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.
Listen to this episode of Paint Radio where Brandon Pierpont discusses his most recent APC article ‘Send It: Direct Mail in the Digital Age’. Brandon runs a marketing column in the American Painting Contractor Magazine called “Painter’s Playbook”, where he breaks down current marketing trends that painting company owners need to be aware of. This episode provides a great breakdown of everything direct mail and how to win in that space in 2025!
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.
Welcome to Paint Radio with your hosts, Andrew Dwyer and Kevin Hoffman. Heck yeah, let’s do a podcast. Paint Radio, also known as the APC podcast. I’m Andrew. Kevin is here, editor in chief of APC. How are you, Kevin? I’m doing well, and thanks for spelling out my title. I’m a, you know, I’m a detail guy. That’s, that’s just what I do. I wanna nail it down. Um. You moved into a new house, not all that long ago. Did you see an uptick in, well, of course, it was a new house, so you don’t have anything to um compare it to, but did you receive a fair amount of mail related to homeownership?
Absolutely. It was a, it was an absolute deluge of uh people offering their services. You know, I would say deluge with the emphasis on the first lot. I may have that wrong. I’m more of a reader than a talker. OK, see, again, me with the detail. So we’re, we’re talking about direct mail today and it is. It is surprising how the uh the outer world can know what you’re up to when the, when you’re in the confines of your own home and all of a sudden it sort of shows up kind of like metadata when uh you sort of mention.
Uh, Non-alcoholic or gluten-free beer and all of a sudden you start getting fed all these ads for gluten-free beer. How do, uh, Zuckerberg and Musk know these things, Kevin, do you have an answer to that? How do they know that that’s what we’re thinking about? I think it’s cause we’re telling them. Oh, well, that would make sense, that would make sense. We brought someone on today to tell us about direct mail. He will probably not be new to most of our listeners because, of course, he has a long, wonderful, rich history in the painting industry.
He’s certainly been on paint radio before. He’s been in APC, um, you’re gonna see more in APC. He’s at industry events. He is Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros. Brandon, thanks for being on the show. How are you? Doing great, Andrew. I appreciate you guys having me. Heck yeah, I saw you not too long ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, one of approximately 27 uh satellite towns surrounding Phoenix in Arizona, and we were there at the uh PCA commercial conference and you were talking about, was your was your talk at that conference specifically about direct mail or was it more about general marketing?
No, at the commercial conference, it was about marketing for commercial painting contractors. It was primarily geared to digital, but also some offline like direct mail. You definitely talked about direct mail, which shows that direct mail is not simply something for um Maybe residential contractors trying to target um specific neighborhoods, but uh it’s really for, for all painting contractors. Do you, do you, uh, You talk a lot about direct mail? Is it one of the, the primary tools in your, in your tool belt, Brandon? It’s something we’re moving into.
So Painter Marketing Pros my company. Uh, we find that the more different angles you can target the same homeowner or same commercial property owner, the more effective you tend to be with your marketing. So when you can effectively conduct online marketing but then also pair it with some offline, works really, really well. So we’ve tested it, we’ve experimented with it. It isn’t something we’ve historically added, but we are having a big rollout in 2025. So Brandon, uh, one of the reasons I, I wanted you to come on the show today is because we’re gonna be, uh, working together in 2025 a lot more closely.
Uh, so if you want, could you introduce, uh, the column and what you plan to, uh, talk about and then maybe talk about the first column which is in the December issue. Yeah, so super excited for the column. It is a marketing column for APC magazine called Painter’s Playbook. The idea of the column is to discuss all different facets of marketing and really bring it down to earth. I think there’s a lot of misconception, a lot of confusion, unnecessary complication surrounding marketing. And so the, the column’s gonna clarify a lot of things.
A lot of questions people have about different vendors they’ve listened to different things that they’ve read in Facebook groups or heard from, from other painting contractors that they’re friends with, it’s gonna give a lot of clarity to that. Nice. And of course, also with marketing, man, things seem to change very quickly. So there’s uh if you think you understand marketing, way around a bit, just like the weather, it’ll change as, as people always say, um. Would you agree, Brandon, which would be rare because you don’t typically agree with me, however, let’s give it a shot, almost never, um.
