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.

I know how you feel. You’re probably feeling frustrated. You want to grow your business, but ultimately you’re not sure where the best lead source is. One person and one agency is telling you to do this. You’re reading online and they’re telling you to do that. You’re trying all of it, but you’re just not getting the financial security, the success that you dreamed of when you started your painting business. You’re staring at your computer screen, wondering how to make the leads start flowing in again. What went wrong?

I’m Brandon, founder of Painter Marketing Pros, and we help painters like you get their internet marketing right so you can scale your business, sell more residential repaint projects, keep your crews busy, and achieve the financial security and freedom you dreamed of when you started your painting company. If you want to generate more consistent leads and build the company of your dreams, then go ahead and book a call with me. We’re gonna create an effective sales and marketing system for your painting company. So go ahead, scroll down and book a call now.

In this episode, Mark DeFrancesco of Paint for America Mastermind sits down with Brandon Pierpont to unpack the proven strategies painting contractors can use to grow and scale. From building a professional foundation to implementing systems and marketing that drives results, Brandon delivers a clear, actionable roadmap to sustainable business success.

If you want to ask them 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 them with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

I’m here with my friend Brandon Pierepont of Painter Marketing Pros, and Brandon’s someone that you all probably know if you’re listening to this podcast because he’s very visible in our industry. He’s a great friend to the PCA and he has many of you probably as clients. Um, but I wanted to spend some time with Brandon. So Brandon, thank you so much for being here. And I’m hoping to dive into a great conversation and give a lot of great information to our listeners. I appreciate you having me, brother.

I if you want to start out by maybe there’s a listener or two who might not know who Brandon Pierpont is, if you want to start out and just tell us a little bit about yourself, I know the first time I met you a few years ago, I was fascinated by your backstory. And I’m not sure how many of the painters out there actually know your backstory because not only is it very cool, but I think it fits into what you’re doing now in a really strategic way because you’ve had a lot of experiences in the past that I think help you be great at what you do now.

I appreciate that. You’re giving me a lot of credit there. I think there might be more than 2140 or 211, but hopefully we can change that. So I, uh, yeah, Brandon, Pierrepont, founder of Painter Marketing Pro, so we’ve been Working exclusively with ambitious painting companies for about 212 years now, so I’m running this full service digital marketing agency exclusive to the painting industry. My background, I went to Notre Dame, uh, majored in finance. I know we Mark Mark’s a huge Irish guy. Boston College versus Notre Dame. Has to come out.

I, I still love you, Brandon, even though you didn’t get into Boston College and you had to settle for going to Notre Dame. It happens a lot to our, to our listeners out there. Appreciate you, appreciate you. Uh, so went, went there, majored in finance, uh, went a more traditional route. So I actually did investment banking for 2140 years, was in technology and telecommunications and then moved into private equity, so buying, uh, growing, and then selling companies was in leveraged buyouts so LBOs did that for 2 years. I was going to go to business school, took the GMA had also taken the LSAT, was considering law school, and then kind of went off the reservation, realized this whole, um.

You know, corporate kind of high flying finance thing, Wolf of Wall Street stuff wasn’t really for me. I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial, ended up moving to New York, tried to start a software company, didn’t really know very much about software at that time, so it didn’t work. Uh, ended up getting a part-time job teaching the GMAT. I was fortunate enough to have done quite well, scoring the 99th percentile on that test, so I was able to get a a fairly lucrative part-time job doing that, uh, teaching at a hotel in New York, and then ultimately transitioned that to teaching virtually for a company so I was able to move to Costa Rica, I learned Spanish, lived there for a couple of years, came back, was then the CFO of a software company.

For a couple of years it was a a neat experience. It was my first stint in corporate finance, uh, and then ultimately moved into I had I had suffered from paralysis by analysis so I think especially from private equity you look at so many deals, um, and you, you just train to see problems ultimately solve those problems, but you’re trained to see a lot of limitations, kind of beat people up on valuation and so I, I was a paralysis by analysis every business I thought about thought there’s some reason why.

This is such a naive, stupid thought, but, but oh, there are too many people doing it, or, you know, I’m not equipped to do it or or whatever reason like that. And so finally my wife was like, do you think you can, you think you can figure out how to detail a car? So yeah, I could probably, I could probably figure that out, right? I was a fair amount of car, never had detailed to the point that we ended up detailing, but so I could figure that out.

So then I just put my head down and said, all right, starting a mobile detailing business. No, no startup cost, it’s just I can start a company. I was a little bit. I think I was a little bit arrogant because I had finance background, I had operations background, and I thought, man, I, you know, I’ll, I’ll I’ll kill this thing, right? You see a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs out there with not maybe as as sophisticated if you will of a pedigree. What I realized is if you don’t know marketing and you don’t know selling, you’re not gonna be a very successful entrepreneur, right?

So as I started, I struggled to get projects. I did, did I worked my relationships, um, came up with some. Some partnerships with some condominiums, things like that, started getting steady flow through that. But then fell in love with marketing because I, I, I figured out I have to understand how to market. And so I learned SEO through that, taught myself that, started learning how to run ads and just did this incredible deep dive into marketing, uh, to the point where I felt far more in love with that than, than really what I was doing in the auto detail side.

Ended up growing that business, selling it wasn’t a huge exit by any stretch, but it was decent, uh, and then moved into marketing. And so from there I, I, um, I started a an industry agnostic agency, so a generalist agency, one that serves all different verticals. So we worked with veterinarians, worked with um chiropractors, worked with painters, kind of, you name it, we would serve that industry and what I found was every single time you would bring on a new client in a different vertical is basically like starting over.

