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 episode, Brandon Pierpont hosts a dynamic panel from the PCA Residential Contractor Conference, where industry leaders share their go-to tools for streamlining communication, scheduling, quoting, and more. Learn how to simplify your systems and build an efficient, scalable tech stack roadmap.

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.

Look at the brain power assembled on this stage. If you were just wandering by outside and you just caught a glimpse, you’d be like, hell yeah, I gotta stop in for this, and you’d be wise to do so. This is our tech stack panel. Our moderator, Brandon Pierrepont, keeping these gentlemen in line. And who do we have? We have Cole Pelea, Josh Houston, Shane Fast, and Fred Hamilton Emery. That is the extent of my role in this process. Brandon, I give it to you for a tech stack panel.

Sweet, thank you, Andrew. What’s up guys? Post launch. How’s everybody feeling? We’re good. Heck yeah. Cool. Anybody learned anything so far? Hope so. Sweet. Anybody have any good connections that you made so far? Awesome. So, as uh As we, as we’ve got, all of us have gone to quite a few PCA events. And one of the, the things that we noticed that was really complicated that people had a lot of questions on was tech stacks. So tech stack is just a, a fancy way of saying the different pieces of software, the different pieces of technology that you use in your company.

And with AI and tech evolving at the rate that it is, it’s becoming ever more complicated. And painters are obviously naturally usually super tech savvy, so you guys are always way ahead of the curve here, but we figured we’d still maybe talk about, uh, some tech stacks that are working, uh, for the painting companies up here. So we, we have a, a range of, of kind of revenue ranges and that tech stack, it, it isn’t. What works for a company starting out is probably not the right tech stack for a company at a million and probably not the right tech stack for a company at multi-million.

So, we’re gonna cover a lot of, a lot of different pieces of technology. We do want this to Uh, have a lot of Q&A. So when we’re covering stuff, feel free to raise your hand. I’ll call, call out to you and we’ll get the questions answered cause you guys are probably gonna have a lot of questions. We have a lot of different pieces of technology that we’re gonna cover. Uh, and with that, oh, there, there’s also, there’s gonna be a little presentation here. That we, that’s basically gonna outline the different pieces of tech that each of, each of these companies uses.

We’re also going to share at the end of this presentation a folder with you that has a whole lot of SOPs that actually go far beyond the tech. So these, these gentlemen have been kind enough to share a lot of their internal standard operating procedure documents, which will be really neat for you guys to download. This presentation will be in there as well. So you guys will be able to see all the different pieces of tech they use. So if you feel like you’re missing something, you’ll have it.

So with that, let’s, let’s kind of just If you could introduce yourself, name your painting company, maybe where you’re, where you’re based, and then we’ll get this kicked off. I’m Coallea, um, Novo Painting up in Seattle, Washington. We’re primarily a commercial repaint, uh, company. We got about 1503 in the field and 3 in the office. I’m Joshua Juuston, uh, of California, uh, owner of Sequoia Painting. We’re 40% commercial and 60% residential. Fred Hamilton with Hamilton Painting up in Austin, Texas, and we are primarily focused on resy paint. Shane Fast, Spartanburg, South Carolina.

So it’s upstate South Carolina and we are primarily res repaint and then dabble in some of the other ones as well. Hybrid model, W-2 and some. Awesome. Thanks, guys. So, let’s kind of kick this off uh with a, I’ll kind of go in the order here. We’ll do a super deep dive. But let’s kick it off in the order of just kind of running through the different pieces of tech you use. So my journey through this whole thing has always been like I wanted to run my company through my phone for the last 13 years and every time I go through these things, I, I find new technologies and a little bit of ADD on it, but our, our main system we use is our, is Google, you know, uh, calendar, email, of course, and all of that.

Um, uh, a lead comes in, it goes into HubSpot. HubSpot kicks it to Buildertrend, which is our, our operations, uh, platform. O in Buildertrend, all time clocks, job folders, schedules, um. Uh, daily logs, photos, everything is all in that job costing, everything is in there, uh, builder trends a little more robust than I think of what I actually need because it’s really made for general contractors, but it does allow me to, um, uh, be versatile and handle some of my, uh, subs through that, through that system.

Um, I’ve been on it for maybe 6 years now and I like it. Uh, Xero is our bookkeeping system mainly that happened 12-13 years ago because my bookkeeper, that was what she wanted to use and that’s how I got on it, and Gusto is our payroll platform, so completely online direct deposits, um, crew has access online through that. Um, I just, I didn’t like going to the job sites on Friday like I heard earlier to drop off checks, you know, so they get it on Wednesday. um, Pascout, of course, has been a game changer for us and then.

Uh, Corego is a platform where one of our commercial clients requires us to utilize that platform in order to receive work orders and things like that, so we’ve had to learn new technologies, uh, and cap cut and whatever you guys use to, to, uh, do your social media videos and whatever is easiest, you know, Cacut works for us on that front. Cool, you turn the screen so I could see it, um, so. We’re, uh, we’ve been using the same tech stack for about 7 years now. We transitioned into res repaint from doing apartments.

Um, the 113st 3 years we were in business, we were just sending estimates and invoices with, uh, with just Excel, right? Didn’t need to really have a whole lot of robustness with it because it was like one single client was our, our main source of income. Once we transitioned, I realized that having a calendar, uh, scheduling app was one of like. The starting point and so we have everything tied together with Zapier. If everybody’s familiar with Zapier, it’s, you know, if you don’t have software programs that will talk to each other already, Zapier can make it happen.

So we had somebody set this tech stack up for us 7 years ago and we haven’t strayed far from it. The reason for that is because I’m still the chief cook and bottle washer in my company. I don’t have an office staff or we just hired our first PM so it’s gonna evolve but right now I’m the only one using the softwares and this is what has made my life really a lot easier. Um, acuity scheduling takes all the information from the clients. What I love is, you know, we’ve got our intake form is very customized to the information that I want to know from them and then um from there.

