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.

Recorded live at the PCA Commercial Contractor Conference, Brandon Pierpont breaks down what actually drives profitable commercial painting work and what to ignore. He walks through the moves that tighten your funnel, improve conversions, and lower acquisition costs, plus the behind-the-scenes habits that build trust fast with commercial buyers. If you want more consistent commercial leads without wasting time on random tactics, this episode will give you the direction and next steps.

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 to day 213.9, I guess, day 2160 if you did Torry Pines of the commercial contractor conference. I didn’t think anyone was gonna be sitting here, so I felt pretty good about it, but a lot of you are. Yeah, proud of you guys, really proud of you guys. So on the people, people who are here, I know are committed. I also know probably over half of you are hungover. Which means that I need to be engaging. So, thanks for showing up, excited for that. I’m gonna, gonna talk about building a commercial brand.

Right now, building something that wins. Marketing is really important. Who here markets? Who here, who here markets outside of just networking, outside of referrals, outside of just talking to people? OK, so, so half of you guys marketing. So Chris, Chris Elliott with his nice introduction, said that if that I should just go up, I should just say, hey, you guys should market, and I should just get down. And here’s the ironic thing, obviously that wouldn’t be the most compelling of presentations. I think it would be memorable in a way.

But I think the, the thing that’s crazy about that is I actually think if I did that, if I went up here, said about 212 words, and then got down. And then you guys did those 212 words, at least the half of you who didn’t raise your hand. I think it would help you more than the hour-long presentation I’m about to give that the vast majority, maybe all of you are actually gonna do nothing about. So just keep that in mind, because most people, they come to these webinars, they come to the, you know, come to these in-person presentations, they do all this stuff and then they don’t take action.

At that point, pardon my French, it’s just mental masturbation. We want to actually implement because that wealth is attracted to speed, it’s attracted to action. A little bit about me. So I’m very involved with the PCA on serve on several committees. I’m an ambassador. I’ve, I talk highly about the PCA. I like the PCA a lot. I’m on their bureau of speakers, run some Sherwin Williams events. Lost that, that’s OK. And then uh there it goes. Nope, it’s gone. Um, there it is. I’ve written two books, one of which is the #212 Amazon rated bestseller.

And then I am a proud veteran of the Florida Army National Guard. I do not have stories for you, like yesterday’s keynote. But I, uh, I’m a veteran. So, if you could download this, so this is a workshop. What this is gonna be is, is this is a form. It’s gonna cover a lot of the stuff that, that I’m going to run through today, and it’s actually gonna cover some extra stuff. And it’s gonna essentially show you where your gaps might be in your commercial marketing right now.

So if you go ahead and download that. You can fill it out. It’s a list of best practices. So if you’re running Google Ads, if you’re running meta ads, if you’re doing SEO, if you’re, if you’re doing networking, all these different things, it’s essentially what you, what you would want to do. To be most effective. This picture is from the last commercial contractor conference. Who here was at the one last year? Cool. So I have you guys. Welcome back and, and for the new people, pumped to have you here.

So I rode a bull last time. Jesse, of course, he’s not in the room, obviously, he’s probably in Tijuana. I don’t know. But he, when I, I left, I strategically left the Benjamin Moore, awesome, awesome thing by Benjamin Moore last night. Thank you guys for that. That, can we give Benjamin Moore a quick hand, that was phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah, so that was a great event, but I did strategically leave 211 minutes early, because I could see bad decisions were starting to be formed, discussions were starting to be had that weren’t good.

And then as I left, Jesse said, Brandon, I said, I’ll meet you there. I think he’s probably in Tijuana. I had no idea where he was going. I did not meet him there. But last year, I unfortunately did talk with Jesse, and he said, hey, I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna ride a bull. I said, cool, yeah, me too. Not having any idea what he was saying. Uh, just because sometimes I say stuff before I think. I think a lot of men do that. And then we ended up actually riding a bull, and I said if I survive, I’m just going to talk about it always.

So for some of you guys, it’s probably about your 213th time hearing this story. I’m sorry. It’s gonna continue going, it’s a promise I made to myself. I said if I get off this thing, if I’m not on a feeding tube, if I’m not dead, my neck’s not broken, I’m just gonna keep putting it up. And so, there you go. 215 seconds. You guys can clap. Who you guys can clap. I rode a freaking bull, you’re, it’s OK if you clap, doesn’t make you less of a man to clap.

Jesse lasted 2125 seconds. Now in Jesse’s defense, his bull was bigger than mine, for sure. Uh, in his not defense, I think he hadn’t made it out of the gate before he was in the air. So it was not very long. A little bit about painter marketing pros. So we have generated over a quarter billion dollars in revenue through our leads for our partners. We have worked with over 400 painting companies, have a little bit of experience generating over 300,000 leads. Our average cost per lead across all channels over the past 6 years is under $60.

That’s SEO, it’s Google Pay per click, Me ads, LSA, everything that we’ve done. Uh, some compilation of our work. So APC magazine, you guys have some of those magazines on the table. Hopefully you read it. It’s awesome stuff. Kevin, uh, the editor there, does a phenomenal job. We have a marketing column there called Painter’s Playbook. Check it out. We, we have a different, we have a different article released each, each magazine article, uh, in Pay magazine, sorry, Kevin, I do contribute to that in our As a Pro section.

And then the last two years, my team has done a solid enough job, incredibly proud of them, to win PCA Industry Partner of the Year. 2024 and 123, so this is of 60, 70 vendors, everyone you see a whole lot of other people that you don’t see. We were industry partner of the year, uh, for the last two years. So we got to go up on expo, get the award, stand with all these beautiful people. So that’s a testament to my team, and it’s actually the thing I’m most proud of in my entrepreneurial career that I built a team that achieved that.

We, yeah, we have a lot of reviews. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Talk to, talk to people we’ve worked with, we’re good at what we do. So what we’re gonna go through, paid ads. Uh, SEO social media, we’re basically gonna run through all the different marketing channels, the, the main marketing channels that you as a commercial painting contractor should be using. A lot of this stuff will be applicable as well. Who here does residential also? OK, so that’s a lot. It’s probably 2/3 of you.

So, a lot of this stuff’s gonna be applicable to residential. Some of it I’m gonna be talking about the differences and how you should be looking at certain channels such as meta and pay per click in terms of residential and commercial, and what you should potentially do differently. So for paid ads. Uh, we’re gonna go through Google Pay per click, LSA, LinkedIn, and Meta. Obviously there are other platforms you can run ads on YouTube, you can run ads on TikTok, you can run ads essentially anywhere. Uh, these are the main ones that we recommend.

These are the ones that we focus on. TikTok, I would just discourage that. It’s not good, it’s not your customer avatar. Um, and then we have some, we have some generic general principles here that, that seem basic, but actually very few companies are doing it. So making your, making your ads personalized, actually calling out the avatar, calling out who you actually want to, to serve the ad to. Uh, having your ad speed to lead, so actually being in touch with that lead immediately, that’s incredibly crucial with residential, but it does matter with commercial people do not wanna wait.

It’s already giving them the, the experience that you’re somebody who doesn’t care, you’re somebody who doesn’t, is not timely, does not take care of them, not what they want. pair it with organic posts. We’ll get into the organic post strategy. So this is the, hey, you should be posting on Facebook, you should be posting every week. You should, but not to generate leads. So we’ll get into that. Make it easy for people. Don’t make it hard for people to pay you money. Don’t make it hard for people to, to get a proposal from you.

Make it easy. You want, you want to get their money, you wanna do work for them, so don’t make them jump through a bunch of hoops. Have an efficient proposal process, uh, you know, for, for residential. You would always want to deliver the proposal in the home, right? You would not want to go, go email it 24, 48 hours later for commercial. You want to be efficient. People want to move. A follow up fortune’s in the follow up. The fortune is not in the initial lead, and then further monetization, so repeat referral, having a really dialed in system for that.

