Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, the show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 103 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA Educational Series to grow marketing for painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in North America and learning from their experiences.

In this series titled “Success Looks Different”, Shane Fast of Renew Painting will be discussing his surprising journey from ministry to painting, and the many lives he has impacted, lessons he’s learned, and counterintuitive approach he has taken along the way.  It is a 6-part series.

In episode 4, Shane will lay out Renew Painting’s core values and how that impacts every aspect of the business.

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

Welcome back, Shane. Good to be back. Good to be back. I feel like the, uh, I feel like in the past episodes we’ve been kind of pushing the values, like they keep wanting to come up.

We’re like, well, we have a we have an episode on those, so we’ll, so I’m I’m excited to to be able to fully unleash. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I guess your path, you know, we, we’ve gotten into um unlikely path, right, from ministry to painting kind of how you were, you’re resistant to it at first and now we’ve gotten to the professionalizing scaling, we’re leaning into the into the the business. Was the values, I guess let’s figure out what your values are and maybe how they came to be, whether that whether they were sort of developed over time, whether you decided to start with them.

What does that look like? Yeah, yeah, well, I’ll tell you, so we We have 5 core values. Um, they definitely evolved over time. We Yeah, I mean, they went from Various, I don’t even remember what some of the first iterations are, uh, but I know now we, at some point, I kind of try to turn them into more action statements. Um, and then, then just straight nouns. And whether that’s, you know, a, uh, a best practice or not, it’s, it’s kind of worked for us to be able to articulate them and to be able to kinda get our heads around them a little more.

So, um, yes, I’ll just write all them off. So we have, uh, champion integrity and responsibility. So, champion integrity and responsibility, passionately pursue excellence. Dare to innovate and take risks. Confront adversity with resilience. Embrace humility and serve others. So those are kind of our our 5, and then we’ll we’ll chop those up some, so I won’t repeat them now, but So yeah, I mean, they’re a little wordier because we went with the Action statements versus you you just like. You know, whether it be responsible or be accountable, or, you know, which there’s nothing wrong with those things.

It just something clicked for me when I read an article one time about them being action and I thought, I can understand that more. I kind of think that way a little more. And so that’s, that’s how we use them. Yeah, I like that, man. The, uh, like integrity is a pretty common one, right? Integrity or hard work or, you know, things like that. But what does that always mean? I, I think taking, um, you know, a noun and rather being integrity, champion integrity and responsibility, I’m sure there’s kind of teaching in depth to that.

And I think it does reframe it when you make it in action. Yeah, and I would say that’s the one we cheat on a little bit and it doesn’t go, you know, we just snuck one verb in there and kept the two nouns that everybody loves to use. And we know that we laugh we use that the rest of them have a little more of a oomph to them, but, um, but you know, it does help. I mean, we, you know, we just had a situation this morning where I’m talking to both our project managers are newer.

Within 6 months and not to necessarily to organization, but to the roles, uh, one to the organization. And so, you know, we’re going through this, this scenario where we have a callback and You know, some of it’s legitimate, all of it’s legitimate. Some of it we should have documented as previous damage or previous, like, hey, your ceiling already has this really wavy cut line and we’re not painting the ceiling. We didn’t do a good job documenting that, right? So, so that’s an example where, you know, we didn’t talk through this core value as we are navigating the situation.

But as I’m talking to our project manager, I said, OK, well, That’s on us. I quoted it. We had 153 people went for a pre-job walk. The painter painted it. No documented this issue, previous issue. So that like we have to take responsibility that we dropped the ball there, you know. Um, and so what does it then look like to make this customer happy, not saying, oh, well, it was like that way before, so we’re not gonna fix it, you know, because, well, we also want to be people of integrity to say, hey, we’re gonna do.

Say we’re gonna do, we’re gonna leave you with a good product, and yet, we have the PCA standards and there can be latent defects in some of those things. But let’s be honest, if you hire somebody who’s supposed to be a premium company, you expect a clean ceiling line, even if there were one before there wasn’t that clean, right? So that was on us to, to do that. And so that’s I guess that’s an example of where they’re having that integrity and responsibility and saying, hey, we’re not gonna weasel out of it, we’re not gonna lie, which is interesting because uh the feedback at our team meeting just a little bit ago was that, um, you know, Nate said, well, I think when I first started talking to him, he thought I was just gonna try to get, you know, not cop out of everything, but kind of, you know, kind of had that expectation that I was gonna try to make an excuse or whatever.

And so I, when I said, hey, yeah, we should have fixed that, or we should have straighten this out. And then when he asked about something else, I said, well, let me show you on these previous pictures where that was. He said the whole demeanor started to change when he realized, yeah, we have documentation that supports. Some of the stuff was preexisting, but also I’m gonna acknowledge that we could have fixed some of the things too, you know, and let’s, let’s find a middle ground there, you know, to, to work it out.

And so those things kind of play together in my mind. We want, uh, we want our employees to be OK to say I failed. So if, you know, there’s times I still do all the sales, or 99% of them. And so there’s, there’s times when I have to look at our project managers and say, man, I did not catch that, or I just dropped the ball. I totally missed that. I didn’t ask him this, you know, or I should have done X or frankly, or sometimes the way I write the quote.

I literally, I mean, I’ve literally had times this is years ago, but when I sent a quote to somebody, I didn’t include the cost of material in it, um, and that’s obviously totally on me, so I have to accept that and say, hey, we drop cost this, it’s gonna look a little different because I totally dropped this ball. That was years ago before software and everything, but um. But there’s just places where it’s OK to say, Man, I’m gonna take responsibility for my mistake, you know, I’m not getting fired for it.

In fact, I’m more likely to get fired if I don’t take responsibility, you know, so we want our people, we want our people to, to, to have those, those, those values. I love that, man. I think it presents a good opportunity for your team to show that you’re not perfect and how you’re taking accountability for it and that it’s OK that you made a mistake. And I think the I have a pretty good idea of, of kind of where I would, how I would view this, but I’d like to get you to elaborate on it.