It goes into a Google Sheet somewhere that has, uh, just has our client list on it, that is connected to estimate rocket, so that estimate rocket is where we send all of our proposals from. And then we do all of our invoicing through QuickBooks. We already were using it for our, uh, bookkeeping software, but what I found out was that it’s the cheapest that I’ve found to do, um, payments through to process payments. It’s like 1% uh capped at $15 a transaction for, um, for ACH transactions. So that’s typically how we take and we, we can take credit cards on it too.

Like 3%, but that’s, um, that’s the, the easiest and cheapest way that we’re able to send invoices, and one thing I wanna mention, we do, I do all this from my phone. I hardly use my laptop for any of this at all. Like the only time I, I, I wanna get into my laptop is for like a large proposal where I need like a, you know, a huge Excel spreadsheet to figure out all the square footage of a house and stuff like that. So that’s, that’s what’s really helped me as a kind of, you know, smaller company with only one person doing all this, uh, being able to do it all from mobile, so.

Awesome, thanks, Fred. Well, awesome. So we use Slack. That’s where that is, that is our main hub for all of our communication with all of our teams. Uh, that’s where they’ll get, uh, their work orders. Uh, they’re required to update every day at 10 a.m. , uh, where they’re at on that project. Um, communication goes through there. It’s nice cause it gets saved. So if we go back 2 or 3 months. We can look back and see. it saves it all so we can look back and see. Uh, paint scouts, um, is our, our estimating for residential, uh, very awesome, fast and easy, so you can get the, uh, the estimates out on site.

Um, high level is our CRM that is awesome because it does a lot of communicating on its own, you know, uh, uh, after the estimator looks at that project, it’ll send several different text messages, uh, and emails. Uh, Toggle is, uh, what we use. uh Toggle AI is what we use for our commercial, um, which is an awesome program. And then Google Suites, uh, we’ll use, uh, Google Calendar. Um, uh, Gmails, um, all the different docs that Google comes with, and yeah. Cool, thanks, Josh. All right, um, OK, can I just stand up because this is like way easier for me.

Um, OK, so everybody’s talked about paint scout incidentally, we’re not like paid by them or something. It just happens to be one that we all love. Um, for me, the most important thing about estimating software is accuracy production rates and being able to give it on site. So that checks that box, but before that, it comes into Monday through the CRM, spits in the paint scout. Everything’s undergirded by Zapier. So as soon as it hits one thing, it just starts to flow from there. Um, once it’s sold, it goes back into Monday.

com under our project management board. It’s very important for me with two project managers that are very young to have all the data in a couple of central places. So they’ll find it in PayScout. Monday or company cam, they look at those places and then they come ask the sales person if they have a question afterwards. Uh, right now for time tracking with our W-2s, we were using Connect Team, we’re dropping that to switch to Busy busy, has a lot more versatility for us. Um, Slack is what we use with our subcontractors, Google undergirds, a lot of that.

Um, of course, we’d always talked about AI. And then the, uh, the hire bus we’ve used for like 153 or 2 years now as a coaching assessment hiring tool. Uh, it’s very, very robust and it’s assess assessments and very intelligible, um, to the trades. And so we leverage that a lot in our personal development with our people. That looks like a lot up there and it kind of is a lot. I’ve got a just a gift of God and a 25 year old in our office that set all this stuff up, and she helped figure out what the best thing for us was.

So that is way too much if you don’t have that kind of person, um. Um, and it looks like a lot more up there than it is. Like if I showed you on a computer how it works. It’s actually pretty simple. When something comes in, it just tracks through. So we just want somebody to have a fantastic experience with us from the first time they call till we give them a thank you gift and ask for the Google review at the end. And so all of this is driven around that theory is that if we do that, people will keep coming back to us.

And so we wanted tech that did that the entire way through. Thanks, Shane. So guys, that we, we have a lot of different revenue ranges in here. We have a lot of people who are starting out. So I don’t wanna assume that, that everyone knows everything that is being talked about up here. So Zapier, Xapier is, it’s a software that essentially connects a lot of other pieces of software. So if you have 23, you know, 10 pieces of software, this will make them work together. There’s Make. com is a similar piece of software that does that.

But you can see there are, there are themes. The CRM that stands for Customer Relationship Management Software. It’s largely a way to communicate with your leads and to communicate with your customers. I think Josh, I think you said you use high level, we use high level for our partners. It’s a good one. There are a couple of different options. There’s obviously estimating, I think all you guys know that’s typically easier with software. There’s internal project management, there’s internal team communication, so there. There are a lot of fundamental stuff up here, but if you guys are, are seeing something you don’t know, it sounds like gibberish or you’re, you’re not even sure what’s mean, please raise your hand, because we want to, it’s not a stupid question.

We want to make this really, really interactive and then we have a microphone that, that will run over to you to ask a question. So we know we have a fair amount of people who are early on, early stages in their business. Some of you guys are, you know, this is a lot of tech here, Shane. If we’re just getting started, 1st 6 months of business, what are the core pieces, the affordable pieces of tech that we need to implement? You’re asking me, anyone. I, I would, if I was starting over again, I would start with Paint Scout, um, hands down because Paint Scout, you lost money.

Was it? I just said paint scout owes us money, um, definitely, yeah, and I think I have not seen this CRM. I’ve talked to a few friends who have demoed it and they said it’s been really solid, so that could solve a couple of problems there. Um, or a couple challenges in one, basket there. Um, I think that typically you’re not gonna have to do a handoff between sales and production at that level. Let’s say I’m up to like $500 750 dollars, I probably, it’s probably just me selling and production managing, so I don’t need an intermediary there.