Do you think people are both painting contractors and the general public are probably a bit too quick to dismiss direct mail because people think it’s outdated or people think, well, you know, I throw it in the trash, um, as soon as I get it. But, and that may be true, because multiple things can be true. You may throw it in the trash as soon as you get it, but what do you do first? You, of course, read it, and you also flip it over and see what’s on the other side.
That’s, that’s my take. So, do you think direct mail gets a bad rap? 100%. Yeah, I think direct mail, like a lot of forms of marketing, people have They have pre pre uh conceived notions about it. They assume that every person that they are targeting every, every prospective homeowner, business property owner is gonna think the same way they do. So if they don’t respond to direct mail, then therefore no one responds to direct mail. So that’s not actually how life works and if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t.
Uh, no companies would do it, right? If no companies were getting an ROI from it, I think there’s a similar, uh, narrative has been created around email marketing. You know, email marketing is dead. I think direct mail is more effective than email marketing, but I think really any channel can be effective if you know what you’re doing. Wow. And so, you know, just in these first, uh, you know, 10 minutes, we’ve kind of been talking about direct mail as if it’s a monolith. Um, but one of the things I was uh surprised by in your column is that there’s many different kinds of packages for direct mail and you’re gonna want to choose the right one for what you’re trying to accomplish.
Could you just give us a brief overview of, of all the different um kinds of direct mail you can send and the advantages or disadvantages of each? Yeah, so there are, there are tons, so there are a bunch. I’ll, I’ll give you some of the main ones that we, we like to focus on that we’ve seen value in. So every door direct mail is what you’re typically going to hear. It’s what USPS offers. It’s kind of the entry um path that most, most painting companies are going to take if they do it themselves.
This is what it sounds like your piece of mail is going to go to every door on a postal route. It tends to be your most cost effective approach in terms of the price that you’re paying per door, but it doesn’t tend to be the best approach in terms of ROI. It’s going to land at renters’ doors. It’s going to land at doors that you probably wouldn’t want to pay to market to if you were handpicking your prospects. Saturation mailers would be a step up from that.
It allows a little bit more selection. The cost goes up a little bit more. Uh, what I like even better than that, it would be high density plus mailers. So this is pretty high precision. You do need to have a minimum of 125 homes on a poster route to run it. Uh, the cost is going to go up a fair amount from the every door direct mail, but your response rate, your, your conversion rate, so how many of those, um, leads are actually turning into projects for you is going to go up.
It typically is going to go up enough to offset that cost and make it a more positive ROI return on your investment. New mover programs, so what you guys were referencing in the beginning, you move into a new home, you get a bunch of mail. Um, I, I got a bunch, I moved into a new home like 45 years ago, and I remember getting all these mailers offering me a $100 Home Depot gift card. That that was the go to, you know, you get a $100 Home Depot gift card, or a $103 Lowe’s gift card, and I took one of them up on it and the guy just wouldn’t leave my house.
So I don’t do that anymore. I don’t necessarily recommend that. He, he, uh, it was for some water filtration system or water softener system, and he, he wanted to make me tea. And eventually I was like, do get out of my house. So that was a weird thing, but new mover programs can be really effective. Please don’t, please don’t um sit in people’s houses and not leave. And then radius mailers. So I think the one of the just overlooked. Focuses of marketing in general is peppering a neighborhood in what you’re already working.
So when you go out and you’re painting a house, you know, so often there, there are no, uh, there’s no canvassing, there are no flyers being distributed in that neighborhood. There are no mailers being sent out. I think that’s a huge mistake for that a lot of painting companies make and you can, you can conduct something what’s known as radius mailers, and you can actually target surrounding homes from where you’re working already. You know, it seems like the technology really has increased a lot. I received a ton.
Of mailers from companies who uh who do lawn care, a lot of, you know, how to fix your lawn, repair your lawn, take care of those dandelions. So I think They, they must be using like Google images because they already know how bad my lawn looks, Brandon, and that’s why they’re really no arguing me. There’s no way it looks bad. I appreciate that, but so, man, you just rattled that stuff off. That was awesome, um. I guess my question is, So do people, should contractors, what’s, what’s the benefit or the need to hire someone like yourself and people are gonna think this is a softball question, but it’s not to hire like a marketing agency to do this.
