Painting Business Makeover with Brandon Pierpont's Financial and Marketing Expertise

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.

This is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm here with Brandon Pierpont. He is the founder of Painter Marketing Pros. I'm super excited to have him here today. How's it going, Brandon?

What's up, Daniel? Good to see you, man.

Good to see you as well. I haven't seen you, uh, in a couple months. I think we did the, um, Contractor Secrets, uh, Contractor Freedom Summit. Contractor Freedom Summit. Yeah, that was, that was an awesome time.

It was awesome. Yeah.

Now for, now for the listeners that don't know you, can you just give a description of, of who you are and what you do?

Yep. Yeah, I'm Brandon, founder of Painter Marketing Pros. We work with long-term ambitious painting company owners to scale their businesses profitably over a sustained period of time. So ultimately, we're working with ambitious painting companies who have long-term growth goals. That is our, our target market that we work well with.

Awesome. So looking at your background, you know, you've, you've, you have a very diverse background. You kind of come from my end of things where you were like, like a CFO, basically. You've done a lot of different things. What inspired you to initially specialize in marketing for the painting industry?

Sure. Yeah. So it's a bit of a roundabout path, I guess, there. So I went to, to school at Notre Dame, majored in finance, then went into investment banking for 3 years and private equity for 2 years. And ultimately the hard charging finance road was not the one I wanted to stay on. So left, became, uh, I started a software company actually briefly in New York, but I didn't know a whole lot about software, so it didn't really go that well. And then started teaching the GMAT because I had taken the GMAT to go to business school, uh, the standardized test there. I started teaching that, was able to move to Costa Rica teaching that online. So it kind of became a bum for a little while, learned Spanish, Came back, became CFO of a software company. So I was able to combine the software and the finance, but then ultimately I just realized I want to start my own company. And I couldn't— it was this paralysis by analysis, couldn't get out of my own way, found 100 reasons why every idea was a bad idea. And so my wife said, do you think you could figure out how to wash a car? And I had washed cars. I said, yeah, I could probably figure that out. So she said, just start a detailing company. And then you just start a company. Don't think about it. Just start a company that, you know, you could fundamentally understand and see what happens. So I started this company. It was very hard to market a mobile auto detail company in a way that would command a premium price. It's very much viewed as a commodity. It suffers from a lot of the same issues that the painting industry suffers from. I would argue it suffers from it even worse as a mobile detailer. So I had to figure out how to get good at marketing, differentiating, reaching the target audience, positioning our company as a premium option. I got good at that, ended up actually being able to sell that company and then started a digital marketing agency, worked with all kinds of, all kinds of companies, but home service painting specifically. We, we really enjoyed— I really enjoyed working with them, did really, really well, and hence Painter Marketing Pros was born.

Nice.

Probably more than you wanted, Daniel. No, that's off on a tangent there.

Yeah, no, that's, that's a, that's quite a journey there. That's awesome. Uh, yeah, and we, we kind of share a little, little bit of, uh, commonalities there. Uh, you, you lived in Costa Rica for a while, so did I. Um, and you're also Army National Guard still?

Yep, yep. Yeah, I'm still in the Florida Army National Guard. Yeah, you were National Guard, correct? Correct.

Uh, yeah, Army National Guard in North Carolina for, uh, 13 years or so.

So yeah, we have a kind of the same person.

I wasn't gonna say it, but, um, yeah, no, no, that's, that's really cool. So, uh, so what, what type of strategies have been You know, since you're— you've been in this niche for a while, what, what strategies have you kind of developed for painting businesses that have really helped them dominate their local markets? Do you have any specific strategies that you really find— have found that have really helped painting business owners get to the next level?