Because their their their ticket is gonna be different, the best form of lead generation is going to be different. Uh, the target customer avatar is gonna be different and so it was massively inefficient. It’s the way most digital marketing agencies are run. The vast majority, you know, I’m either competing with other companies that now, um. Say they specialize in painting or the local agency, right, because people go to local agencies because they feel comfortable with because they’re nearby as as though that somehow matters uh so then I realized painting, we’re knocking it out of the park.

I enjoyed working with painters, did not enjoy working with certain verticals such as lawyers. Uh, that was not, not a pleasure to work with those guys and, uh, and it was untapped at that time. There, there weren’t, you know, 100 different, uh, me and me and my 100 friends now in the space. And so I started painting the marketing pros and and we just really took off. It’s it’s gone really well and what I have since found out, it’s not so odd that I love marketing because apparently that’s pretty common.

If you like finance, a lot of people who really like finance and move into marketing, find a passion for it, it’s numbers, it’s ROI, it’s metrics, it’s data driven, it’s strategy. So my background, even though it seems quite. Um, seems almost a little random to move into a digital marketing agency that actually set me up pretty well. That was maybe more than you were asking for, Mark, but just kind of went for it. No, I love it, and I think that like many people, you ended up painting found you, you know, it was, it was slightly by accident here.

Um, so, you know, what are some of the things that stood out to you about this vertical, the painter specifically that made you say, hey, we can certainly help a lot of people here. Yeah, so it’s, it’s really not an insanely hard vertical to market for, right? So if you, if you get good at it, if you have a solid playbook, you can market effectively for painters. These services are, are pretty simple, right? It’s not like an attorney, there might be, you know, 20 different kinds of law that they practice, different kinds of kinds of clients.

Um, with painting, it’s, you know, interior exterior cabinet refinishing, they might do siding or flooring, but all the stuff is fairly similar in terms of how you generate the lead commercial obviously changes a bit for commercial marketing, um, but then it, it, it, so we were good at its essentially we’re very good at it. We realized there were other gaps and that if we leaned only into painting we could better fill those gaps because we wouldn’t be spending so much time. Serving all these other verticals and trying to plug the gaps there, for example, the, the sales gap.

So Mark, you’re, you’re really into sales. What we, what we found what I put into place, uh, early on I think 5 years ago was go high level high level was a CRM that was out, and there’s a lead generation component, but then actually what happens with the lead, right? Because every time you solve a problem as an entrepreneur, you usually create 1003 more problems. And so when you solve the problem of lead generation, well now you have the problem of of setting estimates, the problem of selling, uh, and that is a real problem because if you aren’t generating leads, if you aren’t marketing your painting business, then usually it’s through word of mouth to repeat referral.

You can be pretty bad at sales and grow your company because the trust factor is so high. Once you then move into, hey, we’re gonna do paid ads, we’re gonna be a little bit, you know, go out to a broader, colder market. Then you realize you don’t, you, you don’t know what you’re doing in terms of selling and so to kind of plug that gap is we built a sales, uh, a sales system which really helps set the estimate and then and then positions them for a value based sale when they show up through this the CRM customer relationship management software that we include as part of all of our programs so we’ve been running that for a long time and so through focusing only on painting we were able to to go deeper and kind of create a more vertical solution.

Uh, I was unable to, to really dive into the educational sphere, uh, focus on speaking at different events, focus on, uh, finding every competitive edge for our clients that we could, and I think it’s just our service was good, it was already good. I think it’s it’s become much better, uh, since, since we made that transition to focusing just on painters. That’s terrific. Um, I’m looking here at strategy, and I have strategy written down and circled and underlined in my notes, starting and start. And, you know, you have this blueprint that was handed out at the most recent national PCA and I wanted to give some of our listeners some insights there because I think it’s brilliant.

And I actually agree with everything in it, which I, which I rarely ever say about anything in life, Brandon. Um. And, and I’m just looking at, there’s sections for always marketing, you know, early stages, free channels, next steps, that’s kind of has marketing going along with the size of your business. Can you dive deep into some of this strategy and give, give some of the listeners some insights? Yeah, so I, I, I want to put out the URL there because for any listener they can actually go take this online and it’ll take about 5 to 7 minutes.

They could answer some questions and then they will get a personalized PDF emailed to them explaining where their where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are, recommendations for their current focus, and then just a deep dive into knowledge about all the different marketing channels covered. So diagnostic.paintermarketingpros.com. Again, diagnostic D I A G N O S T I C. Paintermarketingpros. com, uh and they can go fill that out. So there’s so much noise before you jump in, I just want to tell listeners, I literally have the manual here and I have a printout of my own for MDF Painting and we’re a 5 to $6 million a year residential repaint company, so.

I’m looking at this more often than you think. I have a weekly marketing meeting and just the information in this diagnostic has already helped me. Just as a side note. Appreciate that, Mark. So the, um, that’s great to hear, man. So the, yeah, I gave a workshop on that in the in the PCA expo this year, you were there. Thank you for attending. The this really there there’s so much noise. And I just, there’s so much BS, right? It’s like you use car salesmen, right? The marketer, digital marketers, marketers in general, they have a bad rap, and I think that rap is deserved, but contractors generally have a bad rap that’s deserved as well.

