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 6, Shane will break down his transition to a hybrid model, as well as his vision for the future of Renew Painting.

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.

What’s up, Shane? Hey brother, how are you? Doing well, man. I’m excited for this final episode. It’s always bittersweet. You know, it’s usually, it’s usually a really compelling episode when we wrap up these series, but it’s also sad.

Yeah, it’s been fun to I I feel like we’ve got to know each other a lot more through this process, which has been awesome. So I have loved it, man. So we are, we’ve gone through a lot, uh, we are now covering. Your transition to a hybrid model, vision for the future. I’m thinking the transition of the hybrid model maybe makes sense to run through first. What are your thoughts? I agree, yeah, I totally agree. Let’s do it, man. Yeah, so, uh, you know, kind of a quick backstory on that is for years, I would Yeah, I was, I was starting to hesitate on these words, but I think I can, I think I can use them.

Uh, I would, I would almost look down on the subcontractor model. Not in a way where I felt more prideful, just where I looked at it, so maybe looked down is not the right words, but it was almost just this negative view of it. I mean, I don’t think that’s super uncommon for companies that utilize W-1.2. It’s, I feel like it’s like an they think there’s an abdication of responsibility or potentially lack of quality control, lack of cult yeah, and potential lack of culture, um, some of those things just kind of like, hey, are we just And also our desire and vision for impacting people, I felt like, well, you can’t, you don’t really impact people, you just hire them to do a job, you know, and so, You know, I’m just absorbing these informations, uh, probably at this point I’ve gone through.

What’s this year, 800. 000 expos, I’ve been to three expos, interact with a number of different people. And last year, 30, in January, we had 100, I think 4 W-213 painters and 203 kind of project manager in training, who was still kind of on the field, kind of managing projects, we’re kind of, you know, growing. And office manager myself. So, so we had a lot of in-house painters. And It’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of stress, because, you know, last year, especially, we saw a a contraction at the beginning of the year.

January, February are always lean months, you know, December, you kind of that December through February lull, where, you know, about time Thanksgiving hits. You better have some work already sto cause people don’t want you in their house decorating for Christmas, all that stuff in the year, they start to think toward budget, but don’t quite make that call to make the move, or if they do, they’re thinking, oh, let’s do this in February, March, you know, so, pretty typical, right? It was the first time we had that many mouths to feed essentially and saying, hey, our pledge is that we’re gonna provide work.

So we’ve got to figure this out, you know, and so it was just a, a, a really stressful hustle and And that was, that was a big challenge. So that, that, take that data point and just kind of pencil it over here. The other thing that started to happen was You know, we, we let one person go, just to kind of like, uh, we started to realize a little character insubordination type stuff. Uh, one person moved to Florida, say, hey, I, we just need to get back home or homesick.

So there’s two going. One person we realized we knew had some OCD, uh, you know, diagnosed OCD and um we thought that, that We just kind of realized, hey, this is gonna be, this, this is, you’re not thriving here, you know, essentially. Like you can’t, can’t shut it off enough to just kind of get the work done and move on. And she, she didn’t feel like she was thriving. We didn’t feel like it. So that was really hard conversation because she’s, last year, literally, I was walking to physical therapy three months after we let her go and gave each other the biggest hug and smiles, you know, I mean, so it was good terms, but it was like, thats us one more person.

And then we’re doing a quarterly review and our longest tenured employee we realized is, is probably. A better fit in a factory, cause he just wants to do the same thing every day all day long, and that’s not what we do. And so through tears, I say, And, I have loved watching you grow and and part of your future growth is gonna be outside of us. So now all of a sudden we’re down to 21100, you know, pretty quickly. Um, so that was by so by August we’re down to 21000 in-house painters.

So, Um, in the meantime over the summer, you know, starting in like May, I, I looked at our project manager said, we’ve got too much work so to produce, we can’t do it because we had slowly started to lose people, right? So we started trying the subcontractor route, and it was, it was messy at first, you know, because you have to try people, you’re learning how to do it, you know, I, I talked to people and figured out, you know, here’s how, here’s how you do it, and here’s the best way to, um, you know, figure it out and set it up, and this, that and the other, but you’ve got to try them out, you know, and, and that’s the hard part is, can they actually do the job to the same standards.

And so it was definitely a bumpy road for a couple months, and then eventually we found a couple teams that could do the the work consistently and do it well. And so by September of last year, we’re pretty much running a full hybrid model to where as the months progressed, our subcontractor revenue outpaced our W-211.2 revenue. And at this point, we have 21800 full-time in-house painters, 21000 project managers, and a team in teams of subcontractors. And so that it’s really been a thing where it wasn’t exactly what we, we definitely wasn’t what we were planning on being a part of the PCA being connected to other painters.

Uh, showed me that the subcontractor model is not bad, that it’s not selling out, it’s not, you know, that there’s a lot of good qualities to it. And so when it kind of happened to where we had to do it, you know, that’s kind of how we got there. And one advantage of it has been, remember that data point about last January and February. So this year in December through February, when we, we were able to just tell our subs, hey, This is a slow time of year.

We might not have as much work for you, and that’s kind of the reality. We’ll do everything we can. And by God’s grace, we still stayed pretty busy, but it was a little bit slower and during that time, naturally than it is now. Um, but we didn’t have the same level of stress having to keep 2130 W-21100s busy versus 214. And that was a big relief that that allowed me to enjoy my life a lot more. So. So let me, I, I kind of wanna dig in. To the, uh, I appreciate all that.

I, I wanna dig into the transition. So I want to get really tactical here because you said, all right, we, we wanted to go from W-212 to subcontractor. You had kind of a mental block on it for a long time, you know, didn’t feel like it was the best option. Decided to make the leap and then you said it’s messy for a few months. Had to try out a bunch of subcontractors, kind of figure out how to do this. Let’s dive into that. So if I’m coming to you today, I have a, a painting company.

I’m all W-218, or maybe I’m just starting out. Maybe I’m actually the painter out in the field and I’m thinking, hey, I want to use subcontractors. I just want to go that model. What would you tell me to do? I would say, You’ve got like our job costing wasn’t set up for subcontractors. It’s our spreadsheets. So I wish we’d just take a step back and recalibrate quicker, uh, more quickly, so that would just make that process easier because we need to have a system for that, right?

Um, that’s one thing. So do our systems set up for that? Are we set up for that on Our work orders and you know, so are we, are we ready mentally to say, hey, like we use Paint scalp as our quoting software and that produces work. Paints. So, so yeah, I mean, it’s phenomenal tool, right? Uh, so are we ready to take that work order, send it to the uh, are we, do we have a plan for communication on the job site, you know, all these kind of nuts and bolts.