Yep. Yeah, 100%. So I'm a very big believer in owning your service area online. So for people who are searching for you, for best house painter near me, painters near me, painting companies my area, right, painter and XYZ City, you know, cabinet painting, you should show up. You should not only have your website show up, you should have your Google Business Profile show up. You should show up in a way that's professional. So your site's built in such a way that people are prompted to take action. So they're prompted to either give you their email or their phone or call you, whatever it is that you want them to do. And then you should have a really refined sales process. So something that's automated, you're utilizing a CRM. We use one called GoHighLevel for a lot of our partners. We have it built into our system. I know that you're, you're very familiar with that since you have multiple companies. There's another, you know, DripJobs. A lot of people we work with will use DripJobs and they have a lot of these automations for Tanner's CRM. So having that tight sales system, what's called speed to lead. So getting in touch with the lead right away, building the value over time before the estimate, after the estimate. All that stuff is really critical. And then the— that's the long-term stuff. The short-term stuff, we focus a lot on, on paid ads. Paid social right now is performing exceptionally well. But again, that, that treatment of your lead, that sales process is so critical. And I think a lot of companies miss that. They think it's a good lead or it's a bad lead, like a black or a white, right? But there's no, well, maybe the lead would have been a good lead if you had a good and compelling sales process. If you had a really professional representation of your company on and offline, then maybe that lead actually was a good lead. But because you failed to present any kind of real value except for, hey, I'm a painting company and I'll paint your house, the lead didn't really end up becoming a good lead for you.

Yeah. So I guess you mentioned one of the things which is speed to lead. As being one of the things that could help, you know, improve that sales process. How fast are we talking?

Within 60 seconds.

60 seconds. All right. You got to have somebody basically standing by the phone ready to respond or—

Yeah. So we hire people. Yes. So we hire people who their only job is to stare at the phone. So we have like a team that does this. And for all the partners we work with, We actually have, have video cameras looking at them to make sure that they're just staring at the phone. No, wait, hold on. That's not how we— let me back up. No, wait, we use automations. That's right. So we don't actually have people who just stare at the phone because you don't need to do that. You can use automations, you can use software. It's plentiful, plentiful. It's very readily available to you. If you use people like Daniel, his services, our services, Tanner Services, it's there. To where when a lead comes in, even a lead that fills out a form on Facebook or even a lead that fills out a form on your, your website, so there's no— they haven't picked up their phone at all, they're on a computer, boom, you can call them within 60 seconds because that's just a thing that can happen with technology. So if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, if that seems very foreign to you, then there's a, a very good chance that your sales process could be improved.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I saw some stats that basically said if you're not reaching out to your leads within like 3 minutes, the value of them goes down by at least 50%. It's something crazy.

It's after 5 minutes. I have read that it's like 1/15 of the value. I mean, it's remarkable. So it's probably 1/5 after 3 minutes. After 5 minutes, I feel like, man, What's the point? Those stats are depressing when you read them. It really— but the overall, the overarching theme is get in touch with the lead fast. And if you think about what people want, they want communication, they want to be cared for, they want to know that you're going to be readily available. If you're not readily available for them, let's be blunt here, if you're not readily available for them when you're trying to take their money, you're certainly not going to be readily available for them when there's a problem. And they need you to come back and fix something, that's what's going on in their mind.

Yeah. Or just like, they're just like, I want to get this handled right now, and they're just going down the list of painting contractors. Like, okay, uh, you didn't answer, okay, next one.

You know, commodity.

Yeah. Um, so are there any other big things in the sales process that really help, you know, take that lead and actually turn it into a prospect and a customer?

Yeah. So communicating by different mediums. So we do, you know, voice, we prompt that voice call. So it's actually a feature where when someone submits a lead form, the phone of the painting company, whether that's whether they're using an answering service or doing it in-house or however they're doing it, their phone will ring. It's a little robot says, Bob, you know, just Just request an estimate, press 1 to be connected to Bob. They press 1. Now that's how they call him within 60 seconds. If he doesn't answer, then it's gonna wait a minute and it's gonna send him a text. You know, hey Bob, this is Mike with Mike's House Painting. Sorry, request an estimate. Wanna get it set up for you. When works best for you? Then send Mike a link to SelfBook. You know, give Mike the ability to go ahead and put himself on the calendar so he doesn't have to, to communicate with someone if that's difficult or if it's after hours or, or whatever. Send an email too. Some people, especially older people, will maybe respond better to the emails. A lot of people typically respond better to the text. So having this varied communication is a key point. And then positioning your company to sell on value. So we call it USPs, unique selling propositions, but it just means why people should choose to do business with you and pay you more money. That's ultimately what it comes down to. So if you don't differentiate yourself, then the natural logical action is for someone to choose the company that charges the least amount of money. If they're all the same, then, and then they should just base their decision on price. So you have to give them reasons to not do that, because you don't want to— the race to the bottom is not a winning one for painting companies. So you do that through estimates that maybe if you have a warranty, include a link, you know, to a PDF with your warranty, right? Include little videos. We have little video templates. Hi, I'm Mike with Mike's House Painting. Thanks for requesting your estimate. They get that sent via text to them before the estimate. So you're already positioning yourself to sell on value versus, hey, thanks for requesting an estimate. I'm number 2 of 4 estimates that you're going to get, and here's my price and go ahead and compare it to the other ones and then just pick the lowest one. Right.

