Jon Bryant: Boosting Profits with Time-Based Estimation in Painting

Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast. The mission of this podcast is simple: to help you navigate the financial and tax aspects of starting, running, and scaling a professional painting business. From the brushes and ladders to the spreadsheets and balance sheets, we've got you covered. But before we dive in, a quick word of caution: while we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date financial and tax information, nothing you hear on this podcast should be considered as financial advice specifically for you or your business. We're here to share general knowledge and experiences, not to replace the tailored advice you get from a professional financial advisor or tax consultant. We strongly recommend you seeking individualized advice before making any significant financial decision.

Hi, this is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm here with John Bryant. John Bryant is a co-founder of PaintScout. He co-founded PaintScout in 2018 after growing one of Western Canada's largest residential painting companies for more than 10 years. He went from guesstimating to pricing based on previous projects or market rates to finally finding the right approach: time-based estimation, also called production rates. He soon discovered that while some estimating softwares exist for general contractors, there wasn't anything designed to solve a critical problem in the painting industry: how to properly price and sell painting projects quickly and consistently. Today, with the help of a solid team, PaintScout serves an awesome community of painting contractors worldwide and has helped deliver over 400,000 estimates that have created over $1 billion in painting sales. John has been featured in and written articles for a number of trade magazines, spoken on the topic of sales and estimation, and is passionate about improving the painting industry as a whole. John, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Daniel. This is exciting, man. Happy to be here.

Awesome. Yeah, you've had an impressive journey from running, you know, one of Western Canada's largest residential painting companies to co-founding PaintScout. Can you just briefly tell me what led you to start PaintScout?

Yeah, I mean, I think, so yeah, my journey into the painting industry was kind of random in a way. I was trying to start a business by the time I went 20 to go bankrupt. And so, that's not every young person's dream, but I had seen a little documentary on Donald Trump at the time, not knowing a lot about Donald Trump, but he went bankrupt a few times, and so that was my goal. Try to go bankrupt. So I, you know, a week before my 20th birthday, I had no direction as to what that business was, but I just asked a friend and he said, you know, there's other college students doing this, you could probably do it too. And I had no better ideas. So there I was starting a painting company and with the goal of going bankrupt in 2 years. I would've done that pretty successfully. It's not hard to do. If I wasn't living at home at the time. But, you know, through that journey of going through, you know, that whole process of figuring out this business from, you know, ultimately having no experience, like none at all, just starting out, going to the paint store, remember literally saying like, you guys have water and you have oil, tell me more. And that's where I started from. And I quickly realized that, you know, pricing painting projects is really, you know, it's a hidden art. Um, you can go ask 100 contractors how they do it, uh, probably 95 of them will tell you to pound sand, 5 of them will try to explain their process, or maybe 4, and one of them actually knows and can explain it properly. And so it took me a few years to be exposed to what the right method was, uh, for consistent pricing. And once we found that in production rate estimating in the company It was really about how to deliver this in a modern way, how to allow for building a sales team. And we were trying to scale our business and so we just didn't find a great fit in the marketplace for that type of estimation. And that's what led us to build it. So that was in 2018 and from then we've kind of had a— it's been a lot of educational days and years just on how this works and how to do it really well.

Mm-hmm. Why do you think, going back to what you said about most painting contractors, and I've seen this too, you know, on my side, why do you think they initially resort to just kind of guesstimating or pricing on square footage? Um, and why do you think they resort to that? And what are the pitfalls of actually doing that?

I think most people resort to it because it's what they have. You know, like we can all look at something and roughly try to see, you know, I'll give you a price. If I don't win on this one, I'll just up my price on the next one. Like I'm just gonna try to make my business work. And generally when people get into it, I think they're not thinking, like I could be wrong here, but my initial feeling is they're not thinking exactly like a business owner. They're thinking more like a technician, just trying to get work so they can stay busy. And, and get, get the job. So it's kind of this mix between like, I'm going to guess at what price the customer might pay, and, you know, I'm hoping that keeps me busy for next week. I'm not going to worry about the accounting right now because that's not what my priority is. Um, I think there's— the pitfalls are just that, like, you, you really don't know why you're charging what you charge. Um, you know, when you guesstimate, you really don't know why. Square footage, a lot of times I think that information comes from hearsay at the start. You don't really know why. And at the end of the day, you know, figuring out how long the average person takes to paint, that's kind of a variable that's really consistent and will be throughout time. You know, I doubt we're gonna get tremendously faster. Maybe technology will help that, different sprayers, different brushes, but we can adjust our rates to match that. So pitfalls of the you know, square footage guesstimating is you're not really tailoring that to your business. You don't know the why. Once you start to move to production rates, you now have a why you do everything and why you price it the way you do. And so that helps you dial that in and really truly run a successful business, I think.

