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 4, Mark will lay out sales fundamentals and deliver an action plan for how you can sell effectively starting today.

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

What’s up, Mark? How are you? Doing well, brother, doing well. We’re back at it again. Great to be back at it. I love it, man. You, you bring the energy, which I very much appreciate. So we got, uh, sales fundamentals and an action plan for how listeners can start selling effectively today.

So you are guaranteeing, Mark, and all the listeners guaranteeing that there will be a 21000% close rate, a 2120% to 2120% gross profit margin. Uh, just all you gotta do is listen to this episode. I appreciate it. Just take, take 45 minutes, listen to this, and then, then you’re good forever, right? And you under promise over deliver. So when you say 50, you mean 60. Exactly. When I say 50, I mean 60% close rate. So thank you for having me here again. Um, this is a big one to unravel. Uh, obviously sales is, is near and dear to my heart.

Um, there’s a lot to this. I think fundamentally speaking, we want to start with your mindset. So it took me many years, many decades to really get to the point where I was OK with someone else selling for me. And I felt that that could eventually be the best and highest version of MDF painting, which meant other people selling for me. And so if you’re not there yet, you have to find yourself there in order to get a system like this to really work. So my sales system is for a professional salesperson to implement and execute on.

So if you try to carry the weight of the system as an owner who’s juggling 20 different things, it’s gonna fail. I just want to be upfront about that. So who it’s not good for is people who are gonna try to implement it alone. Now, if you are selling now, that’s OK. Um, that’s great, you have experience. Um, if you’re in a position where you want to bring in other people to also sell alongside you in the beginning and transition out of it, then this is perfect for you.

So Mark, I wanna just clarify on this. The, I guess the reason why it is not for the owner who’s selling is that because the, I guess the folk, it’s a it’s a pretty holistic system. So if you’re doing a bunch of other things, you’re not going to succeed at it. Yes. And I’ve just seen it time and time again in coaching dozens of painting contractors around the country. The owners that want to take this system and become the guru themselves and become the masterful salesperson, I think it ends up falling by the wayside most of the time.

Just because they have a big job as owner, you know, and we can’t downplay that. There’s a lot that’s involved in being the leader and the owner of your business. That’s why I created this for my own people at MDF Painting. I had tried hiring, um, a couple of sales people through the years. We were calling them estimators at the time. And my idea of training them was having them ride along with me for a week or two. And I remember I had hired an ADT, uh, alarm salesperson who was like the top alarm guy in Connecticut.

And he was a great, nice guy. And he started driving with me, and after about a week, he said, I only have one question. When do we eat lunch? And I was like, oh, lunch is for the week. You know, you need to bring some protein bars or some shakes or something with you because we’re just from one appointment to the next. And I think it, I, I realized at some point later that there was no system, that I was trying to replicate myself and how I had done things as the owner, and that was a losing way in terms of building a team.

You know, in production, it made a lot of sense to have standards and operating procedures and processes in place. This is how you do pre-job meeting, this is how you check on the customer, this is how you close the job. This is how you prep an area. This is how you would spray, this is how you would back roll. You know, all the different things you would do, there was always a system that was trained. But with sales, somehow I thought they would just follow me around for a few weeks and, and get it, right?

And we had estimating software. It was people get so hung up on estimating software. I’ve always had estimating software. That’s super fundamental to the system. But what I’m going to discuss today is salesmanship, the things you have to do to hold the customer’s hand and walk them through the buying process so that at the end of your appointment, your estimate, your call together, essentially they feel empowered to make a great buying decision. So before we, we dive into the system, if I’m an owner, and I’m thinking about, you know, doing this, capitalizing on what you’ve built, my concern would be, OK, I send, you know, my, my salesperson or my sales team, and then they leave.

And I, as the owner, haven’t learned it. I guess how do you rectify that? So, my recommendation is, I want you to learn it as the owner. I just don’t want you to have the whole responsibility of executing it solely on your shoulders because I think that it’s likely to fail. If that’s the case. And so what I’ve created essentially is sales training in a box, OK? And I guess I could describe what it is before I start getting into some of the details of it. That might make a lot more sense for people.

So, once I was doing a terrible job of trying to train my own people. I realized I want to create a system based on the best things that I’ve tried and read about and used and known for years, and put them together into one system that I can coach my people. And I just visualized a room full of salespeople sitting down at desks, watching things on television, because I’m a very visual learner. So I created videos, um, I think it’s around 2.03 or so videos. They each short videos anywhere for maybe 3 to 10 minutes long.

And I basically took the entire one call sales appointment and sliced it down into little mini sections, and I went really deep on specific things. I have a tendency to be too wordy. I’m a parrot, admittedly. And I did my best on these videos to be more succinct. So that this was my best thinking and my best strategies in one place so that someone can listen to them and learn. So that was the beginning point, was really just making the videos. Then I took that information and I made it into a workbook.

We call it a handbook, but essentially, it looks like this, um, It’s maybe 50 pages or so long, and it basically has all the word tracks and all the scripts, and it brings you through a sales appointment. So you can read through that booklet in, you know, an hour or two. Or you could take years to master it. And so, in our sales room at MDF Painting, we use it as a tool to continually train, both the videos and the workbook, um, constant role playing, weekly meetings, um, a 2.5 week training course like an onboarding or.

and initial training. Those are critical. Uh, we talked in other podcasts about making audio flashcards and also making physical flashcards so that people can just get repetition, repetition, repetition. Repetitions don’t work unless they’re perfect repetitions. So professional athletes know this, right? Like if you go out there and you just play backyard basketball pickup game, you’ll get better, but it’s not the same as practicing left-handed layups for 25 minutes, right? So it’s about the quality of Your repetitions. And as sales people, when you get out there, if you’re not following a really great system, you can say, I’ve gone on, you know, 1000 appointments this year, 600 appointments, but they’re not great repetitions unless you’re doing them all really well and following a system.

So these tools, this salesmanship in a box, is meant to plug and play into your business where you essentially take your company name or your logo, and you swap it for the MDF logo, and you just get started. So, where I’ve seen it work uh for other companies, you know, tremendously is when the owner is OK sharing the responsibility of selling. And wants to coach it almost like a resident sales pro, almost like a sales coordinator or manager, meaning they want to be ahead of the team in the learning.