Awesome. Going back to what you were talking about earlier, you know, the way that, that you kind of work, you have the short-term strategy, like how do you get leads in the short term? Then you have over the long term. Um, if, if you're maybe just starting out or you're maybe, you know, a newer business that's only been around for a little bit, what should they be focusing on? Like, should they just go off this short-term strategy? Should they start the long-term strategy or both at the same time?

Short-term. So the, the initial Number one rule of business is don't go out of business. And the reason, as you, Daniel, will know probably better than anyone, the reason most businesses go out of business is due to lack of cash flow. They run out of money. And so that's the number one rule is don't run out of money. Meaning whatever money you put into marketing when you're small, it needs to come back to you and it needs to come back to you quickly. You can't really worry where you should be laying the groundwork in terms of reputation. You should be generating reviews on your Google profile. This stuff is free. You just have to build it into your process to where you ask for it and make it easy for them to give it to you. But it's free. You shouldn't be investing. And I'm the guy who's going to do this for you. So trust me when I tell you this, because I'm the one that you should be paying to do it. And I'm telling you to not do it. You should not be investing heavily into a website. Should not be investing heavily into your organic presence. You shouldn't be investing heavily into that when you're small, right? Then you just need leads. You need reputation. You should have an active referral process. So, hey, you know, thanks so much for project. Are you happy? Okay, great. I want to let you know, you know, we, we do have a formal referral program here. If you refer us, we'll actually give 10% off to the person you refer us to, and you'll, you'll even get a $200, um, you know, gift, right? Thank you gift for the referral if they end up moving forward with our company. So there's a lot that you can do kind of more of a grassroots level if you are doing paid marketing, then make sure that it is generating return for you. For us, that's the paid social ads. It's paid ads in general because those leads come in quickly. The con is that they're a little more expensive. The algorithms change constantly, so what works now might not work in a year, whereas organic for Google, we find it tends to be more consistent even though it's evolving. Um, but yeah, that's That's again, long answer for you, Daniel, but short-term versus long-term, that would be the priority for a smaller company. Yeah.

So basically get, get money in the door as quickly as possible. And it might be counterintuitive, like a lot of folks get hung up on when they're getting started, like, oh, I need a website. Like you can't have a business while the website right now, you know, like, so you're, you're kind of basically saying don't worry about that as much. you know, go actively go after people, not because having a website is kind of passive. Like you make a website, nobody knows, you know, nobody necessarily is going to find out that you exist just because you made a website. But you're saying like, go do more active type marketing when you're getting started.

Yeah, you need to, you need to see the return, right? So you can, you can afford to invest into a well-designed, a fully built-out site. So we build a site, you know, it's 25, 30 pages a lot of times that we're building, right? And then we're doing a whole lot of stuff behind it to rank each of these individual pages. You shouldn't be doing that. And oh, and then we're saying, you know, hey, it's going to be 6 months, 9 months, 12 months before this really becomes a real revenue generator for you. That's not what you should be thinking or trying to do when you're small, unless you come in and it's— this is a second business for you or you have a full-time position and you want to walk into a company that's really doing well and already producing revenue, then that's a different conversation. But I'm assuming for the, for the purposes of this conversation, you're bootstrapping a company, you don't have a lot of money, you're small, and therefore you need to see the return. For the actual website, I think you should have a website because I think you're going to lose opportunities if you don't, especially for some of the better opportunities. They'll probably want to look you up. It should be on your business card. but I would just use Wix, Wix, or GoDaddy, or Squarespace, whatever. Go on to these, they have these website builders. You can hire somebody, you can even hire them through the platform. So you go to Wix, and I think they make it easy to find a developer. Maybe you'll spend $500. Hmm, the site's not going to rank, it's going to be a one-page site, but it's good enough. So if somebody looks at you online, they do their homework, they see, wow, this is a professional painting company. That's all you need. It's, it's a professional image, it's not going to generate any new leads for you, but it will help you close your current leads.

Gotcha.

So just get something up and then, you know, improve it substantially down the line. Don't, don't get too hung up.