Um, so I like the idea of like. Company Paint scout, um, assuming Paint scout CRM is like enough in that way. Um, scheduling, I think at that point, Google Calendar does all that. You don’t need to pay for that. So, um, there’s a certain, to me, there’s a certain simplicity and like, let me do one thing and do it well and do it over and over again. And then as I grow, I can add to it. Can I throw something in there about um. I didn’t even realize this.

I had somebody set up the uh the automations for me, uh, 7 years ago, and I didn’t even realize this was a thing until like a year and a half later. I used to use Apple Maps on my iPhone and then one day I just happened to switch to Google Maps and I started typing and all of a sudden I’m like, wait, my client is already in there. So apparently they synced it to my Google contacts and my contact syncs with, you know, with my map. So now all I have to do is start typing my client’s name and boom it just pops up in maps.

So like little tiny, you know, productivity hacks that are like, oh, I’ve got to go to this person’s house, where do I find their address? I don’t have to like go back into my CRM or my, my uh my estimating program to do that. So just little things that help and then um just uh you know, full disclosure we are switching to Paint scout, so if they’re listening, can I get a check too. So I shouldn’t make my comments about Pat Scott. I love it. I mean, you know, you pump out a proposal, it pumps out a work order, it gives you the quantities, it gives it all there and you put that in the Google Drive and you’re sit, you know, like it’s pretty simple, like, um, so yeah, if there’s one I would recommend it’s pink go for sure.

I’ll chip in here too for the, for company cam. So there are a lot of painting companies that are pretty, pretty far along that don’t use the software like that. It’s not really a mandatory software, but that’s gonna allow you to take a bunch of project photos out there. So, so when you kind of get to the basics where you can manage your projects, you can communicate. With your your leads, your prospects, your customers consistently you, you have a software to consistently conduct estimates and invoices and your accounting and all that, then you would really want to level up and start using softwares like Company can.

They’re actually gonna be proactive marketing tools for you to really create portfolios and things like that. So as you guys are, you have a comment on that? OK. So as you guys are, are adopting the new technology, how do you deal number one with the learning curve? Right? And then if you have a team, how do you deal with maybe the natural pushback or, or the challenges of getting your team to adopt the new technology? So, um, The implementation and all of that has been probably the biggest challenge uh over the years, right?

Because it, it really changes the whole workflow of everything. But when you’re first going into it, you know, it’s, it’s a shiny lure because everything does all these things and you’re free demoing this and free demo that and then you get all jazz and you’re up at 20123 o’clock in the morning and you’re like tweaking because you just see it all, right? Um, and really. It’s, it’s human nature it’s our entrepreneurial spirit to wanna move this forward, but to have that patience, I guess when you’re looking at it because, um, to implement something through your whole organization, you gotta have people who are on board with it too, and you gotta get the buy in from your key people who you need putting inputs on.

The field is my third, um, uh, feedback. I’ll ask him like they they’re the third layer, you know, it’s me first. Then my wife, and then if she’s OK with it and we’re all OK with it, then we’ll get it into the field and we kinda use like a, you know, we’ve done it in a 3 month process which actually was kind of quick actually, you know, to transition from program to program. Um, but I would just be aware of that as a, as a cautionary thing is like, don’t jump too quick, just take your time, look at really what works and you’ll find something that has the things you need, test it, do the free demo, go into the demo expires and then call them and say, hey, I’m really interested in your program.

Could you extend the demo for me? And every single time they extend the demo because they’re trying to sell the program, right? And so that way it got me to have a real good conversation with the, the company on the other end, the tech to see like how this, this dialogue to see if it really was gonna work for me or not. And so I would just say just be patient and, and take your time with it. I think I agree with Cole. You definitely have to have your team buy into whatever programs you guys are gonna utilize cause they gotta be able to understand it, they gotta be able to.

Uh, move forward with it, so you gotta have them buy in for sure. I, I, uh, I’m a super high DI referring to the disc earlier and I love change, so it’s like pretty much like my wife and kids are only thing in my life I don’t like think about changing all the time. And, uh, and so, so sometimes, so, so I have to be really careful um because I just like to change and so I have to remember like this is a hard thing to change.

And so we don’t tread lightly when we look at changing software. It takes, we spend a good bit of time on it, and then we’ll usually, I’m OK also if I need to make a change to pay for something, to pay for two things at once. And what we do is we pilot it with our best lead painter, like our best crew lead, or we pilot it with our best sub and we just kind of like roll it out for like 6 weeks or a month and make sure like we’re locked, we’re good, we’re like jam up.

Now let’s roll the whole thing out. And so, um, people don’t like generally like change, uh, and so you have to be aware of that and like sell them on the vision, sell them on the why, sell them on why it’s gonna help them and why it’s gonna be better for their lives and their productivity in their pocket at the end of the day, and then roll it out, you know, kind of slowly pilot it, find the kinks. Um, yeah, that’s one thing I’d say. I think that’s a that’s a key point.

That’s a key point like, uh, uh, to, to, to really make sure that you’re piloting them with the, with those leads because they, because you need their buy in and I’ve seen them, I’ve seen my field reject stuff that I put in out there. Like you spend all this time, you put the energy in and then they kick it back and they just don’t even, they don’t even use it and you just need that one key player to be your advocate uh for you, so yeah. So if you wanna talk about um slowly adapting to uh new software, don’t ask me how long I’ve actually been paying for Paint Scout and we haven’t made the transition.

