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.
Join the panel of residential painting industry leaders Zach Kenney, Garrett Martell, Sarah Ross, Michal Cheney, Joshua Joosten, & Cody Roberts as they share actionable insights. In this episode, experts discuss high-end market strategies, holistic marketing, client trust-building, handling challenging customers, and navigating economic uncertainty—all aimed at helping you scale and thrive in the painting business.
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 her with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.
So Zach, why don’t we start with you, man? Yeah, I’m Zach Kenny from ZK Painting. We are a custom painting contractor based in Boston. Uh, specialize in the high-end market. High-end market organic influencer Zach is being very modest right now, but we’re gonna cover some of your, your social media organic strategies. What’s up, Garrett? Super. Good to see you mate. Garrett. Let’s let’s do you next, man. Brief intro. Yeah, so, um, G, I own a painting company in southeastern Wisconsin, two-day painting. Um, we’re just gonna do a little north of 7.5 million this year.
Um, I also own a Tradesix. Uh, we do direct mail marketing consulting for, uh, painting businesses, and happy to be here. Awesome, man. Super happy to have you here. Michael Chaney, uh, welcome. You wanna introduce yourself? Yes, sir. Thank you, Brandon. Uh, my name is Michael Chaney, and I’m the owner of Nori Painting out of Columbus, Ohio, and, uh, you know, the way that I look at, at this business that of course I love dearly, uh, the mission for us is really to have impact and we use our skills as painter to really have an impact on our community.
Very cool. Yeah, you do. You speak at a lot of events. You are spearheading the Women in Paint Initiative, uh, PCA. I’ve personally listened to several of your presentations, always very impactful, and I appreciate you being a part of this, of this panel on this event. Josh, Cody, we just did a whole podcast series together. Got to spend a lot of time with you gentlemen. Please introduce yourselves. I’m Josh Houston, CEO of Sequoia Painting, and this is Cody. How you doing, Cody Roberts with Sequoia Painting right here in Visalia, California, right in the heart of the Central Valley, right in the middle of California, um, residential and commercial painting contractor, and Growing like crazy. Amazing.
So we did just do a full podcast series together. I think actually one of the attendees here I’ve done at least one or or multiple uh podcast episodes with. So if you like what they have to say, check out Painter Mar Master my podcast, uh, because we dive really deep into a lot of stuff. Sarah. What is up, Sarah? So happy. I know you started as a panelist, and we had to kick you into attendee mode and then we’re having a hard time getting you back. I’m glad we got you back.
Your team’s behind the scenes, Brandon, they’re doing a great job. They’re, yeah, we’re all trying to make it work. It’s our first one. Thank you. No problem. I’m Sarah Ross, owner of two Fresh Coat franchises in Austin, Texas. Uh, been in the business 11 years with much more modest growth than Brad mentioned, but Brian, I am an accountant by trade, so your, your presentation spoke to me. Uh, great job, Brandon, excited to be here and honored to be a part of it. Yeah I love it. Uh, I appreciate you guys joining, uh, so we will kick it off with a, I guess, a more, uh, a general question.
I kind of some, some questions I’ll maybe point to one of you specifically where I know that’s gonna really be applicable to you if anyone else wants to input, obviously you’re always free to do so. Others I’m just gonna kind of lob out there, right? And we’ll, we’ll just answer it and chime in as you see fit. So 2024. What was that year like for you guys? How was it different? How was it the same from 2023? I’d love to just get a pulse check on that. Uh, I’ll jump in there, Brandon.
I would say the, the seasonality was definitely different compared to other years. We saw a slow July when we went up, we saw definitely some difference around the time of the election. Uh, it was an interesting year. I’m glad to say we were still able to see about 53% growth, uh, but it was, it was a challenge, and I think, you know, just a quick plug for you too. Had we not had painter marketing pros, I don’t think we would have seen that growth either. I appreciate that, Sarah.
Appreciate the call out. Yes, you have been working with us for over a year, and it’s been phenomenal to see your growth. Who else has commentary on 2024? Yeah, felt uh felt a lot of that same unseasonable slow time during normally we’re going full board, don’t even have time to catch our breath, you know, um, and a lot of the same things leads leads got real expensive and a lot harder to get and um just made a whole lot more logistic type work for us, you know, to keep the phone ringing and keep the crews with the work to get completed, so.
Um, Feel pretty good about 25, however, stay optimistic. 25 would have to be a real dumper to outdo the hardships of 24, you know, so, um, we made it through it through a lot of uh. So we, we, we worked a lot harder on the behind the scenes stuff to keep driving in, keep driving in the leads, driving in the phone calls and Uh, making more out of less, you know. I think that’s a great point too. I just want to quickly touch on that because we did just speak about that at length in the podcast.
So when, when there’s a dip in lead flow or there’s some, you know, hardship of some kind like that, Josh and Cody, they do a great job of looking where else can they optimize, how else can they use their resources or time to improve the business. So they spend a lot of time on their ops and their processes. That means when the leads are picking up, they’re obviously still working on the marketing and refining that. But when the leads do pick up, now they have a tighter ship.
Right, they can scale more easily. So there always is, there’s always an opportunity of some kind if you’re looking for it. Uh, Garrett, Michael, Zach, what, what thoughts do you guys have? I’ll jump in there real quick because I think we’ve had a different experience. We had a great 2024. We had um a period of time with our lowest cost per lead ever, clear down to $30 a lead, which now seems crazy because it’s completely jumped up. Uh, at this time of the year, um, we had two goals for the year, two major goals, which was lower cost of labor and increased profits, and, and we did that.
So, uh, you know, we had a great year and, and it was a year of building more structure so that we are prepared to have an even better 2025. I love it. Yeah, you’ve been absolutely killing it, Michael. I think you’re, you’re gonna hit 3 million you’re gonna hit? Is that where we’re at? Yeah, Amazing. Yeah, so we’ve been working with Michael and her team. She’s doing a phenomenal job on the sales process. Uh, if you lean into, I’ll be covering in my presentation, how to win in a, in a harder year.