Make it a real marketing avenue when you can afford to invest in long-term marketing avenues. But for the beginning, just have that kind of minimum viable product. So business cards, right? You should have business cards. So there are certain things that you should just have when you're starting a company. Certain startup costs that are fairly low, don't require a ton of time, but they elevate your brand. Imagine handing someone a business card versus writing your name and phone number on a piece of paper. You would want to invest into the business card. This is, this is along those lines.

Yeah. And just get a basic basic business card or a basic website in this case. Don't, don't get a really fancy bottle opener, you know, business card.

That's one of those like metal ones. Yeah. I'm going to knock, knock you out or cut you if they throw it at you or something.

Yeah.

No, just a normal paper. Yeah. They're going to try to upsell you on, do you want the, the rounded edges or the, do you want a little bit thicker cardstock or you don't have to go through the 15 upsells of Vistaprint. Just get a couple of business cards.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool. So for the painting businesses that have been around for a little bit, you know, they're established in their area a little, you know, they might have that Wix website, you know, they've had it for a few years, they've been around, they have a customer base, but they're getting hung up, maybe folks that seem to get hung up around $750,000 to $1.5 million in revenue, having trouble pushing past that. What kind of things should they be looking at to, to get their marketing to the next level?

Yeah, I would do the short and the long term there. So in this example, if we're at $750,000 to $1.5 million and we're hung up, so we're just kind of— we didn't just get there in this example, we've maybe been there for a little bit and we're not really sure how to move past. Number one is figure out where your leads are coming from. Probably if you're, if you're stuck, either your, your lead generation is somewhat passive, so maybe you're getting a lot of repeat and referral, but you don't really have a defined marketing system that you understand. Uh, maybe you, you just only have yourself as the estimator, and so there's just so many, only so many leads you can get to. But it's usually not the case that painting companies are just ignoring a ton of, a ton of their leads. But it could be, uh, it could be a close rate issue. So there are a couple different things, but odds are pretty good that you need to get a more formalized marketing plan in place. So you should know where your leads are coming from, you should know how much that lead source, the cost per lead is, you should know your close rate, you should have access to all this data, and you should, you should have a website that's generating business for you. That's not just, well, they, they look at you, they found you through an ad, or they you know, gave them your business card or whatnot, and then they go to your website and then they liked what they saw. So then they filled out an estimate, you know, or contacted you through the website. That, that website is helping you close the project. It's not generating the lead for you. You should have it as its own lead channel. So when you get to that size, you need to start creating a variety of different channels. I call them like fishing lines in the water. You should have quite a few of them, but, but ultimately you need to sit down and figure out where do you want to go? Let's say you want to go to $2 million. Okay, have a, have a spreadsheet. You know, there we have one that we employ for our partners. There are a number of them out there. But what's your average ticket value? Average ticket value is $5,000. What is your— if you want to get to $2 million, that's $167,000 a month at $5,000. You know, I'm just saying this math, but $5,000, I think it's 33, 33 projects a month. So we need 33 projects a month. You can back into that. Okay, let's say— and I'm— I think the numbers are correct because I was looking at our spreadsheet earlier today, but there's a chance I messed up. Not— so if you have 33 projects that you need to complete at $5,000 a project to be at $167,000 a month, and you say I have a 40% close rate, well, then to complete 33 projects, you close 33 projects, you need about 83, I believe, leads. Yeah, estimates. So 83 estimates. So you go out and you conduct 83 estimates If you close 40% of them, then you land 33 projects. Now, you're not— every lead that you get is not going to turn into an estimate. I hear, you know, whether you want to call it conversion, I call it set rate. So a lead comes in, what's your set rate? If your set rate is 80%, which is around what it should be across the board, then I want to say you need 104, 104 at an 80% set rate to get to 83.

Estimates. Yeah. 104. I'm doing the math as you're talking.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate you. You're the math guy. So we'll just— I'll kind of throw it out there.

As long as I have a calculator, I'm the math guy. If I have to do it in my head, screwed.