How do you know when, OK, the, the, the client comes and says, hey, I expected XYZ. And, and you don’t necessarily want to just kind of, you know, cater to everything, right? Sometimes there could be scope creep or or things that maybe are a little bit unreasonable versus, well, we are a premium company and they expected a certain things so we’re gonna make sure that we take care of them. Where’s that line? Yeah, that’s a great question, and I, I think it is a case by case basis.

We are human, we have emotions. We feel things right and then well it’s a redundant statement we have emotion feel, but you know where I’m kind of going with this. So if the if if it’s a client that is, so it’s a lot of it. There, so we, we are not objective, I guess is what I’m getting to. So the, the way this interaction goes with the client will, will probably determine a decent amount of that, right? So are they, are they respectful? Are they acknowledging our hard work and those kind of things, you know, that goes a long way to, it’s just like if you were to return something in the store and you’re a day late on the 30 days or something like that, if you come in there and you’re a total jerk, and you start yelling from the top, you’re probably not gonna get.

You know, the outcome you want, but if you’re kind, you probably get at least get a store credit, right? So, I think, I think that that matters. I mean, just being blunt, that, that interaction matters, you know, um. That being said, We want to do as much as we can, and we want to stretch it as far as we can within reason. So, there are times where We have a situation, they say, hey, they thought, they thought we were gonna paint this and it’s clearly not in the scope of work.

And the project manager might say, you know what, I’m, I’m up to date on job costing and this one’s looking really strong. Do you want to just throw that door in, you know, um, and there’s times when we just can’t because we’ve, we’ve already stretched ourselves, you know, the quote was really thin and we knew that going in and then they want to add da da da da da, and we just, we have to give them a price, you know. Um, so I think it, it definitely depends on, you know, where we stand on the job, how we’ve performed.

Have we done everything to the expectation that we promised, and have we done it in the time we promised, you know, or have we been, are we a month late because it was raining and our exteriors were backed up and we’re just now getting to your house. And You know, that, that to me is a place where we’ll give a little more ground and try to, try to create a win for them because they’ve been very patient for us to get there when our schedule’s gotten totally jacked up.

That’s another place where I think we’re a little more flexible, because we want to create a great experience for them. And if they’ve had to wait a lot longer than they expected, maybe we can, you know, kick something back to them in that way that, that brings in a little joy, you know. Yeah, so I think that, I mean, that was empathy that you just, you know, talked about with regard to the client saying, hey, they’ve been patient with us, they waited this time, because I think so many business owners and people would say, hey, it rained.

I can’t control that. They know that I can’t control that. It’s an exterior project, you know, we did tell them when we set the date that this is tentative and depending on the weather and, and kind of, you know, the schedule might shift. But you’re essentially saying, well, I didn’t control the, the, you know, the weather. I didn’t dance to the rain gods and it rained and it got pushed back. But I also understand it impacted their life, whether it was my fault or not. And what I’m accountable for as a company is their experience and so I don’t, I’m not obligated to necessarily offer additional, you know, scope of work or anything like that to try to make their experience better.

But it would do a better job, but my mission of of providing a phenomenal experience from a premium company for them, and I think that I think most company owners aren’t thinking in that that kind of 3D level, right, that level of depth. It’s more, well, this is the scope of work we told them it’s dependent upon the the weather conditions that this is a tentative scheduling date and therefore they are not obligated to to receive anything else. I think that kind of myopic thinking really restricts growth.

Yeah, I think you’re right. It it is, I mean, I will say it’s hard. It’s It’s hard to give something away for free. I mean, it just is, you know, so if you normally target even 20, let’s say, let’s say just use this low number, $20. Let’s say crawlspace doors $20 because it’s in good condition. All I gotta do is slap a quick coat of paint on it, which most of them are gonna be more than that, but let’s just say $20. Then if I’d say to Ryan, which we did last week, hey, you know what, just that needs to be done.

It’s gonna be an eyesore if you don’t, they’re having a party here this weekend. I know they’re saying they’re gonna do it themselves, just hit it while you’re here. You know, if, if That’s literally $20 we just gave away, you know. And um but I did actually, it’s funny hearing, you know, until we’re having this conversation, I didn’t think about that, um, because it just at the time, it feels like the right thing to do because It’s not gonna kill us. It’s not gonna take a ton of time.

We can work it in, you know, that’s the other thing is, do, do we have time to squeeze something in within the schedule we have to, you know, cause sometimes people will say, we can do X, Y, and Z. And even if they want to pay for it, there’s times when we have to just schedule a return trip because we, we’re already scheduled to be somewhere else and so to add on would be challenging there. So I think that it kind of goes in a number of different directions there.

No, for sure, you, you have to calibrate and I think if you, there is a tendency for some companies and some leaders to be somewhat overly virtuous or kind of falling on their sword too much for their clients and, and if you are trying to serve the community and serve people. Uh, at a at a high scale, but you’re not able to profit sufficiently because you’re giving away too many things for free, then that actually restricts your ability to hire, restricts your ability to market, and so you end up paradoxically serving fewer people, not, not more people because of the fact that you’re not running the business in the most efficient way possible.

And I think the, I also want to throw out another thought here, Shane, I don’t know if you have looked at it this way. And you, you want to be a little careful because you wanna make sure you’re doing things for the right reason, but there can be win-wins. So if it’s a, a, it’s a $20 do, don’t make it contingent, um, I think it’s kind of unethical and a little shady, but don’t make it contingent on it, but there’s an opportunity to potentially get a review, right?