Um, it’s just way too long. Yeah, um, sponsor sponsor. They owe me money. They really did. So, um. One of the things that I’ve found when I’ve actually demoed a lot of the other softwares, I mean I’ve demoed drip jobs, I’ve demoed um House Call Pro, Thrive, Jabber, and um I’m actually really glad that I have the tech stack that I do that’s all very segmented. All the things that we’re using have a specific feature, have a specific function and. They’re very customizable for that. So what I’ve found with most of the larger, you know, kind of all in one encompassing platforms is they would have been great if they got to me before I learned what Zapier was and had all these things set up.

But what I run into is that I’ve got a very specific sales process and, you know, project management process being the only one running all of it that I don’t wanna have to adapt to their system and change what I do with my customers for it and I’ll give you a very good example. So a lot of people will have their their calendar so people can go to your website and book an estimate appointment, right? drip jobs when I, uh, I took a great idea from them with with their software they ask for, you know, all your information and they say, what’s a good time for us to come and look at your, your project?

Give us a day and like, you know, morning, afternoon, night, whatever, and then give us a second day, and then you get to get back to them and schedule the appointment. I think they may have a feature where you can just put it on a calendar, but what, what I found is that instead of like leaving my calendar wide open and then having the customers dictate where I get to go every day, I would rather do that pre-qualification call. I know some people frown on doing that like go to everyone, but.

I still just that that set up call even I want to find out more about their uh about their project and I want to see where it’s gonna fit the best into my route because hey, Austin’s a big city. It could take an hour and a half, sometimes longer to drive across from one side to the other. So I don’t wanna have to have somebody dictate my schedule just randomly. And so that’s one of the big drawbacks of having, um, of not having that customization. And one of the things that I look for when I wanted to demo those and, and, and, uh, possibly utilize one is that will one of these softwares plug in with Zapier and be able to work in tandem with the system I have so that I can essentially run that client through both systems at once while I’m trying it out to see if those features are gonna work.

So that’s just one way to, you know, kind of get over the, the, the implement implementation trap, right? That’s a great question, and I didn’t. It was actually my original web guy told me that the analytics, um, the way it, it works with Google Analytics is a lot better than calendly or at least it was. So he’s like, he recommended that and I guess the features were relatively the same. So that’s just the only reason why we’ve been with them so long. Oh, the second Paint scout, we use it, love it.

I wanna get some money as well, so send that to me. Um, Josh, we’re, uh, implementing, uh, high level CRM, but the only thing I found is, is so advanced that it’s very difficult for me to set up. How did you get past that initial? There’s just so much stuff you can do with it. How did you get it set up to operate like you wanted to? This is for high levels. That’s for HubSpot. No, for high level CRM. Uh, unfortunately, I can’t answer that question because my, my COO set it up, um, and it did take him some time to get it set up.

And then also, I mean, He’s gonna kick me down some money too. We use paint scouts and they were a wonderful help with setting up the high level as well. Oh not paint scouts, I’m sorry, marketing. Yeah, so we, we use, um, we go and so we roll it out for all our partners. I’ll tell you. I, I personally dove into it for. 2 to 3 months. It’s, it is extensive. It’s built out. So there are a lot of that’s a whole industry go high level experts, integrators, so you can go on to Upwork, you can go on to fiber, you can go on to some of these sites where you can hire.

freelancers, and you can hire someone to actually set up your go high level depending on what you want and then train you and your team on it. So I’d highly recommend that if you, if you dive in you, and you don’t have a, a strong background in software, it’s gonna, it’s just gonna eat up too much time. Yeah, I mean, I would say like we talked to him last night. I just, I’m usually pretty honest. I would use Pay Scout CRM. Yeah, don’t make it, don’t make it harder.

It has to be. It’s there. Yeah, I got trapped in HubSpot like I went in. I was thinking it was so robust and I get in there and the features and they’re charging you more for more features. And all of that, right? And so like I was already kind of in there and now I’m trying to back out and get back to just utilizing my paid scout um or something simple like um pipe pipeline deals. I don’t know if they’re even still around but something like that that was really simple and it it was effective.

So guys, I got a couple of themes that they, that they talked about that I think are important to note. So when you’re, when you’re rolling stuff, stuff like this out, new technology, which people can naturally be resistant to and really any major change, you could see that Colt, Cole talked really nicely about kind of a hierarchy. He’s gonna explore it first. He’s gonna make sure that he wants to adopt it, then he’s gonna roll it out, uh, to his wife and then ultimately his senior leadership team and, and down and so forth.

And then Shane mentioned having a Basically an advocate, right? Someone who’s gonna champion it within the organization, uh, and it’s a sale. So everything if you own a company, everything that you do is a sale. You’re selling your clients, you’re selling your team on the vision, you’re, you’re selling your team on the new software, why it’s gonna benefit them, why it’s gonna make their life easier or better or whatever it is, so just something to think about. Up here we’re talking a lot about the benefits of the different technologies, but with change, there’s always a risk, there’s always pain, there’s always things that can go wrong.

So as you guys have evolved your tech stack, what are some maybe challenges you faced or mistakes that you’ve made and how did you deal with them? My mistake was taking on too much at once, like. I, I think like one program a year. It’s healthy. Otherwise, with the way technology goes, it’s always, you know, it’s an endless battle to keep renewing, refreshing and everything, right? So you’re like you’re on this. You’re on this cycle in a way, and you kind of gotta settle into it, so I would say like, you know, one a year.

Uh, I think I kinda agree with Brandon is you gotta. Like uh with us with Slack, one of the things that we did is sometimes you get excited with these programs and stuff and like Cole says you wanna push it out there right away because you feel like it’s gonna do something, but sometimes it’ll backfire on you, um, so like when Slack we when we implemented that into our company, uh, we started utilizing in the office first, uh, once the office staff got really familiar familiarized with it, then we like soft launched it to a couple of our foremans, uh, see how they kind of liked it first, and then if they bite in bit into it, then we.