So yes, they watch the videos, they read the, the workbook. It’s pretty simple to do. But then they actually administer the training. So they’re sitting in the room. You know, watching the training, discussing the videos with their guys, and getting the team better while they’re also learning this stuff at the same time. So, I’m not recommending that they take it and just don’t touch it themselves at all. I think they should be part of the process of the learning and the continual management of the weekly sales meeting, especially in the beginning, um, you know, for the first year or two.

but what I’m saying is, in terms of having to run every appointment, Every day, every week alone. That’s a mistake because when you have to hire, fire, sell, train, produce, put out fires, manage the finances, do all the things owners do. And you have to be locked and dialed in for a 2.5 hour sales appointment with a with a residential homeowner. You’re not going to execute this system at a high level. Yeah, yeah, when I was, uh, starting out in entrepreneurship, it got really weird when I learned sales because I, I started, uh, I, I got very good at compartmentalizing.

And so if there were issues or, or, you know, team member things that needed to be done or whatever it was, there were always little fires and things going on in the background. I, I would have to kind of just put those away. And just go, go, I, I mean, to the point, I almost created an alter ego. It was getting it got weird. And I would kind of have to go into this mindset where I’m just, hey, I’m sales, you know, anything else that might be happening, any finance-related things, any vendor discussions or concerns, all that is the other department.

It’s not my, my issue, but it was really challenging to get to that point. I think I just got there out of necessity. I’m not sure it was healthy. I think it did, it did allow, um, and I think it’s cool when you can kind of biohack or hack your brain and, and do things that you maybe didn’t know that you could do, but it’s also kind of weird, right, to go into those zones and, and that’s with, with me doing it not full time, right? If you have a cyst, obviously it will be better if you do it full time, you don’t have to immediately leave that sales appointment.

And then go handle everything else and kind of go back into your other zone. So I think what you’re saying super makes sense. I do have a question on kind of a fundamental question. I have my thoughts here, but you said, OK, you want to have perfect repetitions. You don’t want to be doing things the wrong way. Do you think imperfect repetitions is better than no repetitions? Yes. Yeah, 100% imperfect repetitions are better than no repetitions, but you could control whether or not the repetition is perfect in certain ways.

So if I’ve recorded myself. Delivering an introduction or delivering a quick agenda, or working my way through the question portion of of the meeting, and I have it as a verbal recording, and audio recording in my phone. You know, you have a lot of windshield time as a salesperson for most residential painting companies. I mean, I probably racked up. I don’t know, 2.03 hours a week in some weeks at the busiest weeks, maybe between 15 and 20 for years and years and years, and what you listen to matters. You know, and we can go deep into, hey, I want to listen to Audible and different audiobooks and podcasts are the things that people devour now.

But, but really, who listens to podcasts I know who, who does that? But, but if you’re gonna make your own audio flashcards, and it’s in your voice, and it’s you doing it perfectly because you read it and you listen to it 1000 times. Those are perfect repetitions. So they don’t have to necessarily, when I say repetition, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a full appointment. That’s ideal, that’s perfect. But you’re only gonna get a couple of those a day, right? Our sales people get about 600 appointments a year.

OK. I talked to companies, maybe they get 1000, 1,000s on the high end. You’re gonna watch your ADL drop. You don’t have enough salespeople, uh, so you’re not as efficient as you should be. But I would say between 500 and 1000 is kind of the industry average for a full-time salesperson, number of leads per year. And so, yeah, you’re gonna get those reps, but you could control the role plays, you could control the flashcards, you could control the listening to, to this stuff. You could control the study time. Those also count as reps.

You know, no one makes it to Major League Baseball without hitting off a tee. At some point, they’re practicing off a tee. You know, when I was at Yankee Stadium a few weeks ago, my daughter said, why did they have the tea out there? They’re professional players, you know, she’s 993 years old. I said, because that’s always gonna be part of the game. It’s a fundamental thing. Why are they practice? Why are they doing batting practice every single day? Not because they’ve never swung before. It’s because the practice makes perfect, that old adage is true.

So, nowhere in your painting business will be more important than in sales. And so, you as the owner, I would encourage you to learn it. I’m not telling you not to learn it. I would encourage you to administer it to employees. I would encourage you to guide them along, and in the beginning to coach it. And to manage it, you know, until you have a formal sales manager in place. Sure. I like the, the windshield time. I think the way I, I say it is you can turn your car into a university if you drive a lot, like listening, listening to podcasts, I joked about that, different things like that.

I think sales training. Why? So we talked about creating those, you called it audio cards. Yeah, I, I mean, I call it audio flashcards, but really they’re just little audio recordings that you can listen to again and again and again. And if it’s in your voice, it’s very powerful because people always, they, they read a script, even something as simple as an introduction. You know, in the beginning, you’re introducing the company and you’re introducing yourself as a sales rep, and it has to be under 90 seconds and it has to make sense and, and lead the way in your meeting and your interaction with the customer, right?

You’re a prospect. And sometimes some of that feels uncomfortable. In the very beginning, the first time you read it or deliver it. But if you read it in your voice and you listen to it, even just for an hour, subconsciously you’ll embody it and when you deliver it with a customer, there will be more authenticity. So people buy from people they like and trust at the moment that their perceived value exceeds the cost. That that’s really it. It’s, it’s not, it’s not more complicated than that. And they buy from the first great salesperson they meet.

So in many cases, your prospects don’t ever meet any great salespeople. So that’s why you get some jobs. But as people really, but as people get good at a system like this. They’re gonna buy from the first great salesperson that comes to their door. They really are and, and high-end res repaint, and having it in their voice helps them internalize it better quickly and, and easily, and then there’s authenticity. So what does authenticity bring? Authenticity brings trust. Right, I can I can trust this person if they’re authentic, if they’re transparent.

I can tell when they’re being honest and when they’re being dishonest with me. And so everything in your, in that’s orchestrated, we’ve orchestrated everything in the, in the meeting, even from pre-positioning and calling the day in advance, everything is orchestrated down to minute detail. And so when you follow this system, It naturally raises credibility every step of the way. And it, and it also raises likability because you’re there to help the customer. It’s consultative the process. We’re not teaching you to build a whole bunch of fake rapport with the customer and see, you know, that they have some New York Yankees stuff up on the shelf for Boston Red Sox.