Because you’re going above and beyond and providing this experience and it could just be, hey, you know, we really hope you were happy with your service. I wanna let you know, uh, even though that door wasn’t on the. Wasn’t on the scope of work. My guys, they just noticed it didn’t really look right. We know you’re having this party, so we went ahead and threw it in. Just wanna let you know that, uh, let’s do the walk through. OK, awesome, and then go through the review generation process unrelated to that, but you’ve planted that seat, right?

So now you’re saying, hey, you know, where we. I actually have this card, this QR code. Um, if, if you think we deserve it, I’d love to get a review. It helps us serve more people in the community. Is there anything that that we, you think maybe we can prove right now, make sure we meet your, no, OK, also, can I actually walk you through this? I mean, there, there, the review is likely to be a very positive one at that point, and a positive 1003 star Google review is worth a lot more than $20.

That’s very true. Yeah, that’s absolutely true, right? And uh. And it goes back to what you’re saying. It’s not, you’re not doing it exactly for that reason, but we want to create a great experience and we hope that a great experience will lead to a great review. So, and then I think it, it’s important too as a company owner. So I think about this as a marketing agency. There are a lot of marketing agencies that are kind of shady, right? I mean, we don’t have a phenomenal reputation as an industry.

Marketing agencies don’t have a phenomenal reputation and for good reason. Contractors don’t have a phenomenal reputation and for good reason. Uh, I’m trying to get a fence. Installed at my house, it’s an absolute joke. I called them Friday. I, I had two different install dates, one of which is tomorrow. I asked, Hey, am I installing tomorrow? They told me to call back on Monday. They don’t know. Like, are you serious? They’re like, yeah, just call us on Monday. OK, call them on Monday. They tell me that you call them.

I called them, yeah, they said, hey, I don’t know this other person will know, just call, call on Monday. Call, I call Monday, right? Then they’re like, yeah, I, I don’t know. Call, call at 5. This is for tomorrow, right? This is I call back at 5. So I have to call again. And they’re like, did you take off work or something? Yes, I took off work or something because it’s, it’s this, you know, it’s, I, I want to make sure they’re not hitting the French drains. Like I’ve set aside all this time and I have zero idea whether they’re coming tomorrow, or they might be coming Thursday.

There’s some other scheduled date like 2 weeks from now. And they’re like, yeah, we’re just we’re still learning the software, just call us later. I mean, the experience is abysmal, absolutely abysmal. So when you’re giving away. Extra work. When you’re going above and beyond, and you’re doing the right thing. Getting a 5 star review, it’s almost, it’s, it’s almost irresponsible and and negligent of you not to do that, because when you don’t do it, you’re opening the door wider for your competitors, who may tell the person to call back later, 12 times to figure out whether them taking off the full day of work was worthwhile or whether they need to maybe take off another 4 days at various intervals to try to catch the guys on one of the days, right?

You’re, you’re saving them from a negative. A negative experience because you know if you do the work that you’re going to do a good job. And so I think really truly good business owners, virtuous business owners who actually want to do the right thing, sometimes are too passive in their marketing. They’re sometimes too passive in procuring the reviews. They feel greedy or selfish or, well, if, if, you know, they’ll do it if they want to and they’re not really going to put in that structure. But what all all that you’re doing is letting more people choose bad contractors, which you shouldn’t be doing. Right.

I don’t know, that’s me kind of going on a soapbox, but I, I, you know, I, I think I do feel passionately about that. I, I think that’s real. Yeah, I think that’s, I, I mean, to me, we’re crazy if we don’t chase the reviews, so we have a, a process that stalks those down, you know, and, uh, and, and hopefully get some. We don’t always get them, you know, but yeah, we definitely try. So love it. So that is champion integrity and responsibility. Passionately pursue excellence?

Was that your 2nd 1? It is the 83nd 1, yeah, passionately pursue excellence. What does that look like? So, there’s a, it’s interesting, we’ve gotten feedback very regularly. We have 2. Of our uh painters that love to sing. And so, So this is cool. um, yeah, yeah, it’s a funny starts. But they’ll say, you know, they were just the most delightful people to be around, and they actually liked each other, or, you know, they just, he just sang and seemed like he was really enjoying what he was doing, and so, The reason we say passionately pursue excellence, so there’s a We, because we, we, we, we want people to work with um passion.

So I’m mixing joy and passion together a little bit here. OK. Um, admittedly, because there wasn’t really a great way to work, you know, we were like, how do we work joy into this, and we couldn’t quite, you know, figure it out in a core value, but there’s this, there’s Usually, not always, but usually if you’re, you’re, if you enjoy something and you, you, you’re gonna be more passionate about it, you’re gonna wanna be better at it, right? And so my 13 year old. He wants to be, you know, he’s, he loves football.

He wants to be a receiver. So he, he is a phenomenal work ethic, in my opinion, for any teenager, but especially a 13 year old to where he’ll go in the backyard and bring a friend and just for a couple of hours they’re doing drills and running routes, and he’s, he’s pouring sweat. I mean, he’s literally lost at work, but he’s having so much fun, you know, and he’s not necessarily smiling the whole time, but I can tell he’s enjoying himself, I ask him afterwards, how was so and so whatever.

Oh, it’s great, you know, um. So we want our, we want to pursue excellence, but we wanna do it with a passion and a joy in that mindset that the end goal is not just, um, I’m just gonna be good at something to be good at it, but it’s, it’s, you know, I want to, I wanna be, I wanna aggressively be learning. So I love it when our people say, I was watching this thing on YouTube, and I’m gonna try to do this this way now, or something like that.

I love that. Uh, we want them to be figuring out new ways to do things. We want them to be trying to get better at what they do. I, I’m OK, I, I like for them to be frustrated sometimes. Like I can’t quite get this, you know. And, OK, let’s figure out how to turn the corner on it. You know, let’s get there, let’s get better. They want to be better. And so, excellence could be a skill, it could be the end product, it could be the fact that you’re 5 minutes early to the job site versus just rolling in right at the 7:30 time frame.