Uh, Michael, and Sarah and some of the other, other people you’ll see today are, are gonna be real shiny examples of what to do. Uh, Garrett, Zach. Yeah, so, um, we did grow a little bit. We, um, faced some headwinds with marketing like everyone else in the earlier part of the year. And being in Wisconsin in a swing state, we decided to focus on really developing our team, focus on enhancing systems, but we’re still able to grow a little bit. The plan wasn’t to grow. I’m hoping to have a big year next year based upon the foundation we built this year, but it ended up being a better year, I think, for everyone than what we were all anticipating early on. Yeah.
We actually revenue went down this year and profitability went up. We, uh, we got a lot leaner, got rid of a big piece of overhead that was. Hurting me from last year. Leave it at that, huh? A little growl, um, yeah, awesome, guys, thanks for thanks for sharing all that. So one of the, the themes and you know, some people, Michael, you felt really positively about the year, um, but we all can, can kind of acknowledge overall for an industry it was maybe a little bit more challenging in terms of lead flow cost per lead.
Uh, there was some hesitancy in the market from the election and, and, you know, inflation and wars and all that stuff makes people uneasy. How do you guys balance staying competitive in a market like that where maybe the lead flows declined some, maybe the buyers are a little more reticent. How do you balance staying competitive in a market like that while maintaining your profitability, not having this race to the bottom in price? Personally, I think it’s all about the value that you add. We didn’t lower our prices at all.
Our average sales ratio was um about 48% this year. Um, we added a lot of things to add value in the sales process, like we do things like free touch ups for life for the customers, um, free full service color consoles where we even do like the, the sample painting for customers, um. We are You know, um, are doing a lot of charity work. We’re just really focusing on trying to add as much value throughout the sales process as possible, and, um, we’re able to still thrive from a financial perspective, um, you know, even though in my personal area we got hit with historic rainfall for the first half of the year.
It was raining like every day. We had a lot of challenges this year that we didn’t have, but I think personally if you run a good business and uh you really are offering the best value out there. Um, you can get past any environment that you’re in. I, I would say we were similar to Garrett. We don’t really negotiate on our price much either, but we did some client reactivation stuff and also made a strong effort to get reviews so that the customers that were looking for quality painters could see that we were that just by our reviews.
One of the things that we did was um reduce our TNM rate to GCs. We don’t want to do TNM to GCs anyway. We want to work on a fixed cost. So, but our TNM rate, when you look at what our charge rate is, and just like transfer that to a TNM rate was like really scaring people, and I was getting more and more feedback about that. So now our fixed cost prices don’t change, but the perception in the cli and the GC’s eyes is that we’re not so expensive anymore, and we’re looking at T&M as just sort of like, you know.
Reduce margins, but try not to do much, but now we’re perceived as less costly in their eyes. I love it. Yeah, I think the the idea of not negotiating on price I think is a strong one. Garrett, I really, really liked your focus on the value add and differentiating. So I think the, the, the interior touch ups for life. Did you get that from, uh, is that from Nick May? You just make that up? No, I mean, I’m sure there’s other people doing it, but um just made up the program and um uh it’s been successful so far.
Yeah, I love that, man. I remember hearing it from Nick, I think like 243 years ago. Uh, Nick is one of the very few people that I actually don’t know, which is, which is odd, but I actually don’t know, Nick, but I’ve heard this, and, and I always talk about it. If I were, if I were expanding painting company, which my wife think is going to be running one soon. Um, I would be offering that cause free interior touch ups for life, all it is is sales calls.
You you’re going out, you cap it out an hour, and what a, what a complete value differentiator, complete, complete free interior touch ups for life. I’m not going to go down that whole avenue, but that’s a real value differentiator, saying we have provide quality services, that’s, you know, it’s essentially pretend, um, cause everyone’s going to say this. So try to find a unique angle, try to find a real value add, and then really sell on that, it’s huge. So the stress. Right, so we have, OK, lead flow is a little bit more expensive, people are a little more hesitant to move forward.
Well, people can also be a little bit crankier when you, when they’re stressed, when, when we see wars and inflation, and maybe there’s some financial hardship in the home, and they did hire you, but now they’re being kind of a challenging customer. You have a challenging client. How do you guys deal with challenging clients? We all have them. You got to lean on your, lean on your process, right? Uh, that’s, we talked about that quite a bit in our podcast. That’s uh We try to have all those uh things in play to If a customer is going to be cranky, they may just be cranky, but it’s not going to be a direct result of anything we did or did not do.
Um, really leaning on those SOPs and making sure all those things are done, that customer journey is being recapped, you know, so if there’s Was lost information or mis a misconception somewhere along the way. It’s, it’s caught as early as possible and not left to drag out and the customer thinks about it for 2 or 3 days and then it’s a huge deal because, you know, they’ve been festering on it behind the scenes or however, you know, so I think for us that was that that’s our big one for customer satisfaction and dealing with your Hard to please or potentially cranky customers is Those SOPs, man leaning on them, just making sure every, every hand off, I don’t know how many handoffs you guys have in your companies.
We have quite a few, you know, from the phone coming in to uh the office manager answering the call to sales guy showing up to color consultation, and then finally the production crew showing up and doing it. Like there’s a lot of room there to forget something, miss something, leave something out, you know, so really. Having a solid uh method for those handoffs and making sure it feels like the customer dealt with one person all the way through the process really helps minimize those things that like you said, Brandon, you are going to get.
It’s a, it’s a lot of averages and percentages, you’re going to get one, you know. Yeah, I, I follow, um, I follow a thought leader named Alex frommosi. He’s big in the marketing space. Some, some painting contractors know him who are more into the marketing, a lot don’t, um, but I went to, uh, went to a conference, a professional marketing conference he was having. A couple months ago, and he talked about rather than having it be a handoff or rather warm hand off, make it a warm handshake.
And so just the experience like you said, it, it seems very consistent. It seems almost as though you’re, you’re never having to repeat information. You’re never getting the sense that, well, I already told them that clearly they didn’t really care because that’s what they, that’s how they feel if they’re telling you all this stuff and then the next person asks the same question or doesn’t, you know, misses it, they’re just feeling like it’s this they’re, they’re held kind of along the way. I love that, Cody. I think with customers the biggest thing is identifying the problems um early on and giving them an avenue to safely um complain.
