your opus. Meaning this thing that you just constantly get better at this business, then I think it becomes fun. Like, I’m, I’m hyper-competitive, so for a long time, mentally, I always felt like I was behind.

I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t good enough. We weren’t where we need to be. And that’s common for entrepreneurial people. And I learned to just once in a while, look over my shoulder. And say, hey, look at where you came from and what you’re doing right now. And I do it in the property business now. I have quite a few properties and I was having a conversation last week with my wife and she said, where are we bringing this thing to? And I’m like, Hundreds, you know, like, and she’s like, But do you ever look back because when I met you, you didn’t have properties, you know, and so that’s what my wife does.

He says, I’m, I’m bad at celebrating wins. It’s good to look back because I mean it it keeps you in the right mindset to continue to win. So Tony Robbins often said like see things as they are, not better than they are, not worse than they are. I think it was Tony Robbins or something to that effect, and it’s like, don’t see it worse than it is, man. You’re out there and you’re trying to get better. You’re listening to this damn podcast. You’re doing more than just by listening to this podcast, you’re doing more than 99% of your peers.

So don’t feel bad about wherever you’re at. Get excited that you have the tools necessary to get better and try to learn from other people’s mistakes so that you don’t have to rewrite that history. But the moment I started to think about things in terms of this is my opus, and I’ve got time to get this right. It took the edge off, and I think I just became a better leader for the organization. I love that, more of a long-term mindset. Yeah. Mark, incredible. It’s uh, I mean, the, the depth that you provided, incredibly helpful as we wrap up this episode, is there anything else you wanna add?

No, that’s, that’s some of my mistakes. We have do mistakes too. We’ll, I’m sure we’ll, we’ll weave in other mistakes and answers throughout the rest of the series, but I appreciate you, brother. That was huge. Thank you for sharing all that. I think our listeners will derive tremendous value from it, and I’m excited about the next one. Great.

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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.