ProPainter   Advice   Blog

Starting your own painting business can be scary.  Without an established customer base, marketing budget or references, it can seem like you’ll never get enough clients to break even.  The business bills don’t shrink just because you don’t have enough customers yet – and neither do your personal bills.  But with hard work, you can get past this phase just like millions of small business owners across the United States, and you’ll look back at these scary times as a memory.

If you’ve just started a painting contractor business, or you’re thinking about starting one soon, click on each of these links for information on five things you can do in the first 90 days to help make this phase shorter and less stressful.

• Learn from the experts on how to run a painting business – This blog post provides resources that are dedicated to helping painting contractors succeed. Whether your questions are about profit margins, equipment or customer service, you’ll find help here.
• Play to Your Strengths – Small businesses may not have the financial resources that large corporations do, but they succeed because they do have many other advantages. Make sure you know what these advantages are, and that your business is using them to its benefit.
• Get Customers – Sales and marketing skills are vital to early business success. Unfortunately, a poor painter with great marketing skills can outperform a great painter in the first 90 days of business.  Don’t let them!  This blog details five ways that new painters can get customers in the door quickly and cost effectively.
• Become Visible Online – Even if you can’t afford your own online presence, there are free things you can do to make your business visible online. You should do these things the first week you start your business, because they can take time to take effect.
• Get a Website – As soon as you can afford it, you should get your own website. This will drastically increase your ability to be found online, enhance your professional image and provide a place to display your projects and customer reviews.

Call ProPainter Websites at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com to learn how we can help your painting business receive more calls from potential customers!

The internet has made it faster and easier than ever to communicate.  While this has been great for society as a whole, it’s created a major challenge for small businesses; people expect a much faster response time to questions than they did in the past.  How much faster?  Of the top 10 fastest responding large companies, none took more than 25 minutes on average to respond to a lead.

It’s an unfortunate fact that people looking for a painting contractor will often open the websites of three painters that seem qualified to do their job, request a quote from all of them – and then schedule a quote from the first one that they like on the phone.  If you’re the second or third one to respond, they might not even pick up the phone when you call back.  At this point, you have to hope that there’s something they don’t like about the first painting contractor during the quoting process in order to get a callback.

This is a problem for small businesses because most can’t afford a dedicated scheduling service that can respond to online requests in five minutes or less.  And if you handle your own scheduling and you’re on a ladder with a paint brush in hand, it’s going to be very difficult to answer a phone call, introduce yourself well, pay attention to the customer’s job, and offer a detailed response.

To help painting contractors with this, we’ve introduced a new website feature that can optionally direct your web requests to a cellphone text message.  As soon as your phone signals you have a new text message, you can quickly respond to the customer and ask for more information, schedule a callback or ask for a time that works to visit their home and provide a quote.  And because it’s handled over text, you don’t have to worry about whether you sound rushed or unfocused over the phone.

To learn about this feature, along with many other features specifically designed to get painters more business, email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com or call us at 855-385-1134.

Have you ever been driving down the road and been intentionally cut off by a driver in a business truck or van?  Of course you have – everyone’s had that experience.  Now ask yourself – if you were lucky enough to see the business’s name on the side of the vehicle, how likely are you to ever call that business for service?

There’s a reason many of those business trucks have a “How’s my driving?” sticker on the back, and it’s not just that they want to know when their employees are driving dangerously.  It’s because they know that reckless driving makes people want to scream, and the company would rather you scream directly at them than talk about the experience online.  With all the work a company puts into retaining its reputation, it’s infuriating to see a one-star review on Google or a tirade on Facebook that references your employees’ driving skills.

This is a testament to the value of your logo.  If your logo is on it, then it represents your work.  That’s why you want to avoid the following things:

Don’t put your logo on a neglected truck – if your truck is rusty, then your reputation will be as well.

Don’t allow off-duty employees to wear your company-branded clothes – everyone has a little bit too much fun sometimes, but you don’t want it happening to your brand.

Don’t tolerate poor attitudes when employees are representing your business – this includes at the paint store, while they’re at lunch, and yes, while they’re driving.

Don’t let your yard signs deteriorate – if someone sees your logo on a ragged sign on someone’s lawn, they’re not going to assume you clean up after yourself.

Ultimately, you want anything with your logo on it to be just like your employees – clean, professional, and well-cared for.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business grow, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

It seems like you start getting junk e-mail as soon as you start a business.  Someone from a country you’ve never heard of offers to have you searching on page 1 of Google.  A “bank” you’ve never heard of offers you a loan before they know anything about you at all.  Most of these types of emails are obviously scams.

Unfortunately, some email scams are a little more subtle.  Here are a few emails and phone calls that should have you running away as soon as you receive them.

This is _____ from Google.

Google made $110 billion last year, and 86% of it was from people paying them for Ads.  Google doesn’t build websites, so if you get a call from “Google” offering website services, that’s a scam.  If you give them your credit card, they aren’t going to get you on the first page of Google, they may not build a website at all, and you’re probably going to lose a lot of money.

We’ll submit your site to hundreds of online directories.

Every painting contractor needs to be listed on Google (via Google My Business) and Yelp.  As a painter, it can also be helpful to be listed on Houzz, Angie’s List, Thumbtack and a handful of other home-improvement services sites.  Some businesses also get customers by being listed on Bing and Yahoo.

This handful of websites represents well over 90% of the places that you can get leads online.  Anyone offering to list you on hundreds of websites is the same as putting your billboard on the online equivalent of a road to nowhere.  If your name is listed on a billboard but nobody sees it, will anyone call?  Nope.

Your domain is expiring!  Renew now.

This one could be legitimate – but not if you’ve never heard of the company sending it.  Our customers have been receiving a letter that looks a lot like a renewal form, but is actually an offer to transfer your domain to another provider.  Don’t do it!  If you get a letter that looks like this, call your website provider and ask if it’s legitimate – it probably isn’t.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help you get more leads, give us a call at 855-385-1134 or email Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.