Of course, they could do it on their own. It’s just a function of, I assume, how much time are you willing to put into this, right? How, cause there’s gonna be a learning curve, you need to educate yourself and of course you can do that, of course, you can do it yourself, um. Question is, is that the best use of a contractor’s time? So talk a bit about that. How, how, what should contractors think about when they’re trying to decide what to do on their own versus hiring out?
You know, I think it’s a super legitimate question, and I think it’s one that should be asked. I think you should ask that really about any form of marketing. So I had run a contracting business myself, ran a mobile auto detail business, and that’s how I got into marketing. So I ended up deciding to learn it myself and had a knack for it and fell in love with it. And then now I run a, you know, a marketing company. But I think if you’re running a painting business, you should assess whether or not you want to learn this stuff.
It would be the same. As digital marketing, I, I’d say digital marketing would actually be more challenging to learn. So running Facebook ads or conducting SCO that probably take you several years to become really good at that. But you can go that route. So there’s a few things to think about. Number one is, do you understand copy? So how to actually write the words, how to write the sentences in the paragraph, make a persuasive sales copy on your mailer. Do you understand how to create an effective image, creative, what kind of stuff you want on there?
Because it’s not just, well, let’s take a pretty house and put it on there. There’s actually a psychological, um, there’s psychological factors that need to be taken into account when you’re creating this stuff. Who is your ideal customer avatar? Who are you actually sending this mailing to? How do they think? What messaging is going to resonate with them? Are you going to include a discount of some kind? Are you going to include some other form of promotion, perhaps a value add, as opposed to a discount? Maybe a free pressure wash with the full exterior paint project, something like that.
And then you have to get into what, what I think the question was primarily geared toward, which is the actual fundamentals of mailing it. Are you’re gonna do every do direct mail, or you’re gonna hire a company to actually assist you with that, or you’re going to do it directly through the USPS? Um, and there’s where you need to actually factor in what’s the markup. So you should do some level of homework, you should understand the fundamental finances of it, and then figure out what the markup’s gonna be because a lot of these companies will charge excessively and it makes it difficult to achieve that return on investment.
So there’s the actual creating of the mailer, there’s there’s the Planning what’s called a campaign. So you’re not gonna want to just send one mailer and be done. You’re gonna want to create a campaign. So you’re gonna want to plan multiple mailers in the beginning when you start. You’re gonna want to choose your cadence, you’re gonna want to choose the actual um approach that you’re going to take. Is it every door direct mail, high density plus, what is it? And then you’re, you’re gonna want to move forward from there, right?
And then target what homes are you targeting, how many homes are you targeting, how much are you willing to invest, and then how frequently are you going to hit them. So if you want to learn all that, you can. Uh, otherwise, I would recommend doing some homework, finding a, a vendor that has a proven track record, uh, that can explain this stuff to you, walk you through it, and then giving it a shot that way. You mentioned ROI. I think one of the, you know, great advantages of digital marketing is, is it’s really easy to track metrics and to to determine um what’s working and what isn’t and what your ROI is and and whether ultimately this is worth it and you should keep continuing.
I think that’s probably a lot harder in the real world when you’re talking about direct mail campaigns. How do you track the effectiveness of, of that? Um, is there signals that you’re looking for from homeowners that would suggest that you’re reaching them? Yeah, so I don’t actually think it has to be that much harder. There is a little bit additional complexity to it, but when you send out direct mail, you would want to use a custom QR code. So there are different pieces of software that you can use.
It’s a QR code, people obviously would scan it. With their smartphone and then you’re registering, you’re logging that lead so you know it came from direct mail. You’d also want to use a custom URL, so URL being, you know, Bob’spaintingcompany. com, you’d probably want to create a separate page, a separate landing page, and drive people to that landing page, then you know it came from that piece of direct mail. You would want to use a tracking number. So this is not your primary company’s number. It’s a number that actually forwards to your primary company’s number and then you have tracked it as a direct mail lead.
And then now you know how many leads you’ve got. You track through some kind of CRM, um, whether it’s strip jobs or Paint scout or whatever you happen to be using. Actually, what’s happening with those leads? do they close? If they close, what’s the revenue and what’s the gross profit on the project? And then you can have a pretty good understanding of your return on investment. The challenge, something that will happen is you will likely underestimate your return on investment because some people will get the mailer.