And pretend that you’re the biggest fan or, you know, kiss the dog, you know, we’re, we’re being friendly, of course, but we’re there to do a job. And when we do it in a way that’s really professional and we follow a system that we’ve done again and again, it just produces happy customers. You know, and, and people say, and I always get, I get feedback on this, you know, why, why do you ask your customers to rate your sales people? Why would I not ask them to rate my salespeople?

So, my business is a lot of salespeople and a lot of crew leaders. That’s what it is. So I want to continually rate salespeople with metrics and with feedback from customers, and I want to continually rate crew leaders and painters with metrics and with feedback from customers. It would be asinine to not want to get feedback about how well your sales people are doing. So there was a a fencing company, I think I’ve I’ve talked about this fencing company and other episodes for various reasons, really special, but they came out and the the lady estimator provided the estimate, I don’t know what she called herself, and Afterwards, I’m not gonna put the name of the company out there, but she said that the company was named after her dog, and she said that because they saw that we had a dog, and, and we were part of what they were doing was installing a dog rod.

And so she probably thought, I’m really passionate about dogs because I have a dog. And so she told me this thing and I thought, man, that’s pretty interesting, it’s pretty neat, and it was a point. I was like, wow, that’s just kind of cool, right? Maybe I, maybe I more want to use this company than I did before, because they’re into dogs and we’re doing something about related to a dog. And then I look at the Google reviews. And it’s named after the owner. You know, as, as I assumed it was initially.

I’m like, why are you creating this completely artificial story about this imaginary dog that the company’s named after, because maybe it worked like momentarily, which for me, I, I was fine moving forward with the company anyways. It was the first quote, I didn’t care. They just never ended up getting back to me, which was crazy. But, but you create this artificial thing. So when you’re talking about being genuine, like how do you think I felt when I then go realized it was a bold faced lie. If they’re gonna completely make up this arbitrary lie because they think it will, is more likely to close the deal, of course I’m not gonna trust that company now.

So it has to be, I mean that’s a pretty extreme example of inauthenticity, but yeah, my trust was just completely gone. You have to trust them. It it’s such a critical factor. And I find that a lot of people that you are going to recruit and and interview, and again, this is where HR is so critical because you have to really have good recruiting in place. You have to constantly be reaching out to potential salespeople, and you have to have a hiring process that really vets them.

So they know as much as possible about you before working together and you know as much as possible about them. But many salespeople. They come from all different places and all different places of learning, and a lot of them are taught this fake rapport building and In my world for to represent me and my company, I really need you to be genuine and, and I need you to really care about customers. So if, if they don’t come from a place of honestly just wanting to help people.

And they don’t carry themselves with authenticity, then they can really never work for me in a sales capacity. And that’s really important because I, I really haven’t ever found someone who came to me that was a painting salesperson. We have to build them in our industry. They’re, they’re not out there, right? Maybe they sold solar or they sold roofing or windows or siding or something else in the trades that was in home sales. You know, they tend to do really well in this system, especially the ones that come from great systems.

uh, Anderson Window, who has, has an excellent system. They’re, they’re trained well. Those people jump into this system, it feels the same for them and they just do amazing right away. Um, but what I will say is it’s not fake rapport. They come in as a professional, and when they don’t know the answer to something, they say, I don’t know, but I can get you that answer. You know, the, the company’s been in business for 30 years, but I’m not out there for 55 hours a week painting. Sure.

I’m selling, but I do have the state reps for Benjamin Moore, Sherwin Williams, PPG in my cell phone on speed dial here, and I do have the owner on speed dial here, and you know, we’ll get you that information. And for me, that works better than pretending to know answers to things you don’t know. Um, but it’s a mindset. So the mindset is how can I help you now and how could we really be authentic. And I think that leads to someone liking and trusting you, right?

And so the fundamentals of selling, I would say that the most critical thing you can do is listen well. A lot of my stuff is script-driven, right? It’s, it’s orchestrated. It’s a process. So this is, and I give you the introduction I use. And I say, hey, copy and paste and insert your company name. What’s interesting is I find that most of the companies I work with, they start becoming more like MDF painting. So, and, and I mean that in the sense that it’s about high value, low risk.

So, how do I become this customer’s painter for life? Not just by sending them a bunch of newsletters, but by actually providing value points and and added value year over year in many different ways, right? And so they have this whole maintenance and service-based mentality, uh, buy the ultra premium stuff, be, you know, be better than your competition that I think most of them had in them before, but they’re formalizing those parts of their business as an extension of the sales process. Which I love to see because I think it just makes the company stronger and more built to last, right?

You have to be what you say you are. Sure. So the and you Sorry, go ahead, Mark. And and so listening is critical, although there’s all these scripts and all this orchestrated thing, your ability to listen and actively listen. Is the number one skill that you have to have. That’s the most fundamental part of selling. Yeah, it makes sense, man. It’d be, I mean, listening is how you do consultative sales. You can’t consult if you don’t. And the same thing in your podcast. I mean, you said you film almost 200 podcasts.

Asking the second or third level question is sometimes where it elicits the the best information, right? It’s the same thing in a sales appointment. If you’re actively listening and you’re taking notes, tell me more about that. How did that feel? You know, what was that experience like the last time? You purchased this service last time you had it done. Sure. What did you love about it? What did you hate about it? Would you buy it again? Would you recommend it? Why did, why did you buy it then?

Why did you choose that contractor at that price point? You had options. Tell me about that process then. So, customers, another fundamental thing is, I shouldn’t call them customers yet, prospects. Um, we’ll be confident. They’re customers. Customs, yeah, but, but the thing is to know the difference is, hey, prospects, they’re, they’re wearing a persona, just like you’re a salesperson in that moment, they’re a prospect in that moment. And so you have to understand that their guard is up, they may lie, cheat, and steal. It’s not who they actually are as individuals.

That’s why I love the word prospect, right? Because that just shows this is a bit of a game. You’re gonna be dancing with the prospect, not with that actual person. So if you know that going in as a salesperson, it’s very easy to always be calm, cool and collected and not really get thrown off of your trajectory, which is important to stay on, you know, in in our system. So back to just actively listening, when you’re doing it well. A person becomes more and more comfortable with you.

