How Painting Contractors Can Prepare for a Winter of COVID-19
September 18, 2020
For many painting contractors (especially those in the northern parts of the United States and in Canada) winter can be a tough time to fill your calendar with painting jobs. Some paints stop drying properly at temperatures as high as 50 degrees, and very few paints work below 36 degrees. This can push painting contractors to indoor jobs during the winter, or to other jobs entirely.
Unfortunately, if COVID-19 is still around in your area during the winter, it’s going to make it even harder to stay busy. The pandemic has pushed many painting contractors to exterior jobs, as many people are reluctant to let service professionals into their homes for an entire day or longer unless it’s an emergency. How do painting contractors who face the double threat of cold weather and weak demand for interior work stay busy?
Here are three things you can do to improve your situation heading into late 2020 and early 2021.
- Fill Your Calendar Early – If you have more work than you can handle right now, instead of pushing it out a few weeks, consider offering customers a discount if they’ll allow you to do it during the slow months instead. This strategy gives you extra time to fill your calendar during the weakest periods of the year.
- Offer Seasonal Services – Just because it’s too cold to paint doesn’t mean you can’t provide other outdoor services. Most people aren’t as comfortable on a ladder as a painter is, so offering to hang Christmas lights on houses is a great seasonal opportunity to increase business. Finding and sealing gaps and cracks around doors and windows can keep houses warmer and reduce heating bills. And, of course, snow removal is a major need in many states during the winter.
- Build a Better Lead Engine – Painting leads slow down for nearly everyone during the winter, so the best way to get more painting leads during the winter is to increase the number of leads you receive year-round. What helps with this? A search-optimized website, of course! But there are other ways as well. Make sure you actively seek referrals from existing customers, sponsor events in your town and request online reviews from your customers when you know they’re happy with the work you’ve done.
Once you reach the point where you can’t handle the number of summer leads you’re getting, you can start trying to postpone some of that work to the winter. And if that doesn’t work, you can prioritize your most profitable jobs and refer the rest out to another painter. It’s always better to have too many leads than too few!
To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your business get more leads, call us at 919-424-6121 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.