Dave, are you, is Dave here? OK, let’s skip that side, it doesn’t matter. No, I’m just kidding, we’ll go back. So Dave said, if you’re, if you’re not growing year over year, I think this, I think you’re always growing or you’re, or you’re dying. You’re either growing or you’re dying. I think that’s true in life. I think it’s true with, with personal habits, you’re either improving or you’re decaying. So if you’re not growing year over year, you’re probably dying, you’re probably going backwards. So you have to be focused to growth on some degree.

So I’m glad that a lot of you raised your hand for marketing, because if you’re not marketing, then you are choosing to remain stagnant and ultimately decline. Uh, Google Pay per click. So here are some, there, who here is running Google pay per click ads, the traditional Google ads. Very few. Wow. OK. So Google Pay per click is really good for commercial. I don’t like it as much for residential. It’s really good for commercial. Google pay per click is those, those ads on the top that say sponsored.

It can also show up in the Google Business profile. It’s different from Google local service ads. Google Local Service ads is the little green check mark, the Google guarantee. That’s a different, that’s a different kind of advertisement. It’s a little bit newer. Google, Google Pay per click’s been around for 25 years, been around for a long time. There are different kinds of keywords that you’d want to target. Keyword is just what somebody searches for in Google. They go into Google and they type something that they’re searching for.

That’s what’s called a keyword phrase. So for commercial keywords, there are over 300,000 of those that you would want to target, that would be applicable for commercial painting at an average cost per click of almost $5503. We have estimated clicks, estimated leads. We essentially have, have drilled this down to what this would look like. So if you guys wanna take a picture of that slide, I do think it’s a fairly, fairly good and relevant slide. Res residential is over 3 million, uh, a lot more keyword phrases for residential, a lot more searches, a lot more clicks.

Uh, it is being searched more frequently, and obviously they’re just way more homeowners than there are people searching for commercial painting, but they both work, and I actually like commercial painting more. Here’s the ROI that we calculated. So we looked at the keywords. We went through the, the average, what we, we basically created some assumptions. So for residential, we said, let’s assume a 40% profit margin. Let’s, let’s assume a 40% close rate. Those numbers are reasonable. I think they’re a little bit low. And then for, what we wanted to be conservative for commercial, let’s say 25% profit, 30% close.

And this is what we got to. So this is $3 basically 357% ROI for commercial, 245% for residential. This is profit. This is not revenue, so they both can work, but if you don’t have a budget of at least $3500 a month to put into ad spend for residential, then don’t do it. for commercial, it’s a lot easier to monetize it even though the cost per click is higher. Your average ticket size, your, your average revenue is much higher as well, so you can pay more to acquire that lead and make it make sense.

That’s why we like Google Pay per click for commercial and why we don’t like it as much for residential. If you’re doing a, a 6003. If you’re doing a $4000 5000 dollars, $6000 residential project, but you’re paying $200 300 dollars, $350 for a lead, and that lead may not even convert into an estimate, and that estimate certainly may not even convert into a project, it starts to become a little bit dicey in terms of making sure that you actually have a positive ROI on that. If you’re doing a 1500 2050 1000 $3.93,000 commercial project, a whole lot easier to make sure you have a positive ROI on that.

These are some different search terms. So, there, there’s something called. Broad-based keywords, so this would just be commercial painter, commercial, commercial painting contractor, painter, commercial painter near me, painter near me. These are broad-based keywords. They’re gonna have a higher search volume, but they’re also more generic, so they’re a little bit less targeted. How you’re gonna approach them is a little bit differently. And then there are things that are a little bit more targeted, a warehouse painting, office painting, church painting, something that’s more niche, either, either targeting by vertical, by service, or targeting by service area.

Those tend to have a lower cost per click, but they also have a lower search volume. So they’re hyper targeted, you’re not gonna get as many leads that way, but, but they can be highly profitable. You should run both kinds of ads. So we’ll show examples of what both kinds of ads look like for that. Here’s examples of, I don’t, I don’t love these ads, but these are the generic keywords. This is gonna capture people searching for commercial painting. You don’t really know what kind of property they’re looking for.

If they type in commercial painting, is it an office? Is it a church? Is it a war, what actually is a retail space? What is that? And so you, you see these kind of generic. Descriptions here, we paint retail stores, restaurants, hotels, chain stores, right, all this stuff. There we go, over there. Uh, the next one, request your free estimate today, your local full service building. I actually like the one on the left, we made that a little bigger. I like that they’re just listing out what they, what they do.

Because if I have a restaurant, I wanna know if you have experienced painting restaurants. So I think if you just list out the different kinds of painting that you do, maybe I didn’t. Decide to search for a restaurant painter. I, I said, hey, we need to get the restaurant painted. We’ll go ahead and find a commercial painter. I went out and I looked. OK, they paint restaurants. So I like identifying the services because you wanna really call it your avatar. This is a lot easier. So this is the longer tale, you know, hey, I’m gonna bid on warehouse painting.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I wanna show up for Google Pay per click when people search warehouse painting. Well, now my ad is not gonna be. It’s not gonna be a commercial painting company. We paint retail stores, restaurants, hotels, chain that is not my ad that you’re going to see if you search warehouse painting. You are going to see safe and effective applications, leading providers paint. We’re gonna talk strictly about warehouses. We’re gonna talk strictly about what you care about. And then taking it a step further, we’re actually gonna drive to a landing page specific to that.

So who here knows the difference between a website and a landing page? Cool. So the, so, a website is essentially a compilation of landing pages. Every single page is basically a landing page. When you run a Google pay per click ad, the, a big mistake that probably 90+% of companies make is they take the ad and they drive it and they put it to what’s called the home page, ABC Painting Company.com. That’s your home page. That’s the main page on your website. You put it there and then you have about us, you might have different.

Service pages you might have different service area pages ideally, you know, you might have a testimonial page. You have all these different pages, but you just take them and you plant them on the home page. But if you’re running uh uh an ad here about warehouse painting, or if you’re running an ad about commercial paint or office building painting, you would want to have a specific landing page. So you essentially want to take what’s called a funnel, and you wanna make it as tight as humanly possible.

So if somebody searched. For a warehouse painting, I know that all they want is warehouse painting. They don’t wanna know about my retails, uh, painting. They don’t wanna know about my office painting. They don’t wanna know about, uh, all this other stuff, any kind of water tower painting. They just wanna know about warehouse painting. So I’m gonna take them to a page. There are gonna be no other actions that they can take. There’s no menu. They’re not gonna get lost in the about us and all the other stuff.

People don’t care, by the way, about a lot of that stuff. People think they care, they don’t care. So they’re gonna go to a warehouse page. It’s gonna be a portfolio strictly on warehouse projects. There’s gonna be some testimonial, some case studies. I’m gonna speak directly to the avatar, to whatever they care about regarding the warehouse painting, and the whole thing is gonna be tailored to that. That’s, that’s a tight funnel. It’s more work. It means when you’re gonna set up a lot of different campaigns for Google Ads, you’re gonna run up to different lanes.

Pages not crazy technical work. You basically just take a landing page, you duplicate it a bunch of times, you change the pictures, you change the testimonials, you change the copy, the verbiage, what you’re writing because you’re writing it to somebody different, and then you end up seeing a much uh a lift in what’s called your conversion rate. More people that actually come to your page are taking action and your ROI improves on your ads. Local service ads, Google LSA, who’s running Google LSA? Wow, OK, so everyone should be running Google LSA, even if most of you guys are doing residential, so you definitely should be running Google LSA.

This is the future of Google. So this is absolutely the future of Google. Google doesn’t outline their product roadmap. They don’t tell the world what they’re doing. But when you see their development dollars, when you. See the trends that they’re moving in for, for local services. Google LSA, it’s merging with Google Business Profile. This is where they’re going. It can serve both residential and commercial, and knowing that it’s the future of Google, you want to get in, you want to dominate as quickly as possible because it is where Google’s headed.

So you can see if you search for commercial painters, office painters near me, even though those aren’t categories that you can select right now, you’re still gonna show up. Residential, most of you do residential, you’re gonna show up for a lot for that. Some tips for success here. Right now they appear at the top. So we’re talking about a Google lead costing $200 300 dollars, $400 for a Google lead. Right now your Google LSA costs like $30. It’s insane. Right, it costs, costs about 30 bucks, 40 bucks, maybe 50 bucks. It’s literally at the top of Google.