And I find that a prospect is always more comfortable talking about things, specifically talking about the money, when they’re talking about in the past tense, about what happened 5 or 6 or 10 years ago, or in the future tense about spending money in the future and how they would like to um Be efficient or maximize value or get longevity or things, things of that nature. So keep that in mind, people are much more comfortable discussing the money and talking about it in the past or in the future rather than in the present tense.

It’s just human nature. Yeah, it’s less threatening, less of a risk. So the man, I got a lot here, Mark. This is good stuff. So the, the prospects wearing a persona, I don’t, I think this is another original. Something I haven’t heard of again, I’ve talked with a lot of people, run a lot of podcasts. Well, the, the other thing too is you have to also be the salesperson. You’re not yourself. Like, listen, I’m this Italian American guy, I love family. I love to travel. I do.

When I go and sell, I’m not that guy. I, I’m very direct. I’m very, so I have to morph and I have to just put on my process. I have to execute my process whether I feel like doing it or not, I have to execute the process. And then I have to be this person who, you know, I’m a parent. Which means I talk way too much. When I’m in a sales appointment, I can’t be a parent. Yeah. I’ve got to keep that in check. So there’s a portion of the meeting, which we call the inspection in our process, and the inspection is the time when I look at everything and I measure everything, I take photos, I take notes.

I have a little bit more leeway to be a parent then, because that’s the point where I could insert technical knowledge about why something is failing, why there’s deterioration, and how I’m going to fix it, which could help increase. Obviously credibility, right? But in the time when I’m interviewing a customer, we call it the green sheet, and many of you, if, if you know me at all, you probably heard the term green sheet because it’s be printed on green paper, but essentially it’s a lot of questions to interview a customer with.

When we’re in the green sheet, we’re not a parrot. So even though I’m a parrot, when I’m in the green sheet, I can’t be a parrot. So in a way, I am a salesperson, not Mark DiF Francesca, and they are a prospect. They’re not who they are in every single day of life. And if we dance together that way, that’s how we get them in the schedule. Yeah, and I think the, the thought process where people think sales is slimy or you have to pull one over on people is you’re coming in and you’re playing this game, but they are not playing a game.

They’re just being fully transparent who they are and therefore you’re somehow manipulating them. Whereas if you understand this, this is a staged situation. This is a presentation they’re, they’re coming in and, and they, they, they might have their guard up like they certainly do. And, and they’re thinking, OK, can I trust this person? I’ve had negative experiences with contractors in the past. Are they gonna try to rip me off, right? What, where, where are they going to try to get me? Some, obviously prospects are going to be more suspicious than others based on their personality type and past experiences.

But if you come in and, and just are not engaged at all in that game. Then it’s not a game you’re gonna do well, and playing the game doesn’t mean you are doing anything unethical, so long as you’re not doing anything unethical, cause you could play the game and you could do something unethical. Those are two different things. Correct. So, I’ve, this stuff that I coach is really powerful. I find that it’s, it’s a 100% ethical if you bring the right frame of mind to it. If you really care about providing high quality services and giving people the best that you could possibly give them.

Then you’ll always be in integrity, and this is an amazing system for you. If you don’t use something like this, you will lose to a more charismatic, better salesperson, whoever the first really good person to show up at their doors, that’s who’s gonna win. And so you’re, we talked about this in a prior podcast, you’re leaving them at the mercy of the wolves. But the way I look at it is very simple and you could say this to customers. When you get into this process that we have for salesmanship, It’s like painting a house, OK?

I have a system that I use the same way every single time, because it produces a happy customer and a great result. So there’s nothing unethical about that. That is just smart. It’s good for the customer and it’s good for myself, and it’s good for the company. Like, could you imagine if I came to paint your house, and I took out gallons of paint and I just started spraying it, painting it. Then I came back and I power washed it. And then I primed it while it was wet, and then I scraped it, you would say, what are you a fucking idiot?

You know, I don’t know if I could say that on this, but you would say that doesn’t make any sense. You’re not producing happy customers. So we get so hung up about having a process in sales and thinking that it’s some like negative thing or unfair thing. We only do that cause we’re lazy. The truth is it’s smart. Like if, if I’m gonna paint your house this way, why would I not have a defined process that I work through to set up to get you in the schedule, and to sell.

So when we sit down with a prospect and a prospect doesn’t have time. To answer our questions, or to really follow our lead, cause it is our appointment that we’re investing our time, then I would question the customer. I would say the reason we do this this way is to serve the property and the client, and this is why we have over 11,203 satisfied happy past customers in the state of Connecticut. Can you imagine if I came to your house to power to, to paint it. And this is a 3-week project.

What if I just did it in a day? And I skipped all the necessary steps. How would you feel about it? Well, that would be horrible. I would never hire you, Mark. Well, how can I get us off to the right start if I don’t spend the right amount of time going through this process in our meeting today, this consultation, and you would say that if a, if a customer, I have said that many, many times, and I encourage my team to say that. You know, maybe that happens 5% of the time when you have this high uh director personality, this eagle who is saying, you know, I don’t have time for this.

I’m, and, and all this. Listen, we can schedule a second meeting, we could open up your calendar and ours and schedule a meeting where we have time, but I don’t want to shortchange your appointment. I mean, this is a $25,000 job. Why would I want to rush it? Let’s spend an hour or two together, get this right, and that way you’re a happy customer for life. If, if you wanted, if you wanted to have a really piss poor job done here, you wouldn’t have called me. I mean, we have good Google reviews, we have good reputation.

We’re out there in marketing. People know us in Connecticut, so they don’t call me if they want to absolutely buy the worst paint job. And I’m glad they don’t. Sure. Yeah, we have, we have painters message painter marketing pros or submit a web form and, and they just want to know how much. How much? How much? They don’t know what we’re doing, but they want to know how much, right? And so, We, we invest heavily into our partnerships. We work extensively with all the companies we work with and we view it as a partnership.

So we, we require things that done with you, not a done for you. We require assets, we require a little bit of their time. We have to know about their business so we can most effectively market it. And so if someone is unwilling to have a conversation and even figure out what they’re asking how much for and whether or not we actually could help them, whether or not it’s a fit because we’re not fit for everybody. Then it’s definitely not a partnership that’s going to work out, so we don’t even entertain those people.

