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Do yourself a favor and eliminate these 5 things from your daily schedule. You can thank us later.

1.) STOP: Paint Store visits:

Many owners feel compelled to drag themselves to the paint store to pick up paint or place an order. Why?! This is the job of your painters. Don’t spend one more painful minute waiting in a disheveled line at the paint store. Call your orders in from the phone and have your painters pick up the paint and materials. There is NO need for you to ever be in a paint store unless you want free coffee.

2.) STOP: Actually painting

Many painting companies consist of a sole owner who paints with 1-3 helpers. If this is how your enterprise is set up, you are an owner, getting paid like a painter. If you are at the job-site all day painting with your employees, you are not selling more work, which is where your time is most valuably spent. You could simply replace yourself with a good painter for $15-20 per hour. This frees up your whole day for roughly $150 per day. That means you have to make up that amount in profitable sales per day. That should be easy even if your pricing is on the low end. What if you booked one extra job a week for $3000 yielding $1200 in profit (depending on your pricing/profit-margin). You instantly paid off your new painter for $15-20 an hour and made yourself a couple extra hundred dollars that week. Oh yeah, and you didn’t have to paint the whole week. You’ve now transformed into and OWNER of a painting company instead of OWNING your job as a painter.

3.)STOP: Battling Customers

Some customers are simply never satisfied. It’s just in their nature to be a hassle. Instead of wasting your time and sanity battling these types of customers, you might find it easier to offer a small-to-medium sized refund and walk away from the job. Many painters will exert so much effort and time trying to be right with an unruly customer instead of just walking away from the job. These 5-10% of jobs cause 90% of the headaches. This also limits the potential for negative reviews about your company which can be devastating. Instead of battling, offer a reasonable refund/discount and walk away.

4.) STOP: Picking out colors for customers

Save yourself several hours this year by delegating color-picking to your customer. You already know how back and forth customers can be about colors. Offer some locations of local paint companies with color sample displays. Nothing can be more time consuming than going through several test patches before a color is chosen by the customer.

5.) STOP: Going to your job-sites.

If you have an experienced painting crew painting for your company, they should already know what to do on every house. If you have done your job as the owner, your painters should have everything they need for the house already ready: Instructions, colors, address & start date.

Painting company owners often feel compelled to “check-in” or micro-manage their job-sites. If your crew is experienced and you prepared them well, there’s no reason for you to be there. You can even delegate the final walk around with the customer and check pickup to your painters. You can assign your crew chief to communicate with the customer and collect the final check. There’s really no reason to ever visit the job-site after initially selling the job again.

This is not to suggest poor or negligent service to the customer, rather, faith in your painters to complete the process for you after finishing the work. This is assuming your customer is being well-communicated with despite your efficient absence. STOP going to job-sites

Thanks for reading!

-Painter Choice Team