Yeah.

Would you, would you agree with that? Like, is that what you see?

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, You know, one of the first things we do is we take a look at the folks, their books, you know, see where they're at. And pricing is by far the most common problem. And I like what you said there with the, you know, what makes— why do they initially resort to guesstimating? You said, you know, they're basically just trying to guess what the customer might pay. Which obviously is a very flawed methodology. But I think it's— you hit the nail right on the head. And the big problem with that, I think, is you're kind of projecting. Like, you as a painter, assuming you're in the trades, you're— yeah, you know, you wouldn't pay someone $10,000 to paint your house. So you're like, you know, oh, I wouldn't pay that much, so I'm not gonna charge this person that much money.

Right.

You know, so they're kind of projecting what they would pay maybe. And so they're guessing, you know, because painting is something they know and it's super easy to them. So why am I gonna charge a lot of money for it? But you know, but most folks don't know anything about painting. They don't want to do it. They don't want to have to go to the paint store. They don't want to do anything. So they would gladly pay someone you know, tens of thousands of dollars, a lot in some, in some cases to, to do it for them. So I think that's a, a good insight there. Um, yeah, if, if somebody's like, you can— go ahead, real quick question.

So when you guys are working with a client and they come to you new, um, given that pricing is a, a, a battle, um, do you, do you feel like that's an area that you are happy to give direction, or what do you recommend to people?

So we look at their, obviously their revenue, right? And look at their gross profit. Those are kind of the gross profit being the key one because that's telling us one, if you're efficient or one, if you're having a pricing problem, it's one of those two things. So the average gross profit is 40%. If it's over 40%, then they're, they might be doing something right because they're above average. If they're below 40% gross profit, then there's probably something wrong with the pricing or the efficiency. So then it just becomes, okay, a line of questioning to determine which one it could be and maybe some additional analysis. So most of the time it's pricing. I mean, so I usually just ask, you know, how are you generating, how are you generating your pricing to your customer? So that's the first question and, you know, hear probably all the things that you've heard and which you've already mentioned. And so if they say something other than production rates, that's, you know, the go-to, okay, have you considered production rates? And, you know, the PCA has some resources on that that you can buy to get a set of production rates. And then obviously PaintScout, you can build in your production rates and generate estimates. But question for you, for those just who are unfamiliar with production rates that might be listening, could you explain what production rate estimating actually means, or time-based estimation, what that actually means?

Yeah, absolutely. So going back to the kind of the previous point that I was making about this, the standardization, you know, what can we truly base this project off of for painting? At the end of the day, really, most painting contractors are selling time. You know, that's what this project mostly takes. And so what production rate estimate is, is figuring out the time on average things take for your team to do. You know, an example of that might be, you know, how many square feet of drywall can you paint 2 coats in an hour? And so, or, you know, how many linear feet of baseboard can you paint 2 coats in an hour? And these types of things like you can measure over time. And so you can start out with a number, then you can, you can time your team and see what it takes, and maybe it's more or less and adjust. So that's what production rates are, is really breaking down your, your project into time at the end of the day, which you can sell and price and understand what, what that takes, and, you know, add material on separately if you want. But for the most part, it's, it's just understanding the time.

Yeah, and someone listening that hasn't started this process, that might seem kind of, okay, I gotta figure out how long it's gonna take to paint every single type of surface. And like, that might sound like a huge project that you obviously you would only have to do it once, or, you know, upfront work would be more, you might have to adjust as you learn more, but there's a lot of upfront work with that. Is there any initial steps people can take to get a head start on this, or is this pretty much you got to get, you know, start timing your crews on painting different surfaces and just log it? Or do you have any kind of guidance for how to actually implement that and get that log of all these different production rates? So that they can start, you know, pricing appropriately?