And maybe they’ll keep it, it’ll go in their fridge, maybe they toss it up, but maybe they remember the name. And then they might go onto Google and search for you. And so you’ll either see a direct website visit, so someone will type it in directly, Bob’s housepainting.com. And if you’re effectively tracking your digital footprint, then you’ll see, OK, someone directly went to my website. Or they might just Google, this is more common, Bob’s house painting, and then they click and now what, what you think is you had a brand search through searching through a search engine from Google, but it was actually really from your direct mail.
So when you’re effectively marketing, and this is sort of a, I don’t want to go too far beyond the scope of the question, but when you’re effectively marketing and you’re hitting people from all different angles, attribution, so actually assigning where that lead came from can become challenging. But overall, when you set up the right tracking mechanisms, you, you’ll get 90% of the way there. So I wanna talk about um KPIs, but I have to circle back and ask a follow up because you said you used to have a car detailing uh business.
Please tell me 10 minutes ago, Andrew. I know, but I didn’t, I don’t want to. You didn’t listen to anything else. You just, that was it. I’ve really been thinking hard. Um, what, what was the, what’s the some of the nicest cars you ever detailed? I mean, nothing, nothing insane Ferrari. It’s the nicest car. I’m I’m not a a huge car guy, and I wasn’t doing the detailing for too long. Um, so I think some, some form of Ferrari, I don’t super know cars that well. Well, that question really fizzled then.
You, uh, I thought it was gonna be really amazing. I thought it was gonna be with Brandon and uh yeah that was that was a bust. I’ll tell you about the most interesting car that. Yeah, of course, it wasn’t really the car. I have no idea what the car was, but the, it was early on and when you’re when you’re early on, this was actually my, my first company and when you’re early on, you just kind of take anything, anything and everything, it’s a win, you don’t really understand how to qualify.
Your customer, you don’t know when to walk away, any money is good money, and you’re making progress. So, we took a full interior detail um of a car that was absolutely covered in in mold. Hovered. It was, it looked like it was the Titanic. So you opened it, it’s just green. There were, there were tennis shoes in there that were absolutely just, you couldn’t even tell what color the shoe was. It was just fully green. Obviously that car should have just been lit on fire. She just been thrown into the like, walked away, you know, you need a hazmat suit.
There’s like that would be like, you know, painting a house that has a lot of lead, right? So there’s there’s like a very serious health issue with this car, but me being A novice entrepreneur, not really thinking too much, too much through it. My wife would actually help me detail the cars. I, uh, just told her, sit this one out, and then I just probably reduced my life span by a few years. That would be the most interesting car. Oh my God, that’s, uh, see, I knew there had to be a way to go.
I look back on that and I’m like, man, you probably should have just gotten a job at that point. I love it. OK, so on to the, the serious part of the show, um. I assume there are some KPIs the contractors should think about whether that’s, you know, cost per lead or maybe like a minimum number of sends or, you know, maximum number of pieces. Uh, can you, can you track sort of like yield, the number of leads that would generate, uh, that any, any one campaign would generate?
What, what are the KPIs that you pay attention to? Yeah, so the, let’s start with the recommended pieces of mail. So I recommend starting with 10,27.76 pieces, at least 28,240. I think one of the, the common mistakes when people try direct mail is they will start with either too few pieces or the the timeline of how long they conduct it will be too short. And so maybe they’ll send out 2200 pieces or 240.40 pieces, and they’ll send it out once, they don’t get any leads and they say, well, direct mail didn’t work.
That was a huge expense. Direct mail is Expensive. It is not your cheapest form of marketing. So you’re gonna want to have a little bit of a nest egg that you’re going to dedicate to direct mail and figuring out whether or not this is a viable channel for you in your local market. Uh, so starting with 22025,2040.40 pieces gets you enough data. Uh, it hits enough homes to figure out whether or not that piece of mail worked. If it didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that direct mail definitely doesn’t work in your area.