We do training. Uh, I’m a big fan of training. We do quarterly training and so we’ll stuff like this, we’ll we’ll call all the foremans in and we’ll do a training on it and then then we’ll launch it out to everybody. So I think the big key is just to slowly push things out like that because you can really overwhelm a painter and a foreman real fast. I mean, we all get overwhelmed with these programs so you can feel what a painter’s gonna or foreman’s gonna uh get overwhelmed real quick too as well on top of all the other stuff that he has going on on his projects.

So, I think that, you know, if you’re working with Daniel over there, he’s gonna be on you on your software line item on your P&L because you, you get into these programs and all of a sudden your finance person is like, hey, uh, you got enough sub you know, subscriptions out there for all these apps that you’re on and And that was a that was an eye opener for me at least to, and I, I didn’t know that until I looked at the P&L how many things I signed up for.

Uh, one of the things that I would caution anybody who’s signing up for a new software, uh, I’ll give you a case study that happened to us. So automations are amazing, but you’ve got to make sure that the things that you are trying to automate are set up correctly on the front end before you push the go button. Um, great case study was we signed up for, um, a company that, uh, asked for reviews for us and essentially they asked for our client list so we plugged it in there and I thought all of the automations were turned off.

They weren’t. So like within the next day or two, we had, uh, the first batch of people that they reached out for a review. One of them was a customer that I wouldn’t have wanted to work with again, definitely like didn’t want to ask for a review. That was, you know, kind of a personal choice, but. Another one was somebody who we had only gotten a deposit from. We didn’t actually do the work for them yet and they got an email asking for a review and I was like, as soon as I realized that I reached out and apologized but that’s just because they happen to be in our our customer list that had, you know, populated in that program and because I didn’t spend the time going.

Through it and making sure that you know there was that separation um that’s like all of a sudden the the the automation did what it was supposed to, but because of my user error it, you know, it caused an issue. So I would be very, very wary of the things that you allowed to automate without, you know, putting your eyes on them first. Yeah, I mean the only I add is just know your limitations. Um, I’m really blessed to have Hannah in my office, and she can do a lot of different stuff and figure it out.

I’ve heard like drip, no drip painting and, and Michael present on stuff before, and I’m like, oh, we’re gonna go do that. I’m like, Oh, we can actually do that. Yeah, there’s no way. And so you just have to be willing to say, we’re not there yet, and that’s OK. So the uh I want to kind of follow up to to Fred’s point, so. When you, uh, I’m gonna give an example from a CRM, so again, customer relationship management software we use go high level so you can automate text messages, emails, voicemail drops, all kind of voicemail drop is when a voicemail goes into somebody’s phone and you didn’t actually call.

So that’s a little hack for you guys. Um, it’ll look like you called them, so I sent one out for an event we did recently, so I called, you know, about 3000 people in 30 seconds. So cool technology, kind of scary stuff that you can do. One of the things I want to point out, who we’ve implemented this with hundreds of painting companies. I will tell you we spent 6 figures, but we’re a marketing agency. We spent 6 figures a year in software. The don’t overreact if things, if you get a negative piece of feedback.

So one of the things that we notice, let’s say you implement the CRM and, and you’re messaging before an estimate, and you’re sending out a few messages, you’re sending out unique value propositions, a little bit about your company, and then someone responds, like, hey, please stop texting me. Or you’re, you’re annoying me, right? The knee jerk reaction that we’ve seen of a lot of painting companies, especially if they’re new into the, the software, new into some of this stuff, is he turned it all off. Someone, someone reacted negatively, shut it all down, right?

But they’re not, they’re not taking into account all the deals that they’re closing because of it, all the things that are positive. So make sure you know whenever you make change, uh, Myron Gold and somebody I follow, he says disruption always follows intention. Whenever you make change, there’s gonna be a little bit of negative feedback. There might be a text that goes out at 30 in the morning. Things happen, we own businesses, shit happens, right? Things go wrong. So if something goes wrong or if you get negative feedback, that doesn’t mean scrap the whole thing and go back to just texting.

And I’m just gonna text because now I can control it because then you can then you can’t scale. But the cost of tech stacks really important. Can we get some I guess we, we don’t have to necessarily go through software by software, but what, what roughly should people expect or be willing to spend on their tech stack per month or per year, maybe if they’re 20123 to 500,000, 500,000 to a million. Do you guys have benchmarks you recommend? I might be the wrong guy, actually. Yeah, this is probably something I should know.

Uh, I agree with that, our financials are healthy. And I just trust Hanna to figure out the best value. So that’s the way we roll. I think, I think slack, I, I wanna say slack is around 3000 a year. Uh, but they do have a free edition. I, I, I think you’re maybe just limited to the channels that you just like 90 days or something. I think that’s the one. So I don’t think it saves. Does it save? Can you go back 3 or 4 months? Oh, it does, yeah. So I think what the when you pay for it, I think you get the, it saves it in their database and then um you can create as many channels as you want.

I mean, we have every project channel that we have going on. Uh, we have, uh, uh, vehicle channels, so if any of our teams have problems with their vans, uh, they can, they’ll they’ll put it in there. We kind of made it fun too of, uh, them having, you know, some fun stuff. They can kind of like a Facebook and Instagram thing that they can share, you know, what they’re doing on the weekends and stuff with their family and kind of like the Sequoia painting family, uh, channel.

So, uh, but yeah, I’m almost positive I think it’s like $3000 a year. So, and they’ll, I think they’ll, you could pay it annually or you can pay it by month. So I just look, I, I’m doing about 123453% of my P&L, I know of my budget, so like right now it’s about 25, 2600 bucks for my, my whole staff a month. Total. I think we paid $240 a year for the annual plan on Zapier, um, and then everything else, it’s like $27 for estimate rocket. I think it’s about $2150 for Paint scout, um.