Because even if we said, hey, it’s this much and they pay it this much for what? Now we, now we can’t, if the person’s too busy to understand what they’re buying, then they’re definitely too busy to, to do the work that we need them to do to make sure we can scale their company effectively. If a homeowner’s too busy to understand what they’re buying, right, which means that they are viewing it as apples to apples when it won’t be, Chuck’s gonna roll up, they’re gonna ask Chuck how much.

Chuck’s gonna throw out a number. I mean that that either isn’t your customer or you need to reset expectations, come back, visit again, just kind of dial this in like you’re talking about. So it’s really the customer’s why. How big is their why? How much do they care about it? You know, if I care about it more than the customer, that’s going to be challenging. I need to use my time with them to ratchet up the value. To show them why this is important if they don’t see it as important.

You know, many of your customers come to you seeing it as important, but some don’t. You’re absolutely right. Some just view it as a commodity. And it, and you’ll know right away the ones that feel that way. And you’re absolutely right. If you can’t get to them and adjust how they’re feeling about this project, then it really probably does just come down to price. Um, and, and that’s not a place where you’re gonna win at, not with this, this value add selling. That we do here. So that’s, that’s critical and you won’t be able to serve them.

And so then what they’re also the same kind of customer we find who then is going to be upset unreasonably so. So if they’ll they’ll they’ll pick the lowest bid and then they’ll, you know, that person might just do one coat and they needed two coats or, you know, two coats when really it should have taken 3, or not spend the right amount of time priming and then all of a sudden the, the paint job isn’t as good as it could or should have been, but that’s what they bought. Right?

And then they’re, they’re furious because they’re expecting this $40,000 paint project and they pay 200. So, part of your job is to educate the customer, and it doesn’t mean that you have to lay out every detail of how you do things. That’s such a rookie mistake. I mean, you’re, you’re having to learn. You know, personalities, styles, and how to basically speak to what they want when you’re in the appointment. That’s a big part of what we do, and we’ll get back into the fundamentals in a minute, cause I think there’s a lot we can cover.

But when you look at it in terms of how you want to add value or make them realize it’s important, you just have to say to them, This is the way that we produce happy customers and great jobs. And so we have to spend this time, this is like prep work. To the job. So why I would do a three week job with no prep work doesn’t make any sense. Like I need to sit down with you and go through this. If someone else is gonna do a different way, that’s fine.

That’s just not how, that’s not where we built our reputation. So I don’t. Most people that we meet, when, when you’re very authentic and you have a strong frame. They follow your lead, especially when you’re coming from a place of wanting to help them. Yeah, and I think they, you know, it’s what we talked about before where some people are afraid of the word no. I think you also have to accept that some prospects are not your customer. Some prospects are not not people you want or should do business with, and that is OK. That is more than OK. Um, but get a good repetition repetition out of it.

Go through the whole process, um, you know, someone, you really shouldn’t leave someone’s house unless they point a weapon at you or they call the police on you. And, and people laugh at my sales room when I say that, but they love my salespeople. It’s such a great meeting. I mean, 99% of the time. And the other 203%, I can’t control mental illness and what’s out there, right? And so, Why are we leaving as salespeople? Like, why are we packing up and leaving? And I’ve said this, I was speaking at uh the PCA in Colorado in the winter, and it, it’s like, just don’t leave. Why?

Because we are uncomfortable in that discomfort. So another fundamental thing that you have to do as a star salesperson is become comfortable with the uncomfortable. And how do you become comfortable with the uncomfortable? Practice That’s really it. Like you can’t just say to a person, OK, now you’re gonna be comfortable with the uncomfortable. You can’t just say a mantra, I’m comfortable with the uncomfortable. You have to go and be uncomfortable and practice brings a certain level of readiness. We spoke about this in a prior uh podcast.

Professional athletes, they get butterflies. We all get butterflies, but they have prepared themselves to a high degree, so they are ready to go perform. So the butterflies, they take as a signal that it’s go time. Whereas if you’re underprepared, whether it’s a test in school or a sales appointment, or a professional game, if you’re underprepared, those butterflies could really throw you off. That nerves could make you feel more discomfort. So when I know I’m a professional at selling, and I feel the jitters because I’m meeting a brand new person, of course I’m gonna feel a little bit of jitters.

I did 15,000 appointments. I felt a little bit of jitters walking up to a new person’s house. But I had the stuff. You know, you just, you just get the skill set, so it becomes fun. So when we get to that uncomfortable place where you say, hey I have to think about it. Or I need to talk to my spouse, or I’m getting to other appointments. Yes, there’s some discomfort there. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t, but am I comfortable enough to live in that space?

Where I say I completely understand. Say, what do you think you’re gonna say to your spouse? We had a great meeting today. What are some of the things you might tell them about our meeting? And I have my pen ready, and I’m actively listening. Hey, why don’t we get them on the phone right now? This way I can answer any questions they may have. You know, what time are they gonna be back at the house? Because I have appointments in town all day, and I love to come back and be able to sit down with both of you, because this is important for me.

And I know it’s super important to you. We spent a lot of great time together. I want everybody to be comfortable with it. I don’t want someone to not be comfortable with it. And again, that’s a simple um role play of what may happen if you don’t have a two-legger, and we don’t always have two leggers in my business we don’t. I hear people preach about they won’t do a meeting a call unless they have two-legger. I think it’s bullshit. I think that if you do enough appointments, you know, it, it’s not a bad idea to try to push to have a two-legger, but I just don’t think you’re always gonna have two leggers.

Um, and, and so being comfortable in those discomfortable moments, they come from practice, they come from knowing what to say and do. So most of us just pack up our stuff and leave because we don’t know what to say and do next. And we’re so afraid of maybe breaking rapport or something else, we’re relating to people well, but we need to say, I completely understand. And ask a new question. And when you ask a new question, a side question, you’re giving the prospect an opportunity to let new information rise to the surface that will help you serve them better.