I would try to get as many leads as humanly possible. If, if you’re gonna do a, a search for a, a commercial painting company, residential painting company, and I can be at the very tippy top of Google, I’m gonna play that card all day long. And if it’s not the, the difference between Google Ads. So this is called Google pay per click. So when you run the traditional ads, every time somebody clicks on it, you pay. Doesn’t matter if they actually even go to your landing page, it might, might not even be a human being.

It might be a bot. Unfortunately, that happens quite a bit. Google’s gotten better at monitoring that. But every time somebody just clicks that link and then they bounce, and then they don’t go to the page or they go to the page, they don’t take action, they don’t, they don’t give you their information, you pay, and you’re gonna pay between $603 dollars. Google local service ads, you’re paying per lead, per lead. That’s sick. That’s amazing, right? On Angie, you’re, you’re gonna pay what? 200, 200, 300, you’re gonna pay a lot of money per lead and it’s sold to you and all your friends at the exact same time.

Here you get the lead just for you for like 30 to 50 bucks on Google. It’s a high intent lead. It’s somebody who’s taking their time. They’re already investing their time to find the right painting company. Somebody who has money, their time is worth more to them than their money. So if they’re on Google, if they’re actually already investing their time, they’re willing to open their pocketbook for the right company as well. So definitely don’t sleep on LSA. I believe I’m very confident that it will switch to pay per lead or excuse me, to pay per click because Google’s gonna make a lot more money that way.

I think they’re just getting adoption right now. They’re getting buy-in. That’s how the platforms work and they roll out a new ad platform. They, they make it as, as accessible as possible, the, uh, the ROI as high as possible to get mass adoption, and then they start jacking up the prices. They start jacking up the revenue model. So definitely lean into that. LinkedIn, Dave, nice of you to join us. Thanks for coming, man. So LinkedIn, Dave has made it. Can we get a round of applause for Dave for showing up for the workshop this morning?

I called you out before, you weren’t here, so now I know when you showed up. So, LinkedIn, uh, I like him, that way, the harder I am on somebody, the more I like them. I talk a lot of crap about Daniel Honan, who’s also not here. A lot of crap about him because I like him a lot. Daniel’s great, by the way, profitable painter, CPA. If you guys haven’t talked with them, talk with them. They do good stuff. So LinkedIn isn’t for job hunting anymore. LinkedIn’s awesome.

It’s awesome for commercial. So running, who here is running ads on LinkedIn for commercial? Oh, OK. Well, there’s your takeaway, right? Try, try to, try to run some linked ads, LinkedIn ads for commercial, because it’s a more professional platform. I don’t like it at all for residential. We don’t do it at all for residential. For commercial, it can work really, really well. Here’s an example of what targeting would look like. So you can essentially see this is for job title of property manager in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s much easier to target on LinkedIn.

People buy a job title. Right, so you can actually target the job title so you know exactly who you’re speaking to. You might not get a, a plethora of leads here. It’s pretty, you know, 0 to 30, basically. LinkedIn’s telling you they have no idea how many leads they’re gonna give you, but definitely explore it. Part of marketing is testing too. So we’ve worked with over 400 companies, right? Generate over 300,23 leads. We test because a different company at a different time of year in a different market with a different.

Brand presence, what worked in one market right now today might not work for that company in another market a month from now. So a lot of marketing is testing. I think a big mistake painting contractors and contractors make in general is they do these, they kind of, kind of put their toe into marketing for a second. They try something for a second, it didn’t work and that channel doesn’t work. That doesn’t work for me. You have to actually be OK losing some money on marketing. There’s a piece of it that’s testing.

You have to be OK with that. So test test LinkedIn, run some different ads, target some different job titles, and see how that goes, because eventually it will probably go well. Here are some examples of ads. Uh, the LinkedIn is gonna be obviously more professional showing some pictures of what you did, some videos also test test between videos and photos. So one of the things that really drives me nuts is, is marketing gurus. Like to go online and say, you know, this is dead, that’s dead. It’s all video now, you have to do video, you don’t do photos anymore.

None of it’s dead. It can all work and it varies by market. So when we’re running me ads, we actually find video outperforms. Static images about 25% of the time, it usually doesn’t. The cost per lead is usually a lot higher. So sometimes video works, sometimes photos work. It depends who you’re targeting, where you’re targeting, when you’re targeting, and what your company looks like. So you have to test, and I think that’s a, that’s a major, hopefully you guys take that point away. Testing is a part of marketing.

If it doesn’t work, if something doesn’t work, you’re still doing the right thing. Continue to test and you’re gonna find winners. Sometimes too, it’s about the offer. So it’s about the ad, right? Direct mail is notorious for this. People sending out, you know, they send out direct mail, they do one blast. Hopefully it’s at least 10,000 pieces. There’s some certain metrics you would want to hit, but they do this blast, they say, well, direct mail didn’t work. I didn’t get any, I didn’t get any returns. Usually they’re, they’re looking at it too short of a time window, because direct mail, it kind of spaces out over, over really a period of 6 weeks in the return.

So they’re oftentimes looking at too short of a return window, and then they’re not even factoring in, well, whoa, did my ad suck? What was my offer? What was my creative, right? The creatives, the image, what was my copy? What did I actually write? So I think we, we think it’s, it’s like we just put out an ad and it doesn’t matter what the ad is, it doesn’t matter who, you know, what the words say, it doesn’t matter what the picture looks like. It’s just this, this medium, this vertical works or it doesn’t work, and it’s a complete abdication of responsibility.

There’s a lot that goes into marketing. It’s very nuanced. And all of the channels work. If you know how to work the channels, all of the channels work. So Meta adds, we like it more for residential. It’s stronger and residential, but you can target commercial, the same people are on meta. They’re, they’re they’re human beings. They still have Facebook accounts. We’re all still addicts, right? So we all still have vices where we spend more time on things like social media than we should. So you can target key roles, you can, you can actually reach out to them, um, and, and call them out, call the avatar out, call the person that you’re running that ad for, call them out in your, in your copy, in the actual ad that you’re writing.

So here’s some sample targeting for residential. You can see down at the bottom, it’s kind of hard to see. We have interest interior design, home interior, Sherwin Williams, home, home interior design, whatever. Right, Benjamin Moore, not sure when we’ll just get them out of there. Benjamin Moore. So we have all these different, all these different, um, options for targeting, and then you can see a commercial, it’s gonna be job facility manager, property manager, on-site property manager. So there are, there are different ways to target. What’s actually really interesting in meta.

Let me actually jump to that. What’s really interesting, Meta, something came out this year. Who, who knows about the Andromeda update for Meta? So it’s this weird thing. So it used to be, when you run an ad, you can see there’s a word. Get, get out my trusty. I brought this up here, so I want to use a bot it and everything. So it says suggestions. So it used to be, show it for you guys here. So it’s suggestions. So it used to be, um, that you would target people and it would, it would have to have people that, that met that criteria.

It’d be detailed targeting if they didn’t meet the criteria, they’re not gonna see the ad. The Andromeda update, it essentially changed it from, hey, take this ad and show it to these people, flipped it, which is irrelevant. It does change the strategy a little bit. It flipped it from. I’m gonna follow the person instead of the company running the ad, and I’m gonna show that person the ads that I think are most applicable to them, regardless of, of what you may be put in. So what you’re putting in for this is no longer detailed targeting, it’s now suggestive.

So essentially Meta will take it into account when they’re running their ads, but they might also just not listen to you, which is fine actually. Who here has watched the movie The Social Dilemma? So yeah, it’s, it’s scary. It’s super scary. It’s, it’s came out a few years ago, so Meta’s gotten just only better. They just continue to collect data. Meta and Google, they, they know more about you, I’m convinced than you know about yourself. It is super scary. So leaving targeting kind of opening when open, when, when Meta and, and Google, when they do this stuff with the algorithm, the algorithm kind of hijacks and takes over, it’s actually gonna do better than when you put your thinking cap on and you say, well, I want to target these kinds of people.