QuickBooks, $211 a month. I wanna say that’s on my own plan. I can get it cheaper through CPA but we added the payments feature to it. Um, and then what else do we use? We have company cam. I haven’t implemented it fully yet, but that’s like whatever $215 a month. I mean, we probably, thank you, there it is, um, that’s what we use, yeah. I mean, honestly, if, if we spend more than $22012 a month on our software that I feel like that’s a lot, um, and to me it’s like it’s a no brainer.

It’s just saved me so much time to use all these softwares that I don’t even think about it. Dan would think about it, but probably not much. It’s not that much, right? I, I think the biggest probably thing, I mean, there is, it sounds like there’s like a 22012 to 603% number floating around, uh, but also it, it’s like, is this going to make me money? That’s my lens. That’s the lens we always filter through in our office. Is this gonna make us money either by saving a lot of time and or creating the customer like heightening the customer experience and at that point, we’ll spend the money.

Yeah, I’ll give you an example and I know, I know this is a residential, but on our commercial side, uh, with Togo AI, uh, uh, uh, commercial estimator, you know, if he did a large hotel or something, I mean, he’s, he’ll be diving into the plans for that for a couple of days with Togo AI. I’ve seen him do it as fast as 260 hours, have the takeoffs done. And, and you’re talking for a whole hotel or apartment complex or so. Definitely saves time. And while Brandon’s doing, we share a lot of logins too.

There’s, there’s certain logins you can share and not disrupt the software, and that’s something we do a lot of. I agree. Yeah, and, and something to be aware, the, the percent, so we’re talking 25 or 210%. I like Shane’s approach. Is it gonna make me money? Is the ROI gonna be there? It’s also that your percentage is gonna vary based on the size of your company. You, you get one piece of software and you’re making $50,000 a year, it’s gonna be a little bit different, right? That percentage might go down as you get bigger even as you get more software.

So it’s something to be aware of. Um, so we’ve talked about. Mistakes that you guys have made. Obviously, you’ve been in the trade for a long time, friends with a lot of other painters. What are typical mistakes you would say are common to the industry in terms of how painters think about adopt or do not adopt tech? I think a lot of time it’s about being stuck in the old bucket, you know, like sometimes we get in the bucket and we don’t look above the rim because we’re so comfortable in the bucket and I’ve seen that hold up some of the other companies who who resist the acceptance of maybe doing something a little different even though they know it’s gonna save them time and money.

And so, but it became because of their reluctancy to change their habit and grow as a leader and implement things too so uh I always think about that bucket as an analogy of it it’s like, uh, if you can if if you’re gonna peek outside that bucket, um, then, then these technologies are gonna work for you but if you’re not willing to look outside that bucket, you just wanna stay in here then. Then on, um, I, I see a lot of people get held up in that in that bucket.

You know, um, just seeing the Gusto logo over there right now, like we’ve been using Gusto for payroll for the last 4 or 5 years now. Um, it’s like the 5th payroll software that we’ve used, uh, when we started our business 10 years ago, we had employees, you know, pretty much right off the bat, and I’ve been through several payroll providers, um, Gusto, it’s, I don’t even think of it necessarily as a technology platform because it’s just payroll is essential. It’s an essential, essential function of doing business. Um, but the, the crazy thing is because it makes it so much easier for us, um, it’s worth, you know, every penny.

Um, but, uh, Yeah, I mean, as far as um. As, as, as far as from a, uh, like. What do you do first, right? When you start your business and you’ve got so many things that are on your plate, using something like QuickBooks and uh and a payroll software and then even getting somebody, hiring a bookkeeper, that was one of the first things we did. First thing I’m like, I don’t wanna try to keep my books. I’ve seen a lot of people who will go through 53, 10 years like they’re still trying to do the books themselves and I mean, that, that takes a lot of time, right?

So things like, you know, things like just trying to, to offload using technology and then of course using somebody like a bookkeeper to come in and help with it, um, that saves you a lot of time that you otherwise could be working on growing your business, right? Um, and the same thing with like using estimating software. I remember when I first started and we were just doing things on Excel, like there’s no continuity with it. Um, it’s a lot harder to like, see, OK, well, how much was our sales this month or anything like it’s just, it’s a bunch of random Excel files that are in a folder, right?

So I think. The being slow to, uh, to jump into using technology has been a mistake. I’ve seen a lot of people, um, you know, fall through because again, you know, Dan talks about it knowing your numbers, you’re not gonna know your numbers until you have The technology to show them to you. Otherwise, you’re spending a lot of free time just trying to come up with your own manual reports on stuff. When you’re implementing this stuff, does the owner have to be the one to do it?

What are your guys’ thoughts in terms of, like, like say, hey, I run a painting company, I’m not very tech savvy. I’m not interested in tech. I hate it. So I got a flip phone. Does that mean that I just can’t scale my business now? Uh, I’m gonna answer the way I I think I understood it, like, so. I, I almost think if. I don’t care how much, you know, if you’re the owner, I would hope you have other things to be doing besides implementing a tech stack.

Um, that’s, that’s the way I think. Um, like I, I, we have a team of people, and if I don’t trust that person to do that job better than what I could do myself, then why did I hire them? So that’s, I guess from a person who enjoys tech and I have been a part of our team creating different like, um, schedule help and production help with AI and stuff. Like I enjoy those pieces and I kind of we’re going after and helping there, but I really trust our team to like think in the best way, like with the Monday CRM decision was not actually my decision, I tasked to in our office, like, hey, figure this out and come back and tell me what the best option is, um, the best value.