It probably does work, but there’s seasonality to factor in. There’s what homes you hit. There’s actually what your message was. Was there an offer? We find that uh percentage discounts tend to work better than dollar discounts or value add promotions such as the, the driveway pressure washing promotion that I offered. Percentage discounts are easier for the customer to understand. And then it also doesn’t put you into an issue if it’s a small painting project and you promised $22025 off and now they think they get, they’re getting the room painted for free.
Uh, so you don’t run into all that. Uh, so 244,24 pieces, figuring out whether that messaging worked, hitting it every 6 weeks. So this is another big question mark. Like do we hit it every, every 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, you know, 3 months, how often do we actually send the mailer? 6 weeks is a sweet spot where it’s cost effective, but your, your return, uh, your actual response rate hasn’t declined too much. Um, and then, and then it comes down to your, your economics of your business. Right? So how much does the lead cost?
It’s the same way of looking at it in terms of digital marketing. Like what is your set rate? So these leads that come in, what percentage of them are you actually going to go conduct an estimate for? What is your close rate when you actually conduct that estimate, how many of those are going to turn into projects for you? And then what is your revenue and ultimately your profit margin of those projects and then tie it back to what your cost per lead was, and you can see whether or not this is a viable channel for you. Nice.
And we’ve talked a little bit about uh how you know it’s working and what to do to make sure it goes right. What are the potential pitfalls to watch out for for a contractor who’s probably just getting into this? How, how can you tell if it’s going wrong, you know, what are the common mistakes that people make in terms of uh entering into this market? Yeah, so I think vendor markups would be a, a big potential pitfall so the companies that want to do it the right way and they want to work with a professional, uh, but don’t necessarily, you know, haven’t educated themselves at least at a, at a fundamental level, so they’ll kind of move forward with anyone and haven’t done that math and, and then the, the vendors marking up to the point, your response rate and your close rate would just need to be excessively high for it to make sense, that’s an issue.
Um, postal issues, this is uncommon. But around 443% of the time or so, the, the post office will actually completely lose your mailing. And so this is a huge bummer when that happens, but it will just disappear. So they’ll they’ll scan it in. So there’s nothing you can do, no kind of refund you’ll get, but it just won’t be distributed. You won’t even know that it didn’t get distributed, but you will just have a 0% response rate. Nobody will respond. That, that is a, a possibility that you just have to mentally work with.
It’s very unlikely to happen, but if you do it over an extended period of time, it will happen eventually. Uh, seasonal variability. So sending it out at, at, obviously during the winter is going to yield a lower response rate and ultimately those leads are gonna be more expensive because of that. Uh, summer and, you know, obviously the response rate is going to be higher and the, the, the ROI will likely be higher. And then the, some of the other issues that I talked about, if they’re doing it on their own, just sending too few pieces, I would say that would be one of the biggest issues, sending too few pieces and then sending it only once or twice.
Not really creating campaigns, not testing different offers, not testing different messaging, just saying, hey, I’m going to try direct mail. I tried this one campaign, I sent out a few 1000 pieces. I don’t really know if the copy or the offer was good because I’m not an expert. I just made something up and put it on a postcard and sent it, and it didn’t go that well. So therefore, direct mail doesn’t work well in my market. Another story time question Brandy because I love stories. I love stories, um.
Any stories, any case studies, examples from your clients? Um, the things that went especially well, something that was totally new to them, something maybe they were very skeptical of that, you know, I didn’t think this would work, but boy it sure didn’t work well. Um. You know, I’m trying to Break into this neighborhood that I’ve, I’ve always failed and all of a sudden this campaign really worked for me. Any stories, positive or negative, that you want to share with the listening audience, thousands across the globe, thousands, man, that’s a lot of.
I know that’s so much pressure. Yeah, so the, the best, I guess most surprising wasn’t really surprising to us result that we’ve generated would be a radius mailer. So the, the idea of breaking into new neighborhoods that you mentioned, uh, one company we work with started offering radius mailers. So every time they’d go through, they didn’t do it every time, but when they would, would be serving a, a house in a market that they really wanted to break into, they would roll out radius mailers, and we found that there, it really, it burst open those markets.