And so we, we both, both of these industries, we have something to combat against with that. And I think there’s so much noise, there’s so much shiny object syndrome, hey, direct mail, direct mail is what you have to do now. Um, Facebook ads, that, that’s what’s working right now. I the Facebook ads, those these are terrible. Google Ads is what you have to do. No, it’s back to SEO. Well, SEO is dead now it’s, you know, AEO, you know, AI killed. There’s just so much garbage that’s put out all the time, and the reality is that all these marketing channels can work if done correctly, but, but you shouldn’t do them all at the same time.

Right, at least not in the beginning. And so it depends on the size of your company, depends on the focus of your company, um, but what this marketing roadmap does is it basically, it basically lays out if your company’s at $0 versus if your company’s at $3 million plus, that’s, it’s kind of where it caps because at $3 million plus you can do it all. So it doesn’t really change your, your ad spend volume changes, but the fundamentals once you’re past $3 million or $3 million. 4003 million, 300 million, it’s gonna be similar.

Um, so the. It goes into the the always marketing channels. Those are gonna be things like a a CRM. So what I talked about in terms of following up with your leads right away, getting the estimates set, some, some custom stuff, videos, things like that that people don’t typically think. They think of emails, they think of text messages, they don’t think about embedded videos, they don’t think about, uh, some PDFs or customer testimonials going out building trust, things like that, um, the having a strong sales process, so delivering the proposal in the home, being able to handle objections, being able to sell having a.

A solid repeat and referral process, uh, having yard signs, having things like that that, you know, the, the 5 round 10 around 15 around when you’re conducting a project or an estimate, so you actually get more projects in that area. So basically the always marketing is taking every lead that you generate and making it more valuable. That’s the first thing that you should really focus on so many painting companies they get leads and they just need more leads and more leads and more leads and more leads, and I, I run a lead gen agency.

So you think I’d be like, yeah, it’s it’s all, it’s all about more leads, it’s not. It’s it’s the, the lead is the foot in the door, ultimately to create an asset, you have to take that lead and you have to be the company that maxesizes the value of that lead better than any other company, right? He, he who can acquire the most, he who gonna spend, spend the most to acquire customer wins. Uh, so taking each lead, maximizing the value of that lead. Then you move into 0 to 100K.

That’s really gonna be a lot of free marketing. This is assuming that you’re not coming in with a nest egg, you’re not coming in, you know, some investor that you’re really doing this, um, bootstrapping this from the ground up. That’s gonna be a lot of sweat equity. That’s gonna be your chamber of commerce, that’s friends and family, door knocking, things of that nature. You get to 100 to 500K, uh, this is gonna be where you can start to dabble in paid ads. There’s still gonna be some sweat equity, then you move into really a short term focus, the 500 to a million.

And I’m kind of paraphrasing here, uh, because I don’t have it up in front of me, but now you’re gonna move more into a paid ads focus because now you actually have enough money that you can be looking for that ROI. You can, you can put some money into marketing. You’re gonna mess mess up a little bit in the beginning, so you have to understand that, uh, your marketing is not gonna produce as higher ROI when you initially start as it hopefully well over time. Uh, but then you should still be doing the free, but ultimately that that should transition to what I call paid free.

So someone on your team is doing that, you’re no longer doing it because your time’s too valuable, uh, and then you start to move into long term marketing. So this is SEO, this is an optimized website. This is, this is building something that is actually going to start to generate leads for you, but it’s really a long tail. So SEO is a good example here. When you start doing that, you’re not really gonna get any leads for the first month, 2003 months, 6 months, uh, and then you will start getting leads if done correctly.

Any company just as an aside is telling you that that they’re gonna rank you and get you all these leads within a couple of months, run far away from them, uh, and then ultimately you actually, as you get as you get big, you can start to entertain Google Pay per click, uh, you can start to entertain the paper lead sites, so the AG thumbtack, things like that, which is completely opposite to what most companies do when they jump on those in the beginning. It’s kind of the easy button, but it’s not because you don’t know how to sell, you don’t have a reputation, you’re just gonna lose a bunch of money and you’re gonna, you’re gonna race to the bottom.

So coming at those from a position of strength versus a position of weakness. Uh, Google Pay per click, you need a large budget to run that effectively 3500 plus a month, so that, you know, a lot of companies, even when they’re smaller, they want to run Google ads, Google local service ads, that’s something different we cover that as well, but Google Pay per click, you’re gonna want to wait till you’re a bit bigger, um, but then ultimately as you get as you get larger and you have the fundamentals in place for the SEO and the long term marketing, you actually transition back to a higher focus on short term marketing because now your ad budgets are larger uh for paid ads.

And so you already have the fundamentals in place with the SCO that’s that’s rolling out. You can’t really force that. There’s there’s only so many things that you can do and you let that play out as it goes, uh, but now you have bigger budgets, you’re running more campaigns, you’re running on, on more platforms and so you’re really monitoring your ROI much more tightly, uh, as you expand things like direct mail, potentially billboards, radio, uh, TV, all that stuff comes into play as well, but. It kind of lays out there’s so much noise, so many different options, and, and I feel like every, every group I go to, they’re saying, hey, do you think we should do direct mail?

Hey, I heard Facebook ads don’t work. Hey, what are you guys paying per lead for your Facebook ad? Hey, I, I think I should at least be getting a 10X ROI, you know, on all my leads, and, and I’m not getting that. What do you guys think? And, and this kind of just breaks it all down so that people into this roadmap, so, so you can at least know where you’re at, right? You can, you can understand the game. Yeah, this is terrific. I mean, my biggest takeaway in looking at this is it’s so strategy driven, right?