Excellence could be, you know, 11 little strain right now is we have a two week notice on our PTO and, and it’s probably my fault as a leader, but we consistently violate that, cause I, you know, I just, I’m like, oh, she just found out about this. You know, I mean, all of them have kids. They’re it’s notoriously, I just found out they have this or just told me this kind of thing. Hard to say no to that. It is, and we don’t usually we will say, can you work a little later this day?

We have the schedule set. Can you work a little later here? Can you flex here? Can you work 3 hours on Saturday? You know, we just want to get, don’t want to get behind. We’ve already communicated these customers, you know, we usually figure it out, but But even something like that, you know, the next team meeting, Hey guys, you know, part of being excellent is give us that 63 weeks, you know, as much as you can, give us that 2 weeks heads up. You know, cause it’s still can be something as simple as that to something as, as, as big as, you know, hey, you need to get better at your drywall or your lines need to be, they are, they’re an 8 out of 10.

Let’s get to that 10 out of 10, you know, whatever that looks like. So, we, we just want our people, and that goes for Uh, myself with the sales, I, you know, I’ve been telling people if they ask me what I’m learning and growing in, it’s like, I want to be the best freaking salesperson I can be, because it’s all been intuitive and natural. I’m not even using the processes we created. So I’ve got to, if I’m going to hire a salesperson by the end of this year, I’ve got to be the best true salesperson to understand how to deal with it.

And, and, and my first thought was I’ve got to know how to do it to teach somebody else. Now I’m just excited about getting better at it, you know. So I’m, I’m, I’m pumped about it, you know, tell Hannah. Uh, she, she, uh, I had like 4 or 5 quotes a row, uh, a week or so ago, and I’ll ask her a quick question like, OK, tell me how, what’s the strategy in closing this guy, you know, is it, is it speed? You know, tell me what his pain points are.

And so we asked her to hang on the phone. She says, OK, go make it rain. And that made my day because I’m so competitive, you know, it’s like I am like I’m gonna close. I’m closing this one, we’re closing the next one. So, um. So, yeah, so we, it, it goes for all of us, you know, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s, you know, how our website looks. I mean, any, anything we see, we’re trying to be better at. It could be the smallest thing. Um, we use the word proposal instead of estimate, because, you know, it’s kind of a hook we have in our sales process, but we realized on the website said request a proposal, and we’re like, nobody’s gonna know what that is.

So we, hey, we gotta switch that, we gotta fix that, you know, so it’s pretty little thing we will be excellent in. Yeah, yeah, the, uh, Jason Phillips is big into that through contractor freedom, calls it an accurate written proposal, not an estimate. There’s no estimate about it. This is a proposal. It’ll be the same price. The, um, which I think is really good. I think it, it’s a huge step to professionalization and differentiation. The um Yeah, I think a lot, a lot, a lot of what you said there.

Uh, is really interesting. One of the things we’ve done at Painter Marketing Pros is we’ve, we basically will cross, kind of, kind of cross train. So we’ll have these meetings where someone from our social media team or someone from our ad team or SEO team will essentially train the rest of the, the entire rest of the company on what they do. And what we find it does is it helps everybody understand kind of the company overall. It entices a lot of curiosity and then some people actually wanna cross train.

Maybe they’re in one department, but they started it, you know, start to develop some affinity for another department. We have cross, you know, kind of like lateral movement opportunities, uh, and culturally it’s, it is a phenomenal thing to do. So I think my, my, my thought is companies should lean a little more into that like, OK, a painter. Never has done sales, thought about sales, they might be curious to understand a little bit about sales scripting, sales psychology process, right? They, they might wanna know a little bit about finance, um, you know, some, some companies are more transparent with their books and whatnot than others, but yeah, that’s something we’ve seen in terms of educational opportunities and growth opportunities that’s been very impactful.

Hm, that’s really cool. I like that. Yeah, um. Cool and then bonuses for, you know, bonuses and incentives and, and comping, uh, different certifications, different learning courses there there are a lot of online, uh, learning opportunities and digital marketing so we’ll, we’ll work to train up the team and then actually reward them, uh, for taking action right and kind of going on these different different courses and trajectories, but I think they’re, I think you’re gonna can really apply that to any business and I think when when they see the.

When employees see their employer or the company investing not only monetarily, but they’ve also they’ve actually gone through the thought process of, hey, what, what might they you know they find really rewarding what options could we provide them with what growth opportunities as opposed to here, here’s more money, here’s a bonus, OK, here’s, you know, uh, promotional opportunity, but actually throughout the whole thing you could be growing. So I really like this second value, uh, passionately pursue excellence, and I agree that excellence can look a lot of different ways.

Yeah, yeah, it’s cool, man. Um, your 3rd. My hand is terrible. What is your? to innovate. OK. Yeah, I think you were kind of flying at that point I was starting to lose it. Alright. Dare to innovate. Dare to innovate. Talk to me about that. So I, even back in the ministry days, I, there’s a small little book. You know, the one is like literally small books that was super thin, you know, about size of a bigger wallet or a big phone. And I think it’s called Innovation’s Dirty Little Secret.

A pastor out in California wrote it. And I, I remember a number of things stuck with me. And it also helped me realize that everything we’re having to do in order to figure out how do we enter into this, this. Impoverished community, where there’s a lot of challenges coming from the outside. We don’t want to be mistrusted, you know, everything we did was innovation. We were just trying to kind of keep coming up with ideas of how to enter in and to care for people. And so that innovation ideas stuck with me for years now, um, for well over a decade.

And That being said, again, if you just the word innovate, well, what does that mean? You know, how do you, so when we kind of came up with a dare to innovate and then tagged the take risk on it, it, it, it gave our people the freedom to try things. And, and that was, that was a big deal um to me when I, when I realized that, well, I guess there’s two things to that. One is a leader. It’s a huge deal at that point, if you’re gonna have a core value that says, I want innovation, then you actually have to say yes, a lot more than you say no.