Uh, so we try to do a lot of things to prevent that obviously in the beginning like Josh said with the SOPs, um, but you know, project managers at the start of the job, like, hey, I really want to make sure that you’re happy with this job, you know, my role depends upon customer satisfaction if there’s anything wrong at all, like I wanna be the first person you call. I want to make it right. And give them the power to go above and beyond and handle most little things and, you know, possibly even give away some little things to make the customer happy and try not to let them stew on it.
And that’s, that’s really great. So in sales, a lot of people think no is a bad thing. You always want to go for the yes, no, it’s it’s a bad word. We’re all afraid of the word no. You actually want to go for the no in sales because when you, when you get the no, then you can actually start to address the real objection, and there are objections. That’s why we don’t close 100%, because people do have objections of some kind. So you go for no. So Garrett, I think what, you know, when you’re saying basically go for the complaint, give them this safe place like, hey, there’s probably something we’re doing wrong.
I want to know if there’s something we’re doing wrong, and now you’re proactively almost probing them for it. You’re getting so far ahead of what Cody said them sitting there stewing on it for two days, and now it’s a, it’s a one star Google review. Mhm. Brandon I would say I try and kill him with kindness. I think so many of those customers that are difficult customers are difficult for all the trades, not just us. And so they’re used to that negative reaction when they get negative.
And I think if we can just stay positive, it certainly helps. But I think we need to stand our ground. I think a lot of the difficult customers are coming from. Um watching HDTV or they, they see things that may not be real world examples. And if we can stand our ground to our process, kind of like you were saying SOPs, our process and the reason we do things and explain that but stay positive is the best we can do. I’m not saying I don’t curse once I get in the car or off the phone with them, but I don’t do it in front of them.
HGTV that that whole, uh, that whole thing was supposed to be done during the commercial break. Sa your team’s so slow right now. Uh Uh, Cody, I love, I love your focus on the SOPs too, right? Because if you, it’s productizing the service, it’s consistent. So if the homeowner comes, comes and says, hey, this is terrible. Wow, let’s, let’s revisit. Let’s see. These are all the things we’re supposed to do. Where did we maybe screw up? If we didn’t screw up, then maybe where we screwed up is not setting the expectations up front, or maybe not, not consistently conveying them, because somewhere along the way, we know what we’re gonna do, we did it, and yet apparently there’s a problem.
So it provides an opportunity for either seeing where the problem happened in the delivery or seeing where the where the problem happened in the communication. Yeah. I love that. Anyone else have any thoughts on on dealing with, best way to deal with difficult clients. Like the best way is to, to proactively make sure that they don’t become like don’t let them be. It like, in the sales process, a lot of times the, the red flags start to show themselves for the really bad ones. Um, and being able to like either price accordingly, I’ve had a couple projects where we put massive markups on projects and then just prepare to deal with chaos.
And you know, you know, we’re not gonna say no, we’re gonna say like, hey, if you’re willing to pay this massive premium, I will make sure that I’m here to adapt to your way of doing things. Um, but I think to everybody else’s point, like when you set expectations really clearly, we started, we use mostly subs and a lot of people on our job sites don’t speak English. There’s always someone that does, but it’s like a, a point of tension. So we’ve been like really addressing that with the client and our teams to be like.
You know, guys, and like we started giving him a document. It was like, here’s the call list, like here’s the call me first, call this person second, call this person third. Here’s the names of everyone who’s gonna be on your site, even if they and if they speak English or not, just so that they know who they are, and then here’s what we’re doing, like this week. And like, here’s what we’re doing next week, and just like trying to give them as much information as we can to sort of get ahead of it.
And then when they do show that they’re difficult, just like massive attention, just like a, like so many touch points just constantly like, all right, we just gotta like get this one over the finish line, like let’s just throw a bunch of like. The project manager’s effort at it. Um, because I, I find like if you can get it back with a ton of effort, then the, uh, the touch ups, the blue tape is what we’re trying to avoid. Yeah, and, and ultimately, especially with the residential, the, the projects really aren’t that long.
So if it’s like, hey, this is, this is a nightmare, Zack, yours, some of yours might be a little bit longer. Yeah, mine are a lot longer, unfortunately. Yeah, yours extend out. But for the majority of majority of residential painting companies, you know, it’s not gonna be longer than 1 week, 2 weeks. So if somebody’s a real pain, and I like you charge a PIA tax there, if somebody’s a real pain, you can kind of lean into it and and just bite the bullet. And and try to make the best of it, right, for that week, 2 weeks, or exact, you know, unfortunately you have longer timelines.
Um, OK, awesome. So with the challenging economy, with the reticent buying market, I do want to emphasize reticent buying market. One of the things that Brad talked about that I’m a very big proponent of is investing in marketing. It obviously is the lifeblood of your business. Sales is the lifeblood of your business. That’s how you get sales. Um, so the buying is still happening, but when people are uneasy, the trust factor has to go even higher. And Sarah, one of the things you said is, is we try to really generate to get reviews.
It’s one of the big focuses we’ve had in 2024 and when things are tough. So what, what are the ways that you guys, uh, what are the strategies you guys are conducting to build trust with your leads? We start off by don’t taking, uh, we don’t take any deposits, so that’s grammar still wasn’t. That’s yeah, it’s just, you know, you hear so many times those horror stories where somebody’s given a contractor money and they’ve run off with it. So we just try and express that. We have enough belief in ourselves and the quality of our work that you’ll want to pay us in the end, so we try and win them over by explaining that we don’t take any deposit.
Nothing’s due until we’re done. Once you’re on our schedule though, you’re scheduled. We’re going to be there because we’ve outlaid money at that point and we’re going to be there and get it done on time. Does anyone else build trust? Yeah, I mean, I, I’m a big fan of organic social for building trust. That’s like, that’s our big thing for us it’s just like. Here’s a documentary of our company that you can go watch behind the scenes of everything that’s happening and know what you’re gonna get before you pick up the phone, or before we ever come on site.