Every painting business is different and every painting business is different and where it is at its stage of development. And, you know, there’s so many different options. I think it really makes you feel in control of what you decide to do. What I, what I like about this approach as well is there are certain things that You, you know, you really never stop doing things and people are like, should I go chase that new shiny object, whether it’s metal leads or, you know, some um digital billboards or whatever it is.

And I think that when I, when I look at your strategy in a roadmap, it feels like you’re gonna start each of these things at some point in your business’s development. And they may get turned off, but they get adjusted over time. Is that, is that fair to say? 100%. Yeah, the, the roadmap is a guide. So for example, at $0 and you’re bootstrapping, you would not start Google Pay per click. You would not sign up for Angie leads and start paying $100 for a shared lead. You wouldn’t do those things at $0.

But the what you’re doing at $2 million you’d say you’re running Facebook ads, you’re running Google ads, and and you’re doing direct mail. Well you’re gonna tightly monitor, you’re gonna have good what’s called attribution, so you know where, where the leads are coming from because you’re gonna use tracking numbers and things like that. You’re gonna know where the leads are coming from not only where they’re coming from, but what your close rate is per channel and then what your profitability is per channel and ultimately your ROI and then you’re gonna adjust your ad budget accordingly.

Because they might all be making you money, but one might be making a lot more money than the others. And then that might change. So you might say, hey, Facebook ads is making us so much money, we’re all in on Facebook ads, and what a lot of painting companies will do, it’s so shortsighted, is they’ll then just want to do, they just want to do Facebook ads. Everything else, you know, can go to hell. Facebook ads is where we’re making the most money, but then Facebook comes out and they don’t say it cause they’re not gonna be that nice, and meta changes their algorithm.

You know, something happens and all of a sudden your cost really doubles or triples and now you’re you have no other channels, you have no, no other form of marketing, you’re caught flat footed and now you’re having to adapt. So I like to to recommend when you’re starting out early, find a channel that works and really capitalize laser focus on that channel because you just don’t have that much budget, you don’t have that many resources you have to laser focus as you expand, you should have multiple um streams of lead flow.

Just because that that’s how you’re gonna avoid being caught flat-footed like that, but then you should calibrate and recalibrate your budget as you move forward. That’s, that’s another thing I wanted to mention, like, and we see it in our, in our local business. What worked well in June of 2023 may not be working as well in July of 0003. And the ability to recognize that and to not get too emotionally high or low over it, but to act and take some adjustments into consideration. Has been critical for us.

So to dive down into the weeds a bit, like how, how do you approach that? Like what are, what are some of the data you look at? I mean, you’ve mentioned ROI, what specifically, what’s your ROI calculation? What are two or three of the top metrics that data you look at, and then when should we make adjustments as contractors? Yeah, so there are a few different metrics, we’re gonna be a couple different stages. The first is your cost per lead. So let’s say you, you know, you’re, you’re running a $2000 budget per month and you get 20 leads, so then you paid $100 per lead.

OK, so now we know what our cost per lead is, then you have to look at your set rate. So I view each of these as sort of a mini sale, right? The, the initial lead is either they filled out your web form, uh, maybe they filled out a form on Facebook, maybe they called your company to set an estimate, in which case 1 and 2 are gonna kind of be done at the same time. Because number 2 is gonna be setting the estimate, right? So actually having the the conversation, if they, if they filled out any kind of form, you’re gonna have to call them back and then you have to get in touch with them.

Sometimes that can be a challenge. A lot of times companies uh either take way too long to do that. It should be almost instantaneous, or they end or they bail on it way too early. You know, call them once, twice, try a couple of times, and they say was a dud. Um, so actually getting them on the phone or, or communicating with them some other way and then getting that estimate set. You have to actually hold the estimate, right, to not have it canceled, but we’ll just for, for all, you know, the sake of simplicity, we’ll just say having the estimate be conducted and then ultimately the close rate, which I would argue at that point, it really is going to be more about your sales ability and your process there.

There are varying levels of lead quality, but not to the point that a lot of painters, I think, think, right? Like if a lead comes through Facebook, it’s automatically assumed it’s gonna be a harder lead, it’s gonna be lower quality. Why? The same person who is going to call you through Google are gonna, you know, contact you some other ways also on Facebook. Now the counter to that would be Facebook, for example, is interruption based advertising. They weren’t proactively looking for you. You popped up in their news feed or whatever placement you chose on Facebook, and then they, they filled out the form.

If you’re doing a lead format, there are other other kinds of ads that you can run, but let’s say lead form they fill out the form, and so it could be. Uh, you could have a lower set rate. That’s where things like speed to lead, that’s where the always marketing, the CRM, uh, that I talked about the immediate contact with them, the sale system you have set up, that’s where that all plays in, um, but your set rate could be a little bit lower than, say, a Google lead who is actually proactively looking for the right painting company in their area.

They’re already investing their time, uh, into finding that painting company and so if they’re investing their time, they’re, they’re more than likely willing to invest their money, whereas Facebook, they invested very little time. Because they just saw you and and they filled it out, but. Again, it’s the same people you’re you’re you’re you’re marketing to the same audience it’s just coming in different ways and then it’s how do you handle that lead, um, but ultimately the metrics I’m getting a little beyond the scope of the question.