Meta’s gonna actually do better for you. But then it comes back to again, what’s your ad? How do you stand out? What’s your ad? What’s your brand positioning online? We’ll get into some of that. What is, do you take people to a tight landing page? Do you have a tight funnel? That’s where you actually win at a lot of this for residential people do business with people, so, so residential, make it really personal. None of these look like a painting ad. They all absolutely crush, absolutely. Crush.

You can see the one, the 3rd over Fresh coat Painters of South Dayton, 645 people reacted to this, 196 comments. Who the heck is commenting on an ad for a painter? I will tell you who’s commenting. It’s people that have actually worked with that painting company talking about how great of an experience they had. So now you have an ad and you have 196 testimonials under the ad. You guys think that ad does well? Does super well now you have this massive wall of social proof. In addition to that, you’ve shown Meta, hey, people really are reacting to this ad.

People are enjoying this ad, and so Meta is actually gonna show it to more people for the same cost now because Meta wants people to have an enjoyable experience on their platform. So more people are seeing it and now the people who do see it are like holy cow, this company’s really good. That crushes. So you wanna, you wanna strategically do stuff like that when you just have a before after photo or you have a little, little video reel, oftentimes you don’t get that kind of engagement because even if they did business with you, even if they loved your, your company, even if they left you a review, like this is the best contractor I’ve ever worked with, and then they see an ad, 1, they probably don’t even know it’s you, because they just see houses, whatever, they’re gonna scroll past it, see it’s an ad.

And number 23, even if they do figure out it’s your company, there’s no emotional connection there. You see the guy that you talked with, or you see the owner and you see him holding his kids, and you’re like, you know what, that guy really took good care of me. I’m gonna take care of him. I’m gonna go, you know, unprovoked. I’m gonna go put a comment and be like, hey, this guy’s awesome. You guys should use this guy. He’s, he’s really, really good. And so some people will be trolls, people you, you had to fire.

Right, so you had an employee or subcontractor or whatever, you let them go. People who you went out, you, you provided a quote and they, they scoffed at it, it was way too high, that’s ridiculous. Uh, people that maybe the project didn’t go well, we’re not perfect, sometimes things go wrong, maybe the project didn’t go well, they might light you up, hide the comment, don’t delete the comment, hide the comment. That’s best practice because they’re gonna continue to think that it’s there, they’re gonna see it, the rest of the world doesn’t see it, so Meta recommends you hide it, you don’t delete the comment.

And then for the people, everyone else, we, we have this automated. Automated with human review is what we do at our company for our partners, but everyone else who comments respond to the comment. You’re showing Facebook, you’re showing Meta more interactions. There’s now more comments, there’s more engagement on that ad, so it’s gonna show more people the ad for the same amount of money, but you’re also showing people that you care. If I go in and I take my time and I’m like, you know, Brian, Brian came out to the house, he’s awesome.

I’ve never had an experience with a, with a company like this, use him, and then Brian doesn’t respond. It kind of makes it look like Brian doesn’t care that I just went and I went out on a limb and I said this for him. So make sure you’re responding to that, man those comments. That’s really important. commercial, it can be a little bit more work focused, right? Commercial, ultimately, what are you trying to do? You’re trying to solve a pain point. They have a boss, they have a budget, they need to get the work done.

They’re a little bit less relationships obviously super important, but they’re trying to get the work done. You can be a little bit more business focused with your commercial ads. This Andromeda update, by the way, the, the big shift, what it means for you guys when it’s saying, hey, here’s, here’s a person who uses Facebook, what kinds of ads should I show this person versus here’s an ad and who should I show this ad to. A lot of this is gonna be mixing up your creative more. So mixing up your images, mixing up your video, using, using different kinds of creative as well as different kinds of copy.

There’s more testing that you have to do right now, and that’s how you, that’s how you essentially drive down your cost per lead, given that update. All right, SEO So Dave does SEO really well. Who, who here has listened to my podcast, Painter Marketing Mastermind? Sweet. Not that sweet though. That’s like a third of you guys. So check it out. Thank, thank you for those of you who have, for those of you who haven’t, thank you in advance. So go to, if you go to any, any streaming podcast platform, look for Paint American Mastermind.

Go to PatAmericanpros. com podcast on there. So I’ve done a bunch of episodes with Dave. We did a whole series together. Dave runs a highly successful alpine painting and sandblasting painting company. Uh, in the Northeast, he, he gets a ton and ton and ton and ton of leads from SEO. And it’s interesting how, how so many small commercial painting companies will tell me that SEO doesn’t matter for painting, yet Dave running a multi-eight-figure company gets a ton of leads that way. So I think it does matter.

And one thing that Dave’s done really, really well is he has specific landing pages per market per and specific landing pages per type of service. So. Here’s an example. So on their website, they have a warehouse, warehouse painting page. They’re gonna have a warehouse portfolio, they’re gonna speak to that avatar. Everything on that page is gonna be about painting warehouses, right? They have a a page for churches. So everything is gonna be target the pain points, target the needs of a church that wants to be repainted, maybe historical restoration there.

Healthcare painting, obviously there’s gonna be some different things that go into that. Healthcare painting, hospitals, clinics, doctor’s office. And one of the things that, uh, I guess we’re not here. One of the things that Dave said, one of the quotes, and it, oh, here it is, the, the priest doesn’t care that you paint water towers. So if somebody’s searching on Google Ads, by the way, you, you’re gonna take the Google ad and you’re gonna approach the same way. So if somebody’s searching for church painter. You know, church restoration, searching for that on Google, you’re gonna run a paid ad for it and you’re also gonna have a page like this on your website that’s, that’s essentially gonna drive that organic traffic to your website.

So those are two ways you’re gonna target that. It’s still that idea of a funnel. If you just take people and you put them on your home page and you’re showing water towers and office spaces and whatnot, you’re not, you’re not speaking directly to that priest that’s researching right now. Speak directly to the avatar. Uh, a concept of marketing is, is message, market, and medium. So who are you speaking to? Who’s your avatar? Who are you actually running this ad, or who are you actually building this page for?

What’s the message? What do they care about? What’s their pain point? Dig into that pain point, sell them the dream, and then what’s the medium by what you’re, what you’re going out and getting them right now, that, that medium is Google. Here’s some examples of commercial buckets. So, so here’s, here’s how you can kind of run ads. Here’s how you can kind of think about, uh, SEO. Another big concept misconception of SEO is people think everyone that if you rank really well, then they all just go to your landing page.

They go to ABC, they, they go to your home page. They go to ABCpainting Company.com. It’s not how it works at all. They actually are gonna end up at all different kinds of pages. If you guys go and do some searches on Google, just search for painter, painter near me, painter my era, plumber, just search for anything, and you’re gonna see the ones that do effective SEO, you end up on these subpages on their website. You end up on the, the warehouse painting page. You end up on, on, you don’t end up on the home page, right?

Some of them will be the home page, a lot of them, the ones that are doing it really well, they’re dominating Google. They all of these different pages are ranking, and they’re ranking for what’s called different keyword phrases. Here’s an example, warehouse painting, the subphrases warehouse painting services, warehouse painting contractors, warehouse painting contractors near me. Those are all different things that are going to be typed into Google or chat GPT. Same, same principles here apply to AEO. So AI search. Uh, this is another website we built.

This one is primarily resident. It’s all residential, so Paris painting, but you can see the concepts are the same. So services, you’re gonna wanna have different pages for each service and then service areas. So people think, well, I just served Minneapolis, I just served Tampa, I just serve whatever, but that’s not necessarily your entire service area market. It’s not what people are gonna search. I’m in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Saint Petersburg, Sarasota, Tampa, I’m gonna wanna have different pages for each of those, because now when somebody searches for Tampa Painter, if I’m just focused on Saint Petersburg and I don’t have a page dedicated to trying to rank for Tampa Painter, I’m not running an ad for Tampa Painter, I’m not gonna be there.