Let’s touch on that for a second, ZK, and then I do want to see what, what other strategies the rest of the panel has, but you are very big into the organic social media, you do things differently. One of the things that, that you just said that I think can apply to everybody is behind the scenes. We all want to do business with people. We don’t want to do business with companies. You do want to have a professional presence out there, but showing photos of the crew, showing photos of, of the owner Zach, you talking about the company, things like that, it, it humanizes it.
It’s like, OK, I, I think I understand Zach. I think I understand his company. I feel comfortable with them. I’m interested, not just this this professional brand, impersonal, but you could get, get into if you would, a little bit about what you do, because we probably have a lot of attendees that don’t know and it’s quite unique. Yeah, I, I mean, are by like 95% of our leads are coming from organic social and it’s, you know, when you follow our Instagram, most of the people, most of our clients have followed for extended periods of time.
They’re always like, oh, I’ve been following you for like 1 long. They, they see consistency, they see openness, they see most of our stuff is processed, most of our content is processed, it’s not finished photos. Um, it just shows like what’s happening, like, if you hire me to paint your kitchen. Well, here’s what it’s gonna look like. Here’s like all the stuff, and we just beat the drum like over and over and over again, and so that consistency over time is, I mean, the number in my experience is like, it’s probably the number one trust builder, right, in life, in anything, just consistency over time.
So the fact that we’re able to just like be us, we don’t have to put on a show, we just like put a camera on what we’re doing, um, and then just wait is is a lot of it. People, by the time they pick up the call, they’re just like, at my last job, we just finished like a great job for a new client and my project man my lead was just like, dude, what’s wrong? Like what’s going on with this client? Like, she’s just like leaving us alone, like all the trust was so high.
That they were like weirded out. It’s awesome. Yeah, and in, in marketing and sales, you want people to know like and trust you. So when they followed you for some time, if Zach’s having that conversation, I can promise you his close rate’s going to be high. They already feel fully confident in his ability and his team’s ability to complete that project. One thing I think that is very important is just having a lot of reviews online and uh we personally have a project map where um we can go to the customer’s house and see like, OK, we can show them we’ve done 10003 homes in your neighborhood.
These are the homes that we’ve done, you know, these are the reviews that they left. um, so we have a tool that syncs all that and uh that’s really helpful in the, in the field, especially if you’ve done a lot of work in that in that area. Do you use nearby now or, or a tool like that? What do you guys use? It’s called Project MapIt. um, that’s a tool that we use. I, we really like it. I highly recommend it. It can sync with your website, um, into your sales presentation, uh, but, um, yeah, it does a lot of good.
And when you have over, when you really focus on reviews, we have over 1000 5 star Google reviews and that goes a long way to building trust. It’s hard for somebody to think that OK, this company is not legitimate when you have that many reviews. And the more, the more somebody you’re marketing to or selling to, the more they can feel like you’ve already served them or people are very, very similar to them, the more, the more they trust you. So when Garrett’s saying we have over 1000 5 star reviews, but then his sales estimator or sales consultant or whatever Garrett’s calling him, walks into the door and can actually show, hey, all your neighbors have used us.
These are all their projects, that trust factor goes through the roof. I think another thing just keeping it basic communication, you know, our foreman, they are required to communicate on a daily basis in the beginning of their shift at the end of their shift with the customer and building trust as simple as when that foreman says, Hey, I’m going to be here at 7 o’clock, and he’s there at 6:50, you know, that, you know, that speaks volume right there, you know, and Doing that for, you know, 10 or 15 days that you’re into that project.
He builds a lot of trust with the customer, you know. So I would say a lot of it’s communication, communicating with the customer. Yeah, the communication is so paramount and it’s something so many painting companies and home service companies in general are not very good at. And if the way I kind of think about it, if you logically play this out, if I reach out to an electrician or painter or whoever, and I’m having a hard time getting hearing back from them, I think that maybe they’re coming.
I don’t really know. There’s been no communication since we talked 303 days ago. I think they’re coming at 100 a.m. or 11 a.m. today, not sure. Like the cable company, they give you these 4 hour windows and you don’t know if they’re coming. I don’t trust them very much. I’m uneasy. I don’t even know know if it’s going to happen. If that’s my experience when I’m trying to pay you. What do you think I’m, I’m gonna think when things go wrong? If I, if I’m, if I’m so insecure about you wanting to come take my money, I can only imagine how insecure I’m gonna be when you, you know, you mess something up and then I’m trying to, trying to get you to come back and fix it.
There’s no way you’re gonna fix it. So that’s the, that’s what’s being conveyed to leads when you’re not, when you’re not communicating with them. So Josh, you might have said it’s simple. I think it’s one of the best things you can, you can possibly do for your company to have a really consistent, solid professional communication. Yeah, on the, on the front end, on the estimating end of it this year, um. Our, our residential estimator, uh, early on getting a little discouraged, you know, when things were supposed to be close to booming time and it was still kind of slow and that he, he was having that were too expensive kind of mental block, you know, and I, I. We had a conversation.
I said, you know, we just need, I, I need, I need a mindset shift from you. I, we’re never going to be the most affordable quote, right, the most affordable, we’re never gonna be the cheapest. I hate that word. um, so. Don’t let that deter you from doing your process. How about let’s look at it from my point of view. If I’m a consumer and I have a problem and I have called your company to solve my problem. I need to know all the things that make my hard earned money worth spending with your company.
So even though that doesn’t entail some crazy low price point like I’ve heard from other contractors, everything you tell me needs to put me at ease that, hey, I may spend a little bit more money here with Sequoia, but I really don’t want any problems, and they have basically laid out their process that makes sure that doesn’t happen. And So many things I feel in business and in life in general can be controlled by perspective, you know, to, to put a different perspective on it, take a, uh, take a different angle at it and Um, He quickly realized, you know, how much just his demeanor and posture really affects that interaction with the customer.