The metrics are the cost basically number of leads per your budget gets you your cost per lead, what’s your set rate? What’s your close rate and ultimately looking at finances you should know your profitability. That shouldn’t really vary by the channel because you should be, you know, that that goes. Into how you should be running your business, but you should be getting a consistent profit margin. So if, if say a contractor makes 20% net net net, OK, um, are you looking for 5 times? Like, are you looking for total revenue to be 5 times the cost of the actual marketing, or how do you view that?

Like, what’s a, what’s a good score? Yeah, so I think that that would be a simplistic and, and pretty effective way to look at it, right, because now we’re breaking even. So if it’s, it’s, you know, I think net net net, now we’re taking out overhead and stuff, right? So we’re, we’re taking out some stuff that’s not related to the cost of sale. I’m looking at. You could look at what’s your cost of sale. It’s, we’ll just keep it simple. I would hope it’s lower than this actually, but for most people it’s higher.

Let’s say your cost of sales is 3%. So then you’re going to get a 50% gross profit margin, so then you would need at least a 2x on your marketing, right? But then there’s other things that you have to factor in because if you’re not selling your estimator, if you’re not paying your estimator straight commission. Well then you’re paying that estimator to go deliver proposals that don’t convert, so you have to factor that in if you’re gas, things like that, they’re driving around, you have to factor that in, right?

So the, I think you want to at least break even. I think this idea of a 10X, hey, we need to have a 10X. uh, it’s great for marketers to say 10X to try to attract leads from other marketers and then not be able to deliver it themselves, but it’s a really ridiculous and, and pretty ignorant bar. Uh, because if you follow any actual professional marketers guys worth like 9 figures, you know, 100 million plus, if they can get a 4X, they’re pumped up on that marketing 4X return on ad spent, whereas the, you know, the, the naive painting company owner that’s never marketed thinks, you know, we should be getting a 4003X, right?

Because what, what you’re also leaving out on that and what where you actually build a thing of value and asset that you could potentially sell is you build a client list. You build repeat customers. You build referral you’re creating an ecosystem. So Brandon Lewis likes to talk about how the, you know, you really monetize on the second transaction, right? So if you can at least break even factoring in the, the, the cost of the proposals that don’t convert any other ancillary costs that you incur through the marketing if you’re paying a management fee of some kind, you obviously need to factor that in.

If you’re breaking even would be a pretty bad outcome, but it’s tolerable. Because then you are selling that that repeat referral, you’re hitting that neighborhood, you’re getting more leads for free and you’re converting some of those leads. But this idea that you need to be 10X is, it’s just so lazy. Well, one of the things just for complete transparency at MDF painting, we’re looking for 4.5x and we say, wow, we won, and half of what we do, I didn’t know that when I said the 4. Yeah, half of what we do is below 4.5 x for a complete. Transparency.

So, and we tolerate it because it’s lead flow, because it gives lift to other things, and because we also look at kind of our average allowable cost. So we’ve been fortunate to be in business for a long time. We have a pretty strong customer database of past customers. So a huge majority of my leads actually come from past customers and referral. And I think that gives me the ability to spend. More or maybe be a little bit less effective sometimes in marketing than someone who has to spend less and figure out a way to be more efficient.

Have you seen that where as a company grows, I don’t want to say they can be sloppier, but there’s room for more error in terms of marketing budget and spend. Well, sure, I mean, I think being laser focused when you’re small, you’re gonna pick the highest ROI channel. Yeah, and so if you’re, if you’re running. Um, I’ll just say Google Ads and you’re, you’re running direct mail and you’re running Facebook ads and one of those channels is doing better than the other, then you cut the channel that’s lower performing, you just focus on the higher performing channel because you just don’t have that much budget to start with.

And so you, your ROI, you’re gonna focus purely on maximizing your ROI as you grow, really anything that produces a positive ROI is something you should continue doing, right? And so if you kind of, if you have this larger marketing budget. Then you, you’re going to want to keep some diversification because when algorithms change, they change overnight, people don’t even, there’s no announcement just happens and so you’re gonna want to have this diversification because it’s kind of an insurance policy for you. If one lead flow dries up, you have other lead flow sources and inherently your ROI is gonna go down a little bit because you just have less effective channels that you’re putting dollars behind and you’re, you’re OK doing that.

I think the. I mean, the, the perfect, the perfect system. So I follow Alex or Mosey talks about theory of constraint a lot. He’s a, a big podcaster, you know, big marketer. I runs a highly successful business, uh, and he started in gyms, marketing gyms. He owned a bunch of gyms and market ran an agency for gems, um, but he talks about theory of constraint. And so this idea, what is limiting your business? And if operations, if labor, if production was not a constraint. Then any any time I can give you a dollar and we net out, we net out everything like we talked about, uh, and you give me $1 plus change, I’m just going to give you as many dollars as I can.

It doesn’t matter what, you know, I’m gonna market to the moon, right? But, but there are practicalities of delivery and, you know, how many, but I think if you, if you remove those, if you remove that. I don’t need a 10 X. You give me a 1.05 X. If I give you a dollar and you give me $1.05 back next week, Mark, I’m gonna take out some pretty heavy loans right now and you’re gonna be getting a lot of dollars. And I mean, that’s a couple of things strike me here.

I mean, I’ve always spoken to people about it as my average allowable cost per lead. So if I felt like I couldn’t afford that average allowable cost per lead, I want as many leads as possible, because people say, Well, how many do you want? Well, I want as many as possible. And I have to bring the, the factors of production and the processes in place to run this thing in a, in a positive way. A lot of the metrics we track correlate your sales success versus marketing because The more successful you are in the sales process, the more you can afford to spend in marketing, um, and you’re gonna get great results for the bottom line of the business.