So when people have ideas, if you, that’s one thing I learned from the book was if you keep saying no to their ideas, they’re not gonna come up with any more ideas. So that’s, that’s one thing they have to feel safe to have ideas, especially if they’re against the grain. They have to be willing to, to push the envelope and you have to give them freedom to do that. And when they fail. you actually have to find a way to celebrate that failure. That sounds weird, but you’re celebrating the attempt, right?

So you’re, you’re, you’re you’re essentially acknowledging, hey, you did what we ask and you tried something new. So if a, if a painter says, I want to approach the job this way. And I think, I don’t think I’d do it that way. My default is gonna be to say, let’s go for it. You know, even if I don’t, even if I wouldn’t do it that way, if I wouldn’t approach this this way, or I wouldn’t spray this, or I would, whatever it is, you know, and I’ll just say, OK, let’s, let’s go for it.

You run it. And, and, and a lot of times it goes great, and sometimes it doesn’t, you know, and I’m never gonna say, well, I didn’t think that was gonna work. We have to say, hey, like that was a great run at it. That was a stupid learn from it. Yeah, what can we learn from this? Uh, there were, there was, there were a few things, even in the, uh, I had some examples of this. And I, I couldn’t find my notes, but I jotted on a couple of examples, even recently, where even administratively, uh, I felt like Hannah had done several things that were, were kind of out outside, they were outside the box.

They were, they were uh not our norm. And she presented them as, hey, I want to implement a new system or process here. And, you know, I thought, uh, I guess so. I trust you. That’s, that’s where I went. I was like, I trust you. Um, I don’t really exactly see, like, I didn’t, it wasn’t lack of seeing the value. It’s like, I’m not fully understanding it, but I, but you’ve been working hard on it, so let’s roll with it. And it’s been awesome, you know. And, and I think that’s where, that is one place that we, we just want people to be OK to fail.

We want them to be OK to try something new, to take a risk if they see that it’s gonna be for the good of the company, the good of their teammates, the good of the client. As long as those kind of boxes are checked, then try it, you know, if it’s your ego, then that’s probably a bad place to start, right? But generally speaking, we, we have people trying things and being willing to try new things. And they’re not in this culture of, of fear, you know, and it takes a while.

We see when we have hired a couple of people from other painting companies or they’ve had painting experience, it, it takes a while for them to believe that. They’re really expecting you to come down on them if something doesn’t go exactly right, you know, for the first time. And the same thing with the integrity and responsibility. It’s the whole, you know, you go in there’s a piece of a, a, a light, a a. Glass all over the floor and there’s 3, vanity lights and there’s only 23 pieces of glass up there.

So it’s clearly a glass was broken, you know, so I, I have no idea how it was there, you know, that’s, we, we have only experienced that when somebody’s come from another company. And, and, and that clearly has this like fear-based kind of culture. So we, in order to have this idea of innovation, taking risks, having, taking responsibility for things, you have to be OK to make a mistake, and, and we, and they have to be empowered to know, hey, I can make a mistake and it’s OK. Yeah, it is, it is, uh, sorry.

It, it’s um, I mean, meta back when they were called Facebook, you know, one of Meta’s core values is move fast and break things, you know, obviously they’re gonna be consequences of that, but Facebook grew really quickly, you know, Facebook is Facebook because they wanted to encourage innovation knowing that there would be a consequence and sometimes things being broken is not, it’s really not ideal, right, for, for things to be broken, bugs to happen, whatever. Um, mishaps with the company, but the good of that, all the different innovation and and development that’s gonna happen because people aren’t afraid of those mistakes because they just want to continue to move knowing that, uh, speed attracts wealth and speed wins in business.

That’s huge, right? I think the. We as owners, we, we can say, hey, we want to hear your ideas, we want to hear your innovation, but employees are naturally going to be, um, a little bit more reticent as a whole, as a general rule, they’re gonna be a little bit more reticent. They’ve maybe had negative experiences before, maybe no, um, no company has really empowered them or actually taken their ideas seriously, but they’re, they’re your boots on the ground, you know, they, they’re doing their different functions and oftentimes they understand more on a day to day what’s happening.

And if you empower your team members to come up with these ideas, and sometimes you, you say, yeah, let’s try the idea, thinking maybe it won’t work or maybe I don’t fully understand it. Sometimes you’ll have a killer idea because your team and then what does that do for morale? It’s like, wow, great job, Susie. Now we’ve implemented this, it’s created this kind of cost savings, whatever, however you want to celebrate that team member, you not only have something that’s not functioning much better in your business that you wouldn’t have had, but you also have a team.

That feels appreciated and valued. Wow, I’ve never had a company recognize me in this way, listen to me in this way. I’m not just some cog in their machine. They actually value me. That’s huge. Yeah, yeah, it absolutely is. But everything has a cost, right? So, could you try an idea that doesn’t work? Yeah, 100%. Could you lose money or XYZ happens? Sure. Facebook doesn’t want things to be broken, but they know that the the pros of moving fast and trying a bunch of innovation is going to outweigh the cons of the headaches that they’re gonna have with the broken stuff.

It’s a game, man. Business is a game. It’s true, it’s absolutely true. It’s cool. Your values are very in depth. I like them a lot. Um, Number 4, embrace humility. Yeah, so, um, well, we don’t have them sequence or whatever, but confront adversity with resilience would be the 4th 25 on the list. Oh, that’s um, I don’t know we never, we didn’t order them 21000 to 215, but that’s just how they, you know, came out. So, so I, I rarely operate super linearly, but for some reason in this my mind stuck on that, that order that I haven’t.