You know, you got to, you got to be, you got to walk in there with confidence that you are the solution. They had a problem. That’s how they found you, right? Whether it’s peeling paint or whether it’s the uh the wife’s tired of the color of her dining room, doesn’t matter. There was a problem that led to them getting a hold of your company. So as long as that’s Your main uh focus, you know, you’re the solution. Let, let’s let price be what it is. That’s our cost of doing business and this is everything our business entails when you go on this journey with Sequoia Paint.
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a great thing to think that a lot of times the homeowner can do the project themselves, especially maybe not cabinet refinishing, maybe not some of this stuff, certainly can’t do what Zach does, but they could do a simple interior repaint, they can paint, paint their own room, so they’re not really buying that from you. That’s not what they’re buying. They’re buying the ease, they’re buying the experience, they’re buying the fact that you’re taking the problem and the headache, and you’re going to get it done for them in a, in an easy manner.
So it’s not about, you know, competing, well, what are we doing? We’re offering painting services, not really, you’re offering experience, you’re providing a solution to them, totally different. Who else has thoughts, thoughts on this? I’ll just share quickly, Brown. I think when we think about, or when I think about trust, it’s twofold. It’s creating a level of trust so that when someone, I’ll say stumbles across you can immediately feel as though you’re reputable, right? And that’s where Google reviews, websites, all of those things, social media telling your story, you know, putting your values out there, but then there’s the maintaining trust, which is what you have to do throughout the project, right?
Um, and I think that that’s where, you know, that, that strong communication and, and, and following the processes that you have in place, uh, really can, can help you keep the trust, right? It’s, it’s gaining the trust and then when you’re there keeping the trust, we just talked about how, uh, how you deal with difficult customers. Well, if you could really hold on to that trust, when a difficult situation comes up, you’re more likely to get through it. In more of a, a teamwork effort, right? cause you still have that trust.
I have, I have noticed that the breakdown occurs when we lose the trust during the project, and it could be something simple. Maybe we said we were gonna do something and we didn’t follow through with it, or the customer called us and we didn’t call them back right away, right? So we try and tighten those things up, but I think that maintaining trust is another important component to kind of consider. Yeah, absolutely. I love it. OK, so we talked about uh the, the trust and building the trust.
Let’s actually talk about what happens after a project. So we’re gonna go for the review. We know that, talked about that, uh, for Garrett, you know, we’re pursuing his strategy, we’re gonna actually try to use the software to leverage it proactively in our sales process. Every single one of these projects can be leveraged directly into another sale. What about repeat customers? What about referrals? What are we doing there? You guys have any strategies you’re, you’re enacting? The repeat one was uh it was actually something Joshua really started honing in on like 6 months ago because what better, what better resource for revenue than people that have already spent their hard earned money with you.
Um, we are drip jobs customers, so their blast feature that’s on there every single customer in your deal you can target um past projects. Never did a project and and those kind of categories and reaching out to the ones that you’ve already done work for, um, it generated some for us. It wasn’t like a uh a huge spike, but it, it was in a year where every little, every little bit kind of helped, you know, it was definitely a resource. I was glad Joshua thought about, you know, whenever he did.
You know, Bran, if there was one thing I could probably do better early on, it would have been develop a system to stay top of mind with my, my customers. Uh, you know, when you’re moving and grooving early on like me and I, I held the paintbrush in my hand and I was building this thing by myself. those things fell to the wayside, but now I recognize how important that is, right? Um, so, you know, having that touch point where you’re reaching out to your past customers, um, and I say this knowing that if you are a small company, it can be difficult to do that, right?
Um, thankfully now we have some automations like we mentioned drip jobs and things like that that can help you do that. But, you know, my advice to anyone getting started would be to start those type of processes early on. Staying in contact with those past clients is, is like golden, right? You want those referrals when they refer you, it’s usually a high close rate. It’s usually a, a potential customer that is similar to them, right? Um, so now, of course, we can do things like reactivation campaigns, you know, we’ll, uh, you know, this week we’re gonna be delivering our cookie cans to some of our top clients, right?
We have, uh, 1 gallon empty cookie cans that we put a no drip label on and then we take some, some. Like gourmet cookies and, and drop them off the folks. Um, so there’s things that you can do, but I, I would say for me personally, I certainly missed the mark early on, um, on leveraging those customers who had a great experience. And, uh, and, uh, so yeah, I think that’s an important component of all this. Michael, we did we run a, a reactivation campaign for you this?
Yeah, so, you know, this was really the first year that we have done it on a grand scale. Um, Brandon is, is, is my marketing, my marketing team, and so we did a reactivation campaign. We did it right before Thanksgiving and uh so what that looked like for us was sending out emails and text messages to our contact list. And as we move forward. We’re gonna do more things, right? We might also, uh, you know, end up sending a mailer to those folks. So we’ve got an entire plan for 2025, but even just a simple, um, email, text message, or phone call, right?
Uh, you know, sometimes I think we don’t do the things, uh, that we should be doing, but also we don’t do the things that might be a bit more uncomfortable. You know, I, I experimented this with this last year and I hired, um, a few, uh, ladies to come into the office and just, I’m gonna say cold call, but technically it was a warm call. My entire contact list, right? We don’t do that enough, um, and, and it worked out. And actually, one of those. One of those ladies ended up coming on on board for our full-time admin.
But doing those things staying top of mind. I mean, that’s really where the goal is. And, and it’s the most inexpensive way to do it, right? They already know like and trust you. They’ve already, you know, used your service. But sometimes you need to remind them who you are. I’ll give you an example of this. It’s not uncommon for us to paint an interior, and then they say to us, do you guys do exterior painting? And to us, that seems so crazy, right? Yes, we, we’ll paint every anything.
You want us to paint your cat? We’ll paint your cat. Just kidding. I, I don’t know if there’s a paint for that. But the point is, is that sometimes people just don’t know. So you just need to remind them, and I would start with the people who already have got a rapport with you. And uh go from there to me that’s that’s where really the magic is. Yeah, I love that. Oh yeah, one of the things. But go ahead, Zach. And that’s, that’s the most powerful part of social media and when you can get that follow from your client, like that’s our lifeblood is our our clients follow us and now they have a tool to refer us that is so much more sticky than maybe a business card or maybe just a phone number, because like I said, most people are following for extended periods of time before they call.