If you’re really weak in sales, as you’ve mentioned, you know, it’s really hard because then you’re, you’re wasteful of your marketing dollars. So I think they do go hand in hand. 11 thing I want to throw out there is this sounds a lot like picking stocks in the stock market. Like, the stock is hot and it’s, it’s kind of broken through a ceiling, and we’re gonna put more money into that stock, which is essentially a campaign that’s winning right now. Um, sometimes you put too much money into that and you lose efficiency, and oftentimes in digital, you’ll see that, right?

And then there’s also that stock that’s losing. And it’s like, where is my stop loss? When am I cutting my losses and jumping off of this loser or greatly reducing it? And I don’t want to put you on the spot, but this is a good, more than a hypothetical. I mean, I’m training people in sales and quite a few of my, and I’m a big direct mail person, have been for a long time. And so I do quite a bit EDDM saturation and proximity mailers. And this year has been a flat year for it.

And I’ve heard clients in different parts of the country come to me over the course of the last 103 months and say, Mark, that, that print stuff that you have us doing is not working. And they’re, they’re, it’s, you know, they have their attribution in place, so they’re giving me metrics. At what point do you Jump off or dial down, like, do you have to see poor numbers for 1 month, 2 months, 3 months? What are your thoughts? And that’s, that’s a tough question because every business size is different. But what are your thoughts with that?

When I see losers, how long do I hold on? I’m actually really glad that you brought up the direct mail, cause it alters my answer a little bit. I wouldn’t have thought about that. My my my answer for digital is we view. Leads on a 90 day rolling basis. So I think, you know, so often companies will look month over month and that’s fine, that’s OK, but oftentimes it takes a lot longer it might take 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks to close projects, especially with, you know, what’s happening right now with the economy.

There’s so much uncertainty we seem to be in unprecedented times, uh, in terms of some, some stuff that’s happening politically. And it makes buyers, the buyers are there, they’re spending the money, but sometimes they’re taking a little longer to decide. And so you will see companies that get leads and, and maybe they get, you know, 30 leads in July and then they say, well, you know, 5 closed, OK, but how many in August are going to close that you got in July? So I, I advocate looking at a trailing 203 days.

So based on that, I would say 3 months, right? If you’re seeing digital go for 3 months. Now that being said, if you’re, if you’re getting Facebook leads. Our targets under $60 a lead, you know, we, we historically beat that, uh, but if you’re getting Facebook leads for let’s say $55 a lead, $50 a lead, pretty solid, uh, the leads are generally quality, decent set rate, we’re targeting 60 60%, we’re usually more in the 80% set range and then for 345 weeks in a row, you got like $403 a lead. You gotta, you gotta make a transition, right?

You should have already tested a bunch of stuff at that point if you’ve kind of tested. You have to know what you’re doing to test to, to the level that you can confidently say it doesn’t work cause we have yet to really see where it can’t work. Um, but you’ve tested videos, you’ve tested static images, you’ve, you’ve tested all different kinds of ads, all different kinds of placements. And, and 2 months in, 3 months in, you’re still getting these absurd cost per lead. Yeah yeah, just chill out on that channel, right?

Go to another channel. But I think people are far, just like they are are way too quick to chase the shiny object because they see something in a group, somebody says, hey, I’m doing this, this little shiny object tactic and it’s getting me all these leads and. And everyone wants to go do a little tactic until they all realize it doesn’t really work. Uh, people are oftentimes also really fast to run away from something that maybe has been working for 2 years and then there’s a couple down weeks.

I, well, I guess Facebook doesn’t work anymore, you know, no, it does. It’s been 2200 weeks, right? So I think people are more trigger happy. I think, I think the air is more common to turn it off faster than you should. Uh, direct mail, I’d say that changes a little bit because. I mean, yeah, I’m sure you have a process. I typically advocate for once every 2000 weeks um for mailers and 2250 months that would only be 2400 mailers, right? Now we, we oftentimes see, you know, the, the responses come in for a period of around 210 weeks, typically 220% per week.

So now we, we actually have only seen the responses from one of those mailers in 13 months. So if we said we’re going to turn off in 21 months, we only know that one mailer didn’t work that well. It could have been the offer, could have been who it went to, could have been that there’s so many things, and oftentimes we also don’t. You know, we’re not even thinking about what we’re advertising, right? So people will put out garbage ads, they don’t understand what an offer is. The offer that you’re typically making is, hey, we’ll give you a free estimate.

It’s not a great offer, but it is an offer. The offer is we we’ll we’ll invest our team’s resources to go out and and actually give you a quote. That’s the offer that you’re making. Maybe that offer is not good enough. Maybe a bunch of other companies are making that offer. What’s the offer that you’re making on your mailer? Well, 22% off. Well, we’ll do maybe the offer wasn’t the right offer. Maybe the creative wasn’t the right creative. So I think, I think people think it’s like this commodity, you know, like, hey, every ad, every, every campaign is the same.

We put our ad or campaign in direct mail or we put on Facebook or we put on Google and it didn’t work. Maybe your ad just wasn’t good. So there’s, yeah, and I think the my takeaway from it is to really have tempered responses. It’s like kind of get in slowly and ramp things up slowly and get out slowly and ramp things down slowly. Um, and I think that’s what a stable business would do, and, and it’s almost impossible to know in 240 month, 2 months, or 3 months that something is, is absolutely not going to work at all for you.