So whatever that looks like, I mean, we have, so our, our tech stack now is. And this wasn’t what it was when we started, uh, and, and part of the reason that is this now, I’ll say it’s because we realized we needed to spend more to have a bigger tech stack to make this work. Uh, you know, we have Paint scout. Monday is our CRM and our project management software. So we, we, we, that, that takes it in all in one, you know, comes in there, stays in there when a jobs sold, there’s a a zap set up that spits it onto a project management board and our product project managers, we all dialogue in Monday about the job.

Some people use Slack, that’s a really good tool as well for that in terms of. Job site communication, you just don’t want on text because it, you just, you just don’t. Like, at the end of the day, you don’t want a bunch of photos coming through text and a bunch of notes about the job come through text because there’s no clear documentation, right? So we want to keep all that in Monday and Company cam is the other thing we, we invested in, uh, late, late last year to say, OK, I’m gonna get over myself and realize that I’ve actually got to spend money.

So let’s get Company cam. We also got Hay pros to work with a subcontractor, um. I think it’s a good tool. I, I, I would say that is it necessary? Absolutely not. You know, for us, I felt like I’ve got two very young project managers, and I want to give them as many resources as I can to communicate with subs and to, to set prices. Uh, one of them is a 20. year old, he’s gonna get, they’re gonna try to beat him up on price, right? So I knew from the jump, if I’m going to bring Nate into this role, I need to help him out.

And so we invested in Hay pros for that reason, uh, you know, that was one of the huge drivers. Now, it does a lot of other really cool stuff. I think it’s a great software. I’m just saying there are, there are multiple ways to skin this cat, I guess is what I’m saying, whether it’s it’s a software for basically performance pay, right? No, that’s, um, I don’t know what that is, but that’s not it. Yeah, so Hayros is strictly a subcontractor management tool. Got it. So it’s how we, we go in there, we set, here’s the address, here’s a paint scout work order, here’s a company cam links, and here’s the price and we send it to a sub.

So whether it’s, you know, let’s just say John, Bob, Billy gets whatever they get the thing and say, hey, you can book it, or you can say this doesn’t work for me and we’ll hire somebody else, you know. But that way you kind of agreed upon price up front, they can invoice through it. So it, so it does, it does help a lot of those back in in those communication pieces. Um, So I’m trying to think, I think that’s the end of our tech stack. Besides, we still use, you know, Google Sheets for job costing.

Um, there’s to me, there’s still nothing better for that. Just set up, you know, we, we have one that we get through our coach and we personalize it from there, and we can see all the metrics and everything we need. So, I would just say that you’ve got to have that tech stack really clear. So that your communication, your documentation, your management of those subs, all that is really clean and crisp, because we were kind of flowing with, yeah, we texted him this work order, we communicated this, and he sent this picture, you know, everything was all over the place, and there was, it was really hard to just get our hands around exactly.

Where things are in our in our process. Um, the other thing is that it that leaves no room for miscommunications at that point. You, you have, you know, hey, you had the work order, you had this, and now we have subs that actually say, hey, I don’t see that on the work order, and so what they’re saying is more money, right? But, but I love that they’re reading it. You know, so they’re they’re now reading the work orders and saying, hey, did you quote that because is that in the price, cause it’s not written down, you know.

And so that’s where you want to get them to. So the more you can develop some consistency in how you’re managing them, I think they like it, we like it, it just helps everybody. So, that’s, I think that’s the biggest thing, Brandon, um. You know, finding subs is really challenging. Uh, our, you know, big help we’ve had is we hired a, a Hispanic project manager, so he’s very, you know, he’s bilingual. And so in our area there’s a lot of subcontractors are Hispanic, not all, but a lot, and um, so that’s, uh, you know, that’s been a huge help. um.

Trying to think of some other stuff. I mean this was, I, I do have a couple questions for you, Shane. Yeah, go for it. You, you talked about job costing not set up for subs. Yes, how is it different? Our, our sheet, sorry, it’s a truck job I mean our sheet was uh really exclusively designed for W-2s. So You know, the way it tracked the, who’s the painter, how many hours do they work, what’s their, you know, hourly rate, plus the employer burden and all those kind of things.

That’s how ours was set up. It wasn’t set up for, we sold the job for $10,000. This is what the materials cost, this is what the labor was for the sub, all those kind of things. And so we had to, um, essentially just recalibrate the Uh, the entire sheet, you know, but I mean, Chris with the lead business advisor has already done that. We just, you know, we had to just abort that sheet and switch to another one, I guess, so I wanna specify to, correct me if I’m wrong, but for people listening employer burden, that would be things like payroll, uh, tax, right?

There’s Social Security, Medicare, everything like that that you’re gonna have to cover on top of. Yeah, yeah, that’s So FICA, that Security, Medicare. Uh, we we also calculate our workers’ comp and GL into our labor because that’s essentially what it costs me to, you know, if I, we pay somebody $30 an hour, it’s like. Sorry, I’m right by this. You, we’re doing this big new commercial. I can’t hear it. OK, OK, good, good, good. Let’s not worry about it anymore. All right, thank you. Sorry, um, we calculate the workers’ comp and is GL into that because those are typically a metric of your payroll and so.

So anyway, that, that’s, that’s also an important number for us because I, I wanna that, that to me that kind of comes off the top versus later saying, oh well, I pay this in workers’ comp and GL and I at that point I have an accurately job cost in my actual job, you know, because that’s a professional rate to the employee. So yes, the, the finances are super important and we find that a lot of painting companies unfortunately don’t have that dialed in as much as they maybe should and then they’re.

They’re wondering where they, you know, where the money is at the end of the year or kind of surprised by the tax burden that they may be carrying. There’s all kinds of financial implications of that, obviously, oftentimes under pricing projects because they think their gross profit is higher than it is, especially if they’re doing the work, if they’re the project manager or a painter and they’re not essentially accounting for paying themselves for that work, there’s a lot that goes into that. But I think the, you know, when you switch from W-2 to, uh, subcontractors.

Not having that employer burden. I mean, that’s, I look at that as an additional 303%, might not be quite that high, but it’s pretty high. What do you mean in terms of if you’re, if you’re paying someone, let’s say, you know, 500 for the year, I’m gonna go ahead and allocate 30% on top of that. That’s just kind of a rough back you know, back of the envelope metric. I’m gonna assume that they cost the company $650. Yeah, I think, I think if, if you’re not, if you’re not kind of analyzing numbers like that, you could miss things like that.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I, I, I absolutely agree, you know, and then, and then that’s where when you get into, we evaluate our, our in-house jobs and our subcontractor jobs for our project managers, they actually have different goals depending on those jobs because we know our in-house and everybody’s different. I’ve talked to some that say, hey, we make more money marginalized on subcontractors than we do in-house. We, we have a really good in-house team and so we make. Really good margins on our in-house work compared to subs, uh, 5 or 10% more, sometimes 15% on average.