You just gotta get that follow, and if Miss Jones loves the paint job you did, and she can show her friend her house being painted on your social media, the process. Now she can send it to her friend. Her friend follows, forgets about us, but we just keep coming up. It’s a really powerful feedback loop. Yeah, yeah, I love that. So we, we, we rolled out a reactivation campaign this quarter for, for a lot of our partners. It’s a phenomenal way to fill your calendar when leads are expensive, uh, when the trust issue is, is more difficult because people are more reticent to make that purchase, who trusts you the most?
People that have already done business with you, that have already had a good experience, you’re very likely to close them, your profit margins likely to be high. Uh, it’s a great way to reach out, and I don’t see a lot of painting companies do it. Um, which is why we’re offering the, the offer that we are at this event. Another thing, um, to keep in mind is, is people need painting projects. The average homeowner needs a painting project every 2.5 years, right? So every 2.5 or 3 years they’re they’re gonna need a painting project, but so many companies treat it like it’s a one and done, they, they got this painting project, I guess they’re, they’re set for life.
Never, never need to worry about that one again, and then you have to go fight, like Michael said, they, they’re not gonna remember you, they’re really not. They’re not going to remember you 5003 months later. They’re certainly not going to remember you 2.5 years later. So now you’re back in the market fighting again for the same lead just like Mr. Mr. Company A, B and C, who I’ve never worked for them before when it shouldn’t happen, like Zach’s saying you were, you were top of mind for them. You don’t have to be a social media influencer, but you were, you were.
Top of mind for them with your, with your messaging, you’re adding value, they know exactly who you are, and they probably reached out to you for the next painting project. Now your cost per lead is 0 and you’re closing it as a high profit. That’s how you build the NASA, that’s how you build a killer company long term. Who else has thoughts here on our repeat referral business? Brandon, I’ll jump in. We, we did the same reactivation campaign with you and since it’s part of our package with you, doing it didn’t cost us anything.
Uh, you did encourage us to put a little give in there and the give we offer is just a $50 gift card. And the, the other benefit to that is we use our AX points to get those gift cards. So it really wasn’t any cash outlay to try and reactivate those customers. It just makes sense. I One thing that we do to try to reactivate them is we have different programs this year we had a 220% rebate on anything they spent in the summer period up to $25 and then we reached out to everybody who did work for us, uh, this past summer, and, um, a lot of them got on the schedule for projects.
A lot of them had $25 to $224 rebates, um, and they would, um, end up adding on $21000 worth of winter interior work. Um, last year we did um 230 bedroom paintings for, um, um, charity and for previous customers. We reach out to everybody being like, hey, we’ll come and paint a room in your house for free. On average, um, we kept a lot of people busy and we made a little bit of money off of that program because of upsells. So, um, there’s a lot of things that you can do outside the box to try to get winter work and reactivate those customers.
Of it. Um, so I, I’m gonna go off on a little bit of a tangent here. So I, I have a, uh, Pa American process as a marketing column now in APC magazine. I haven’t actually announced that publicly. Uh, so super, super excited for that. You, you guys, if you haven’t received the magazine for, for November, December, um, you’ll see our, our first marketing column and that’ll be coming out every time. It’s called Painter’s Playbook. But Garrett, uh, our first article was about direct mail. We’re gonna be leaning into that, moving, moving some offline.
Um, in 2 to to provide more holistic marketing, but I went back and you and I had connected, I think for an hour and you had, you had kind of walk me through how you do it, how you do what you do, and you, you said percentage discounts typically work better for direct mail than than dollar value, and I remember we talked about the 2262 verse 6 because I told you I read this book Thinking Fast and Slow. We talked about 29627% works better than 10%. You said you were going to try it.
Did you try the 15? We have, yeah, we bounced back and forth between discounts. The 15 is um Um, a staple for us, you know, we, um, we run it probably more than we should, but it always works. It always has provided a consistent return on investment over direct mail, and, um, um, I’ve tried a lot of different offers and I love the 15% off in the, um, in the nice weather, 25% off in the winter weather. You always have a different special so people don’t think that it’s just like a forever special, but um it’s.
It we’ve we’ve tested out doing that. We tested out doing no promotion thinking it was going to increase um sales ratios and create better customers, and it did not. It actually did the inverse effect, you know, we actually had a little bit lower sales ratio and a greatly diminished response rate. So I love the 15% off. I’m a huge fan of it. Interesting. Um, all right, I want to open it up for people to come on and ask questions. Uh, so raise your hand, we’ll pull you in while we’re waiting on that.
I just want to get, get anyone’s thoughts. Obviously there, there’s labor and there’s leads. Um, used to be labor was challenging a couple of years back. Now leads, it’s kind of the pendulum has swung a little bit. You guys have any great hiring techniques for finding good, good talent, whether it’s subcontractors or employees and maybe how you motivate your team, retain them and, and get them to perform. Well, as far as um retaining goes, um, we do something we call a day interview and um with every employee once a year during their annual review and we try to get to know them throughout the year, but what we do is we ask questions like, um, you know, what makes you wanna come to work every day?
What would make you one day want to leave? Is there anything from a manager that you’re not currently getting uh. And we ask a handful of questions like that to try to You know, really understand our employees know what they’re looking for, get their opinion, and then we can. Make sure to keep everyone happy and because of that we’ve had an almost perfect retention rate in our company. We usually have maybe one employee turnover per year. Um, we almost never lose any subcontractors. We’ve been able to retain a team which is really helpful for growing sustaining quality and maintaining that experience.
Uh, so definitely invest into your employees, do lots of good company events like don’t shy away from, you know, making sure that they’re treated fairly and uh it’ll go a long way. Yeah, I, I will say having seen Garrett’s company culture, it’s pretty special. Appreciate that. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, one of the questions, questions I’ll ask um people who are interviewing with us is what, what would make you, what makes you happy at a company? What makes you unhappy at a company? Why should I hire you?