So now we know, okay, we're at $750,000 to $1.5 million. We want to be at $2 million. Obviously we're neglecting seasonality in this example. You would want to factor that in. But we're saying we're straight lining it. We're saying it's just $167,000 a month. Every month gets you to $2 million. At $5,000 average project value, you need 33 projects. To get 33 projects at a 40% set rate, you are 40% close rate, you need 83 estimates. To get to 83 estimates at an 80% set rate for your leads, you need 104 leads. 104 leads, set it to 83, estimate, set it to 33 projects. So then how are you getting 104 leads? So then you look at— that's where understanding your marketing— where are your leads coming from? If you're at $750,000, $1.5 million, are they referrals? If they are referrals, a lot of them are repeat or whatever. Was it active, or did it just kind of come in when it comes in? It doesn't come in when it doesn't come in? Is it a super passive thing and you don't really have any control or clear visibility into your marketing? Because only then can you actually start to formulate a true plan, you know. And when you are at that size, you should be doing this. I think when you're small, I, I'm not a big proponent of this. I think you need to hustle and grind, and I think you need to get to some scalability. But when you're between $750,000 and $1.5 million, you should have a true marketing roadmap at that point. Mm-hmm.

That's good stuff. So yeah, 104 leads, that's like 3.5 leads per day. So yeah, that, that breaking it down like that, that gives you a really good roadmap on how you're, how you're going to get to whatever goal you have set. And then, then from there you can kind of figure out, okay, You know, where, where can I put my dollars to get that amount of leads? Or yeah, I'm gonna put my energy to get—

if you're getting, you know, let's say you're getting 40 leads a month or something, okay, these are repeat referral and, and they're passive. They're just because you've been around for quite a few years and whatnot. So people, people come through. Well, how can— what if you start being more active? What if you do what's called database reactivation, or you reach out to all your past past customers, right? Can you, can you get, generate uptick there? Okay, and now we're at maybe 50 or 60 a month. Okay, well, have you ever run paid ads? Are you getting any through your Google Local Service Ads? Are you getting anything through your Google Business Profile, which comes back to organic? Are you getting anything through your website, which is organic? Have you run paid social, Facebook? Once you— what the, the good thing about paid ads and paid social especially is it becomes like a like a, like a volume knob. It's like a knob, you know, if you know, okay, my— for us, we're targeting average cost per lead of under $50 on social. So let's just say it's $50 a lead. If I need 10 leads, then I'm going to spend $500. If I need 100 leads, I'm going to spend $5,000. It's not quite that simple, but when you get it really dialed in, it can become close to that simple. And that's where you have this volume knob of how— of, okay, I'm just going to put more money into ad spend to get the number of leads because now I know how many leads I need. Given the math.

Mm-hmm. So going, taking that a little bit further, you know, $50 per lead. Um, and we were saying, uh, was it 104 leads to get, uh, 33 closed jobs, right?

Yep.

So 33 divided by 104, that's basically 31% of the leads that you're getting. Your, your become customers. Yeah, 32 maybe. Uh, so 30. So if that's the case, so that's basically you gotta have 3 leads, so it's $150 to get a closed customer. So then you can start doing like the customer acquisition cost.

Yep.

For that, um, go ahead.

Oh no, I just You know, we're on the Bookkeeping for Painters. You should be looking at your revenue. You know, marketers are going to say, oh, look at the revenue, right? Revenue. Yeah, revenue's vanity, profit sanity. The marketers don't fully control your profitability. So that does get outside of their control. But you need to look at your revenue. Let's say it's $5,000. Let's say your gross profit's 50%, your gross margin. Now you're at $2,500. I mean, you have some overhead and maybe some other related costs, but let's just say your straight gross profit is $2,500. So at this point you're spending $150 for $2,500. Now you do need to factor in your estimator's time. You know, I, I think estimators should be compensated fully commission, but then maybe you're still factoring things like gas or whatever. I'm not building out a full financial model here, but that's generally how to look at it, right? You paid $150 in this example and you got back $2,500 of profit. So that's a good trade.

Yeah. What are some of the benchmarks as far as marketing numbers go? Like, for— is $50, is that something to be expected for paid social ads? And then, you know, is the customer acquisition cost, is that typically around $150? Like, if someone's doing this, you know, what should they be striving for in terms of those marketing numbers?