So they’re just, they’re just that, and we only have 3 right now and they’re that good. They’ve been with us for a few years. I know the systems. We know what jobs, set them up well, then that’s the other thing about Harvard that’s fun is I know what our in-house crew is gonna thrive in, and I know what our subs are going to thrive in. So at this point, I don’t put my in-house team on a $30,000 exterior and bury them for three weeks there, you know. Um, we’re gonna put them on, we’ve, we’ve found actually that having that in-house team to go hit these $453 jobs, even sometimes, like I got one scheduled for Monday, it’s $1100 job, and that sounds like, you know, some people have minimums much higher than that, and that’s fine, but we know that that $1100 hey, we’re gonna make really good money on that with that in-house team.

Um, revenue per hour on that, it’s gonna be well above our charge rate because I know exactly who’s going in there and how fast they’re gonna crush it. And the second thing is that I know that customer is gonna call us for a bigger job later. They’ve got a whole exterior, they got dental molding over the whole thing, that’s gonna have to be painted at some point. And when we do that, we’re gonna send a sub team to do it, you know, so, um. It’s given us a lot of flexibility, but yeah, our, our PM targets, our project managers targets for in-house team are 50% or higher on gross profit, and the subs is 45% or higher.

And that 50% on the W-2 side already includes all that employer burden. So that’s already, that’s already taken out. So they’ve got to hit that 50% with the employer burden accounted for. Are you, when you say 50% and 45%, are you also accounting for the estimator for project manager for, for everything? Yes and no. I mean, part of the reason we have those numbers a little higher is because we are, we are kind of accounting for those people, but that’s gonna kind of shred off of that number. So as we whittle from that 1003 or 50 down to the net profit, they’re gonna come off of that.

So, so I guess the answer technically is no. That’s what it sounds like yeah, that makes sense. But, but the reason we set those a little higher is, is because we know what those numbers generally are, you know. If that, if that jives. So yeah, our, our estimators and PMs have a base plus, uh, I mean, right now I am the estimator, but we, with the job description, the comp plan for the estimator PM they’re, they’re the exact same. So it’s a base plus percentages based on how much they manage.

Up to a million is a certain percentage, the next quarter million, the next quarter, the next quarter they get higher percentages, so. Got it. Yeah, I mean, I think I was at a minimum. The commission, whatever commission is being earned by either the estimator or the project manager should be accounted for in the gross profit. But then companies, I’ve seen companies do it various ways. If there’s a base, whether or not they want to kind of divide that across cost of sale or view that as overhead.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, so the commissions are generally going to eat between 2 and 3, I mean, they’ve got to really be doing over a million. 5 to get much more than 3.5%, you know, of that next level. Uh, so let’s say you had sales MPM, that’s, you know, on average 4 to 6%. So, you know, when it rolls off of that and they because their bases are not extremely high. So, so we’ll look for maybe 40, around 40% for the subs all in and 0003 for W2. That’s right. That’s right, yeah. One of the other things, Shane, you mentioned.

With you, one of your hesitation switching from W-2 to sub was culture. Has that been negatively impacted? No, um, it’s actually been It, it’s been really fun. So one, yeah, I’ll give you an example. One of our specialties is cabinet refinishing. And so we had a cabinet refinisher call and want to be a sub. And at first I just said, we’re not gonna talk to her, you know, um, we’ll call her back and politely say no. But in talking to her, I realized this person knows her stuff.

Let’s kind of try them out. So we, you know, we try, we brought Pat in, we tried it out on the job, kind of just say, let’s find a daily rate, work with Tanya, you know, on this and our cabinet refinishing side. And it became really apparent really quickly, she’s good at what she does. And So she does do a few other jobs during the year, but I would say if there’s 52 weeks in a year, let’s say she takes off 3 weeks, that puts us 49, she works for us 40 weeks a year at minimal.

Uh, and so she’s pretty much working for us almost exclusively, right? She comes to our Christmas party, she comes to certain event, and you know, she’s, she’s part of our team and we’ve been able to positively develop that relationship with her in a way that is, you know, so for us, as long as a sub reflects our core values. Then they can be a sub, and they can be, you know, painting partners what we’d rather call them, right? But for the purpose of this podcast, we use subcontractors, we don’t want to confuse anybody, but we like that term painting partner because we really believe we’re partnering for the growth of your company, for the growth of our company, and more importantly for the good of our clients, right?

I’m glad you said that though, because I think that’s a valuable piece of information for people to hear. That just a categorization, yeah, yeah, I mean, um, you know, lexicon of a company is really important. What words do you, you know, do you ascribe words are powerful? Yeah, we, we feel like that, that really we want to link arms, right? Now I want to, I’ve had great conversations with subs that say, oh, I’m just gonna fire this person, and they’re not doing it. And I said, yeah, you know what, I’ve had knee jerk reactions too.

Let’s talk about this. Let’s process through it. Let me tell you some of my story, you know, or I just want to do what you do and not, not be on a job site all day every day, and I say, look, there’s still projects I’ve managed, and I’m still on job sites. And I’ve done this since 2016, and it took a long time to get here. You know, so don’t try to run before you’re even walking. And, and so to be able to kind of have these conversations and invest in people.

And as far as the, yeah, so I’m skipping ahead a little bit to the other concern I had which was can we actually invest in people at that point, right? And we talked on the flywheel last week, you know, that’s where we’re still learning on the sub contractor or painting partner. Model, uh, how does that work? And there’s some limits to that legally, obviously, that we can and can’t do. That being said, we have found that we can really invest in these men and women. We can invest in them as people, we can invest in their businesses, we can, you know, help them think through problems, and we can invest even tactically sometimes, like, hey, I’m seeing you’re doing that.

Have you ever thought about doing it this way, you know, yeah, we can’t legally train them, but we can sure talk about methodology, and we can learn from them. And I think that’s where our culture has been improved as we’ve even had our In-house painters and our subs on the same jobs together at points, because they’re just so big and so, hey, we gotta go get all this done. And that’s been really fun to see them interact together and our culture rub off on the subcontractors in that way as well.

So I, I think it’s been surprising. How much Try to find the word confluence or, you know, it’s just kind of come, come work together. Maybe, maybe cohesion’s a word, yeah, and, and something about us rubbing off on them a little bit, you know, to where, you know, Pat would say, man, I, I got, I am renew painting, you know, yeah, I might not officially work for you guys. I don’t want to have, I don’t want to technically work for somebody else, but I, but I like, I’m all in, you know, and so it’s cool synergy that, that kind of happens.