Why should I not hire you? And I find when you kind of put all those together, some pretty interesting, you get kind of a pretty interesting data matrix there. Uh, I think Amir, I think we have you in if you want to ask your question. Hey, yes, sir. Good, good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for all this valuable content. God bless you all. Appreciate it, appreciate it a lot. Um, real quick, uh, Garrett. Uh, you said that you have, um, an app or a tool that you that you use to show them your reviews like on a map.
What was that called? I missed that. I’m sorry. Project map it. Um, you have to manually like I have to upload a list of your previous customers. It’ll sync all the data points on a map. You have to, um, uh, sync your reviews and connect them to those data points and you can add pictures if you want. It is a decent amount of work, but it’s super helpful. I highly recommend it, um, especially if you’ve done a lot of work in the area that you’re trying to do business.
Awesome, awesome, yeah, I appreciate it, man, and uh I don’t know if it says it on there, but we are, we’re with paint and rollers. We share the market with uh Michael, no drip. What’s up, no drip? Yeah, hey. No, no drips going to 4733 million Amir. Let’s go. We’re, we’re going with her. Let’s go. Is that, is that through cryptocurrency or through painting or both? 10 million, 10 million painting, 10 million crypto, so it’ll be 20. Let’s go. Yeah, yeah, me and Adam, my brother’s name is Adam. We’ll see you guys at the PCA, God willing.
Amazing, amazing. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in, man. Thanks for your question. Uh, we got Cornelius, uh, you are up. If you guys have a question, just raise your hand. you are on mute. All right, uh, Edwin, you are up while Cornelios uh figures that out. Uh, Edwin, let’s have you ask your question. Good morning, guys. Thank you for all your advice or your knowledge. Uh, I know Garre, uh, mentioned that he All he have his employees, but um. I guess uh some of you guys have subcontractors.
Uh, well, um, all of you guys, uh, uh, uh, have been talking about, uh, customer, but, uh, on the Denver market, um. Here there is a lot of competitors. Um, maybe you have some strategies for keep your subcontractor um with you. I mean, um. Here is uh is something happening a lot is you have to subcontractors and maybe another company start offering more money or something more and then they go with another company. Uh, it’s, it’s try to getting uh hard because it’s hard to keep, uh, with you, uh, keep, uh, or, or maybe they try to, to offer things to your customer or things like that.
What strategy you do you use for keep your, your, your subcontractor like, uh, um, you know, um. I think it’s, yeah, I think that’s great. So if competitors are trying to, trying to use your subs, if uh maybe customers are trying to work with them directly, how do you actually retain that relationship, that’s the that’s the term. I’d like to offer something for this one. sorry, sorry, Garrett, um, but you know, I think we sometimes forget. That we still have to have a strong hiring process for subcontractors.
You still have to find people that align with your values and your mission, right? I think that’s the first piece of the puzzle that we let fly under the radar when we think about subcontractors. You know, the other piece of it is, is that you have to treat people well and treating someone well, of course, there’s A price you need to pay, right? People need to have a livable wage, whatever that is. You’ve got to pay people what they deserve, but also you’ve got to just treat people well, right?
Uh, and, and I’ll give you just a quick example of what I mean by this. We had, and we have a, by the way, we have a split model with employees and subcontractors. Um, but there, about a year ago, we found out that one of our subcontractors who relocated from out of state and had been working with us, that they had 5 family members in their house and they were all sleeping on air mattresses, right? And, and I will give this credit to my team because this had nothing to do with me.
Uh, well, my team found out about this, and they posted on Facebook, we need 5 new mattresses. And within 24 hours, they gathered new mattresses and had them delivered to the, the, the, the home of, of, of our team. And that is us showing that we care, right? Now, they are, they are with us. They are committed to us because we are committed to them. That is a relationship. There is a bond there because we show up for them and they show up for us, right? The pay has less to do with it when you have a relationship like that.
And so I would encourage you to ask yourself, Does, why would someone even want to work for me, right? That’s the question. It doesn’t matter whether they’re an employer or subcontractor, um, we need them, they need us, you know, when we talk to our team, especially subcontractors, the message is we need you to be successful. We need you to feel like you’re taking care of like you’re part of our team. And we need the same, right? It is a, it is a team effort here, and then the business side of it, I will say, is always be open to have a uh a transparent conversation.
If someone is struggling because they’re not getting paid, if it Really is about pay, have this open door policy where they feel comfortable to come in and talk to you about it, right? Because you don’t want to lose someone over dollars. Um, you wanna treat someone well and that’s how you gain their loyalty. And I mean, that’s what we all want, right? This is about treating people with respect and dignity. And of course, you got to pay people to live the life and achieve the goals that they want for their life.
I couldn’t agree more, Michael, and I completely agree with everything you said. The, the one thing I will add is that most of our subs, they just want to stay busy. So we use a very simple calendar, Google calendar app, and they all have access to our calendar. They know exactly how far we have them booked out, where they’re booked at, what the project is, and if we get within a week of not having something for them, we’re telling them. We don’t have something for you. In the upcoming week, please be looking, please be asking around.
Most of them can get side work on pretty quick notice if they need to, but the minute we have something back for them, they see it on their calendar, they know they’re coming back to us. So when we aren’t able to keep them busy, we’re communicating that as well so that they can get money coming in elsewhere. But we have, uh, thanks for that question, Edwin. Appreciate you, you participating. Michael. We have a question for Michael Laho. Go ahead, man, you’re up. You are on mute. Oh You are on mute again.
You’re good. You hear me? Yep. OK, so I just had a question uh. What do you guys look for in a sales person, like how, how is that uh process of interviewing someone that does sales? That is a good question. Um. So we look for outstanding people in general, but there’s a lot of traits that make a good salesperson, and a lot of it depends upon your sales process. Um, we look for people who are obviously personable, organized, uh, detailed, because they also have to be able to estimate well and communicate um expectations well.