Yeah, I mean, like you said before, the PCA is a decent option. So they've got their estimating guides. The one thing with the PCA estimating guides that is challenging is that they're hard to distill into simplicity. And what I mean by that is that they list out things as 1, 2, 3 codes based on different types of application. And, and that gets a little bit confusing. And so great place to start just as a baseline, but you're still gonna have to do that testing. You know, the second would be, you know, we have some preloaded, you know, production rates in Pain Scout that people can start to use. And those have been based off of, you know, amalgamated data from a lot of different sources. So that's another place. The third, you know, you could time. Timing is very laborious. You've got all the other things in your life going on. You know, do you really want to time your crews? And so what I've heard people say is that you can— one thing that's really helpful is get your team together, bring them into a space, say, guys, you know, we're painting this room, and get each of them to write down how long they think it would take. Hey, this is the square footage. Here's our room. We're painting the walls 2 coats. Everyone write it down. Okay, now we're painting the baseboards. Everyone write it down. And I think for the most part, painters kind of know intuitively what it'll take. And the more data points you can get, the better. So the more people you can get in that discussion, the more helpful it'll be. You take those points, put them all together, get your square footage, get your dimensions, and start to look at that data. And say, okay, this is what my team is telling me. Let's go out and do an estimate and see if this works based on what my team is telling me. So that process is going to cut down all the timing, all the, you know, moving site to site, looking at different substrates or surfaces, and really just kind of bring your team together and get them to tell you, start to base it off that, and you'll find more buy-in from your team. You'll find a little bit more. You know, they're going to know at least a place to start and start measuring, measuring, testing, doing some job costing, and you're going to see.

Yeah, that's, that's a great point. Getting buy-in from the team. Just reflection on my own experience with running a business, when you're trying to make change, often the hurdle is, is the people involved in getting them to accept the change that you're trying to implement or to get buy-in on that change. So that's a great point of allowing them to be a part of that process of developing the production rates so that they kind of understand it better maybe and also know that they had a role in it and that they were heard. So what my mind went to, you know, when we're recording this, this is September maybe the tail end of painting season for some. If you're doing an annual kind of barbecue, maybe like, or annual employee outing, you could take that opportunity to kind of do some of this maybe, and that would be a tax write-off. You know, have a barbecue and then go through some of the production rates and introduce this concept. So that's a great idea. Um, but then you also—

go ahead, you're speaking as a true accountant, get the write-off, you know, have some fun, get the write-off. Amazing.

Exactly, exactly.

Sorry, got to cut you off.

Yeah, no, uh, the other thing you said that was cool was, um, Pain Scout has a lot of the production rates already built into the system. Is that, is that right?

That's true, yeah. Um, obviously, you know, they're there, but you're gonna have to test, like inevitably you're going to say, oh, that's my team can do it faster, or we're a little bit slower than that. So taking any production rate as gospel is just, that's a mistake. You need to still test because every team is different, right? Like the way people produce is different, the culture of every company is different. So still worth looking at, but I think getting those baselines and taking away the really laborious work of sitting there with a timer, I mean, that kind of thing is, you know, we're all, I think, inherently a little lazy, so let's go with the laziest solution and then test.

Yeah.

And I think Paid Scout, you get those rates in there, you can ask your team together with those, you're gonna get kind of a sense of what's going on.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, let's talk about the benefits, you know, using the time-based or production rates. How, what should someone expect to see as improvements in their business? Um, or have— how have you seen it improve your own business, or how have you seen it improve others' businesses?