There’s a bunch of inbound traffic, a bunch of people are doing searches, and I’m not showing up. So having pages for service and service area is really key. It’s fairly basic. It’s really fundamental for SEO and, and same concept again for the landing pages for Google Ads. Maggie. Maggie wrote, uh Maggie had a, a good quote here. So some of these quotes are from podcasts that I’ve done, by the way, so listen to the podcast. This is just a hint. So in commercial work, they’re not looking at Google reviews, they’re looking at the content on your website, looking at the professionalism.

I’ll push back on that a little bit. Google reviews are really relevant for SEO. So if you don’t get any Google reviews, you’re also gonna struggle to show up organically, so that actually really matters. And if your Google review profile is terrible, obviously that will matter as well. But ultimately the professionalism, what you’re, what you’re putting on the website, the applicability of it, the tightness of it, if you’re, if you’re looking to paint water towers, I wanna see a bunch of examples of water towers and why you’re the company that I should use.

So build pages, again, the alpine painting and sandblasting, build paint pages for, you can see how many pages we have here. This, this is just a subset, but commercial services, a lot of, a lot of companies will just have commercial painting. That’s the page, commercial painting. There’s so many types of commercial painting, not as many types of homes. We’re not searching for like paint my, my stucco home, paint my whatever home. But commercial painting, that’s a super very, what do you mean commercial painting? There’s so many different options there.

So they, this is just a subset of some of the pages. It, it goes on and on the website. So go to, go to Dave’s website, we’ll all stalk them, kind of see what it looks like. Uh, AI traffic is growing, so there’s this, I, I know, um. Uh, AltaVista presented yesterday on the AEO, the AI search stuff. AI traffic is growing. It’s actually not as significant right now. Here’s the difference between Google Search. Google Search has taken up about 40% of website traffic is coming from Google Organic.

And down there it’s about 0.28% of traffic that’s landing on websites right now is coming from Chat GBT. There are a lot of searches that are happening on chat GBT, but they’re mainly just informational. They’re getting their information back. They’re rarely actually clicking in and going to a website that will continue to grow, but it’s not as drastic as people think it is, is this, this chicken little, you know, the, the sky is falling kind of deal right now. Also, the same concepts apply. It changes a little bit.

You want to get a little bit more long tail in some of your approach, a little bit more conversational, so ranking for those kinds of keywords. But the same concepts, the same fundamentals that get you high on Google are also gonna get you high on, on chat GBT. This is, and, and by the way, that’s called answer engine optimization. Uh, it, it improves the brand’s visibility, AI powered engines. It’s not just chat GBT, but that’s the most highly adopted one right now by the general market. And getting citations, putting up, putting up content, doing technical stuff, so schema market, doing, doing some certain technical things that are beyond the scope of this conversation on your website, uh, building authoritative backlinks.

So a backlink is like someone recommending you. If someone, if some, if you link to a garbage website from your website, it hurts your, it hurts you. So it hurts you. So when somebody, when you get an authoritative backlink, I’ll give you guys a hack too. So if you’re. If you’re, I mean, all you guys are generally, I mean, I know, I know Dave serves a bigger area. Some people serve bigger areas, but if you’re, if you’re pretty hyperlocal, especially residential, this is really important, but it helps with commercial as well.

You can research the different, the Little League, the Cub Scout, the church, research the different sponsorship opportunities. Some of those sponsorship opportunities come with a backlink. If you know what you’re doing, it’s not overly hard. You can, you can actually figure out what’s called the domain authority of that backlink. How authoritative is that backlink? On a scale of 0 to 100, you can use a website like Hrefs A H R E F S.com. You can use a website like that to essentially figure out the credibility of that backlink, and then you go out and you strategically sponsor these things to get backlinks to your website.

Don’t take. Them all to your homepage, take them to various pages, most to your homepage, about half to your home page, half to other pages. And what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna show Google, hey, I’m this, I’m this trusted hyperlocal company in this area with all these organizations around that you know that have pretty high domain authority, and they’re all linking back to me. Therefore, when somebody in this area, in this radius is searching for a painter, you know that you can trust me, Google. So that’s called industry, that’s a service area specific.

Then there’s industry specific. For me, painter marketing pros, we have a backlink from the PCA. Google knows that the PCA works with painting contractors, is a trusted association, been around a long time, has a high domain authority. It links back to painter marketing pros. That’s an industry specific backlink. So, well, you know, this website’s probably at least somewhat trusted in the painting industry. Uh, this is a, this is a quote too. This is by Tim Solo. So he’s the CMO, chief, chief marketing officer of H Refs.

H Refs is a leading marketing intelligence platform. It’s what we use for SEO for Google Ads research. He said if you want your brand to show up in chat GPT, you have to do the exact same things you do to rank in Google. It’s a lot of this stuff, and, and people say, Well, how do I rank in Bing? How do I rank in these other platforms? Number one, they’re very darn minuscule compared to the traffic on Google. And number 2, it’s, it’s, everyone’s kind of following Google.

Google has this massive data set. No one has as much data as Google. It’s absurd. It’s gonna be very hard to catch Google ever because of the data that they have. The, the data is so valuable. It is the value currency right now. So because they have so much data, everyone’s kind of following Google’s algorithm. So if you do what you need to do for Google, you’re gonna win at all these other platforms. So don’t listen to people saying SEO is dead, Google is dead because it’s not true.

It’s a sales gimmick. Social media, social media, social media does not, I, I think the posting, the organic, I actually don’t think I know from our data, the posting on social media doesn’t generate a ton of leads, so we’ll typically generate maybe 2, maybe 3 organic leads a month, and we know that because we use tracking, we use tracking numbers, we use tracking scripts on the website, so we know where a lead comes from. Whether it comes from SEO, whether it comes from a Google ad, whether it comes from a social media organic, whether it comes from a paid social ad, whether it comes from local service ad, if it comes from a LinkedIn ad, we know where the the lead comes from.

Very few leads come from social media organic posting. What social media organic posting does is it bolsters your professional presence. So when you run an ad and then people go do homework on you, which definitely a commercial, they’re gonna do even more than the residential, they see this constant professional presence of content that you’ve put out. Your, your last post wasn’t 8 months ago, and they’re more likely to trust you and take action. So social media postings, what is going to increase in marketing speak. What would be your conversion?

The more people that see you, a higher percentage of them are gonna take action. It’s not gonna generate a ton of new leads, and that’s another big misconception like, oh, you should, you should post on Facebook. I post all the time. I do these $15 boosts. I do that. It doesn’t really, that’s not really gonna help you get leads. It’s gonna help you close leads. Here’s an example of some posts, you can see some, some different content. It does, you don’t want it all to be. You don’t want it all to be salesy, so the, the, there are different kinds of content.

So core pillar content is what, what a lot of people would think of. It’d be kind of the before after project showcase. It’d be industry specific or technical expertise post. This is really more about the craft. It’s more about your work. It’s what everyone posts pretty much every single time. But then there’s engagement content. People want to do business with people. People trust people. Nobody wants to go do business with a faceless corporation. Even commercial property managers, commercial property owners don’t want to do business with the faceless corporation.

They want to know who they’re doing business with, who they can trust. So when you kind of behind the scenes, employees spot. Lights, client success stories, um, just behind the scenes of, of your application or how you run your projects. Now all of a sudden you’re, you’re lifting the veil and people feel like they can trust you. They understand the company, they see how you operate. There’s this, there’s this trust factor that goes up. So about half of your content should be really more geared toward this if we’re doing 23 posts a week, which is the example here, and about 1 of them should be what essentially everyone’s doing, and then 1 per week should just really be thought leadership.

For me, this is the podcast. For me, this is being on this stage. This is thought leadership. Right, so you guys can do the same thing with your stuff. So social media, put up thought leadership, put, where do you see the trends? Right? What do you, what do you see going right in commercial painting? What do you see going wrong in commercial painting? So putting up stuff, innovation, safety standards, evolution, sustainability. Uh, here’s, here’s some examples of posts. You have a, you have a, a meet the team one in the middle, that’s gonna be kind of that behind the scenes.