So, but, uh, but I, the, the other reason I wanted, cause you mentioned business as a game. So, you know, I grew up playing sports and and and competing, and if you play sports, you’re gonna have adversity. So it’s, it’s whether you wilt or whether you face it. And You know, I remember being in college and our my senior year, we just have one of those games. We were, we were, we, we weren’t great, we weren’t as good as we had been in the two years before we finished like 2100 and 28 or um something like that, and Um, And so one of these games we lost, we probably, I don’t know the score, but it felt like it was like 26 to nothing.

It was probably something in. Oh man, it’s awful. It was something in the, you know, where they, you felt, I felt like in this, in my mind, I’m looking at the scoreboard and we’re, we’re returning the ball. They scored again and they’re, they’ve got like 53 and we’ve got 25 or something, you know, I mean, there’s not those numbers really exist in football, say 225 to 22 or something. This is making me think of like a, like a barnstain Bears book or something, teaching, you know, little bit, you know, bro brother bear whatever gets his butt whooped in soccer and, and, you know, some kind of lesson.

Well, I just remember jogging out onto the field and that, you know, on the kickoff return team, unless you’re the returner, that job sucks, man. Now, they’ve changed some of your rules now. I don’t know if it’s as bad, but, you know, I mean, you think about it and you’ve got somebody running somewhere between 40 and 60 yards full speed, and you’ve got maybe 10, and there’s just a massive collision. It’s, it sucks, you know, and you can break the physics down all you want, we’ll take an angle or whatever, but It, it’s a risky play, right?

And, and so at that point, nobody wants to block on that team, you know. And I just remember just jogging on the field and just had this thought that when I’m called to, like, we’re called to excellence. Like I’ve got to go full speed on this play as much as I don’t want to be out here right now, like, can we just call the game? We’re getting destroyed, you know. And, and so that’s the kind of, you know, confront adversity doesn’t mean, it doesn’t mean, I don’t know if I blocked the guy on that play.

I don’t, I don’t know how we still lost the game. There was no like big comeback or something like that. So there’s no phenomenal ending to the story. We rode the bus home in silence. It sucked, you know, um, but there, there, there was this, this, that, that does kind of epitomize the value because confront adversity with the resilience doesn’t mean you conquer every challenge. It doesn’t mean you, you win every Battle. It just means you fight it as hard as you can, right? Like I can, in resilience mean I can get knocked down and get back up.

So, if we fall forward, that’s ideal. If we get knocked down backward, let’s get back up and keep going, right? And, and so that’s, we will use that one a lot in, in conversation and everything. Hey, that was a great example of really confronting adversity. It could be something as simple as You know, we quoted a 2 coat room. The customer picked an orange. Nobody really caught it. This is a true story that happened about 2 months ago, and we end up putting 8 coats on the wall, and they don’t want to pay for but 8, you know.

And so, you know, project Andre has to navigate this. By had to navigate it. Poor thing, painted so many coats on that wall. She got the Core Value award in that quarter because of that job. And, and, I mean, she’s done other things too, but, you know, it was literally there was not complaining, there was not, it was, OK, let me just go. Let me go. Let me keep, let me keep plugging. Let me keep pressing, you know. And, and so that’s the kind of idea is that we want to face various challenges, various adversity with, with resilience.

And, and that, and that’s an important one to me too, because I’m a person who At, at points in the past is, you know, I can be emotional and so I can get deflated pretty quickly if I’m not careful, if I’m not in doing some of the self-care things that you and I talked about a few episodes ago, then that can, my, my emotions can swing and, and I can be down before I know it, you know. Now, thankfully, I’ve learned so much in the past few years that that’s, that’s just more, more neutral now.

But that, that also is a value that’s important to me because I have to realize that, that whether it’s, you know, I just made a mistake or whether whatever it might be, or just I’m afraid it is a hard situation, you know, to be able to keep moving forward, to be able to keep moving forward, and to not Wilt in that moment is, is a big deal, you know, so it’s a, so it’s a big deal for all of us. And, and we definitely, we’ll definitely sling that, that core value around a good bit because work’s hard.

Business is hard. Things happen. We can’t control a lot of things and a lot of things happen to us, and sometimes those things are really good and sometimes they’re really hard. So yeah, the only thing we can control is the input. One of the things I liked about your football story. Is the, you know, we form these neural pathways in our brains with, with the habits that we create. And so when you choose excellence, right, when you confront adversity with resilience, when you don’t allow your own bar to lower, just because you’re getting annihilated and it, it’s not really gonna make a difference in terms of the score.

you’re forming habit, right? And so, because it is gonna make a difference other times. And so not only is there kind of the morality of it, the ethics of it, kind of keeping your word to yourself, which is its own other conversation, but you are building this habit that there are going to be other times when you’re not being annihilated, when you might be tempted to lower your bar or not, you know, be quite as resilient when actually you, you would have been a huge win and you would have fallen for it if you had been resilient, but you weren’t because you You, you know, you made too many decisions like on that football field saying, hey, it really doesn’t matter, so I’m just gonna throw in the towel.

And so now you’re, you, you, you’ve kind of fallen into this pattern of self-destruction actually. Right. Yeah, so I think it, it does, even though it didn’t kind of didn’t matter on the outcome, it was sort of a training and and establishing yourself as the kind of person where you’re going to get as many wins as possible because you’re just gonna show up every time. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It’s, it’s that whole. I mean, I’ve, I’ve had quotes where I’ve got 3 or 4 in a row, and the very first one, they might balk at, you know, for whatever reason, you know, oh, I got this price here or I don’t like you for this reason or whatever it might be, you know, right away.

And it’s, am I, am I stuck. Or I’m able to, to, to name that to, you know, tell you like, that’s adversity. I’m gonna shift my mindset and go get the next one, you know, like you said, it’s developing that, that pattern, it’s developing that pattern. So, uh, and I think it’s really important on the ground too with our teams because sometimes they Sometimes they feel that adversity more than we do, even, you know, so if I’m not on site and I, and I have an interaction with the customer and I start to realize, hey, there’s some challenging stuff here, they’ve got some.