So they ended up getting a lot more leads and then because we actively worked with them on what’s called database reactivation. Um, it’s a stupidly complicated marketing phrase, but just reaching out to past leads and, and past customers through, uh, looking for repeat and referral business through email marketing in other ways, uh, continuously keeping in contact with them. We were able to generate basically whole new service areas that became consistent sources of revenue, uh, in which areas in which they had a difficult time breaking into previously.
It’s like, like uh associations, homeowner associations, gated neighborhoods, some areas like that where they just weren’t having luck previously. Because they have, because they’re gated, right? You can’t get in. I mean it could be because they’re gated, you know, I think the the marketing just wasn’t really effective. I don’t think they were doing door knocking or anything, so I don’t think that the gating necessarily was actually the issue, uh, but when you, when you’re actually, you know, when you have a, I mean it comes back to the sales psychology piece when you’re, you’re serving a house in an area that you want to serve more houses in, people are naturally gossipy.
People naturally want to know uh what’s happening with, you know, Mrs. Jones’ house, right? And then they, they see kind of the transformation that’s happening over there. And there’s a little bit of FOMO. And so when you bring that opportunity to all the neighbors and and they’re seeing something beautiful happening, it’s only natural that you’re likely going to get more leads from it, and then it becomes a bit of a snowball effect. But I think just just so often digitally and offline, things like direct mail, that’s completely ignored by painting companies.
One of the things you just said, uh, kind of sparked a question for me. Door, you mentioned door knockers, um, obviously, there’s also people who are gonna hang um flyers on your doorknob. Um, is that in place of direct mail? Is it a complement to direct mail? Would you suggest pairing those things or is it completely unrelated and unnecessary? I don’t think any marketing is unrelated and or unnecessary. I think experiment. I mean, typically companies wouldn’t do both those things because usually if you’re knocking, you don’t also need the mail.
But I think try it. Try in your market, try the door knocking. I mean, maintaining a canvassing team is difficult. Obviously there’s a lot of turnover. It’s a tough job. Some people love it, but oftentimes people last about two weeks and then quit. But try canvassing on its own, try direct mail on its own, and then tag team it. Right? And then different mixes of digital marketing run paid ads targeting those certain areas, get a really strong digital presence in terms of SEO, so you’re just showing up at the top of Google.
I mean, the, the ultimate trump card here, the way to win this game is you’re just everywhere. People look for you online, people search for a painting company, people are on social media, people go to their mailbox, people answer their door, you’re there. So it’s as if the universe is telling them, you are the right painting company. It’s just helping the universe out a little bit. Well, what a nice way to think about advertising. Andrew, I don’t know why I’ve been waiting for you to bring up the bull.
I mean, I don’t, I felt like it’d be arrogant for me to bring it up, but you keep bringing up stories and yet this one hasn’t come up. I don’t, I, I see how it’s super relevant to direct mail. I’m just wondering why you haven’t, haven’t talked about it. So I mentioned that uh. That I saw Brandon recently in Scottsdale, Arizona at the PCA commercial painting conference, and I was attending the evening reception, which was co-sponsored. By painter marketing pros, enjoying a nice adult beverage with Brandon when he said, I need to leave.
And I said, where are you going? And he said, I gotta meet a guy about a bull. So he actually went, I don’t know how, but he found out that there’s uh this place where the locals take money from tourists by allowing them to ride a bull and uh Brandon. He was smart enough to do that and uh and then the next day is when he gave his presentation and he He opened his presentation by telling the story about The bull riding and Brandon, man, I gotta say.
You had that room rolling. I mean that was, of course, it’s, it’s quite a story, it’s quite an event, it’s unique, um. And Brandon just, he had the room rolling telling telling the story about the bull riding. So I’ve, I’ve set it up for you. What, what more can you add about the bull riding experience? I mean, that was pretty good, Andrew. I appreciate your humoring me there. The, uh, I, I told my wife, I called her, I said, Hey, I’m gonna ride a bull, and she’s like, that’s great.
She supports me to a flaw. It was like my family, my friends are like, she should not tell you yes to the things that she does, but she’s always basically like, that sounds great, uh, which is part of why I married her, and there are other great reasons as well, but I told her I’m gonna ride a bull. She’s like, that sounds great. I’m like, I started getting second guess, you know, kind of second guessing it a little bit, started looking at some statistics, some stories. I was like, you know what, this might not be the best idea.