You have a before or after or before and during, that would actually be a little bit behind the scenes. So a lot of these are kind of behind the scenes, because it’s not a before or after, during. People trust that more. The before and after, they don’t really know what happened in the process when you can kind of show stuff, especially videos, then it increases the trust factor. Right, database, who knows what database reactivation even means. Branddy, you know what it means? Yeah, so Brandon, Brandon’s huge on this.

It’s the idea, he talks about a lot about stepping over a uh a dollar to pick up a dime, right? So we, we do, I run a lead, what’s called a lead gen company, so we generate leads. That, that’s the primary thing that we do. We also do stuff like this. I think that the money is in this. So lead generation, that’s your, that’s your foot in the door, that’s your first step, that’s you getting a lead, that, that’s your most expensive lead ever. When you generate a new lead, it is your most expensive lead ever.

It’s a cold lead. That’s where all the content, that’s where the portfolio, that’s where speaking directly to the avatar, that’s where you have a specific offer. That’s where all that stuff comes into play because they don’t know you and they don’t trust you. Right now you’re just a commodity, you’re just, you’re just another painting company. That’s your most expensive lead. Once they’ve done business with you. They already trust you. You didn’t screw them. You did a good job. You know, the, the trust factor is so high.

That you want them to do business with you over and over and over again. You want them to repeat their friends, their refer their friends, their colleagues. This is database reactivation. So what we do is every single quarter we reach out to all of our past clients. We reach out to, not, not for us, for our partners, we reach out to all the past clients. We reach out to all the past leads that didn’t move forward because they’re still a lead. They had a need at one point and they trusted you enough to give you their information even if they didn’t do business with you.

We reach out to them and, and we have some sort of an offer. Some sort of a back to school offer, right? Or hey, book now before the end of Thanks, you know, before the end of November offer, reduce seasonality, pump in some work for the winter. So so many people sleep on this list, and it’s interesting. Private equity is obviously entering the home service space. It hasn’t come aggressively as aggressively for painting yet as it has for some other verticals, but it will. You know what, I worked in private equity for several years.

I worked in leveraged by a group at a company called HIG Capital. What, what private equity, one of the main things they’re looking for is your client list. Right, they’re looking for certain things. They’re looking for, for how many inbound leads do you generate. They can go in and they can make ads. So if you guys are really good at ads, they don’t need to buy that from you. They can, they can figure that out on their own. But if you have, if you’re showing up everywhere for Google, they can’t do that overnight.

They can’t go flip a switch, they can’t put money behind that and make that happen. So if you’ve built this solid brand, if you have 500 Google reviews, if there’s all these different keywords that they, that you can show that you’re showing up, and you have this huge list where you can show repeat business, you can say. Hey, on average, our lifetime, our lifetime customer value is X. We know that data because we track it. It’s not just average ticket size, it’s a lifetime customer value because typically, uh, of this whole list over the past 15 years, the average person on this list has done business with us 3.6 times.

The reason that they’re gonna pay you more money for your company now is because they’re going to make more money. Think about that. So, so companies don’t really think about it, they say, well, I don’t wanna sell my company, so it doesn’t really matter. They will buy you, buy it for more money, they will pay you more money because it’s going to make them more money. That inherently means that it will make you more money. So the list is really important and actually doing something with the list, actually being able to show how many times somebody buys from you.

Matt That is so good looking. So, we don’t market to companies, we market to people. Matt, what is, if you don’t mind, well, it’d be awkward if you didn’t at this point. Where, where are you at roughly revenue for Harpeth painting? Uh, wait 20 minutes and I’ll have it on the screen. I don’t wanna give it away yet. OK, so it’s a, it’s a secret soon to be revealed for you guys, but I can tell you it’s a sizable number. So when Matt, who, who’s, you know, done thousands of deals and does a lot of money every year.

When he says we don’t market to companies, we market to people, that’s a trend that I would probably wanna listen to and follow since, since he’s running a really successful business. This stuff is not rocket science. It’s not new. We’re not up here curing cancer. We’re not doing something that’s never been done before. We’re taking tried and tried and true advertising and marketing principles. We’re applying them to, to the mediums to Google, to the chat GBT, to everything that’s available today to Meta. And then we’re, we’re winning.

So looking at companies like Harpeth Painting that are already winning, imitate what they’re doing. Looking at the Alpine Painting, looking at the website, looking at how big and successful that company is, how many what’s called inbound leads, people that come to them. What, what, what do you think is, is better in terms of a trust factor if somebody researches and, and Google shows, shows you to them, and now they, they’re coming to you, they’re knocking on the door, I can tell you, I, I have had so many people come through that have listened to the podcast for years.

I was, I used to run the sales. I don’t run the sales anymore. But when I ran the sales, there would be people say, Hey, man, I’ve, I’ve been listening to you for, for 2 years. I, I’ve, I have probably listened to 80 of your episodes. The deal’s done. It’s already done, right? So I’m gonna, I’m gonna make sure it makes sense. I’m gonna talk about their business, because sometimes they’re too small, it didn’t make sense, but I’m gonna make sure it makes sense, but there’s no trust I need to convey.

It’s already done. Right, so if you, if you have that brand, if people are coming to you, your job’s mostly done. At this point, it’s just yours to lose versus if you have to go out every single time and you have to get that lead, you’re, you’re, there’s so much more work that you have to do to establish that trust. So get people to come to you. That’s called inbound leads. That’s all this stuff on Google that we’re talking about, and database reactivation is that stuff where you keep in touch with them.

You, you flatten out your seasonality, and you take the person who did business with you once and you have them do business with you again and again and. And then you have them do do refer their friend and their colleague and everyone else to you and all of a sudden you have this ecosystem that’s what Brandon focuses a tremendous amount. Painter’s Academy, you have this ecosystem where you’re creating a tremendous amount of value. One thing I do, one thing I would do, one thing I, so my wife has started a painting company.

She’s very adamant that it is hers, it is not mine. Uh, I, I value my marriage more than I do my entrepreneurial success. So I don’t run a painting company, but I can tell you an idea that I, I think very is very good that Nick May came up with that was not mine was free interior touch-ups for life. I like that a tremendous amount, and people think, Well, why? That’s crazy. That’s absolutely crazy. I’m not gonna offer free interior touch-ups for life. I’m not gonna send a guy out there every, every single year.

To do work for free, I’ll I’ll, I’ll, you know, I’ll lose my shirt on that. But if you actually offer that, if you think through this process, if you send somebody out there and you cap it, you have to be smart about how you do things, you cap it, it’s an hour, it’s up to an hour per year. And you’re sending someone out there every single year, that’s a sales appointment. Now you, you saved several $100. You didn’t have to generate that. You just have a standing sales appointment with this person every single year, right?

And if you call them and you say, hey, you know, just wanna let you know, we serviced you a year ago, worked on it. We know scratches and things happen, uh, interior of the house, we want to make sure it’s looking brand new for you. You as part of your, part of your. Service, we have free interior touchups for life. When works for you for us to send out our painter to go ahead and, and knock that out for you? Compare that to the company. I mean, what’s, what’s the homeowner’s fear?

The homeowner’s fear is you’re gonna screw them. You’re gonna mess something up, you’re gonna, you’re gonna, you know, drip paint all over the floor, you’re gonna steal something, whatever, and then you’re out, you’re gone. They call you, you don’t answer the phone, you already paid them, you’re out. This is the complete antithesis of that. If they, if they now need something repeated, you know, most homeowners are gonna need to repaint every, every 13, 3 years. They’re gonna need something else painted. It’s yours. It’s yours forever. So everything that they ever need is now yours as long as they live in that house.

That neighborhood becomes yours because guess what? You, you might have a referral program that’s active, you hand them a sheet. I believe in hard collateral for that. Don’t just, hey, do you know anyone who needs a painting job? Make it, make it specific, incentivize them. Give them $250 Amazon gift card. Give 10% off the referee, make everybody win. You, by the way, you, you say, well, I don’t wanna pay this. You have to pay for leads. Leads are expensive. So if, if you pay with ref with kind of incentives.

