call us 1-855-385-1134

ProPainter   Advice   Blog

Archive for September, 2018

Your Browsing For A Painting Contractor in the Scottsdale, AZ Area Stops Here With Rising Phoenix Painting LLC!

September 27th, 2018

We all know how stressful painting projects can be, but Rising Phoenix Painting LLC guarantees a stress free experience from quality professionals. Revive your home or office with this locally owned and operated company. From interior and exterior painting, to cabinet refinishing, staining, and power washing services they take pride in their residential and commercial projects and deliver excellence. Call 602-565-9809 today for your free quote in the Scottsdale, AZ area!

Three Business Services That Help You Focus on Painting

September 26th, 2018

You probably didn’t decide to own a painting business because you really liked all of the aspects of the ‘business’ part of the ‘painting business’.  By that, I mean sales, marketing, accounting, finance, and, if you have employees, employment law.  Let’s be honest – who really likes doing all of that stuff on top of their primary job?


A recent blog post focused on shortcuts for some of the work you really need to do regularly, even if you don’t want to.  Fortunately, there are also software or services out there that can further cut this work down, allowing you to do more of the part of your work that actually generates income – painting.  Here are three of them.

Scheduling and estimating software:

Painters spend most of their day on a ladder or in their car, and most businesses aren’t big enough to hire someone to sit in front of a computer juggling scheduling and invoices all day.  That means there’s precious little time to make sure everything is in order.  Tools such as Jobber and RazorSync can help you stay organized and generate invoices on the fly, and cost less than a couple of buckets of paint each.

There are also pieces of software custom-tailored to painting contractors, which have estimating tools built into the software.  A few of these include Estimate Rocket and Paint Estimating Program.  Not only will these tools make your estimates more accurate, they will also make your business look more professional and organized to the customers receiving your quotes.

QuickBooks Online

For as little as $10 per month, you can subscribe to QuickBooks Online, which can track your payments and expenditures, helping you gauge your profit and pay your taxes.  While QuickBooks can’t tell you how your business is doing, it can make it much easier to figure that out by tracking every single transaction that goes through your account.  You can automatically categorize these expenses, and within a few months of using it you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to manage your finances.

Marketing services

There are plenty of marketing guides on the internet for painters, and nearly all of them will tell you that knocking on a few hundred doors and leaving a flyer behind is one of the most effective ways to get leads quickly.  They’re right – but it also requires days of work, plenty of uncomfortable conversations, and more than a few irritated homeowners who were interrupted while doing something important.  Even if this is the route you decide to go when you get the business started, once painting is taking up most of your time, you aren’t going to want to take several days off of painting (making money) to advertise each month.

That’s why you need to find a couple of marketing techniques that work for you, with little or no time investment on your part.  Obviously, a high-performing website is one way to make this happen – although it takes 3 or 4 months to really start generating leads, once it gets near the top of the Google Search Results it will regularly deliver leads without any work on your part. 

Many people also find that coupon book services such as ValPak or postcard delivery services can generate some leads, although you’ll need to mail thousands of these to get more than a small handful of results.  One particularly effective method is to do whatever you can to earn referrals from satisfied customers, from yard signs to referral discounts.  There’s no better advertisement than a happy customer with a beautiful, recently-painted home they can show their friends.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your business earn leads without investing hours of work, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

 

Monthly Painting Business Health Check-Up

September 24th, 2018

Running a painting business is time consuming.  After ordering paint and supplies, completing paint jobs, providing customer quotes, marketing, employee issues, and bills, there’s sometimes not enough time or mental energy left to dedicate to managing the business.  But if you can’t regularly find the time to work on your business, you might not be working in your business for long, either.

This is why it’s important to have a few quick metrics that can help you quickly figure out what parts of your business need the most attention.  If you track these metrics monthly, you’ll be able to see if specific parts of your business are calling out for help.


Quick Ratio

The Quick Ratio measures how well you can cover your liabilities.  First, add up the assets that you could turn into cash within a month or so if you needed to do so – cash, investments, unpaid customer bills.  Now divide this amount by the total cost of all bills you have due within the year.

Any number over one means you can cover a years’ worth of bills.  As this number sinks further towards zero, it means that an unexpected expense could leave your business in dangerous territory.  Whatever your quick ratio is, tracking it monthly ensures that your business doesn’t slowly creep towards insolvency without you noticing.