So the first thing, um, first thing you're going to see is you're going to be a lot more confident with your pricing. And the reason that that's the case is because when you use production estimating, it flows in this, this life cycle of the job, which is that you price based on time, you do the project based on time, and that those two things, and you can test to see how you did time-wise and make adjustments coming back to the start. And so you get more and more confident as you go, as well as, you know, when you price this way, you can deliver that work order or that information necessary to give your, your team the ability to know how to get to the proper destination. And so what a lot of— if you're pricing using, you know, guesswork, or sometimes square footage even, you don't really know the path to success in order to be profitable. You're still kind of wondering what it might be. Whereas when you price on time, you know how long it should take, and you price your time appropriately, you can now, if you get to that proper point where you've said this will be 40 hours, it took us 40 hours, therefore we are profitable. And that— there's a lot of power to that for your team, for your company, for your estimators. The whole process becomes a lot more, um, predictable and understandable, I think.

Yeah, that's an interesting point, like the, the peace of mind basically knowing that, you know, um Because reflecting on my own experience, you know, starting out doing estimates, you know, being pretty young and not knowing that there was some anxiety over whether I just, you know, when I book a job, okay, great. There's that like initial excitement, like, yes, I closed it. But then you're like, okay, now we have to produce it. Did I actually price this right? Because I, I don't know, am I going to just lose money on this? Because yeah, I booked it, but then the excitement goes away because I'm like, okay, well, did I actually price this right? So that's the peace of mind there is, is, uh, is definitely big. Um, I can see that.

Um, there's, uh, there's kind of two stories that come to mind, like when you say that. One is, uh, you know, a friend of mine in the painting industry, he like, he priced a job, I think it was the biggest job he ever priced, was $25,000. It was a lead job, and at the end of the day, he spent $75,000 producing it. Um, so he— that, that like excitement at the start of being like, man, I just sold this huge job, um, almost destroyed his company because he didn't know really what the time was going to take to do a lead job. He never done one, and you can run into some real problems. Um, and then the second is like Another guy that I've talked to, this happens a lot, this isn't one guy, but they go do the estimate, they go to the house, they talk to the customer, all of that's fine. They go back to their car to do up the estimate and they get this incredible amount of anxiety. Like, what is the price on this job? Like, what? I don't know, I don't wanna screw up again. And hearing that, that feeling, like I know that feeling all too well, that anxiety and that feeling of like, I don't know where is this, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000? I don't know. And that could really mess with my business. Like that feeling sucks. And I think when you, and I don't know what your experience was, Daniel, like if, did you learn about production rates and start to get that figured out or, or did you not?

So I did one of the college painting programs. CollegeWorks Painting is what I did, and I believe it was a product— and my memory on that is a little fuzzy, but I believe they did some sort of production rate thing. But, you know, I wasn't super confident in it, you know, just kind of 18 years old and going to people's houses and doing this first-time business type of thing. So yeah.

So you know that feeling, that feeling of unsurety, you know, just like, I don't know if I'm doing this right. And when it's real money on the line, like if you lose a couple times, man, it becomes so real so fast. You're like, I don't want to lose again. I don't, I gotta keep staying in business. Like these are real feelings. So I think coming full circle, like when we made that transition as a company to production rate estimating, and really committed to it, man, we saw our, you know, gross profits increase. We saw company morale increase. We saw net profits increase. I mean, these were just straight across the board increases because all of a sudden we had control over our business. And every time I think we sell a job, really we're selling our business. And so if you're guessing, you're not really selling your business, you're just giving a number. And so getting like, like, I mean, I've heard you talk about production estimate before, like, like you get it. And I think sometimes I just want lots of people to get that feeling of confidence and like recapturing what, what they set out to do their life with a business, just make money, get there, you know, get the lifestyle they want, live the dream. But without— with painting, it's that, that moment of pricing is just so vital, so critical. Oh yeah, yeah.

I mean, if you can get this piece down, I mean, because like you said, it was a peace of mind, and then, and then what you just said was the gross profit. That's the biggest lever, that's the biggest number. You can get gross profit, you know, high, like 50% or more, that's gonna naturally open up, like you said, your net profit, which is the money going in your pocket, that that's going to solve a whole bunch of problems there. And then the other thing, you know, you kind of have a system of doing things. So you said freedom, like then you have the freedom to let somebody else do the estimating because they have a system to actually work off of. Can you talk to that at all?