You’re saving money on the leads, so you have to factor all this in because that is your cost of lead now. So when you, maybe they don’t know anyone, maybe no one in their neighborhood needs painting, maybe none of their friends or family need paint. A year from now that somebody’s gonna need painting, 2600 years from somebody’s gonna need painting. So now you’re just owning everything, right? So that, so think about that kind of with this database reactivation, with this keeping in touch with your list stuff. Networking, who in here networks?

I would hope to God that that’s everybody. If you’re at a commercial painting conference, I would hope to God that everybody networks. So that’s obviously massive building the relationships. It’s the same kind of concept as homeowners. It’s this trust factor. They need to know that you’re gonna meet their needs and that you’re not gonna screw them. In this case, they probably need to know that you’re gonna make them look good to their boss. Right, no one ever, there’s a, a quote, no one ever got. Fired for choosing Microsoft.

Right, no one ever got fired for that. So it’s the idea that there are sometimes more innovative tech products that come out. There’s sometimes more innovative solutions that come out, but a lot of times employees will err on the side of maybe a, a less innovative or maybe even a less applicable kind of software solution for their company because it’s safe versus if they go out on a little limb like this software looks really cool. I think this could really do, and then it flops. Boss is like, what were you thinking?

Why would you do that? Look how much money this cost us. So if you can be the safe alternative, you can say, hey, we’re safe, we’re trusted, we’re true. We, we meet the needs, we do it on time, we do quality work. Person just you, you, you’re safe bet. So grow business through networking. We seek relationships, not work. The quote from, from Matt, couple networking groups there, uh, and then Matt, uh, I really like this quote from, from Maggie, which was again, I think, I think this came from a podcast episode.

I take freaking lasagna to the job trailers, not because I’m a girl bringing dinner, but because walls go down when we’re human. Again, people do business with people regardless of whether it’s a homeowner, whether it’s a commercial property owner. No one feels really excited. No one feels really trusting of. Of a company of a faceless entity of a faceless corporation, people want to do business with people. We’re all human beings. We’re craving that, especially now. I, I would actually argue this is, this is becoming even more relevant with AI, you know, we see videos half the time we don’t even know if the video is real or not.

It’s like, oh, I can’t believe that guy did that. Oh, the splash happened before he landed, and so he didn’t do it. Like, I, I, I, I’m starting to not know what videos are real and what I have to watch it twice sometimes to figure out if this thing actually happened or not. Like that would be crazy. OK, it didn’t happen. That makes more sense. That guy just walked through that other guy. Yeah, I don’t think that actually happened. But, but we’re, we’re getting inundated. It’s just gonna get worse where we don’t know what to trust, right?

So building relationships, if you’re actually talking to somebody, you’re bringing lasagna to them, we’re still at a point where if you, if you bring food and talk to me, I believe that you’re human. I don’t yet believe that you’re not. At some point, I, I, I will question that, but we’re not there yet. Learnings from podcasts, a couple quick learnings, and I wanna give you guys a little bit Q&A. So cash is king. Juan Vasquez, uh, good friend of mine, if you don’t plan it right, a lot of companies go out of business because they say, yeah, I can do it, then it takes net 23.9, net 260, and, and your cash flow runs out.

So I know Daniel, he, he talked some about cash flow. There are many, many, many businesses throughout history that have gone bankrupt and, and gone away because they sold too much too fast. So when you’re moving from residential to commercial, you have to understand you need cash reserves. You have to understand how that, that cash flow, that working capital cycle is different from residential. So take that into account. I know some of you guys are residential only and you’re looking to move into commercial. It’s a different game, so don’t, don’t just sell without thinking through your cash reserves, uh, business development, Dave said we’re transitioning from painters to business professionals just professionalizing your overall company.

And then Matt, every day you have to block out time for business development. That’s what you guys are doing right here. You’re here working on your business. You’re not you’re not just hustling for deals right now. You’re not putting out fires right now. You’re actually working on your business. Go home and actually write down 22 to 22 things from this conference and then implement those things. That’s the, that’s a key part. Well over half of you are going to do nothing from this. It’s still, in my opinion, not a complete waste because you came, you expanded your mind, and, and you planted seeds.

But if you come to conferences, oh, I go to a lot of conference this is like my 22th or 33th conference this year. I go to so many conferences and so many people don’t. I follow up with them. They don’t, they haven’t done anything. So write down 23 to 25 things. I think we all wanna do everything. I have this idea and this idea and this, and that guy said this, and, and then we don’t do anything. So just almost cut your losses a bit and say, hey, I’m gonna do 225 things.

And, and here are the months by which I’m gonna do it, and I’m gonna hold myself accountable to do it. And by doing less, you’re gonna do more, because otherwise oftentimes you’re going to do nothing. Uh, systems over sales, so the accountability advantage. Matt Carlson, uh, take ownership of your results, build systems. I’m very, I’m a big believer in the importance of systems, systems over people. System solves people. Systems hold people accountable, and systems actually helps you hire the right person too, because then you put systems in your HR and you’re recruiting, you put systems.

In your management, in your performance, in your incentivization system solves people. So I’m a huge believer in systems over people. Uh, there are books, there’s who, not how. I mean, killers, absolute killers obviously help you, but you can’t rely on just having a bunch of killers to grow your company. It’s not realistic. Most people are not killers. Uh, systems drive million dollar growth. Garrett Martel, he runs a really successful company. Chris, I want to put one in for Chris. Chris, where are you? You think you have friends.

So this is just a life lesson. You think you have friends and then you get up on stage, a guy’s like, I wouldn’t want to present, and then he leaves. Sweet. So quality is a permission to play. That’s an expectation. We built our company around providing extraordinary experience. Who here has ever looked at a painting company website or an advertisement that says quality service? You guys ever heard that or seen that? Nobody. You guys should do that. That would be really innovative. If you guys say, hey, we provide quality service, you guys are gonna stand out, because apparently nobody’s ever seen it.

Who here has ever seen a company or gone to a website or seen an ad that said mediocre service, mediocre quality. Less so. So if everybody says the exact same thing, it’s just white noise that doesn’t mean anything, right? So you don’t differentiate by providing quality service. Like, dear God, I hope you provide quality service. You’re all in this room, spend a bunch of money, spend a bunch of time to be here. So I assume you care enough about your company to provide a quality service. That’s just permission to play.

That just means you’re not a dirtbag. Right? You’re actually going out doing what you promised and say you’re going to do. You’re not a dirtbag. You don’t grow a huge company by not being a dirtbag, you just stay in business that way. You grow a huge company by the service that you provide, by the above and beyond that you provide, by the, by what the other contractors don’t do. Uh, niche focus. So Gina, Gina Kurt, Shamrock Painting, very big painting company, very successful, very big in the PCA.

So I always, I always say pick a niche market. If you cast too big of a net, it’s gonna get messy and you’re gonna, you’re gonna fail. I know one thing Maggie and Matt, that we’ve talked about is essentially picking, if you’re moving to commercial for the first time, and I, I know from talking with some of you yesterday that you are, pick a niche, pick a vertical. Don’t just say, hey, I do commercial painting now. Pick something, maybe do office painting. Right, retail space painting, restaurant painting, pick something and start there, become really good at it, develop connections there, and then move to another vertical, and then move to another vertical.

We’re 6 years in, and we only work with painters. 6 years in, I can’t, I got my director of ops. He’s been pushing me for over 1 year to go move into plumbing, roofing. Hey, we, you know, we, we’ve already done so well in painting. Why don’t we go home services in general? Because I think there’s more meat left on the bone. I think we can get better at what we do. So I haven’t done it yet, 6 years. I still work with just painters. People are like, what are you doing?

So you don’t, people think, people think that you’re, that you’re losing all this, all this market share, but if you become an expert at a niche, I promise you there’s a lot of market share there to take versus if you come with this generic, hey, we do everything and none of it very well, you’re not gonna do as well. So own a niche, become the best in the world at that niche, and then move, or at least the best in your service area at that niche, and then, and then move forward, move on and grow from there.