And then my rational brain started kicking in, but I think that’s fear trying to, trying to trick me. I’m like, well, you know, I paid thousands of dollars to sponsor this event. I’m, I’m here to talk to people we’re at this nice golf course and it’s really great. And I’m talking to my friend Andrew. It’s pretty illogical for me to go. Just walk away from my own event that just started. It’s going to go on for the next 2 hours. Just walk away and tell everyone, hey, I’m, I’m gonna go ride a bull.
Um, but I said, no fear, you’re not going to trick me. So I went, Jesse Ramos was, was the individual TJ’s professional painting. Um, he was the, the individual who brought this to my attention. So that’s how I found out about it. He’s a wild card. And then we went and we, I said a little prayer. Beforehand, um, and I called my wife. I told her I, I do not want, um, the breathing tube, you know, take it off. That’s, she thought I was gonna call and say, I love her, and this.
I said, just take it off. I don’t want it. Living will. I told her if we, if we walk away from this thing, then I’m going to tell everybody that I wrote a bull. That’s what’s going to happen. So, thank you, Andrew, for humoring me. I did walk away, uh, 7.76 seconds, almost the 8, but quite frankly, that was. It was very secondary in my mind how long I stayed on the bull. It was in my mind, but it was not my main focus. Now, is there, uh, I’m sorry, Kevin, is there, are there any, uh, images or, uh, photos of you on the bull that have already infiltrated your own marketing?
Not my own marketing. I, I put a photo of the bull and, you know, the first slide of that presentation. I explained to the room how I tried to find a way to tie it into the presentation, but I was unable to figure out how it related to commercial um marketing, and we’re just all going to talk about it for a second because I did it and I survived it. So it, uh, I haven’t yet figured out, I guess, you know, grab the, grabbed the bull by the horns.
Uh, go for it. I mean, we could probably find some kind of cheesy marketing, but no, so far it’s just a cool story that I’d like to talk about. How is the dismount? Uh, it was a little bit rough. I thought, I thought maybe, um, sometimes I’ll tweak my back and I thought maybe that was one of those times, and, and that we were gonna have a rough night. Uh, but it ended up being OK. We, we, uh, had some celebratory beverages after that. I think it kind of loosened the muscles up a little bit.
But the dismount was not smooth. It was not a smooth dismount. I don’t think you can have a smooth dismount. That’s why it’s, it’s a pretty stupid sport. It’s not like, hey, I’m gonna get on the bull and, and, and then I’ll, you know, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll, I’ll just get off the bull and, and we did it. The plan is you’re going to kind of get rocked, right? It’s just how badly do you get rocked. You, you’re going into the situation knowing it’s not going to work out that well.
So I think it’s kind of a silly sport, but it was a one and done, I think for me. Did they give you any advice like tuck and roll when you hit the ground, or very little, very little. No, we were. So when you I’ll tie this one into marketing, so when something is free, when something’s free for you, so you go onto Google and you use it and say, well, this is great. They’re giving me all this information for free, or you go on to Facebook and you connect with your friends.
Oh, this is awesome. Then you are the product being sold. So Facebook ads are being sold to you. Google paper click ads and local service ads are being sold to you. You are the product that is why it is free. I was the product of that experience. I did pay $40 but there were over 200 people in there who had also paid money to get in there. And so the, the, the concern of the people running the establishment was not training me up on how to ride the bull.
It was making sure that the bull left the chute at the time that the people thought it was going to leave, even though I still didn’t even know which, um, where this bull was headed or kind of how this whole thing was going to go. It was only $40.40 dollars, yeah. And, and just sign sign a little waiver, Jesse said, Oh, should we read it? And I said, What do you think it says, Jesse? We’re riding a bull. If it kills you, if it stops you, if you’re on a breathing tube, they’re not eligible.
You’re choosing to ride a bull. You don’t need to read it. So I envisioned uh your homepage eventually saying something along the lines of marketing is a wild ride, a raging bull. Brandon rides it so you don’t have to. I kind of think that that should be the theme of 2025. I think just everything I do should be, you know, should somehow revolve around bull riding. All joking aside though, that is You know, where, you know, where does courage and and stupidity begin? Who knows, that’s not the point.