That’s awesome. So you, you said one of the other challenges which, you know, is a challenge for a lot of companies is finding subs, finding reliable subcontractor crews. One of your uh advantages is you have a Hispanic project manager, bilingual, so that person, I would imagine sources a lot of your subcontractors are there. Are there specific areas from which that person from what your PM may be sources, whether it’s Facebook groups, uh, next door, just people that they know in the community. What does that look like?

Yeah, and I’ll say this is very fresh for us because he’s been here. It’s his 3rd week, so this is very a week though. You must have found him somewhere else first. So what’s that? You must have found subcontractors somewhere else first, right? So I was gonna touch on that, yeah. So, so I would say in this 3rd week though, we’ve been able to find 1.23 more subs, so. Just because, so, uh, part of it is, let’s say somebody doesn’t have, here’s where the language barrier gets really challenging.

And, and, and, well, there’s two layers going on here. There’s a language barrier and then there’s a minority majority person, minority majority, you know, thing. And I’m not gonna try to make this like sociological and political or whatever, but there’s a reality that, you know, in our country, being a middle class white man is a very privileged place to be, OK? Like that’s a lot of our culture is kind of just set up and operates that way. Um, and there is a reality that, and I, and I saw this play out.

I mean, I spent 9 years in an impoverished community that was largely African American, and so there’s a level of connectivity, um, you know, minorities connect with minorities really well. And there’s a lot of reasons for that in terms of just like historical dynamics and other things. But at the very least, you look in our country, if you have an immigrant, it’s like, I’m gonna Uh, people understand me, people that speak the same language, people that know my culture and what it was like back home and all those kind of things, right?

And I know there’s a ton of different, you know, Hispanic speaking countries, but in general, there still is a level of connection there and um. And so where we’ve seen it be really helpful is when a sub doesn’t have workers’ comp, which a lot of them want to be subcontractors and they don’t carry workers’ comp. And that’s a very dangerous thing to do, right? Um, you see a lot of companies do it, they’ll say, I’ll keep you on forever. I just got to take this 10 or 11% out every single time.

But there’s, you’re exposing yourself dramatically at that point if you don’t make them have workers’ comp. And so for me to sit down and explain, hey, you have to have this, yada yada. Is a, it’s a different level. One, I’m trying to translate this insurance information. 2, I’m trying to get them to trust me. So it’s just been a, a more rapid trust and, of course, the translation is instant from Juan versus me. And so there is that reality that that’s been extremely helpful. Um, you know, even communicating, and I talked to, uh, actually Matt Keer about this not too long ago.

He, he is, I think they’ve just hired one of their first Hispanic project managers. That being said, he had a subcontractor. That was Spanish speaking that he had from the time before he started, they started Harpeth even. And so he said, if I had not had that guy, my our growth would have been totally different because this, this person could say, you know, he could say, hey, will you talk to this potential sub about what it’s like to work with Harpeth? And then, you know, boom, they’re off and running, the guy speak credibly about Harpeth, he’s speaking in the same language, and that allowed Harpath to find more subs that way, right?

So, I think the language barrier and the trust there is just pretty dramatic and it’s whatever or pretty um. Important, I guess is a better word, like the, the opportunity to kind of engage that way. Um. We put up as far as tactical. We’re, we’re just now trying to, you know, we’ve grown enough to where we said, hey, I think we need another 1 or 2 subs. Well, one just found a couple, so we’re probably OK for, you know, a few months here. If we get more sales like we hope to, uh, then we’ll need some more.

And then I think we’ll go more Facebook groups and some of those other things, which I think are ways we can find them. The other way that I’ve heard a lot of people, or people say it’s really effective is literally just to go to Sherwin in the morning when people are coming in and getting their products and just interact with people, meet them, try to hit it off with them. We Did, uh, Nate did a great job doing that and found a potential sub and went to visit job site and everything was great.

He, he just had a vehicle rap and he wasn’t willing to put some magnets over it and stuff to do our jobs. So that’s a non-starter, right? Sure. Um, so that was unfortunate, but the, the method worked. It was just, we couldn’t quite get over that hump. We can’t control everything, right. Uh, we put up signs at Sherron Williams at the been more stores in Spanish and English looking for subcontractors. Um, Facebook ads. So we’ve, we’ve had some response there. Our Sherwin reps, I hear people sometimes say, hey, I’ve had great success through our Sherwin reps.

Um, we have not, and I don’t think that’s for lack of trying. I just think there’s a lot of crappy painters out there. So we’ve You know, a lot of those referrals for whatever reason just have not worked. And so, you know, probably our biggest ones have been putting the signs up in the stores, and these men and women going in, that’s how we found pets, how we found Francisco’s, how we found, you know, I can give you 4 people that we found just because they saw the sign in the store.

And the to put the sign in the store, how did that go? Did you have to kind of speak with the store? What did that look like? Yeah, I mean, I talked to the store, man. I talked to our reps said, hey, we want to do this in every store in our area, and they, you know, basically kind of Because, you know, signed off on it and then we talked to the, yeah, I mean then we’re, I mean, we’re, you know, gosh, Brandon, it takes so, it’s such a low bar to really, I mean, you can say, oh, it’s just about spending money.

If I spend $800 or $100,8003 to Sherman every year, like they’re gonna let me do it all, you know, do a lot of different things. Well, it is true, but I could spend that 8000 or $100,000 and be a total jerk, or I could take. Donuts, take pizza, take Christmas gifts, you know, gift cards at Christmas, and we do that to the store managers and the associates every year. So we’re always taking them, you know, the managers, maybe it’s a $50 gift card, maybe the associates were given $25 gift cards at Christmas, but we’re doing different touch points during the year to where we’re earning their trust and we’re earning their favor.

We’re treating them with respect. We’re not yelling at them if they screw up an order. You know, I’ve seen some Idiotic thing from Painter, just the way they treat these uh employees at Sherton Williams and, and I’m thinking it’s just foolish, you know, just treat them like humans to be partnership idea, yeah, I mean we really look at Sherwin and Spectrum Paints is our Ben more dealer in our area and so we look at those two as as partners and uh and so we’re, we cultivate those relationships to where when we say, hey, hey, we’re growing.

We need more, we need some subcontractors can be put up signs. Of course they’re thinking, well, 1 + 1 equals 2. If they sell more, they sell more jobs, they buy more paint that gives us more numbers, right? Uh, so of course that reality exists, but I think it also helps that we have that relationship. So yeah, love it, man. So I want, I want to transition into discussing the future for a new painting, and I know you have big goals, but is there anything else subcontractor specific that we should cover before we move on?

