Hey this is Eric! I’m one of the co-owners of Painter Choice and the founder of Painting Business Pro. If you’re reading this, you’re someone who is interested in growing your painting business. Whether you found this post through a search engine or through one of the other articles here at Painter Choice, you’re someone who is looking to grow your business. This post is the first part of a six-part series that outlines all the steps that you need to take to grow your business.
The Reason for this Series on Growing Your Painting Business
The reason I want to make this is that there’s a lot of really great advice out there, but the problem is, it’s all incomplete:
If you go talk to a lead company that provides leads, they’re going to tell you that the key to growing your business is getting more leads.
If you talk to someone who is selling a software system, they are going to tell you that you need to know your numbers and you need to have their software to run your business, and that that will help you to grow your business.
The truth of it is, you must work on your whole business if you want to grow your business. That’s what we’re going to talk about over this series:
- What the steps to growing your business are, and
- How you do it, because there is a system for it.
I’ve been helping people grow their businesses for the last 10 years, and I’ve kind of got the system down. And that’s what I want to get into. Here’s what we’re going to cover over the course of this series.
Where Do You Want to Be?
I think it’s good to start with the end in mind of where you want to be. Since you’re reading this, the following probably applies:
- You want to grow your business.
- If you want to grow your business, you need to be doing something different from what you’re doing right now.
- The reason you want to grow your business is probably to make more money.
Mapping Your Time
There may be other motivations too, but one of them is to make more money. To do that, you first need to understand how much money you’re making per hour depending on what you’re doing. Then you can find out where your time is most valuable.
For example, if you’re actually painting on job sites, you’re making about as much money as you could pay someone else to paint, so that’s the amount of money you’re making per hour. You can spend a lot of time in the production part of your business, but this part of your business isn’t where you make a lot of money. By production, I mean: hiring painters, managing job sites, trips to the paint store, talking with customers, and dropping by job sites.
Most people spend a lot of time in the production part of their business and not as much time in marketing and sales. But to grow your business, marketing and sales is where you need to spend time. Unfortunately, that’s usually where most people spend the least amount of their time.
Free Your Time
If you’re someone who spends most of your time in production, then the next thing you need to figure out is how to free your time. It’s so important to free your time because once we free up some of your time, we can replace whatever you were doing with things that generate more income and more revenue than whatever you got rid of.
For example, if you’re painting houses 40 hours a week, you can stop painting 40 hours a week and hire someone for $15 an hour to do that. Then, you can spend that new 40 hours that you have free, doing marketing and sales, which will make you more than $15 per hour.
Finding the Balance
Once you’ve freed your time, then you need to take actions like marketing and sales actions. The second part of the series looks at that because it is a balance between marketing and sales. You don’t want to get so many leads with your marketing that you can’t serve all your customers. But if you’re not painting, you’re making less money, so you do need to increase sales as well.
Think of it as a kind of a dance, increasing marketing and sales at the same time, once you start to free some of that time up. After we’ve talked about the balance between marketing and sales, the next section of this series will take us into the nitty gritty of sales.
Improving Sales
Sales is probably the most important skill for you to learn, and we’re going to talk about why sales is so important in this part of the series. We’ll start to give you some resources on how to improve your sales and improve your process with your leads, because if you can’t sell, that’s going to be a problem with growing your business.
Once you’re excelling at sales, what you want to do is continue to get more and more leads for the business so you can do more and more sales. As you fill up your schedule with sales, there may be a point where you’re completely booked doing sales all the time. Then is the time to start to hire salespeople to go out and do all those estimates for us.
Marketing and Generating Leads
In the fourth part of the series, we’re going to look at marketing and how you can generate enough leads so that you can book yourselves with sales. And once you hire sales reps, you need even more leads, so this section of the series will be dedicated completely to marketing.
Painter Choice and How Leads Services Work
In the final part of this series, we’ll outline our Painters’ Choice service and give you some insight into how the whole paper lead service works. My painting company in Colorado has had a lot of success with Painter Choice leads, and in fact, I was a customer of Painter Choice before I became one of the co-owners. I had so much success with the leads, that Taylor and I went into business together and that’s how we ended up being co-owners of Painter Choice.
We’re going to talk about how that works, as well as how other types of leads services work, so that as you start to go in and do more marketing for your business, you know what to expect. We want you to have at least some guidance for how you’re going to be able to grow your business with more leads. Now that you’ve freed your time, you can fill that time with more marketing and sales efforts to grow the business!
We’ll also leave you with how to keep growing from here, so we want to give you a model for how to grow your business, no matter what stage of the business you’re at.
We’ve got five more sections in this series coming at you where we’ll go into detail about everything we’ve touched on here.