That’s what you’re doing. It’s not, it’s not some devious, mischievous trick. It’s just you finding a way to elicit more information in order to help them make a better buying decision. And so get another fundamental thing is get more yeses and no’s and less maybes. So if you’re gonna become professional, you’ll get a lot of yeses and a lot of no’s and very few maybes. Because what is that, it’s a sign that you’ve really helped the prospect make a really great decision. And sometimes that great decision is they are not gonna hire MDF painting.

And you’ve held their hand, and you’ve walked them through the whole thing, and that’s their decision. And that’s a good thing. You brought a decision to the forefront. That means you’re a good salesperson. And people are hung up on this. They say that’s not true. I want to sell everyone more yeses and more no’s and less maybes means you’re better at this. Mark, what percentage of your sales are completed in the home versus during a follow up? So, even with this system in place, you’re still only complete uh about 60% of your total sales that gets sold.

That doesn’t mean 60% of your appointments, that means 60% of what is closed, OK? And that’s, that’s a good target to, to shoot for. So follow up is a way of life. Follow up and prospecting should all, those are different podcast episodes, those are different coaching seminars, but follow-up and prospecting is part of the life of a professional salesperson. Let me say that again. Follow up and prospecting are both part of the life of a professional salesperson. This is another reason why the owner is not the ideal candidate to be a professional salesperson.

I’m absolutely horrific at follow-up. 15,000 appointments under my belt. How many of them did I call back? A 2nd, 3rd, 203th time. How many of them did I try to get the sale after I met and did not close in person? I’m embarrassed to tell you, not many, OK? And that’s my fault, um, but you can’t allow your sales people to make that same mistake. And if you as the owner trying to do it, it’s, it’s just too much on your plate. It’s this is a a a sales position in this industry is a 50 hour, 45, 50 hour a week endeavor where you’re locked in if you want to be great at it.

So another fundamental is understand. What greatness looks like. OK, what do I mean by that? Learning this takes time. You, you can, you can know it in a couple of weeks. Like you can know the scripts, you could understand it pretty quickly. To really have it locked down where it feels really comfortable, it probably takes you a year. To become masterful at it. It takes you 5 years. So when you start, you should know that, hey, this, this might take me 5 years to become masterful at. 5 years of, say, 600 appointments a year, really good reps, studying, training, going to meetings.

And, and so if you’re not willing to do that, you’re probably not gonna write your ticket in terms of your income, you know, so as a commission only salesperson, your income really has no cap. And as you’re hiring people, and I don’t want to go too deep into hiring, that’s not what we’re here for today, but as you’re hiring people, you want to look for people who aggressively want to earn money. That’s a big sign of a person doing well at this. I want to ask you something about the hiring people.

So you mentioned people who had done in-home sales for solar or other. Um, contracts, uh, well, people who have been successful at doing that because many, many people have shuffled through those systems and got spit out quickly because they weren’t up to the task. So if I can see someone who has, say, 3 years experience doing that and I can see like an income somewhere in the 100,183 range, uh, you know, consistently, they’re, they’re gonna be pretty good. Do you require that? I don’t require it because people are not pounding down the, the, the local uh painting company’s door to go work there and sell there.

So you’re going to find that the more that you do this, um, you really have to recruit salespeople. Would you hire someone who doesn’t have any sales experience? I have, and it’s never worked out for me yet. So, I, do I have enough data points to say that it could never work out? Of course not. You know, I’m one painting company in Connecticut, so, I There’s certain things you want to look for, and I would say 3 years of consistency selling some other, uh, in-home sales, specifically in home improvement, like, you know, what, what I love about solar is, it’s a terrible job for most people, and if they can make it in solar, then they usually have a thick skin and they’re a lot more comfortable with discomfort.

And if they’ve made it with like a large uh window roofing siding outfit, they’re used to selling bigger ticket items, and they’re not selling at the lowest price. So you’ll find certain certain sales people just sell because It’s the cheapest price and things that you wouldn’t think are that way. Like, think about pharmaceutical sales. Like you’re just basically hanging out at a bunch of doctors’ offices, giving them free samples, and there’s just consistency to it where you’re trying to help the doctor make some incentives. It’s totally different than selling high value low risk. Right?

I sell cars. Sometimes selling cars is more about how a person feels, and, and selling paint, you can bring some of the emotion in, but it’s about how they’re financed in many cases. So as an industry, I don’t think we’ve moved that far to being financed yet. I think we’re going that way, as an industry. Um, and when we do, car salesmen will do better selling paint jobs. But right now, I find solar, you know, roofing, window siding, those are ideal categories if you want to go recruit from, and you want to see sustained success.

They don’t have to have a 25 year career. If they have a 25, 6 year career, successful in that, I would say, why are you coming to me now? I, I find a lot of people have worked for places that have 25 salespeople and they just feel like they’re a number on a spreadsheet, and they could come to a smaller organization like mine and feel like they could be a big fish in a smaller pond, and that’s where you can get a star. And that does happen. I’m not going too far down this, but I do want to ask 11 additional question.

So you’re talking about people who have at least 3 years’ experience. You can obviously find that on LinkedIn and other public sources, but then people who have been making. Uh, consistently 6 figures, which you might need to figure that out in an interview. How do you proactively recruit away from these other organizations? It’s a challenge. I mean, I think you just do it with transparency. You have to show them, well, one thing is to show that you have a great system in place. So, if you don’t have, like, my training is really helpful to me.

I’m talking about the fact that there’s videos and workbooks and role plays and weekly meetings and this team camaraderie and a growth mindset where one of our core values is improve or die. And that’s Mark, will you find them on LinkedIn? Is that the first place you look for? Well, I mean, indeed and LinkedIn are the two that we primarily use. So we’re actively doing, and again, I don’t do the HR directly myself, but they have some type of like smart searching that they do where you can basically poke someone, invite them to an opportunity on Indeed.

And then on LinkedIn, you can reach out and send them an email. And they actually do it through my personal LinkedIn because I have a, a pretty good network, um. And that works. I mean, you get people that are interested and then also just running the job ads on Indeed, and being as clear and detailed in your job ad as you can be is going to attract someone that maybe moves to a new area, wants to change in, in career. Once they talk to you, if you can set the vision for what you are as a company, that’s what allows them to jump onto your, into your business, right?