I think the last thing I’ll say about the hybrid model is it gives us a ton of agility. So I just sold, I think I had, I had 2 quotes Monday 0003 quotes on Tuesday, right? So of those 7, I think we will. Yeah, yeah, I mean it was all, and I think we’ve closed 8 of the 9 actually. It’s crazy, which I know people would say that’s too high a rate that’s too high a close rate, but I, I can’t, I don’t know, man. Like it’s not good, man. You can’t help it.

Well, I’ve gotten really competitive lately cause I, I have a, well, I have a competitive drive and somehow I have turned that into the sales drive. I, I work out every morning with a friend of mine who sells cars. I mean, he’s in a discipleship with me with a top realtor in the area. So the three of us are just all of a sudden, I think there’s just something contagious where we, we’re not necessarily competing against each other, we’re competing for our own businesses with each other and so there’s just this surge for all three of us, which has been so fun.

And um so yeah, I don’t want to close rate to be 90%. That’s not our goal. But at the same time, I didn’t give up any money on any single one of those jobs. We closed them at the, the, the market rates we want to be at, right? The, but the reason I’m sharing all that is to say, I think that 6 of those 9 will be subcontracted out because they need to be done very soon. So part of how I closed them was I said, yeah, we can get in here next week.

We can get in here in 2 weeks. We can have this done the week you’re out of town because I can call them some of them say, hey, can you be here at this time? You know, and I know we’ve got somebody to put in, put in that role. So I think the agility it’s given us to sell it, it used to be we were 6 to 12 weeks out. And that’s what I just had to tell people. So if a realtor called and said we really need this house painted, so we can put on the market, we just unfortunately might not be able to perform.

But now, now that realtor’s not calling you next time. So yeah, that’s exactly right. And then we’re losing that relationship because they’re gonna have to find somebody else as much as they might like us, they have found someone else and they have a good experience with somebody else, you know, so so many painters and business owners just in general myths is the bigger picture. Right, you mentioned it with a smaller painting project, the 303, you’re gonna make money, but it now when they have a bigger need, they’re gonna come to you.

I would take it a step further, being that you’ll get referrals, right? If you do it the right way, you can, you can kind of own that neighborhood if you, if you canvass in that neighborhood and so there’s a, that $1100 is just a foot in the door. If you say, hey, hey, to the, you know, real estate agent, we’re not gonna be able to, we’re not gonna be able to help you with that project. Well now the real estate agents forced to go to another company, maybe the other company does a good job.

Maybe they, they now formed this relationship with this other company. Maybe you just cost yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars because you couldn’t do that one little project. That’s right. That’s right. And whereas when we had a full W-2 model, we would bend over backwards to do those real estate jobs because of everything you just said, I did not want to lose them. But gosh, sometimes it’ll be painful to figure it out. And, and now it’s just, there’s so much flexibility in our schedule and so much ability to take on more and more work.

And so, you know, our revenue a few years ago is $600 last year was 1.1%. Right now, the last month we did $200,000. So that’s a $2.4 million dollar company, right? We’re, our goal this year was 1.2%. So that. We said we’ve got a new project manager, we’ve got, we’re trying to figure these things out. Let’s set it at 1.2 and be really conservative and just try to, you know, and that did not happen. The volume just kind of came and came and came to where we said, we’ve got to figure this out.

And um so anyway. Numbers are part of the story, right? They’re a part of the story. They’re a data point. The reason I share those numbers is not to say, wow, we’re really growing as much as to say, the reason we’ve been able to make some of those increases is going to the hybrid, because we can say yes to that job that needs to be done in 1003 weeks, you know, and make a make a profit on it and move on to the next one, and do it again and do it again and do it again.

Yeah, one of the, I think one of the most harmful things that I hear from painting company owners, they’re quite a, quite a few, um, kind of incorrect thinkings, but one of them is taking pride in being booked out super long. I got booked out 3 months. Cool. That’s not something you should be super proud of. It’s great that you have that business. It’s great that you’ve sold all those projects. But that kind of thinking, and then what I’ve seen from those same painters is then they’ll they’ll end up panicking because they’re booked out for 3 months, but then maybe eventually a year from now, they’re, they’re kind of not booked out at all and it’s just not balancing the ops and the sales and not having the agility.

It, it’s just not, and maybe part of it is that they’re booked out 3 months, so they told so many people, no. That then all of a sudden they’re burning bridges kind of the whole time because they’re booked out for so long. And now when maybe things get a little bit leaner, when that real estate agent relationship could have really helped, there are certain, you know, relationships or referrals or repeat business could have really helped, they don’t have it because they turned down work so so many times, right.

Yeah, and, and I would say that I was, you know, guilty of, you know, at one point taking pride in that as well, like, man, we got so much work, you know, and then I, then I started to look at and, and I was looking at these people that call and say we need it done in 2100 weeks and I was like, oh, we’re missing that job, we’re missing that job, you know, and then you start to realize. Yeah, you know, at some level, everybody’s not going to say, oh, you, you’ve got the best quality or whatever.

And I’ve already told you my theory on that anyway, is that there’s a lot of use quality work. So if you’re going to give somebody a premium experience, some of that’s going to be able to be reactive and, and, and meet their need because their main need is a timeline. I can’t meet it. I’m not getting that job, right? And I’m not getting that relationship. I’m not getting. Referrals, you know, and when I mentioned even the close rate earlier, all those leads weren’t cold leads, you know, they weren’t just Google Web searches, you know, 2000 of them were customer referrals or repeat customers.

So we expect to close most of those. Sure. So the more of those we can have, you know, I mentioned Harper painting, they turned their marketing off because they had so much volume and I heard. Maggie say most of our work comes from repeat customers and customer referrals. A massive company. They’re a big company, yeah. That’s where it’s coming from, you know. So it just shows the strength of those relationships and like you said, like you got to keep them, you know, and that obviously they’re, they do a ton of commercial and so they kind of, a lot of that makes, you know, it, it, it’s bigger than residential in terms of the, the, the, the volume of repeat there.

But, um, anyway, there was something else you said to me. I was trying to think of how you said something that I thought was a really good point you made. Now, I can’t remember what it was. So anyway, sorry. Yeah, the, um, I mean, we’re, you know, painter marketing pros generates leads, right, for painting company. We do do what’s called database reactivation, so that’s reaching out to past customers, past leads generate, you know, generating repeat referral business. So we help with that as well. But from somebody who actually the, you know, my job, my career is generating leads, I think it is massively undervalued, not the first lead, but the second lead, the repeat, the referral, kind of owning the network, viewing these, these projects as just a first step, ultimately you’re building an empire.

