Painting Biz Owners: Get to know who’s behind PaintScout, a popular painting estimating software.

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 painting 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.

That whole process of figuring out this business from ultimately having no experience, like none at all, just starting out, going to the paint store, were 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 the hidden art. You can go ask 100 contractors how they do it 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 for consistent pricing. And once we found that, and approximately estimating in the company, it was really about how to deliver this in a modern way, allow for building a sales team. And we were trying to scale our business. And so we just didn't find a great, you know, fit in the marketplace for that type of estimation. And that's what led us to build it.