Um, we don’t have a, we have a, we don’t have a hard close process, but we do have some awkward moments and some questions that you have to have someone with some assertiveness and someone with some competitive drive to actually push and try to win jobs. Um, so I think it depends on your sales process and what you’re looking for and your company culture. I’ve adopted the Jason Phillips method, which is really leaning into disc assessments. And you’ll hear from Jason, um, and he’s a wealth of knowledge, has an amazing team that does all kinds of training, but, um, if you’re not familiar with the disc assessment, it, it basically, um, it, it’s, it’s a test, it’s an assessment that you can determine where, where someone falls in terms of, uh, you know, I guess it’s kind of like a personality thing.
Um, but you’re looking for certain traits, right? So, um, you know, in terms of a sales person, you want someone with like a high D or high high I, right? That has been a, a good guide for me. Um, it has taken a lot of the guesswork out of things and it’s a starting point, right? So you wanna make sure that they lean towards, um, the characteristics that make a good salesperson, but then I will tell you that everything comes back to aligning on company. Values. And I have learned a hard lesson on this, um, and as a result of, of learning a hard lesson and literally getting my heart broken in this business, as well as it being a, a huge detriment to the business, I have really Made sure that we tell the world who know your pain is, and that means who we are as people, who we align with in the world.
And I know that this isn’t everyone’s, uh, you know, not everyone looks upon this as a favorable way to do things, but I want people to know who we are and the hope in that is that it detracts the people that don’t align, but it absolutely welcomes the people that do align, and that has been um Very, a, a, a very good move for us because it brings people to the door and I don’t have to go looking for them, right? Like it literally will call people into the business and, and you know, I also just believe that when You know, well, that our businesses are just a bigger reflection of who we are, right?
All the good and the bad. But when we can really open up and stand in our true light and say, here’s who we are as a business, here’s who we support in the world, here’s who we are calling into our business, you automatically attract like-minded people. I don’t want to get too woo woo, Brandon, you know, I have a, I have a tendency to go here, but you do you balance it pretty well. I don’t like if it gets too woo woo, but I like your material.
But it’s finding someone who fits a sales, a sales role, right? What is, what are the that person I was that characteristic, but also the more important question is, do they align with your values and are they gonna show up in the world that represents you and your business in the right way? I would like to piggyback that, uh, the value is huge. That’s I would look within your company, make sure you don’t have that sales person already there, ready to put on a collared shirt instead of a white shirt, you know, um, that was our method.
We’re pretty big on the hiring from within, given those opportunities within the company to those that are looking for the next rung on the ladder. Um, and start there. The big advantage is if you are already employing them, they should have a real solid grasp on your values and understand what your company is about and the expectations. You’re just introducing them to a new side of it, but it’s the exact same values upheld throughout the company. So, um, Look within first, always open that, uh, put a, put a bulletin out.
I’m looking for, you know, whatever your painting company’s name is, next salesperson, and it’s a open, uh open applicant scenario. Anybody currently working here is feel free to apply and I’m gonna start doing interviews on X date, whatever it is. Make sure you don’t have that person already there. Awesome. Yeah, I would, I would encourage when you do that, uh, especially given depending on the size of your team to also interview external applicants to kind of throw them all into one bucket. Um, but as Cody’s saying, do, do not neglect the team that you have.
Uh, Cornelius, I think you’re, I think you’re, you’re making another run here, um. Let’s, let’s give you a shot at the title. So you are, um, here we go. Hey, Brandon. Sorry fellows and ladies, um, thank you very much for all the contribution you’re making to us, greatly appreciate it. So my question is for everyone on the panel, um, is what? Lead generation platform has yield the best return this year. That’s my question. Thank you. It’s a great question. Maybe I’m a little biased, but for me direct mail, um, every market I think is different in different ways.
Direct mail kills into my market. Um, there’s a lot of different strategies, but there’s a lot of good strategies out there. You just have to really focus and develop them and, you know, not just throw a few dollars in and call it quits right away. Yeah, that’s really important. Yeah, the almighty Google, I feel like as a. Still prevails. We we’re pretty new to the every doorect, that’s a new, new campaign of ours, so we’re still collecting data on that to track its success, but um, yeah, Google, Google brings Google gets the phone to ring quite a bit.
Side note, Joshua, I wouldn’t do every door direct mail. You can um target homes for around the same price per piece, make it a lot easier on yourself, and you can increase your response rate. If you have any questions about that, just let me know. I can help you walk through it, but I always tell people avoid EDDM like the plague and direct mail. Garrett, I don’t know. I, I know I was sending a lot of, a lot of business your way, um, at the point that you wanted me to stop, uh, because you do run a highly successful painting business, but if you’re open to scale that business, please feel free, uh, to provide people, people a little bit of information about that right now.
Yeah, so, um, I am open to uh taking on new clients. Um, I’m really a direct mail consultant. I help you kind of connect all the pieces, get the right strategy in place. I have a buyer’s group with a fantastic vendor, um, with really good negotiated prices, and I basically just kind of, uh, connect the dots. I help understand your strategy. Um, there’s multiple different avenues of direct mail that you can go and multiple different strategies. Um, like, you know, you could do targeted mass mailings you’re only targeting people above a certain, um, home value or, you know, single family owner occupied units.
You can target people around job sites you’re doing, target new homeowners, target previous customers. You can hyper focus and target just 1000 homes with like a direct custom piece, lots of different options, usually around the mid 30s and then up depending on how well you target and um different factors, but um. It’s, but if anyone wants a um So talk to me. I just charged $500 for my services flat, connect you with the vendor, and they take you from there, um, just a little pitch. Love it. What, what, uh, how can I get in contact with you Gary?
Do you have an email they can send? Uh yes. Um yeah, it’s Garrett. T W O D A Y at gmail. com, or you can find me on Facebook, shoot me a message, um, or text me at 262-473-9627. Or come to your address at knock on my door knock on my door anytime day or night. No, Gary, you’ve made yourself very accessible. Appreciate that, man. Guys, I, I have to wrap up this panel. We have Janelle Rodel of the PCA. She’s gonna be coming up. She’s gonna be offering it.
A special offer, a special discount for uh PCA Expo attendees. I want to thank you all. Zach, Garrett, Michael, Josh, Cody, Sarah, thank you for participate participating in this panel. You are all thought leaders. You all run highly successful businesses. I value your time and I thank you for this.
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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 Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.