Um. Now, if I, I don’t know as far as the owner who like literally has like no concept of tech, that would be. A little challenging in general, I guess, but like, to your point, I guess if you have, you can surround yourself with a team that can do that, you’d be all right. So it depends on your role too, yeah, like starting out, I might not have the team, so I gotta kind of figure that out and iron it out and I, you know, solo pre you’re running it, it’s gonna be you, um, as the company grew, then I needed the input from my people and then I can assign them and and get their buy in and tell me what you think, kind of thing, but that’s kind of like an evolution, evolution of it, yeah, that’s good good correction there’s good, good tweet.

So one of the things you guys can think of too is, is let’s say you get to a point you’re, you’re scale a bit and you hire an office manager. A lot of young people are naturally pretty techy and they don’t need to be paid as much also because they’re young. So you can think, OK, I’m gonna hire someone who’s really into tech, who’s gonna do all this stuff for me, and they’re also going to be, you know, they’re, they’re gonna do the scheduling and answering the phone and all this other stuff.

They’re also gonna help me adopt tech and kind of implement the tech in the company, so. you also gotta remember too, you have your PCA team. I mean, that’s why we do these things, right? So we can all be a huge team and Exchange numbers with each other and that way it’ll save you 2 weeks at a time. You could do it in 30 minutes or an hour, you know, so always utilize PCA as well. Yeah, that’s a great point because I know for me, when we adopted Paint Scout, I called a friend in St. Louis and he said, he, he, you can download all the production rates and email them to somebody else and then I could kind of start to understand like how to make all these things work for us and align all our stuff around it too.

So there’s, that’s a, yeah, it’s a great point, Josh. I don’t think he’s here, but Juan from Illussions, he came to my office a couple of weeks ago because he’s getting ready to do residentials, uh, repainting, and he spent the whole day there and we went down all of our production rates and Got everything set up in his program and they’re, they’re actively working on it right now. So utilize the PCA team if you don’t have an office staff or, you know, so. Awesome. What are you guys’ thoughts on some softwares kind of try to do multiple things.

So there’s, there’s this idea of more all in one softwares versus specialized softwares and maybe it depends on the stage of your, your business or maybe it doesn’t. You guys have thoughts on that? To me, I feel like it depends on the stage of your business. I know John Bryant told me a couple of years ago at Expo that, um, if you’re a million plus, you’re gonna have to have a stack of technology. And then, you know, they kind of reacted to demand and created their own CRM now.

But, um, but I’m still guessing they’re still using somewhat of a stack, even having created that stuff and that. That was kind of eye opening for me. It’s also really frustrating because I thought I just want one thing. Can I just buy one thing? I don’t want to have to connect all these dots. And, um, so I think 7, 150, you can probably find an all in one that can do combined with like a Google Suite, can really kind of take care of everything and probably minimize your headaches and make sure all the stuff’s working together.

And once again, I’ll caution with that there’s only so much you can customize one single software. So if you’re OCD about your process like I am, there’s certain things I just don’t want to have to adapt my process to the software. I want the software to be able to adapt to me and that’s one thing that you can do by using multiple, uh, technologies. Again, I’m spoiled I guess because I, I learned how customizable certain things were before we got to an all in one. Um, but 11 point about that is I met somebody, uh, here at the event yesterday that they do, you know, north of $15 million in revenue, and they’re also using Paint scout for estimating.

So like some of these softwares, they, they can, they can cover a very wide range of needs when it comes to a company. Um, again, they have a whole other slew of softwares they use as well, so not everybody’s gonna use every feature of every software. Um, but with the all in ones, if you really just need an easy solution to jump into something because you’ve never had tech before, um, I think it might be a good starting point. I would just say don’t, you know, don’t close your mind to what else is out there that could also be added on to it, uh, to, to help supplement certain things that you feel like could, could be done better or differently, um, or if you know, eventually you decide to go out and piece it out into different softwares.

So like from 2012 I I had this hunt for the all in one and then you find the all in one and you’re like right on estimate to uh to time card, job costing, all of that. And then Paint Scout comes out and they screw me up because I’m like, man, this technology is so good that now do I really want it all in one, you know, and so it just worked that well after going all in one, I had to take that one piece out and now, you know.

Builderre does everything except estimating for me, you know, so. Sounded like some some sort of action adventure movie since 2012. I’ve been on a hunt, a man on a mission. Um, also, guys, when, when you guys are using this software, like you’re using Paint scout, you can use that stuff in your, in your contracting in your estimate to refer to the PCA standards. So if you’re a, if you’re a member of the PCA or thinking about being a member of the PCA, same idea as leveraging the. People that you’re meeting, probably meeting people who are a lot farther along than you exchange contact information, reach out to them, because if they’re doing multiple millions and you’re just starting, odds are good that they’re using softwares that you’re gonna want to learn and use, right?

But if you’re a member of the PCA leverage the standards and make sure that your prospects, your leads, the homeowners, or commercial property owners know that and what the standards are because it’s gonna help you differentiate from chucking a truck who’s gonna roll up and he’s not. So all this stuff, it goes back to sales and marketing, unique selling propositions, and it’s real. So make sure you’re doing that stuff. One of the things too, uh, I mean, you may have said this, but, but the PCA also has a, a production rate, uh, book that you guys can purchase, right?

I think digital and digital, yeah, for you guys that are starting out, I really highly recommend that. I mean, we still use it a lot. To this day, even though we got a lot of production rates built in paint scouts and stuff, I mean, some of our commercial stuff when you’re doing steel buildings or, you know, uh, it’s a good starting point, those books. So I, I would really highly recommend to get that book. If I can interject just on that point of production rates, that was actually uh remembering back to when I first signed up for Estimate Rocket we used their built-in production rates that came with the software and I just made the assumption that they were correct that only that only worked for one bid.