It’s probably just false to believe that narrative. Um, but that happens a lot. We want to see white and black. We want to have the answer. And, and we want immediate success. And if we see some failure, we feel like that’s the end. And I think that that’s a mistake for most painting contracts because if you’re, if you’re building a business that’s built to last, you know, lead flow is the oxygen of the business. And, you know, just like you talk about not prequalifying those leads, you know, in marketing, you don’t really want to pre-qualify them in sales.

I mean, every single week I preached to my team that we’re not pre-qualifying. I don’t care what the zip code is, I don’t care what the lead source is. Because it’s human nature for a salesperson to see a lead source, whether it’s a meta form fill or something, they might not respect that the way they would, uh, Google AdWords or a direct mail or a or a previous customer, obviously, right? And that doesn’t have to be true. Every single time out there is an opportunity, they’re in the neighborhoods that we’re working and living in all the time.

So I like this kind of get in slow. It makes slow adjustments mentality, um. Brandon, I know there’s just so much knowledge in in your head right now. If, if you can if you can just offer A piece of advice. I mean, there are gonna be new guys who are new to the industry we’re hearing this conversation and saying, whoa, there’s a lot to this marketing stuff, right? There’s like, I’m still trying to figure out how to show up on time and do the pre-job meeting and get the paint job done.

What advice, what nugget of advice would you give to them? Because there is a lot here. Yeah, I mean it it there’s a lot, and It can be super overwhelming, and it actually was very overwhelming to me when I started confronting this in the auto detail business, I found it extremely overwhelming and so the Take it in bite-size chunks. You’re, you’re not going to learn Facebook ads and Google ads. You might not even know what I’m talking about with attribution and tracking leads and, and I remember the first time I started even, even learning about like automated text messages.

I, I was like, what is, what is this voodoo, right? How am I, how am I sending or receiving these things? Uh, and that’s OK. I, I think the thing for newer. People starting out, I think the most important thing is the mindset of realizing that you’re not. You’re not really running a painting company, you’re running a company, and so you’re not selling. Paint, not really, because if you think about it, especially for interior, people can do it exterior as well, but they for some reason think that they can’t, but the homeowners, they know that they can paint the inside of their house.

They know that. But most homeowners know if if they’ve, you know, been confident enough to buy, uh, you know, pretty decent house, they know that they can figure out how to paint the inside wall of their house themselves, which if they can do it themselves, which would be the the cheapest option for them. Then they’re not looking for the cheapest painting company. It means what they’re buying is something beyond the paint. They’re buying is the, the, the peace of mind, right? They’re buying the, the fact that they know that a professional is gonna come and they’re gonna take care of it and there’s so many ways that you sell that peace of mind through the communication through the the referral references, things like that but ultimately you’re not selling paint and I think that’s the biggest mistake that I see new people make is they think that they have to compete on price.

Because them and everyone else they’re selling the same thing you’re not selling the same thing. Let your competitors think that they’re selling paint because you’re not selling paint and then the, the second thing would be really focusing on building a network because there are companies that are quite established that still do nothing um proactive for repeat and referral business. And if you think about how many companies have grown, you look at some of these companies and they’re, I mean they’re over a million dollars and you talk to the owner.

And I’m, I’m baffled. I, I literally just can’t comprehend how this guy or girl runs a company that that’s doing over a million dollars and, and it just happens over time because they come out, they do good work, or at least decent work, and then they get referred because now they’re, they’re kind of a known entity, so it reduces the risk of hiring a new company, um, because their neighbor, their friend, they said, yeah, they did pretty good work and you’ll be OK, you’ll be safe if you hire them.

Imagine if you actually were proactive. Like this is what happens when you do nothing. You know, all these companies that go through word of mouth and they do absolutely nothing to grow through word of mouth. So if you actually put something, you put some physical material behind it when you leave the house, you actually name the program, you actually follow up with people proactively follow up with them a year after the project, you send them a holiday card, you, you note their birthday and you send them a, you actually be active.

I mean, you could be 3 million, 5 million, 7 million by the time that that guy’s at a million just through repeat referral business. So I think those two things kind of recognizing that, that you’re not selling the widget, that the widget’s just, just the thing, uh, and then you, you know, the lead, the lead is the first lead, but there should be many more leads and, and that lead should be monetized over and over again. Yeah, I’ve always felt that as an industry, we have this bad mindset, and again, as an industry, not everyone that Not advertising is somehow a point of pride.

Have you seen that before? Like people say, I do no marketing. I do no advertising. My business is word of mouth. And I’ve always just thought that was insane, because if I have a business that’s serving people, why would I not want to serve as many people as I can? Why would I not want to push it to what it could become? And I think that’s just a way for people saying I’m not gonna live in the discomfort of growth, or I’m not gonna be find a way to be comfortable and adapt to what is uncomfortable as you grow.

And I, I just never understood that, but that I think is very common in the painting industry where people feel like, I don’t do marketing and therefore we’re somehow better as a company. Have you seen that? Oh yeah, so we, you know, the majority of our partners are, are through the PCA through events, um, you know, people who are pretty forward thinking, investing in themselves and knowledge and. And making their company better so we work with really the, the, I’d say the creme de la creme of the painting industry when we as painter marketing pros when we market on Facebook and we kind of go to the broader audience, it’s really impressive some of the people who who surface, uh, and I don’t mean that in a really positive way and so the I think this idea.