And so for me, it’s about the training, it’s about the camaraderie of the room. But it’s also about the industry in the sense that there’s no one good you’re competing against. So if you sell windows and you’re gonna go sell 50 to $25,000 window jobs, you are competing against some pretty sophisticated sales systems. Even in my area, the roofers have it down. There’s a lot of good roofers where if you call them, there’s a really sophisticated system, almost identical to mine that they’re using to bring you through buying the roofing, right?

And so in painting, it’s just not there yet. So if they’re a star, they can come in and the competition is chucking a truck. So that’s a selling point. And, and I also just talk about the, the macro kind of economics of the whole thing, and we’ll talk about this maybe in the next podcast. Um, remind me to talk about this. You know, we’re at this moment in history where all these baby boomers are retire I mean, most of them are retired, but they’re retiring every single day.

So there is just, there’s a, a shortage of labor. So you have this massive, massive demand. You have this shortage of labor in the trades that is gonna last throughout my lifetime, OK? And there’s a massive demand and there’s no one really great doing this. I mean, in, in my market in 2008, 2009, a lot of people went out of business in Connecticut. Then with COVID, some people took like a golden parachute, kind of exited, and it’s just less really good companies. I’m not saying that there’s not a lot of painting companies.

There’s probably 2000 just in Connecticut. But there’s very few that are really dialed in. So your ability as a great salesperson to come into this industry right now. It’s almost unlimited. You know, I, I see my kids playing like the Mario Brothers. You jump and get the coins. It’s like unlimited coins. Really, if you’re a great sales unlimited coins, but if you’re selling cars, every single car dealership is dialed in. If you’re selling windows, they’re all dialed in. They really are. This industry, we’re not dialed in yet.

Yeah, it’s a big opportunity. And people listening to this podcast, you mentioned it previously, they’re in the top 1%, 99% of their competitors, if not more, are not listening to things like this and that kind of self-improvement. And, and so fundamentals, I’m trying to get back to some of these fundamentals. So always be listening, um, find a way to become comfortable with discomfort. Follow the system every single time, like, get excellent reps in every single day. Have a long term view. Know that it’s not just about executing this one appointment today, although you need to do that to make money and to serve the customer and to serve the company.

It’s really about what you can become. And so you have to have this growth mindset. Improve or die pretty much sums it up for me, um. But you you want to be that. Fundamentally always help the customer. How can I help you now has to be your operating system. That has to be what’s always driving you. In fact, when you get stuck in the closing dance, it’s not a bad thing to say. Hey, Brandon, we, we’ve been together for a couple of hours now. I know that you’re my type of customer, you really care about your home.

We’re your type of company. Um, how can I help you? Essentially, what has to happen for us to do business together. Thermometer clothes, you know, we’ve had a great meeting on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being you absolutely never hire me, 173 being you want to sign up right now, where would you say we are? And you give me a number. We’re a 7, OK? A 7, 60% of the time, 299% of the time, answer 220. It’s 220 quite often, uh, maybe because 220 is a lucky number. I don’t know. We’ll have to get into the psychology behind that default to 218, which won’t be too long.

My director of ops would ask me questions. He’d say, Hey, how do you rate this, you know, 2250 to 0003, you can’t choose 2000. And so that became my default. I’m not allowed to choose 220 on things. It really is quite the mind trick. Well, people are generally pretty nice, so they would probably then say if I can’t pick 220, I’ll pick 8. But the, but the follow-up question is the key thing. So what has to happen, Brandon, to get you to a 10? And so Now you’re gonna give me the answers, you’re gonna give me the keys to the car, the the puzzle pieces.

I mean, another thing we didn’t talk about, but fundamentally, the whole reason you’re there is to find out what they want to accomplish and solve their accomplished list, and this confuses everybody, even people that are probably in my sales room now at MDFP. What they want to accomplish is not to paint something. On some level, it is, it’s just a scope of work thing, but what do they really want? What is gonna drive their decision to hire one company over another, and to keep coming back to that company?

So for some people it’s gonna be time frame. That’s super important that drives many more decisions than we realize. I need to have it done by this specific date for this specific reason. And 95% of the painters out there aren’t listening to that. They’re tone deaf. They want to talk about scope of work. Time frame is critical. What else is important? Longevity of the work. What else is important? Who’s gonna be at my home? What else is important, the overall customer experience. Do you come every single day?

Do you take time off from my job? Do you start and then stop? How is it scheduled? Who do I talk to? What happens next? I mean, the customer experience people care about more than they’re gonna tell you unless you elicit that information from them. So what are the two or three major things we’re trying to accomplish? So once you’ve interviewed the customer and you’ve asked them a lot of questions and done a lot of active listening, even on the back of my green sheet, I have a section for accomplish list.

And I wanna, I wanna parrot it back to the customer. I wanna say. This has been amazing. Just to recap what we went through, it sounds like this is super important to you. The fact that you’re having a graduation party on this date, having it absolutely done and cleaned up well in advance of that is super critical to you. Is that, would you say that that would be super important to you? Yes, sir. All right, will check it off. That’s one item we’re gonna circle that. You also mentioned the last time you had it done, it only lasted a couple of years and you had peeling, and it wasn’t a great experience, so you were hesitant to call the contractor back.

When you did call him back, you basically ignored you. So you really want to be protected this time. You wanna have a long warranty, and you want to have a warranty from someone you could trust. Would that be helpful to you if you had a long warranty or you’re part of a customer care program, would that be helpful? Oh my God, that would be amazing. Checkmark. So that’s your accomplished list. So yes, they want to sand the house, they want to prime, they want to use Sherwin Williams, whatever they want.

That’s basic. But what they really want to solve. Are those pain points. Those accomplished list items. If you get those right, that’s more than half the battle for selling. So when you prepare to close and you present your price, You basically are not presenting a full scope of work unless the person has shown you that that’s the most important thing to them, which I find is very rare, less than 10% of the time. Instead, what you’re doing is you’re reintroducing the pain points or the accomplished list items. Yeah.

And it’s so critical when we, we missed that. So we’re, you can’t sell anyone a paint job, you could help them buy. Just say, let me say that again. You can’t sell anyone a paint job, you could only help them buy. A woman walks into a store to buy shoes. She’s gonna buy the shoes she wants to buy, not the one that you want her to buy. If that makes sense. And, and what I mean by that is, they’re trying to buy what they want. So you have to really listen to this, and you have to make sure that you’re solving what they want.