$50 per lead, per quality lead through paid social is a good, is a good price per lead. You will hear people sometimes say other leads. There are different, different kinds of ways to run ads, different approaches. So there's conversion ads where it'll take you off. Let's just say Facebook. There's conversion ads where it'll take you off Facebook to a landing page. That lead quality will tend to be very good, but it will tend to be quite expensive. To take someone. Facebook basically penalizes you for taking them off their platform. There are Messenger ads, which tend to be a, a pretty good lead source and tend to be fairly affordable. But, but sometimes the quality can lack. There's lead formats, which is the one we prioritize where people fill out the lead form. We have found it has a nice bounce. You can— and then the lead form. Now there's another— there's always these different different things to consider, right? So with the lead form, if you just put up name, name, email, and phone, and you just leave that, Facebook will autofill it. So I could actually go run an ad, and, and rather than targeting $50, I could probably target $20 if I just did that. If I just said, hey, let's just do name, email, and phone. But those leads are going to be terrible because they have put no effort whatsoever into filling out. They didn't even have to type anything. They just kind of click a button, Facebook fills it out, and they're like, okay. And it was a 3-second thought process on their end. What we do is we'll ask a couple of more specific questions and we'll ask kind of what, what they're looking for, where they live, right? So a couple of things like that that they have to type in that Facebook will not autofill for them and they cannot submit the form. What that does is it reduces your, it reduces your lead flow because people will not do it. You've created an obstacle, a barrier. So the people who really are not committed at all are now going to fall out, but the quality of the lead is going to go up. The more obstacles you put in front of somebody, taking them off Facebook into a totally another website is a big obstacle with a conversion. Now, the more obstacles you put in front of somebody, the higher the quality of the lead, but the lower the volume of leads. So it's all kind of that balance to where you get a good— but $50 a lead for, for fairly high quality leads. Yes, that's a very good lead cost per lead through paid social. And then the $150 for as a cost of sale, that's a phenomenal cost of sale. You know, right now for Google pay-per-click, which I don't recommend, but a lot of those search terms are going for $20, $25, sometimes $30 a click. So it could cost you right now $300, $250, $300 for a lead through Google Ads for a lead. So unless you're doing— unless you're— you have a really big budget, you're a pretty big company, Google Ads don't make sense right now. But if you say $250 a lead and you have a 50%, you set every single lead, which you're probably not going to do, and then you have a 50% close rate, that's $500 cost per, cost per sale. $150 is a great cost per sale. If you can't win as a painting company at $150 cost per sale, you need to look at what you're doing wrong. Probably need to talk with Daniel.

Yeah, well, I think that's a What you just said there in terms of the Google Ads costing so much money, that's, that's, you know, for, for so long that was like the way to go.

So that's like, uh, well, and that's why I say paid ads is short term because those algorithms change. Pay-per-click was great and now it's so not great.

Yeah. So, and I think I feel like a lot of people, I feel like if I've also witnessed it, Or they have the Google Ads, you know, just turned on and like they set it up, maybe just like bleeding money. Yeah. And it's just—

but it's a check the box.

Yeah.

It's like the SEO, you know, it's like there are all these people selling hypothetical SEO. I used to refer people to this company because they'd be like, oh, well, you know, my neighbor, my friend, or, you know, this guy does SEO. What's his background? Oh, well, he works as a whatever, but he does SEO and it's part-time. Like, oh, very cool. Very cool. I'm sure he knows a lot about SEO. So the— I used to refer people to this website, $29seo.com, and they would say, hey, we'll do SEO for— they don't do anything. But I think they changed it now. I think it's something different now. But it used to be $29 a month they would do SEO. So anyone who ever was like, oh, you know, that's way too expensive. I was like, I got— I have the perfect referral. I would tell them it's not going to work. I wouldn't actually make them do it. But I would, I would send them there. But yeah, don't just check the box. Like, don't run Google Ads, you know? Oh, what's your Google Ad budget? $500 a month. Well, that is dumb.

You're just writing a check to Google every month.

Yeah, you're not getting anything. What are you getting? Well, I don't know. People say that they came through Google. Okay. Do you— I mean, there's like 10 different ways to come through Google. Do you know if it was a Google ad or if it was something else? Don't just waste money.

Yeah, so definitely take a look at the, uh, your Google Ads account if you, if you haven't looked at it in a while. And, and hopefully you're tracking where, where those leads are coming from, because hopefully somebody is.

Yeah, because if you're not adding negative keywords, if you're not going in there and, and doing that on a minimum of a weekly basis, you're definitely wasting money. You have to actively manage that.

Yeah, that's good stuff. All right, so $150 is a phenomenal, I believe is the word you used, a phenomenal cost of cost per sale. Cost per sale.

Yep.

Is there a— is there like, you know, is $200 like good, like $250 average or, you know, is that kind of—

I mean, it comes down— I— so I'm in finance, you know, that was my background, right? Finance. So I think about everything in terms of return on investment.