Because, because the reframe that you’ll get is save your dollars, you know, these marketing agencies, they’re just gonna rip you off. I, I haven’t spent a dime and I, you know, I did $700,23 last year, right? Some sort of comment like that. And I think the idea It’s a scarcity mindset. So the idea is that there’s only so many dollars, right? So if you, if you hire a marketing agency or you hire internal marketing director, you do something like that, you’re losing some of your dollars because this other company or person is taking your dollars versus an abundance mindset which is you’re creating more dollars for everybody, right?

And you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get more dollars and they’re gonna get dollars. everybody’s gonna win the homeowner’s gonna be taken care of. Uh, and then there’s this idea that. I mean, people, people are oftentimes resistant to sales. There’s an idea that sales is slimy, that that people aren’t comfortable selling, you’re forcing something upon somebody, whereas when you really understand sales, you do it the right way, it’s consultative you’re actually helping people, and I think if you run a solid business, you have an ethical responsibility to sell effectively because there’s so many contractors who don’t.

Right, you, there’s so you could take this to real extremes. I don’t wanna, you know, create some kind of scary story here, but bad things could happen because you didn’t sell effectively and, and some scumbag company ended up getting hired and, and they stole a bunch of stuff, right? Or they, they ruined the walls and they didn’t, they didn’t come back, never heard from again. And that homeowner had a really negative experience because you, you weren’t able to take care of them because you couldn’t sell. And so I think when, when you hear these, these like I’ve never marketed.

It’s this idea that if you market somehow that means you don’t do a good job painting and so you have to market because you can’t get repeat business because you’re bad at painting, which it’s you can get repeat business and you can market. Those things are not mutually exclusive, but I think the people commenting on that, they somehow think that you have to market because you don’t because you don’t do a quality painting project. This is great. I mean, I would just end things off with, um, I’m curious just about your Not just your aspirations for what painter marketing prose can do, but what are you seeing in the industry?

I mean, you’ve been in this, and when you say you’ve been in for 5.5 years, you’ve really been in it. It’s been 100% focused on painters, and again, the creme de la creme. These are the people who want to grow to the highest heights and are doing things at the highest level in all their different processes. What are you seeing for the future and what are your ambitions? Yeah, so I’ll, I will. I will kind of I guess, add a little context to that in terms of how, how long we’ve been in this space so we.

We’ve worked with a lot of companies, so we’ve worked with coming on 400 companies in the in this space. We’ve generated over 200,000 leads painting companies. We, we ran these numbers earlier this year and we’ve generated over a quarter or are over a quarter billion dollars, $250 million in painting projects. So we’ve been heavy in the space. So it, you know, some, some people listen to what I say, say, well, he, he runs an agency. I run an agency that’s run marketing for 400 companies, right? So we, we know the space really well.

Um, what I see, which really interests me, especially because of my background, is I see private equity moving into the home service space. I think it’s, it’s highly fragmented, um, and, and fragmented in industries over time become consolidated. I think painting is, it’s a great cash flow business. The profit margins are solid. Uh, really, really attractive profit margins. And so I think we’re seeing companies come in, swallow up other companies, professionalize. I mean, all of Holdings and PCA is kind of an example, taking a minority partnerships and tons of different companies.

It’s a bit of a different approach, but I think over the next 10 years, I think there’s, I think a lot of the chucking the trucks, the guys who think that they’re selling cheap paint projects and that’s their competitive edge, I think they go away. And I think the companies that understand that they’re selling something different and put professional sales and marketing systems behind it, I think they swallow up a lot of those guys. Terrific. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the audience now? Uh, I, I mean, they can feel free to, to send me an email.

You know, I think we covered a lot of stuff. What’s the, let’s, let’s put out there the URL for this. Let’s explain for a moment the URL for this diagnostic, because I was really, I’m still very impressed by this. And I think it’s something that everyone in America that runs a painting business would benefit from whether they have a $20 million business or they just started last week. So what is that URL and what actually happens once they answer a set of questions? Yep, yeah, so it’s diagnostic.paintermarketingpros.com.

And what’s gonna happen is it’s gonna ask a series of questions um about your Google Business profile, your website, sales process, Facebook ads, essentially what you have going on right now. And then based on where you’re at, based on your revenue level, it is then going to send you an email, uh, detailing what you’re doing well based on best practices and then where there’s room for improvement kind of order the severity of of potentially the room for improvement, um, right? And so then the and then uh below that it’s going to have, I mean something pretty I think 40 pages or something.

Uh, it’s basically a book of of all these best practices for websites for Facebook ads for Google Business profile, for SEO for direct mail. It’s, uh, it’s a heck of a book. It’s actually even more extensive than the printed one. The printed one’s pretty big. This one’s even bigger because it’s digital, um, so the, the first section is, is this customized basically feedback road map like if we were to sit and talk for 1 hour, 2 hours, this is what I would tell you, you get it, uh, and then 40 pages are kind of self study.

And it’s gonna be emailed to you. And is that your preferred method if people want to get a hold of you? Is that the first point of contact? Should they also just call or email you directly? What do you, what would you prefer? Yeah, it would be great if they emailed me and mentioned this podcast episode. I’ll personally read that. That would be, I would, I would derive a lot of pleasure from that. Um my email is Brandon B R A N D O N at paintermarketing pros PROS.com. Perfect.

But yeah, the, the marketing diagnostic would be, would be great for them to take it for their company. Terrific. Well, thank you so much. Uh, this has been great chatting with you. I know I have a whole page of notes here. I’ve taken a lot from it, so I appreciate that, and I’m excited to talk to you soon. Thank you so much, Brandon.

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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.