ProPainter   Advice   Blog

As a service provider for the painting contractor industry, we are constantly looking for ways to help painting contractors grow and succeed. We work hard to do this for our customers, but we also create a lot of content through blog posts and infographics that is available to customers and non-customers. The ideas for this content almost always comes from conversations with painting contractors. They will share with us the challenges that they are currently dealing with and we create a blog or infographic with insights to help them and hopefully the industry at large.

Here are three recent articles we put together that we feel are especially helpful.

Choosing to Be the Best Painting Contractor in the Area

If you want to be considered the best painting contractor in the area, you need to be different from your competition in a way that really matters to customers. That’s not as easy as it sounds, but if you can pull it off, your business can be hugely successful. Check out this infographic, which features tips on how to do just that – https://www.propainterwebsites.com/best-painting-contractor/.

How Painting Contractors Can Best Side-Hustlers Every Time

The Side-Hustle Economy was born out the Great Recession that occurred a decade ago. Uber and Lyft are the companies that get the most attention in this space, but depending on your location, companies like Takl.com and TaskRabbit.com can be major threats to the painting contractor industry.

To homeowners who are only want to pay the least amount of money possible for a paint job, these platforms can look like a great option. You may not want that type of customer, and rightfully so, but with a little education on your part, you may be able to turn them into one of your best customers. This blog post highlights how to do that – https://www.propainterwebsites.com/how-painting-contractors-can-beat-side-hustlers-every-time/.

What Makes a Great Painting Contractor Employee?

We continue to hear from painting contractors that it is nearly impossible to find good quality employees. That is true across all of the trades, from auto repair to HVAC to painting.

Your key may be to find a candidate who has all of the character traits you want in an employee but very little experience. You can usually teach somebody how to paint well, but it’s much harder to teach them to have the character traits of a great employee. What are those character traits? We recommend three very important ones to look for in this blog post – https://www.propainterwebsites.com/what-makes-a-great-painting-contractor-employee/.

We hope you find these posts very informative and helpful in your efforts to run a successful business. If there are other topics you’d like to see us cover in a blog or in an infographic, please let us know by emailing us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

We recently heard the story of a local cabinet painter who was spending 30 minutes pulling together every quote that she did and doing an average of eight quotes a day.  She was dedicating at least four hours a day to creating quotes on top of all the time she was spending doing the work.  But the worst part was, only about five percent of these quotes were turning into jobs.

Like a good businessperson, she made it very easy for potential customers to ask for quotes on her website, so she was getting a lot of leads.  But the challenge was that she had to manually put together a quote for every single one of the leads, which led to a lot of wasted time with a five percent conversion rate.

Do you have a similar story?  Are you spending too much of your all-important time creating quotes for a lot of leads that will likely never turn into customers?

If the answer is yes, I’m hoping the solution she came up with will help you too.  She changed up her website so that if somebody clicked on a “Request a Quote” button it would ask the person how many doors and drawers they had in the cabinets they wanted painted.  When they typed in the number and hit the “Submit” button they would be taken to a new page that gave them the typical range of cost that she would charge for cabinets with that many doors and drawers.

The web page said that if that range of cost looked good to them to please go ahead and fill out the form to provide additional information so that she could get right back to them for a more specific quote.

This may be somewhat counterintuitive.  As business people we are often looking for reasons for why a sale could or should happen.  But really, our best bet is to go for the quick “no” from the potential customer so that we only spend time with those potential customers who really fit the profile of our best customers.  If somebody is only going to base their decision on cost, there will always be somebody out there who is willing to undersell you.

Importantly, this doesn’t just apply to those who ask you for an online quote.  When a potential customer calls you, or asks you in person, you can always give a rough estimate during your conversation.  Take in what their reaction is and then decide if they will be a potential customer that will be worth spending time with.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business gain more customers and earn more money, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

Have you had this experience?

You get excited about a product based on seeing a picture of it online or in a commercial, so you order it. Then when you receive the product, you discover something that makes you feel like you were misled, or the product just doesn’t live up to what was promised.

An example that many people can relate to, is the burger commercial for a fast food joint. In the commercial, the burger looks tall and juicy and stacked with toppings. Then when you get it, the burger is wrapped tight and a quarter of the size with about half of the toppings that you expected.

Chris Shank, the Education Director at the PDCA shared a BuzzFeed post with our Marketing Director, Martin Morgan – 17 Design Choices That’ll Make You Mad… – that captures some perfect examples of this type of misleading marketing.

When you think about how mad or disappointed you might be if you purchased one of these products or the fast food burger mentioned above, you get a good picture of why it is so important that you don’t use similar misleading marketing tactics. As a painting contractor, you know that establishing trust with your potential customers is a good way to ensure they become long-time loyal customers. Anytime you start a relationship off by demonstrating that you are willing to be less than honest to get their attention, you are risking your credibility.

Chris and Martin discussed the BuzzFeed post and the importance of maintaining your credibility in a PDCA podcast entitled Leads Not Lies.

During the podcast the guys talk about the importance of being genuine in all of your marketing and not trying to portray your painting company as something it’s not. That includes everything from the type of experience you have to the number of employees you have.

They also talk about the value of under-promising and over-delivering. That includes pricing. Don’t get in the door for a bid by telling a potential customer that you offer low prices only to give them a quote that’s three times more than your initial estimate.

Chris and Martin then spend a few minutes talking about what steps you can take to give your website a quick examination to make sure that it is not misleading. We highly recommend you give this podcast a listen! Check it out at https://soundcloud.com/paint-ed-podcast/leads-not-lies-with-martin-morgan.