But It takes a lot of courage and confidence to say, yes, I’m gonna get on a boat because obviously a lot can go wrong. So kudos to you, Brandon. Appreciate you, Andrew. Thank you. By the way, listening to you, you guys’ banter, so I run a, a podcast and some people listening have probably heard it, Painter marketing mastermind podcast, but listening to you guys’ banter in the beginning. Made me kind of want to co-host and made me start to feel lonely on my own podcast. Just so you know, it sounds you guys have a good time.
Well, I think that’s uh Thank you. And I think that’s why, um, I mean, obviously this podcast has been around for 10 years, um, predates Kevin. I think we started it back with Emily Howard. It was an excuse for she and I to do a podcast together, um, and that was probably the primary and the, the educational content was secondary, and now that’s, that, uh, that focus continues with Kevin cause yes, it is, it is fun to banter, um, but Brandon, thank you for coming on the show.
Founder of Painter Marketing Pros website is paintermarketingpros.com. Uh, what, what will people find there? There is it fair to say that you’re a digital market agency? That is fair to say. OK. So if somebody goes to your website, uh, to learn about you, what, what will they find, um, how do new customers typically get involved? What are they, uh, looking. To have you help them with maybe what are services that you offer that, that might be a little counterintuitive to them. Um, just tell me about how you work with painting contract.
Yeah, yeah, so if you go to paintermarketingpros. com, you can see a list of our services and how it works. You’ll also have the ability to schedule a strategy session. So that’s where my team will sit down with you, run through your goals, how long have you been in business, uh, what are you doing currently and what are you ultimately looking to achieve. And then path a, uh, help you chart a path forward, that path may involve us working with you, it may not, but it’s an opportunity for us to sit down and talk with you and give you some guidance.
Uh, in terms of the way that we work with painting companies, our focus, our customer avatar, if you will, is really the, the long-term focused painting company owner, so someone who wants to build an asset of true value. Whether they ultimately want to pass it off to their children, whether they want to make it a sellable asset and eventually exit, uh, through a sale, whether they want to continue to run it, but just generate more money, and have a better lifestyle, or potentially even Grow into more of a passive ownership type role.
So having the, the lead flow and, and the organizational structure to ultimately be able to lead, uh, from truly a visionary perspective as, as opposed to being an owner operator, which so many painting company owners are. Um, so we can help with all of that, um, and more. You know, far be it from me, you know, I don’t like to hand out confluence, Brandon, especially to you. The whole thing was remarkable you said that, but I will say. I mean, obviously we went over general content for this podcast, but we, you know, it’s not like, you know, these are the questions.
You are in an elite class when it comes to paint radio podcast guests for being so quick on the answers, so concise, so controlled. And I, you know, Kevin and I. We’re communicators. We’re, uh, I’m a former editor in chief. He’s current editor in chief. It’s all about providing information and providing it in, uh, in bite-sized capsules and not overdoing it, and you did a fabulous job, man. That’s a good job, Brandon Pierrepont. I appreciate you. You’re a good podcast guest, and yes, and that is probably why Kevin said, hey, Brandon, we want you to be a regular appearance, uh, presence.
In the magazine. So you will see Brandon’s column in the uh December issue, and you’ll see it moving forward into 2025. And if you don’t see the magazine, if you don’t receive your copy or you think you do, but maybe it’s been a while. Little secret, we do purge our our uh subscriber roles on occasion if you do not renew, if you do not resubscribe, um, because it’s pretty darn expensive to print and mail a uh a magazine. So, Make sure, go to PatMag. com, find a subscription tab, renew your subscription.
It’s free. And there’s basically two things to subscribe to the magazine, but also Paint News, which is the e-newsletter. Both are free, e-newsletters once a week. It’s incredibly uh useful and just boom, 44 points, 4 stories in each e-newsletter. I don’t know. Talk about effective and efficient. We, we don’t load that up with much um fluff. Uh, no fluff, it’s a fluff-free newsletter. So, go to paintbag. com, click on the subscriptions tab, renew your subscriptions. Brandon Pierrepont, Painter marketing pros, paintermarketingpros.com. Thank you so much. Have a great day, everybody.
You’re doing a great job. We’ll see you next time.
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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.