Personal crisis going on and that, that, that’s kind of coming out on us a little bit. Um, you know, I’m not, I’m not there for 8 hours, but my team is. They might be catching a lot of that the whole, you know, so, so it’s training them with that mindset of, let me keep pushing forward, let me continue to be excellent in spite of this obstacle I’m facing, you know. Yeah, I love it, man. And then what is your, I don’t even wanna say it because I, I might I might be wrong.

What is your 5th? No, you got it. Embrace humility and serve others. Got it. Embrace humility, embrace humility and serve others. Yeah, you know, and humility is not, I, I heard someone say one time it was uh uh Tim Keller, I think is who it was, and I’ll butcher the quote, one of the brilliant thinker and um he was a pastor in New York City uh for years, and he said humility is not. Thinking Of yourself, man, I knew I’m gonna butcher it. I, I think it’s something the effect of thinking of yourself, um, thinking of others more as much as think of yourself less or it’s not thinking less, it’s not thinking less of yourself is thinking of others more.

That’s what it is. So humility isn’t that false humility of like, oh yeah, I’m not a very good painter, but Ryan’s really great, you know, it’s, it’s, um, you know, that’s that kind of like that that false, almost like we’re, we’re raised to not be prideful or something, right? As if that’s, that’s what humility is. But it’s really, hey, how can I serve Brandon this moment? You know, I know he’s facing this challenge. I know he’s, um, going to do this next week or whatever, like, you know, how could I, how could I serve him?

And, and I think that’s, that can play out on our team in a number of different ways. Anything from Hannah walking up to me, Hey, I know you’ve got all this on your plate right now. Is there anything I can take off? Or, you know, you watch on the job site, and it’s not, hey, you left that your tarp there or your this, or your, you know, it’s, I’m, I’m cleaning brushes. You want me to wash yours too? Something like that, you know. So we, we want to have a servant hearted mindset on the team, and in order to do that, we have to think of each other, you know, not necessarily.

At the expense of ourselves, we’re not denigrating ourselves, but we’re, we’re prioritizing others. That’s the best way to say we’re prioritizing others and that, that also goes for the customer, kind of to your question earlier about how do you know when to give or take, you know, extend something. It’s, we want, we want to serve people as, as much as we can and we believe that we can do that, we believe we can do it well. So let’s go for it, you know, and um, Let us folks strive after.

Knowing your company’s propensity to serve others and that you’re you’re going to have a tendency to probably Uh, cater more to people maybe than some other painting companies might do and that there is a potential risk to that of hurting your job profitability, potentially hurting morale of some team members if they maybe have to stay on site for, uh, at a client that maybe isn’t the most pleasant, they, they have to stay on site longer doing something. And do you, have you built that into a qualification process of any kind in terms of your sales?

OK, hey, this person. This person seems like they might really lead us down a bad path, so we’re gonna go ahead and walk away from this project. We do try to feel it out as best we can and uh you know, as you know, you probably have clients like this where everything seems awesome perfect. It can go to no, they’re all perfect, you know, the ones you have now. Maybe you let go of a couple, right? So it’s, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re, you do all that qualification and everything just flips when you start, right.

That’s happened. There’s been, there’s sometimes the people who seem the nicest, it, it’s wild, right? Like a Doctor Jekyll Mr. Hyde kind of deal, right, exactly. And then there’s a few times where I just haven’t gone with my instinct, and I said no, they really want us to do the job we should do it. And it’s, my gosh, either we just gritted our teeth and got through it, or I, at one point, I literally walked away from one. And I’ve only done this once and we left over $1000 of material and 15 $100 in labor and just said, you don’t have to pay us for anything, because I realized that to keep my team there was going to, to be very destructive.

Sure, can we get the job done? Yeah, we could have, but it was, it was not a good environment, you know, for our team, our team was not gonna thrive in that environment. Um, and so, yeah, we, we definitely do our best to qualify as much as we can. And, you know, some of that’s as simple as what other people, you know, we, it’s, it’s kind of that like we’re trying to get after what’s really driving them. So if they’re just fishing for the bottom dollar, or if they really want a quality product, or if they, they just need it done fast.

Uh, not like rushed, but they need it done soon. You know, there’s always kind of a driving factor for people, but even in the process of some of those driving factors, you can kind of get a sense for how they’re interacting and, and the, and Hannah takes all, it does all her intake, and she’s really good at screening that, and she might say, yeah. I just, I just didn’t have a great vibe talking to this person, and I don’t think they’re gonna be a good fit for us.

And, and I don’t even have to have her articulate it. She can if she wants to, and I’m glad to listen to it and help her process it, but I trust her that if she says, you know what, I think we shouldn’t even touch this, you know. And there’s sometimes when I show up and, and I’ll walk it, and I think Yeah, I just don’t think we’re gonna be a good fit for that, you know, and, and that’s the, that’s the phrase we’ll use is we don’t think we’re the best fit for your project, and we just leave it at that.

So the, what’s driving them, I mean, that’s a big part of sales, figuring out the motivation behind it. You know, when, when you go in thinking, you know the motivation for why they’re buying something. And, and you presume that you tend not to sell as effectively. So kind of understanding the driving force behind it. When you say figure out what’s really driving them, do you guys have that kind of in your scripting some way to, to, you know, hey, why are you, why are you deciding to complete this project now or, you know, what’s important to you in this project?

What, what do you value most highly? Are there certain questions that you ask that kind of tease out that answer? Man, you know, that’s a great question. I, it almost, this is embarrassing. I have to ask Hannah. She does such a she’s done a phenomenal job for the last two years. She crushed it and You know, I, I know she has some things. I mean, timelines a big, you know, if they have multiple quotes, she’ll, they mention that, she’ll try to draw that out if they mention it, she’ll try to kind of ask questions to kind of get at what they’re looking for in multiple quotes, and I would say the highest percentage is gonna be, people are gonna say price, but that’s not always really the case.