Uh, people, oh, also people think too small. I like this from Matt a lot. People think so small. It is, it is, it’s just as hard to do small things as it is to do big things, so you might as well go bigger in your business. You’re taking a lot of risk by having a business. So many things can go wrong. It’s like a million things that can go wrong for you guys, so you might as well play bigger and make more money because otherwise why are we here?

So recap targeted marketing, use targeted marketing message, market medium, identify who, who’s your avatar, who are you actually selling to, who are you’re speaking to, what do they care about, and actually have your copy, have the words that you have, uh, address that person. Through the different mediums, through the different channels, whether it’s Facebook ad, whether it’s a Google ad, whether it’s Google SEO, whether it’s direct mail, use the different, different, uh, marketing messages that are gonna resonate with whoever you’re targeting, build relationships, of course that’s extremely important in.

In commercial it’s also important to residential and this idea of of monetizing your database. Just imagine yourself going to a potential acquirer and that acquirer looking through your financials, looking through your client list, and you being able to say, hey, here’s how many clients we’ve worked with over the past 10 years, 15 years, 53 years, 5 years, and here’s how many they’ve bought, how many times they’ve bought on average. Here’s the average ticket value each time they bought. Here’s our gross profit margin. Your finances get a whole lot better when you do repeat business and you do it very intentionally.

Uh, continuously improve operational excellence, do good work, don’t go out and do bad work. That’s another thing that’s kind of ironic, and it happens, it’s happened with quite a few of, of my competitors. It’s something that, that marketing agencies are notorious for. They go out and they market hard, market, sell, market, sell, market, sell, but then they actually put themselves out of business really quick, really quickly. So there are agencies that have kind of come into the painting and then they go into the plumbing and then they go to the electrician, then they go.

Because they just burn markets throughout. So if you guys, if you guys say, hey, I’m gonna market, I’m gonna do all this stuff really aggressively, but you don’t have operational excellence and you start selling beyond your operational capabilities, then you’re actually killing yourself because now you’re just, you’re getting more people to think negatively about you. So make sure you’re running a solid company. People in culture and then financial stability have, have the actual cash reserves understand that. So Brandon Lewis is here. We do a lot of painter marketing pros has a partnership with Academy for Professional painting contractors.

I got Bran who here has talked with Brandon or Tara? Cool. So they’re, they, Brandon’s been in the space for, for over 12 years, worked with 550, 600, some, some large amount of painting companies. His average, he has an annual summit. Average painting company that attends there is, I think, I think 3.9 million. I mean, sizable, sizable companies. He has an immense amount of experience. We are hosting a one day, uh, boot camp. So one day boot camp, if you go to commercialwinterwork. com, he’s gonna be sharing his whole playbook, what he shares with, with all of his clients, people who have worked with him for years.

He’s gonna be having some people present. I’ve asked some of his, I don’t think I told you who it was yet. I, I told him this happened yesterday. I’ve asked some of the people that present for him. I, I reached out and I asked, we have an event coming up as well in December, um, a little before that, and I asked some of them to speak at that event, they told me no, because they say they don’t really enjoy speaking, but they’re loyal to Brandon because of what, what he has done for their business, so they only speak for him.

So you’re gonna hear some voices that you will not hear elsewhere that I cannot get to speak elsewhere. So go ahead and check that out, commercialwinterwork.com. We’re gonna be laying out everything that you need, uh, to get your first, if you’re starting your first commercial, uh, interior painting project in the next 60 days, uh, and it is, it is a complete money back guarantee if you come and you’re like these guys are a joke. Um, we’ll just give you your money back. So we don’t need it.

We need, we need our reputation. We don’t need your money. So. Check this out. We’re, we’re offering a free in-depth 2-hour audit. Uh, Evault, he’s a smart dude. Some of you guys have talked with him. He’s a very smart dude. So at this point, I kinda let him run with it. He’s South African, so he talks real pretty like too. And he will do a 2 hour audit with you guys, so that’s something we’re offering here. We do not offer that. That’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of money for us to, for me to make him available like that to you.

So if you scan that, we will give you a completely free 2 hour audit of everything you’re doing. Obviously the idea is if there’s a fit that we would, you know, it’s a sales strategy, right, for us, but you don’t have to move forward with us, we’re gonna do it either way. But potentially, yeah, there is potential partnership opportunity, but take advantage of that because we’ll meet through every everything you’re doing either residential or commercial we’ll go through we’ll, we’ll identify areas of improvement you guys have that little checklist, but we’ll go a lot, a lot deeper for you, so it’s, it’s worth exploring.

Who’s got questions? It always makes me feel like I nailed it, you know, when you, when you finish a presentation, nobody says anything, it’s like I know, when my wife asks me how it, how it went, I’ll be like, I know it went well. Yeah. Um, when you’re posting stuff on social media and like let’s say you’re working for a GC and they post something about a project that you worked on with them. Would it be more strategic to like repost or share their post or make your own post about it?

no, share it. I mean, do, do both, OK, do both, but no, you wanna share the heck out of that. It’s so it’s always more powerful. I mean, that’s why testimonials, that’s why social proof, that’s why Google review, that’s why that stuff’s so important. It’s always more powerful when other people talk about you than when you talk about you, right? People trust other people. You’re of course going to say positive things about yourself. So yeah, share that, especially if they’re sometimes they’re they’re um kind of influencer micro influencers what we call people who have a lot of connections in a certain area.

If you can get one of them to post it and put up people like, oh I know that. I, I know that guy, then that, that’s huge credibility when you should put that everywhere, blast it, and then guess what, save it and then post it again later. Don’t just do it one time. Use that same post, save it, and, and then post it again later. You can pin the post too at the top of your Facebook page if somebody, it’s a really good post, pin it. So that you’ll see some of these, some of these pages, the top post is 1 year old, and then the next post is 3 days old because they pinned it at the top because they want everyone who goes to that page to see that post.

Yeah, Ryan. I think, I think Steve’s gonna get you a microphone. Well, we’re recording, we’re recording it. It’s not that loud, Ryan. Then I’ll talk really quiet. Can you explain backlinks to me a little bit or how to get them? I’m always confused with them. Yeah, so backlinks is just a, a, so you know those hyperlinks, you go to a website, you click on it, and then it takes you to another website. That’s what a backlink is on Google. If you go ahead and you link to a bunch of garbage websites, then it is going to hurt your ranking.

It’s gonna kill your website. So when you have a, a strong like PCA, if, if. Painter marketing pros, if I just made it this terrible website and there were a bunch of websites like that and then PCA kept linking to them, the PCA website would not show up nearly as frequently. If you search for painter trade association, things like that, it would start to tank because it’s, it’s essentially vouching for another website that’s like, hey, here’s my friend. That’s what you’re doing online. You’re telling Google, hey, here’s my friend.

So when you get something that’s either specific to that service area like the Cub Scouts, the church, whatever, those kinds of sponsorships, or you get something specific to home improvement or commercial, commercial property management. Then you’re saying, hey, this is also specific to this type of service. So industry or service area specificity is is key and then also what’s called high domain authority so I, I, you know, we could go on this for like 5 hours. Last question. Brandon, uh. Posting is very important. I’ve got an account that’s about 25 years old, Newport Coast Marriott Villas.

We like painting at that place. I love that place. Go to work in paradise. Had some painters post some stuff. It went through the corporate hierarchy like wildfire. I got a call from the general manager who’s a personal friend, but he’s a powerful dude with my money I earned there. Posting is powerful. Is anybody else here in the building had an employee post something that’s not appropriate that went through the corporate and they said, no, you can’t do that. Posting with certain information is. Can be dangerous, but the right stuff, right content, and filtered.

Is that pretty much accurate? Yeah, I mean, that’s, I think that’s PR in general, right? You have to be careful what your company’s putting out in general, whether it’s social media posts or anything else. I’m just dented. It almost cost me a real valuable account. You don’t mess up telling your employees not to do that. Yeah, no, it’s a good, it’s a good point. I appreciate you guys.

—-

Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback. Let us know how we did. And also if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at PainterMarketingPros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.