Yeah, I mean, so So in terms of growing a painting business, I think you can hire a lot of the roles. I mean, you could hire the painters, the technicians, you can hire the, you know, someone to manage that. Hiring the salespeople is a real challenge, especially when it's experience-based pricing. Like if you're the one who's actually been, you know, pricing using guesstimating and got really good, How do you transfer on that knowledge? How do you— if you're just doing square footage pricing, how do you trust that that number, when there's preparation and all this other stuff that comes in, is going to be, you know, spot on? And so I think the freedom comes when you know that when you pass on the sales, which is really a critical point to getting your business to be a business, that you know that that information can be passed on easily to another party and they're going to be able to price the projects in order for you to run the business that you want. And so, you know, for us it was, you know, really tied to this concept of time-based estimating, understanding our times, you know, working with technology to take pictures and videos and ensure that new reps weren't underpricing working with a mentor to, you know, whether it's the business owner like myself or it was, you know, another rep who had gone through our system. These things allowed us to get the business to be a business, everyone to do their role properly, and for this place to operate really, really well. And, uh, and I think it, it comes down— ultimate freedom and having a business in painting comes down to passing along that hardest part which is sales. And that gets a lot more streamlined when you have a system and understand why, why you price what you do.

Yes. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. That makes a lot of sense. Um, and then, you know, I would say you, you had asked me, you know, what do we look at when we take someone on for the first time and kind of giving them financial advice, looking at their profit and loss, you know, pricing obviously is a big one, which we've been talking about, uh, And then the secondary one is the efficiency side of things. And if you have that system where you know the budgeted hours for each of these projects that you're closing, you can improve your efficiency with using this, the same framework, production rates, because now you know how long it should take your team to complete the project. And you can hold them accountable. And this is one of the big things I like about Pain Scout is that you do your estimate in Pain Scout and, you know, it calculates the budgeted hours and it transfers that over to the work order. And so then you have a work order that you can hand over to your crew leader, to your subcontractor, whoever it is, and you can say, hey, here is the budget hours for this project. And you can hold them accountable, which will improve your efficiency. So it's, this is like, you know, to beat a dead horse, this is critical to get down. What other things, features or workflows does PainScale help with that process of transferring the estimate to a work order?

Yeah, so I mean, I think you nailed it. Like, the work order is your ticket to profitability. Like, you can— if you bid a job at 1 hour and the job takes 1 hour, you've— you're making money. So, um, PaintScout, yes, simultaneously as you're building your estimates, transfer that data into a work order. You can pass along to your subcontractor, to your team. It breaks down not only labor, but also preparation. It'll give them a sense of how much paint or material is needed. It also has a really cool feature, which, you know, as coming from a paint contracting background, I really wanted, which was that when you, when you typically estimate most programs, you do it by area. So you say like, in this area, we're painting walls, trim, ceiling. In this area, we're painting, you know, walls, trim, wainscoting. So walls, baseboards, wainscoting, whatever that might be. And what I always got questions from customers about was, well, that price is a little bit too much. What if we took out the walls? I just want to do the baseboard and the ceiling and the wainscoting. And that was very labor-intensive. For us to go back and remove everything. And so what Paint Scout lets you do is break down everything into surfaces. So it has a separate view of surfaces. So when the customer— you want to present that information to your customer, you can enter it all in by area, but then it'll display to the customer if you want in walls, baseboard, wainscoting, ceiling. So they can now see the prices for each one and make decisions to, to, you know, engineer a price that they're looking for. But what that does is it transfers so well over to a work order where we don't only give you an area view that you're doing, we also tell you by surface what your, your work time and your prep time is. And that helps a lot so that you can break down the job properly. So when your crew comes in, they don't have to see the whole house as, you know, in the bedroom we're doing the walls, in the, you know, office we're doing the walls, in the bathroom doing the walls. They can see walls, see those areas, see how long it should take, break down the job appropriately so they do one task at a time. And, and when that happens, we see even greater efficiency because people aren't jumping from area to area doing separate tasks. So the system's been designed to work like a painter should work. And sell like the customer actually wants. Because the customer didn't ask you to break it down by area, they just said, I want the walls painted in my house. And so we can deliver information to the customer and to your crew that's both efficient for the sales process and the production process.