I lost money on one job and I’m like, yeah, no, we’re not doing that. I need to go and actually like put our own, yeah, so just that is a very good point because yeah, they will come with some standardized production rates and they’re not gonna match your company. You know, just like if I was to give you my production rates, you probably have to test them out a little bit because they may not match your company as well, you know, uh, question. Uh, we get our data from busy, busy busy, busy, and it’s, so Google Sheets is where we do a ton of stuff.

Google Sheets is where all our job costing is how we can how we can upload all the time sheets in there, download all the, the, uh, Ben Moore, Sherwin, renter, all that wherever we’re buying materials from, and then our PMs put a job code, everything has a job code, they put that in there and it pulls in all that. Data that we can then align to it um that’s a short answer longer with this we can look at my computer and show you our, our job costing is all within Buildertrend, so Builder trend will collect all the time.

It’s gonna collect, uh, all my bills and invoices and everything gets shot into Builder trend, and when I pull up that job folder, it’s gonna show me my job costing right in the home page with the daily logs from the most recent updates from that project and then and we can track it that way. So to Fred’s point, when he talked about his sales process and making the tech stack fit it, there’s not one size fits all here. So there’s, there’s where it’s really important to know your business and, and, and kind of your values and how it runs, because just because everyone’s up here, you know, maybe everyone or almost everyone’s using Paint Scout.

Paint Scout’s a phenomenal software. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t the right software for you, right? So just being really intentional with your business. Are there any resources, so, so blogs, podcasts, websites, anything that you guys would recommend or that you’ve used to learn about these pieces of software that we could share? Come to a PCA event and talk to your peers. Yeah And I, I mean, that’s real. I mean, uh, you know, we would have heard of Pascho being here, so, or any of the other stuff.

So I mean that’s, that’s the biggest source really. I mean, you could ask Chachi PT, but that’s just, you know, uh, well, you know, it’s funny you said there is actually there is. Yeah, Hannah just recalibrated a number of our things and use chat GTP to do it. Like I’ve got these softwares, how to use Zapier to make them talk to each other and all this stuff. And I’ve built some pretty sick spreadsheets just by saying I want to know if my production manager hit 12345 metrics, like give me a formula for that just by telling it like what, you know, so there is.

There’s that, but as far as like researching, yeah, I mean, it’s, I think it’s your peers. OK, so if anyone, anyone else has any questions, feel free to ask them. But if there’s just one takeaway that you guys can share, if there’s just one thing that you want the listeners to walk away from, and, and I’ll have each of you guys do this, what would it be? Start with Cole. Go ahead. Start with Shane. Um, so our entire business is built upon the customer journey. So we think a good quality finished product is a barrier to entry in our industry.

So that’s your pay, you can play the game that way. If you can give the customer joy and delight throughout the entire experience, then you’ve got, then you’re gonna win. So we’re, where we want to win and so we want to give the customer that experience. So everything we do tech-wise is centered around the customer first. I love that because uh to me the customer experience is paramount um you know I’m again we are OCD about details and and how you know how good of a quality product we leave behind when we leave a job site but from start to finish how that client interacts with us is very, very heavily reliant on the software that we use.

Um, that’s one reason I’ve stayed away from a lot of the automations and stuff and you know, to my own detriment, uh, I’ve left a little bit of the personal touch in there with it, um, but when it comes right down to it. Having the right software can save you so much time that, you know, you can, when we, when, when Dan was talking about one of the first, you know, hats that you take off is hiring somebody in the back office, like, I went straight to hiring a project manager instead because I don’t have to spend a ton of time with.

The back office stuff yet when we get to a higher revenue level and there’s just, you know, too many invoices to send out or something, then maybe but right now I can pull out my phone and send an invoice to somebody in like 60 seconds. So that’s, you know, you just can’t say enough about how much time savings there is with it. I don’t, I think mine is not. Uh, surrounded by tech stack, but I think, um, if, if you’re starting out, you need SOPs and you need to do training, training, training.

We, we do quarterly training and yes, it’s gonna, numbers are gonna run through your head. It’s probably cost you 5 or 10 grand to shut your company down for the day, uh, to do some type of a training, but it’s gonna save you headaches and it’s gonna save you money in the long run. So making sure your SOPs are all in line and lots and lots of training. Just get that, that muscle memory built in into your entire staff, so. Take your time, trial, trial, trial, um, and, uh, uh, be patient with it because when you try to rush it because you just wanna get, get that result, I found that for me I’ve always ended up in a position where I have to like reverse now.

Because the program wasn’t the right program or what have you. But if I just took my time a little bit more and say, once you get that, if you can find one advocate in your uh in your company to help you implement. That’s gonna be the game changer. You just need that one other advocate out there to help you um get it, get it going. So take your time trial, trial, trial, get an advocate. So guys, you can scan this QR code right here. They’re gonna be a bunch of resources from the gentleman up here on the stage.

This presentation is gonna be in there, so you’ll have that scan that while you’re doing that. Who, who here, I just want to do one more, more quick value prop for the PCA. Who here has ever had a homeowner do the flashlight test, kind of take a flashlight on the wall? It’s a good time, right? So the, the PCA has standards where they actually say that, that the standards do not include that, that, that it’s not, uh, you shouldn’t be doing the, the flashlight test. So that’s an example of how the PCA helps you.

It’s not that expensive, right? The membership is, is a drop in the bucket relative to the benefit because you can take that to the. Homeowner and you can say, hey, listen, I’m a member of the, the largest professional trade association of painting contractors. We uphold the most, most ethical and strongest standards in the industry. Just want to show you that I’m not holding the phone, not holding my flashlight to your wall, right? So, guys, download that. Thank you, panelists, thank you, everyone. Hopefully, hopefully you guys learn something.

Thank you guys. Thanks, guys.

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Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback. Let us know how we did. And also if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at PainterMarketingPros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.