Right, you’re building this network in this community. You’re not, and, and so many painters, I see it’s kind of hand to mouth, right? Like, oh, where’s my next lead? Where’s my next lead? Where’s my next? What about your last 21.2 leads? What about your last 2800 leads? What about the, the ones that didn’t close? Are you still following up with them? Do you have a CRM that’s following up with them for a year? Are you calling them still, right? 2000 month, 230 months out, maybe they didn’t complete the project, Drive by their house.

If it were an exterior project, maybe it hasn’t been painted yet. And guess what? Every other contractor stopped after a week or two as well. So you just call them back, there’s a good chance you’re gonna close it. What about the projects you completed? Are you, are you following up with them, or like you said, maybe there’s something else they need painted. Maybe their neighbor, neighbor needs something painted. I think painting companies, they think that the homeowner’s gonna remember them. Homeowner’s not gonna remember you. Could have been the best experience ever though, you know, how many times have we asked somebody, hey, who, who, who did this for you?

Oh man, it was, uh, gosh, it was just, oh boy, let me, let me try to uh man, it was a great company. I don’t remember the name off the top of my head. They’re not gonna remember you because they have so many things going on in their lives, so you have to. You have to kind of make them remember you by staying in touch with them. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, I mean that’s that’s absolutely true, and I know you guys providing phenomenal service for that, so it’s important and appreciate that.

And then the, I think the other thing you said, you said meeting meeting their need, meeting the need of time, right? Sometimes time, sometimes convenient, sometimes maybe being really attentive to the fact that maybe there are elderly people in the home, maybe kids, maybe schedules, nap schedules, whatever it is, I think so often. People think, well, it’s just price and quality. That’s all they care about. But the, the customer experience, like you said, quality is kind of the price of entry. If you, if you can’t do, if you can’t paint, then you’re not gonna succeed as a painting company.

There has to be a certain minimum, minimum bar there, but you look at all the marketing of, of painting companies, what does it say? Quality. Quality that that word means absolutely nothing because there’s no company out there being like, you know, we’re mediocre, kind of mid quality. I mean, we’re not the best, but we’re not the worst. It’s like sort of OK quality that isn’t a marketing message. So the quality is just that you might as well just throw that word away because nobody cares. Yeah, our little on the back of our t-shirts, you know, we have a new painting and then it says renewing people, places, and expectations.

So that’s awesome. Our kind of drive is, and I straight stole that from a friend in Saint Louis. They had a movie because I saw it on his business card. I’m like, that’s awesome. And we end up deciding to even renew painting. I was like, I’m using that, you know, because that’s really what we want to do, right? Like we are trying to impact our people, impact the people we work with. We’re trying to, we are, we are a painting company, so we want to renew a space, like a place or a space.

That’s what we do. But we all, the expectations part is the experience. You know, so maybe it’s, maybe we should renewing experiences. I don’t know, but it’s, that’s the idea that we’re, we’re looking for is people expect subpar experiences. They expect to call, have to call their fence company 43 times like you did to get on the schedule, you know. You know what, they came out, they came out, um, man, yesterday. So they came out yesterday. Dude, they did a great job. The, the crew lead, he was phenomenal.

We had a bat house. That that we wanted them to put up, they did. So we, we live in a, we just bought a house and they’re a bunch of no CMs and mosquitoes. So we put up this bat, they, they installed the bat house on the post. You know, that that was kind of outside the scope and they were super patient with us. You know, we should have already selected the exact location of the bat house, but we didn’t. So my wife and I are out there and I’m researching, you know, how close to a tree can a bat house be and all this stuff and they’re super.

They did a great job. But what a terrible experience up to that point. A lot of people wouldn’t have stuck with them. I was just desperate because everybody was terrible. Yeah, the bar is so low, and that’s it. That’s what I tell people sometimes is for a while I thought, I don’t know if I can keep doing this because the bar is so low that it almost feels boring at points. And then I started, then, then I really got into the business side to succeed and make money and change lives.

What a, what a boring thing. Well, this again, this is back in like 24 22, and I was also resistant to doing it. I’ve talked about that. So, you know, that’s before I realized everything you just said, like, what does success look like, how is it impacting people? How are we impacting more cust clients, how are, you know, all those kind of things, yeah, obviously that flip the switch for me, right? So there was a there was a lot going on, but, but that the the low bar does exist and, and, and.

You know, our hope and Our areas that there will be more people that do give people great experiences so that everybody would raise that that expectation, right? But yeah, 28% man. Rising tide lifts all ships. And another thing you mentioned was the you working out with your two friends in the morning. All of you pretty sales driven real successful real estate professional, car salesmen, car salesmen are some of the best salesmen, right, if they’re good. I learned so much from just in conversation. Oh my gosh, I got to use that.

I got to do this. I got to do better at this, you know, it’s tough. I mean, people, who wants to go talk with the car salesman? Nobody. So you’re going in, we all have defense when we go into a sales mode, right? The, the painters face it when you go in and you’re, you’re a contractor and you’re going to conduct an estimate. You’re gonna face it. Nobody faces it harder. Than car salesmen because they they’re like the, the proverbial just worst type of salesman. So to succeed in that, in that game, you have to be pretty good.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and I learned something from a buddy and he’s, he, he wins there every single month. He’s like the leader, you know, he’s got like dealership record for most car sales in a month and you know, and he’s not sleazy. I mean just. You know, they have no haggle, so you can’t even haggle with, you know, you can’t even negotiate. They have a no haggle price set up at the dealer. You just got to win them over. And so through those conversations, I learned so much from him and it’s, it’s been awesome.

I bet he’s a great listener. Identifying their need and so that’s right. What’s your actual, what’s their need? What’s your actual objection? I’ve learned, I mean, just, but yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s been, it’s been fantastic for me to, to learn so much. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you saying that though, it emphasizes the importance of community. So I’m gonna do a quick plug for the PCA. And anyone who’s listening to me for any, any period of time knows I’m huge in the PCA. So PCA Pat E P A I N TED.org.

You can go there, check it out, register if you’re not already a member. We have uh another 4 events coming up through the remainder of this year, really awesome events, but I, I think this idea of being around like-minded entrepreneurs, people who are driven. Is, is undervalued in the industry at large. And so with the PCA growing and um I feel like that’s turning the tide, but hopefully, anyone listening, you know, goes, goes ahead and checks out one of those events or becomes a member. Yeah, I mean, absolutely, the, the, the, I heard a talk from Brad Ellison a few years ago, and the only thing I remember from it earlier was he somebody it was a Q&A I don’t, I don’t want to be more than 3 weeks booked out.