That's awesome. Yeah. And so that's a— I didn't realize that it could do that too. That's pretty cool. So basically if a customer, you know, says, hey, paint the interior of my house, and then you can present the bid to them with the walls and the baseboards and the ceilings, and then they can come back and say, well, actually we were hoping my budget was more like, you know, $5,000 instead of $7,500. Can we just not paint the ceilings? And then that will be in my budget, and that kind of gives them more information to make a decision as opposed to, you know, here's, we're painting your living room, your kitchen, your, you know, bedroom 1, bedroom 2, and it has all these, you know, they want to paint all those places, but maybe the ceilings are not as important to them. Is that kind of what that's— okay.

That's exactly what it's doing. Yeah. So we, like, there's area view, which is, you know, your view that you see the rooms in, but we also have surface view. And so whether you're just having a, you know, informal discussion with the customer or you wanna show them that information, it, it gives the customer the power to control their decision process. So they, they now have control over what they wanna spend and they feel like it's a more of an à la carte type experience, which we've, you know, we've seen that be very successful in the sales process where you're not telling the customer what they want, you let them choose what they want. And so, um, that's, that's been really helpful, you know, from the start. Like, I felt that was really helpful for customers, and so we built that in. It was a huge pain to build because mathematically it's all really complicated. Yeah, but, um, it's, it's helpful for, you know, for the customer to see what they're getting and for the crew at the end of the day to break it down. Like, when you, when you— I think a lot of teams, like, it's hard for them to see the project properly even with a work order by area. They need to see it by, hey, I've got— I have 30 hours for baseboards, I have 42 hours for walls. Hey, there's actually 12 hours of preparation on the walls. So hey Jim, I'm going to have you work on the preparation of the walls for the next day and a half because that's 12 hours. So I want you to go mud. Meanwhile, Sue, I'd like you to get going on the baseboards for the next couple days because we have that time. And so now those people are more efficient because they work on specific tasks, not on the whole project. As you know, they're not jumping walls, ceiling trim. They just have their role and they have their time, and so they can be more specific, better craftsmen, as well as produce better.

Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, that is an awesome feature. One of the, one of the other things you mentioned was The paint, amount of paint you need to purchase is also calculated in the work order, I believe, so that, you know, you can, based off what you estimated with the surfaces, the time it takes to paint the surfaces, you're measuring out all the surfaces, it will give you an estimated amount of paint to buy for at the paint store, which I would imagine would, you know, make your paint purchasing process a little bit more efficient. Is, is that kind of how, uh, it works?

Yeah, that's how it works. There, there'll, there'll forever be a challenge when it comes to estimating paint though. Um, our system, I mean, we tell everybody this too, it's no secret, but the system itself, we calculate the paint, but we don't know what openings the place has. Like if it has windows, doors, if a whole wall is windows. And so you, It's a great place to start. And it's really helpful if you just say like, you know, we're going to cut this in half for now, and we're going to order up as we need to. But you're getting a good sense of how to, you know, how much product that space should use in theory. Our system lets you adjust coverage rates. So you can start to make those adjustments as you go to. So say a manufacturer says, you know, 350 square feet per gallon or whatever. But you find that based on the average room, there's 100 square feet that aren't being covered, then your coverage might go further on a product because you're not doing the windows, that kind of thing. But the bottom line, yes, is it does calculate that as you go. And it's, um, it's really, really helpful when you're trying to be, you know, efficient for ordering and getting the right product to the job site.

Cool. All right. Um, What challenges do you think a painting contractor might face switching to this estimating method, production rates, and how do you think they can overcome them? I know we kind of talked about some of these already, but is there anything else that folks run into a challenge or an objection when trying to switch from their current method to production rates, and how might they be able to kind of overcome that challenge?

So the one that I see the most is just trusting it, right? Like, if you— change is hard, I think we can all agree on that. And I think it's even harder when you try something and the first time it isn't perfect. So you go back to what you did before. For us, it really took a commitment, you know, I'd say 10 years ago, committing to production rates and knowing that, you know, The first couple of jobs were a learning experience. And so you need to set yourself up for that, right? Like, this is a learning experience. I'm going to give this some time before you just abort. And so I think that, yeah, that's kind of the emotion that I think we can describe is that lack of trust in the system and failure leading you back to what you used to do. So I'd say commit. Just know that it's going to work out. Start the discussion with your team. Start looking at each project as it comes in. How long did it take? What did it— was it successful? And make adjustments from there. So I think that's a barrier, and I think, yeah, just get started, try it out.