I don’t think. Uh, I think they’re, they’re, they want somebody’s gonna mesh well with them, you know, at the end of the day. And so, Yeah, I need to uh dig into that a little more. If someone’s saying price, it’s they’re usually saying value. You know, some people maybe they can only afford a certain thing, but they could also paint the house themselves. So it’s it’s usually more applicable to value and, and uh, yeah, if you go down that price game, that’s a losing game. Right, your price down.

Uh, OK, cool. Shane, so you, you said something pretty interesting. You said that, I forget her name, but you said someone, the woman who had painted 8 coats, you said she won the core value award for the quarter. So do you guys have quarterly awards? We do, we do. So. We, we’ve done a couple of different iterations. I think at our best, we will have people give them to each other, um, and, and they kind of identify another, another teammate and explain why they would get that award.

Uh, a little bit, a little bit of the gap that I identified there is that our painters don’t really know what Hannah is doing in the office. So I realized she’s gonna be left out pretty much perpetually. She’ll never get happy. We don’t do something, you know. Um, and they don’t, or they’re just kind of thinking of each other. They’re not necessarily thinking of like the whole framework, and that’s, that’s OK. That makes sense. That’s what they’re around day to day. So this last quarter, we gave out actually everybody, um, you know, but myself.

So we had, at the time we had 6, um, W-2 employees and so counting myself. So the other 5 all got awards and And, you know, I kind of started developing why I thought each one should get that. And then I went over it with Hannah and kind of looked at it. And then we, so essentially presented it, told a story about each one, and, you know, gave them the, they get a certificate, and then we take a picture. So, and then I think a gift card of some, I’m trying to remember now, I think it’s like a $25 QT gift card or something that we do.

Well, so yeah, I, I like the show The Office, still watch it. I think me and me and all the like middle school girls or who whoever the main demographic is that watches that show and uh Michael Scott, he, he had bought himself a, a mug that said world’s best boss you could do that, right? You could buy yourself a coffee mug said world’s best boss, and that’s your reward. That’s what I would do. Yeah Thank you guys for this. I love it. The, so you, so you guys are, you’re doing that quarterly.

Are there, are, are there kind of like day to day, weekly, any, any ways that you’re keeping those values top of mind a little bit, maybe even more consistently? Um, so I think my internet’s getting a little bit, a little bit choppy, it’s me, not you, uh, but Um, I, I think what you talked about was how do we keep them top of mind? Yep. Yeah. Yeah, so we’re getting, you know, we’re getting signs right now to put around the office. We try to talk about them regularly in the field.

Hey, that’s a great example of X, you know, or Vivi. That’s a great job like pursuing excellence here. Man, that was a really cool way to try that out, Ryan, like way to exceed that core value. So. We do try to, to talk about those. We’ll actually use them to make decisions, which when I say actually was not the point of them, but we do a lot of companies don’t. I’m saying as if it’s surprising, but it’s like, why do you have them if they don’t work is is some sort of filter, right?

And we just, we’re doing our first commercial new construction right now. And we were going back and forth on it. Do we send the code in, do we not? And I think it was Hannah at some point said, Let’s take the risk. That’s our core value, right? This is what we do. Isn’t this who we are? And, and, you know, and then we, we were having a day last week, I think it was Tuesday, and, and that job wasn’t, didn’t like it was ready. Another one didn’t and and so I just remember calling Hannah and it’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t know where, I don’t know what we’re gonna do tomorrow.

Cause everything I’m checking on right now is not ready, and as they said it would be. And and so it’s that moment of we say, OK. It’s only 2 o’clock. Let’s keep pushing. Let’s keep pushing. Let’s keep pushing. This is adversity. Let’s keep pushing, you know, so there’s times when we just, we’ll say it to each other. It as a way of making a decision, as a way of driving forward, as a way you mentioned the, the, the thing about, you know, how do we just, it’s a filter for how we interact with customers.

Hey, does this fit our core values? You know, and so, so we don’t have probably the best way to keep it top of mind because all the, a lot of those things I just said are kind of organic, but we do try to Our project managers, myself, Hannah, we’re kind of trained to call us out when we see them in people. Yeah, I mean you have it living in the, in the day to day, which is the, that is the point of it. Otherwise, why have it, right?

It’s gotta serve some kind of function. Shane, I’m glad we dove into this, man. We’ve been, we’ve been kind of punting on this, this, uh, these values to this episode, but this is great. Is there anything as we wrap this episode up that you wanna add? Uh, just that I wish we’d galvanize some of this sooner. You know, we took, we kind of play, we, I’m not, I’m not great at finishing things a lot of time. I’m an idea person, so I’ll throw a bunch of stuff on paper and then I’ll sit for a long time, throw a bunch and edit it and they’ll sit for a while, and eventually when we just said we’re gonna turn these into verbs, we’re gonna figure this out, we’re gonna do it.

It’s been really helpful for us. It’s been really helpful. So that’s it. So if you don’t have them, do them yesterday. Yeah, I think the, the turning them into to verbs, I think is a huge takeaway for me. The uh quarterly awards, uh, people recognizing and making sure everyone, everyone’s kind of in that mix to get those awards, using it as a filter, you so that should be obvious, it really isn’t a lot of times, right? We think, well, it’s a set value, set a mission statement, but then what do you actually do that, do with it, right?

So using it as a, as a decision making filter and then also something to almost lean on for motivation when things are hard or scary or whatever in the company, um. Yeah, I think there was a lot of value in that. I think there were a ton of takeaways here. I appreciate you, Shane. Looking forward to the next episode, brother. Thanks for opening up about all that. Absolutely. Look forward to it as well.

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