Yeah, that was the first thing where I was just like, Oh, that’s interesting, but it’s again, I mean, I’m rewinding to 10 minutes ago, the topic we’re talking about, but that’s a PCA nugget. There’s, I can give you so many old PCA nuggets that transformed our business. Yeah, love it. So Shane, let’s, let’s kind of focus shift gears here, focus on the future of her new painting. What does that look like, man? Exciting. Uh, we’re, you know, we’re having a blast, and we’re excited to see where it goes.

We need to Look to hire a salesperson toward the end of this year, early part of next latest, based on our current trajectory. The reason I’m still doing sales is, is, I mean, it’s, it’s probably the only job I would find if I wasn’t doing this, is kind of sales oriented, so it, it does fit my aptitude, does my wiring. Also, I want to get really good at it and develop a really good system and process. That I can hand off and so much of it has been intuitive that I have, you know, we’ve even had processes I didn’t follow because I didn’t have to, right?

And I would fire somebody for that. Um, so it’s OK, let me put myself in that sales role, kill this to where I can train this, right? And so that’s kind of where I am right now personally, in terms of like looking toward the future is I’ve got to nail this so I can hand it off. So I can hire somebody, train them, empower them, and they can fly. So just saying, hey, go make, go make the sales like I did, that might not be quite enough.

That’s, yeah, I said last year, one of the things I learned last year was that if it’s intuitive, it’s not teachable. So if I just do stuff intuitively, like I was doing project management intuitively, and I was trying to teach a project manager. I couldn’t do it. So we had to rewind and hey, what is an SOP for this? What happens from the time you’re assigned a job to the time you close it out, right? I love that, man. I mean, that, that quote is, I just wrote that down for myself.

If it’s intuitive, it’s not teachable. So you have to actually figure out how to convey that effectively to other people. You have to systematize it somehow. That’s right. Yeah, you take what’s intuitive. Which is a gift of the, the gift of all your experiences and God’s grace, right? Like that’s great. And what’s intuitive is, is it, I should say it is teachable if you take time to systematize it, to write it down, right? But if it’s merely intuitive to me and I’m not taking that time, then it’s, it’s useless to anybody else.

And that’s what we were running into as we started to grow. Like I was a I was a bottleneck because I’m like, yeah, go do this, and I hadn’t. I don’t know how I did it. I just did it, you know, for people listening to, I want to, um, interject, sorry, Shane, real fast, don’t be proud of being a bottleneck. You can be proud of skills that you have, right? But I’ve, I’ve seen entrepreneurs, well, nobody can do it like I can do it, right? Or this always comes to me because I do it the best. Cool.

That means that your company is not gonna, do you want to be proud of you doing this certain thing, kind of proud that I’m the best employee at this thing, or do you want to be proud of the business you’re growing and the team you’re empowering? Right, that’s absolutely true. Right, stepping off my soapbox, keep going, Shane. No, it’s absolutely true. I mean, I have seen every single turn, if you hire the right people and build the right team, when you hand them a responsibility, make it clear what you expect, make it clear how to do it, they take it, they make it better, they innovate, they grow it, they do it better than you were ever gonna do it.

Yeah, and you do that 5 times over, that’s how we’ve grown. Is me getting out of the way, you know, and saying, hey, we’re going to hire the right people and let them fly. Jason Paris was really big into that, you know, Paris painting, I think they’re 14 million or whatever they’re at. all of Holdings, I mean, they managed, I don’t know how much money assets under 50 million maybe, and he said that the thing that he’s best at is getting out of the way. I mean, it took me a long time, and when I was, you know, part of my burnout story in in doing the ministry, and just I felt like I could do it better, so I did I still did try to do everything.

And I had some incredibly gifted people on our team that I hindered and I frustrated because I didn’t let them run, you know, and I didn’t realize I was doing it. And they won’t always tell you that either. They’ll be reticent to say so. They might not even notice it. Right, how many companies don’t typically empower people the way that you’re talking about, so they might, it’s a kind of a normal workplace, right? Yeah, and and unfortunately that’s how I, that’s how I was and I, I learned the hard way, man.

Yeah, you’ll, you’ll destroy yourself and you’ll destroy your company doing that. Uh, ultimately, that’s, that’s where it’ll end up, because it’s all gonna depend on you, you know, and that’s gonna crumble at some point. Um, so as we look to the future, I, I, yeah, we’re moving, um, someone, our office manager is incredibly high ceiling, where we, I’ve been grooming her to take over an operations role to where she would have all the marketing, the office stuff, the production, and all those departments, obviously under my leadership, you know, but she’s gonna do it better than I am.

That’s, it’s that simple. You know, those quar quarterly reviews that I’ll forget and we only do them twice a year. They’re gonna be every quarter now, if not, and there’s be more touch points because she’s gonna be in charge of it, you know. So there’s a great example of of me realizing I can’t do it all, right? And And so I’ll still kind of have the sales and the sales team as we grow that. And commercial, we’re dabbling in our first, we do some commercial repaints, some small renovations.

This is our first, hey, here’s, you know, a ton of blueprints, new construction, barbecue restaurant, give us a quote, you know, and so, We’re, it’s going great. We’re excited. We again, PCA that’s where I, that’s how I brainstorm how to quote it is through other, other men who have companies that have done a ton of commercial work before. We’ll see if that’s an avenue we continue to take. But it’s definitely something that in our area, it’s a very growing area and there’s gonna be a ton of need for it.

So that could be its own division at some point for us. We’re realizing that as I suspected, it’s probably its own animal in terms of sales, in terms of marketing relationships, in terms of quoting it, in terms of producing it, it’s its own animal. And I, so I think it’s its own line of business. We’re not there in 23, but we’re experimenting in 2025 so that going forward we can learn, yeah, this is how we will need to do this, you know. I think it’s important that you, that you know that, right?

That you know, hey, this is going to essentially be its own division. Because I think another, another mistake painters will make when they want to switch from residential and commercial or, you know, whether that’s repaint or new construction, new construction being different is they, they kind of aren’t, you know, they’re saying, well, we’re just gonna offer this as well. But if you start mixing and matching those processes, you’re going to run into. Kind of a lot of issues, whereas if you say, hey, right, right off the bat, this is essentially almost a new business we’re going to use our existing resources and knowledge base, but we’re going to essentially create a new division, a new line of business over here.

It’s far more palatable and maybe you don’t want that line of business, but you’re doing essentially a beta test right now. That’s right. That is exactly right because we can go that direction and lost that new line of business, or we could look at the cities around us and say, hey, this one’s only 30 minutes away, this one’s 45 minutes away. What if we just pop. Either a hybrid person that can sell and produce, or two people, one salesman, one project manager, and We go, we go hard in marketing in that, that area and try to really expand our reach into that area.