And it’s fair for you to ask them, did I get this right? It sounded to me like this was the most important thing to you. So while I put together your numbers in Paint scout or estimate rocket, I called Kelly in our scheduling department, and I found that we can, if we can go ahead and get you in the schedule today, we can definitely get a pre-job on this date, we can start it, we can get it done 2 weeks in advance of your party. Would that be helpful to you?

Yes, it would be. Check. Great. You also mentioned the warranty mattering. I can get you as a 5-year warranty, but then I can get you in our customer care program for another 203 years, where we can come here and do maintenance work for you at a nominal cost just to protect your investment. If we did that and got you in the schedule today, would that be helpful to you? Yes, check mark. I’m not discussing sanding or primers or anything at this point. OK, great, to to do this for you, it’s gonna cost you X amount.

Does this all make sense? It either does or it doesn’t. And I’m starting to get into the closing dance a little bit. But if it does, great, if you sign here and here, we’ll go ahead and get you the schedule right now. I’ll call Kelly back. And you, you need to ask for the business. So that’s another fundamental. You need to provide a price and ask for the business. I can’t buy anything if I don’t have a price, at least in this market, in this day and age, I can’t buy anything unless I have a price and unless someone asks for the business.

So, You would be shocked how many painting estimates happen every day. In which a price is not provided. And they did not ask for the business. Well, it’ll be emailed 48 hours later. Correct. So, I mean, it’s a massive percentage of the time, and this is what really good, you asked me how do you recruit a great salesperson to a painting organization by talking about things like this. The fact that you, you go out there and it’s just like the wild west and people are doing things stupidly.

Because they’re not professional salespeople, because they’re owners and they honestly want to go paint something or hire or fire or improve something, and I don’t blame them. Go do that. That’s why the sooner you can take a great system and implement it with other people, the more successful you’ll be in sales. Yeah So Mark, as we, as we wrap this up, this has been a wealth of knowledge. I appreciate you sharing all this. I want to list out a bunch of the fundamentals I’ve written down. I missed a couple, but let me know if there’s, if there’s something we need to add to this list before we wrap it up.

No particular order, so just write them down. Uh, how can I help you now? They need to like and trust salesperson, always be listening. Uh, follow the system, have a long term view, talk money in the past tense and the future tense. People are far more comfortable doing that than in the present tense. Be comfortable being uncomfortable, shoot for more yes or no, less maybe, uh, find out what they want to accomplish and sell on the accomplished list. Um, ask for the business, present the price. It’s a lot there’s a lot if you just do all of that, well, the one thing that’s missing and maybe the most critical thing and probably because it’s the most challenging thing for most people to implement is.

Have a closing conversation that feels like a dance. So, and I did this wrong for a long, long time. You, you have your printed proposal, you have your pricing in place, and now it’s like the moment of truth. Drum roll, please. You go back into customers thinking about it. Yeah, you sit down and you basically present the price and I described how you should contract around their accomplice list and their pain points, but at some point you have to give them a number, a price, right? And it always felt like, did I win?

You know, like you, you have this thing like, I hope I won. I hope it was the right price for them right now. Stop. That’s the wrong mentality. All it is is the beginning of a great conversation. Just like when you introduced yourself and you gave them a gift and you did a quick intro, it was fun. Just like when you sat down and you asked them a lot of questions, and you listened, and you took a lot of notes, it was fun. So this is the final most fun part, which is when you go shopping together.

So stop treating it like you had one shot, you gave the price you won or lost. It’s not like that. Treat it as a conversation that has to unfold. And what I mean by that is if you have, we’re now in version 2.0, every year I’m improving everything, including these handbooks. So we’re in version 2.0 of a worksheet that we’ve created at MDF Painting that um is essentially, I don’t want to call it a closing worksheet, we call it a scheduling worksheet because it makes people feel more comfortable.

But essentially, it brings them through all the questions, the side questions that we want to ask and the conversation we want to have after. After we’ve given the price. 99% of painters, well, so many painters don’t even give the price at the spot, but the ones that even do give the price, the customer says yes or no, and then they leave. The other fundamental is stay for an extra 20 minutes. Just hang out. Say the price and don’t leave for 20 minutes. If you do that, you’ll be wildly successful.

And people make fun of me when I say this, but it’s like literally open up a newspaper, I guess there’s no newspapers anymore, but open up a newspaper, open up a Kindle, and sit there and hang out with them for 20 minutes. If you did just that, it sounds crazy, magic would happen because we’re so quick to exit the discomfort. Instead, have a closing conversation. Use a scheduling worksheet. Continue to ask side questions and elicit new information. When you give a person a price. It’s a whole new conversation, meaning there as a prospect, their answers change.

Here’s one good example. Before I give the price, I say to the prospect, you mentioned you had multiple people out here to give you professional advice and talk about this project. What prices did they give you? And the customer says, you know, I don’t, I don’t really know. I’d have to look into that. My wife handled that. The moment I say it’s $18,250 to do this job. Their selective amnesia disappears, and they say, hey, I had another guy who was 17,000. Or whatever. And you’ll see if you’ve done a lot of these appointments, you know exactly what I mean.

And so all I’m saying is that, and it’s not wrong, it just is what it is. It’s how a prospect handles you. Their conversation is different after the price is presented. So, why have sales people in my room that say, well, I already know when they’re going to make a final decision on this, cause we talked about it in the green sheet, we talked about their decision making process. So why do you want me to ask them again after I’ve delivered the price? Cause you elicit new information, because it brings you down a path of being able to talk about our preferred customer program and how it benefits the customer to make a decision.

It’s leveraged to close the sale. So all I’m saying is, once you’ve given the price, hang out and have a conversation for 20 minutes. If you do that, you’ll become masterful, and I can show you exactly how to do that in a comfortable way, and that’s part of being comfortable with the discomfort. But that’s super fundamental. After you give the price hang out for 20 minutes. I love it, man. That is, uh, this is gold. So thank you for sharing all this, Mark. Uh, very in-depth episode. Looking forward to the next one.

It’ll be the last one. Yeah, I appreciate you, brother, man, you’re sales guru. Thanks for sharing. Thank you so much. I hope it helps some people out there.

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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.