Yeah. Okay. One of the other things that I really like about Pain Scout is it integrates well with Zapier and other softwares. And because a lot of folks are worried about making their system talk to other platforms, so that the CRM, if they're using WorkGlue or, you know, whatever the case may be, you know, how can PaintScout kind of push that information in and out of their software or talk to QuickBooks Online? And from what I, my experience with PaintScout, a lot of that is you have a Zapier integration, you have QuickBooks Online integration, integrations with other CRMs. I think Worklu is one of them. I really like that kind of built-in capability to really to be able to work with most softwares. It seems like that's been a deliberate effort on your on your behalf and the PaintScout team. Is there anything I missed with that kind of capability?

No, I mean, it's 100% deliberate. We know that I think pricing and selling the paint job is one of the most difficult parts of the painting process, at least for, you know, a business owner, for a salesperson. We want to be laser-focused on that. And for us, it's all about delivering estimates quickly, professionally, that you're going to allow you to build the company that you want to build. And so we've, you know, every day we fight, you know, feature requests that are outside of what we want to do. And we just believe that, you know, there's really amazing CRMs out there, There's better accounting software, there's far better scheduling software than we're ever going to be able to build. But the thing that we can be world-class at is pricing and selling painting jobs, and that's where we want to live. And so we'll do everything in our power to make sure that, you know, your tech stack works, that you can get information in and out of the system as you need, and that we can allow you to build a world-class tech stack that lets you build an amazing business. And so that's our, you know, one of our founding principles, and we'll hold true to that forever in terms of us being a company that makes pricing and selling paint jobs really easy. So we don't want to be distracted by that, I guess.

All right, well, as we wrap up, is there one piece of advice that you give to painting contractors who are hesitant to make the switch production rates?

One piece of advice? Well, I mean, I can only talk to what I felt when I made the change. You know, having spent like what I'd say 3 to 4 years in the wilderness of guesstimating, trying to talk to contractors, I have that CollegeWorks College Pro. I've got all these pricing documents at the time from other people. I didn't know what they meant. Like, I was in the same position you were.

Yeah.

And so it wasn't until, um, you know, someone showed me, here's a basic production rate system, try it. And I actually committed to it because I was just essentially so beat down by everything else. That I actually went and did it. And the amount of relief that I felt once we started to implement this system, I would say was the biggest, most important day of me staying in the painting industry. Because finally I understood what it meant to run a business and that feeling of, hey, I have control. And so my advice to people, you know, if you want to feel like you have control of your business, give it a shot. Do it. If it doesn't work for you, well, at least you tried. But give it a real effort, and hopefully you'll get that same feeling I got, which was like sweet relief. So, um, that's my, that's my, uh, that's my, my two cents, I think, right there.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's great. All right, well, how can, uh, listeners learn more about Pain Scout or get involved in, in your community?

Yeah, there's a couple ways. One, I mean, you can obviously sign up. That's a great way to start, and you can do that at paintscout.com. Talk to some one of our wonderful people on our sales team, or, you know, you can get involved in a Facebook group about pricing and selling paint jobs, and that's out there if you wanna get involved in the discussion, start asking questions, see what other people are asking. I think that's a great way to start. We also have a lot of great resources on our website. So, you know, how to calculate your hourly rate is on there, how to come up with production rates, you know, starting production rate sets. Those are all available through us. So, you know, come on over, check it out. We're not for everybody, we get that, but, you know, in the meantime, you might learn something. So I don't think there's any harm.

All right, awesome, John. I really appreciate your time today. And definitely give it— for listeners, definitely give PaintScout a look. It's an awesome product, and I've seen a lot of folks have success, turn their numbers around, and get some sigh of relief of getting, you know, estimating solved. So definitely recommend. And with that, we will see you next week.