Hours Worked to Hours Paid

Nobody in business gets paid for 100% of the work they do.  Providing free quotes doesn’t pay the bills.  Neither does taking time to buy supplies, pay bills or hire employees.

One thing is certain, though – if you’re spending most of your time doing work you’re not getting paid to do, then you’re going to lose money.  This is inevitable for most businesses during their first months, because they have to work to build a customer base.  But it’s not sustainable in the long term.

There are several ways to improve this ratio.  You can increase the number of quotes that lead to jobs, either by pricing more aggressively, impressing the customer more during the quote process, or refusing to quote jobs that you are unlikely to win.  You can increase your minimum size job – meaning one successful quote will lead to more work.  You can also have paint delivered by the paint company instead of getting it yourself, if a rep in the area is willing to provide this service.  Finally, you can invest in marketing that works without any effort on your part, like a website, so it doesn’t cost you time.

Next 4 Weeks: Hours Scheduled to Total Hours

If you work a 40-hour week, then you’ve got 160 hours to fill with work over the next four weeks.  How many of them are already scheduled?  If you’re booked solid for three of those weeks, you might not want to take a smaller or less profitable job (or you may want to try and push it out to a time when you know you’ll be less busy).  On the other hand, if your schedule is looking pretty sparse, it might make sense to take a job even if it’s not “high-value” work.

To learn how ProPainter Websites helps its customers succeed, call us at 855.385.1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

Affordable Painting Plus | 38 Years Painting Nashville!

September 20th, 2018

David Paz has earned a reputation of excellence in residential painting and commercial painting. Whether you need interior painting, exterior painting, or other services such as power washing, Affordable Painting Plus is your go to choice in Nashville. Give Affordable Painting Plus a call today at 615-582-9565.

3 Keys to Success for Small Painting Businesses

September 12th, 2018

The majority of painting companies in the United States have fewer than five employees.  In fact, most of them have only one employee.  Small companies have some advantages over large ones – there’s no waste on middle management, multiple offices or different teams repeating each other’s work.

However, they also have some unique challenges.  More than half of all businesses fail in their first year, before they have a chance to grow into a larger company.  What separates successful small painting businesses from those that fail?  Most painters would rather paint than do these three things – but without them, a business won’t last long.


  1. Bookkeeping

A recent blog article of ours detailed how to price your painting services for profit.  Pricing for failure is one of the most devastating mistakes that a small painting business can make.  Make sure that your pricing allows you to pay your bills and have enough left over to live comfortably without working 60 hours per week!

Once your pricing is right, however, you still have to handle your books regularly.  Have you received the money you’re owed, or do you need to make late payment calls?  Are your bills what you expected them to be – or did one of your providers overcharge you?  Have you paid all of your bills on-time, or will you owe late payments?  And most importantly, do you have a financial buffer in place to cover a bad week or two?  If you spend enough time living on the edge of profitability, eventually an unlucky event will knock you off the ledge.

  1. Building Tools for Customers to Find You

When you first start your business, the odds are high that you’ll have to go find customers, or pay someone to do it for you.  This takes many forms, including postcards, phone calls and knocking on doors.  It’s expensive and time consuming, and it takes away from your time painting.

As your business grows, you want customers to find you instead.  It’s generally cheaper, and it takes no time of yours at all.  Of course, a website is one way to do this – if it searches well people will find you when they need your services.  There are other ways too, however.  One key way is to try to build relationships, both with customers and people such as real estate agents who are frequently asked about painters.  If you have people referring your services, you won’t have to take as much time away from painting to focus on marketing.

  1. Planning for Success

Where do you want your painting business to be five years from now?  You might want your business to look much like it already does, and that’s fine.  But you might also want to grow the business to a point where you’re managing painters instead of handling the painting yourself – or to bring on your first crew of painters. 

Wherever you want to land, you need to put a plan together that will help you get there.  This should include what changes need to be in place by what date, as well as how much money you’ll need to save to make those changes happen.  If you make major changes to your business without thinking about what might go wrong and how you’ll deal with it, you might find yourself managing a crisis instead of painting – and losing a tremendous amount of money in the process.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your small painting business set itself up for success, call us at 919.385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

It’s Not 2015 Anymore! Does Your Website Produce Leads?

September 7th, 2018

Google frequently changes its requirements to rank highly in search results. If you haven’t managed your web presence in years, you’re probably not getting very much from it.   Click here to learn about four things that have changed since 2015.