You know, so there’s in that, of course, I’m speaking residenttially at that point. So, um, there’s a couple of different avenues that we could go and our team’s aware of that and everybody’s just, we’re kind of Trying to grow strategically, to grow right, to grow wisely now, and, you know, just kind of see which one of those makes sense. Maybe it’s both, probably not right away, um, kill ourselves, you know, and that’s, that’s one thing that I’m pretty convinced of, uh, Brandon, I don’t know how, you know, I don’t know how people think of money in all kinds of different ways.

Uh, to me, money is just a scoreboard. So our, our revenue, our, our gross profit, our net profit, all those fun things, they’re just scoreboards, and I like to win. I don’t know if I live differently, if I make, you know, $100,000 a year or or a million dollars a year. I, I don’t know that my life is gonna look any differently. Um. Because I don’t actually, you know, we have those months they’re really good. It’s not like I’m sitting, oh, let me go spend, or let me go do or let me go buy, you know, but I, I love what some of those numbers represent is our reach into the community.

The more revenue we have, the more reach we have into the community, right? But we need to do it in a healthy way, and we need to grow in a healthy way, and I need to think about our people and and how we’re managing that revenue. And so, um. I, I don’t exact, we don’t have, we don’t really have numerical targets. Like I said, our goal this year was 1.2 and saying let’s don’t really grow, let’s just get really healthy. Well, we’ve been able to, to actually get healthier and grow, which is great.

That’s awesome. We’ll take that every time. But we’re not gonna do growth at the expense of health. Yeah, for sure, man. Done that before, and it, it, it crushed me and a lot of people around me, so we’re not, we’re not doing that. I want to add, I, I wanna add kind of a third option too for people listening. So you talked about expanding geographically, so going to surrounding cities, we, we talked about creating a new division, new line of business with the new construction commercial. I think a lot of painting companies also will very much undervalue the amount of work that is in their current service area.

And so I, I’ve had, I mean, it, it’s, you know, a company doing half a million dollars with a population of 800,000 saying they think they’ve tapped out. I mean, you could, you could run a, I mean, quite frankly, you could run a $30 million plus company with that size of a population, you truly could. And if you look at Paris, Spain, you look at some of these companies that the size that they’re at and their population will kind of prove that to you. So I want the, I, I want people listening too, they’ll feel like they reached some kind of a cap.

There’s this theory of constraints. Alex or Mosey talks a lot about it. He’s a thought thought leader I follow in marketing. I’ve talked about him a lot, but he talks about the theory of constraints. He’s really big into that. So when your business is not growing or maybe it’s growing slowly or stagnant, there’s something that’s keeping you back, whether that’s sales, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s your product line, rare rarely is that, whether it’s your ops, right? You can’t fulfill whatever it is, and I think for, I think for the majority of painting contractors, I think it is their marketing.

I think it is their sales and their marketing. I think it’s it’s hamstrung. And I think we put these, and I’ve been guilty of it as well, 100%. I think we put these glass ceilings and we say, hey, you know, I think we’re, I think I’ve tapped out. Well, maybe you’ve tapped out your ability. It doesn’t mean you’ve tapped out the, the total addressable market. Yes, I, I couldn’t agree with that more, and that’s, that’s actually the conversation we’re having internally right now. And so we just decided to, I mean, we’re really for the first time doing marketing.

I mean, HandA had plans, but we haven’t been able to handle the volume. So we, we’re just like, we can’t, we can’t mark because we can’t handle what’s coming in now. But now with the hybrid model with more subcontractors on board, we can handle it. So let’s actually go for it in our area. And, and I’m guilty, I was guilty of thinking that with the cabinets. I thought, well, We just want to create an entire cabinet refinishing division, which basically we’ve unintentionally done. Then But if we want to go further and let’s say we build a shop and we’re just boom, we’re hiring 4 W-2s and all they’re doing is cabinets, you know, to say, I don’t know if that’s possible.

Well, Corey Leister does it in the same size area as us, right? Because that’s what she markets for. And so it just hit me. It’s like that. I had the one thought and then I had the other thought that just smacked me right in the face and said, that’s pretty stupid and that’s limited. Yeah, I like, I love it. I agree with what you’re saying. I, I think that makes complete sense and yeah, we don’t have to do any of those things that I talked about. In the near term, you know, it could just be a way to do it and like we are going to do everything you just said, particularly with targeting certain neighborhoods in our community, we’ve got this plan in the next 8 months to hit them multiple times, and so for the first time, say we’re gonna go after neighborhoods where we have a lot of influence already and we’re just gonna go after it and see what happens.

And um so yeah, I, I totally agree with everything you’re saying. Love it, man. So we, you’re gonna focus on refining systematizing the sales process, bringing in another estimator, replacing yourself, eventually building a team. We’ve talked about the, you know, potentially exploring this, this new division, new line of business, potentially exploring geographical, uh, expansion as well as, as more focused marketing and sounds like some hyper local marketing in terms of owning certain neighborhoods that are are really your ideal customer avatar. Is there anything else that we should cover regarding your future vision?

No, I think just, uh, I mean, we, like I said, it’s healthy growth is a huge thing for us, huge. So, I, I think that that that underlies everything that, you know, you just said, and that comes from experience of doing it the opposite way. the pain of that. So that, that quote, what is the quote, what is it, what does it benefit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, something like that? Yes, yes scripture, yeah. Yeah, that always comes to my mind, you know, I think so often as entrepreneurs we sacrifice our health, we sacrifice our family life, we sacrifice our marriage or relationship with our kids, we sacrifice our personal happiness.

Because we’re, we’re so focused on growing something, and I do believe in seasons of life. I believe at times sometimes you have to just stick it out. I don’t think everything’s perfect at all times, but I think, I think hard driving, you’ve talked a lot about wanting to win. I think hard driving entrepreneurs, myself included, I’ve certainly been guilty of this, will, will kind of stick it out too long, right? We don’t need to stick it out, but we think we need to or we want to.

And, and it does hurt you and it hurts the people around you. So I think that concept of healthy growth is really important one. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, that’s a good that’s that’s a very good observation. Shane, you always make me feel good about myself. I appreciate you thinking about having another episode just so it can make me feel good. Right? You, you’re a giver, man, servant leader. Brother, I appreciate this. This has been a phenomenal podcast series. You’ve opened up a lot, you’ve shared a lot. I thank you for that.

Is there anything as we wrap up, not just this episode but the complete series, anything else you’d like to add? Yeah, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I’ve appreciated the time as well, and it’s given me, I was just sharing with a friend the other day, it’s, it’s made me think a lot about where we are, and I’m grateful for that, that self-ref reflection that you give me, so I appreciate it. Love that. Shane, thank you, brother. Thank you, brother.

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