Yeah.

So for me, it's always a good return if you're making money. Yeah. So the, the, if you have a variety of different channels to make money, then you have to figure out which one's making you the most money, you know, and do that. But for me, I would, I would always say go to, I mean, if I, if you factored in the cost of the estimator and the gas and everything else, like you factored in all these things, then like a 1.1 return is good. Because they give you a dollar and you're giving me a dollar and 10 cents. Now, now, when you, you factored in project management, this assumes you as the owner not getting pulled into fires. Obviously, you know, I'm not gonna like pull my hair out for, uh, you know, 0.1 return on that. But, but that's the math, right? Hypothetically, anything— if I give you a dollar and you give me back more than a dollar, I'm going to keep giving you dollars until you're not giving me back more than what I'm giving you. So if it's $150, if it's $200, I don't care if it's $500 cost per sale. If I'm making $2,500 and my company's running away that I'm not— as the owner, I'm not getting pulled back in, I'm making 5x my money. Yeah, that sounds great. That's how I think about marketing. But a lot of painting companies come into it so passively. They have never really officially done it. They've grown through word of mouth. They don't actually fully understand where their leads are coming from. They say like, oh, well, they ask them and they say it's Google. Or they, you know, they're just sort of past customers, but they haven't spent anything. And then they kind of look at this stuff and it can be jarring. But this is how you look at a business. You know, private equity would buy companies that were undervalued, that had issues. We would solve them. We'd go and do a bunch of operational fixes, then we'd sell them. And so the whole idea was looking at a business as an investor and understanding the mechanics of this. This is how you look at business. So it's a little bit different. I don't know if that answered your question, Daniel, or if I just went off on another tangent here.

No. So basically, I, I, I definitely agree. Cause you, if you look at the national data, you know, the average painting business, they're spending like 1% on advertising. So basically they're not spending any money on their advertising. Most on average, most painting businesses. Now, of course, the folks that want to grow, they're spending, you know, 5 to 10% of their revenue on marketing. So yeah, and for folks that are in the 1% group, their, you know, their jaw drops, you're like, oh, you have to spend that much, you know, that's kind of a big thing, you know. The idea of spending 10% of their revenue on marketing, that they're kind of surprised that that is anything that you can do and also be very profitable in doing.

Yeah.

And like you were saying, you were, you know, if you can 5x your customer acquisition costs to your gross profit, like if you spent $500 on your customer acquisition cost, but you, um, your gross profit on that job was $2,500 because it was— you sold it for $5,000, let's say, um, and direct costs were $2,500, leaving you with $2,500 of gross profit. You know, that's a 5x return kind of on— for gross profit, uh, and, and then other folks kind of use the like return on investment in terms of revenue. So they spend $500 customer acquisition costs, they should be aiming for a 10x return on investment in terms of revenue to kind of gauge how they're doing it. Do you have any kind of numbers that you, that you, um, look at in terms of, um, evaluating how how you're, how you're spending your marketing dollars and are you getting a good return on investment on it?

Sure. I'm going to go into a little bit of a rant here, Daniel. I hope you're ready for this. Oh, the, the, the 10x thing. I kind of hate that. I kind of hate that rule because it's, it's a, it's such a lazy way to look at this. It's so lazy. It's like, oh, well, you know, I heard from X, Y, or Z person in the industry or just in general that you should get a 10x return on your marketing. And then they just look at, okay, what is the revenue and their marketing? They're not breaking it down by channel. They're not actually caring what their profit margin is on their projects. They're not actually factoring in the overhead versus direct cost of sale, and they're not factoring in when a lead comes in what they should be doing with that lead. It's a very— it's a good litmus test. It's a good general benchmark. Of like, am I just roughly in the right area? But it's not the right way to look at marketing. So if we back up into the people you said are in the 1%, like they're, they're spending 1% of their— they're not, they're not doing anything right. They're not really investing into marketing. Maybe they're buying some yard signs or whatever as part of their business and they're calling that marketing, which is a form of marketing. So they are now at, let's say, $1 million. You use the 750 to 1.5. We're going to put them in a million And they want to get to $2 million, and they've been around, let's say, for, I don't know, 5 years. Been around for 5 years at $1 million, and they don't invest into marketing. For all intents and purposes, they don't invest. Then they're like, I want to get to $2 million. They start investing in marketing. They hire— they either pull someone in. So you have a few options when you decide to market. You can pull someone in like a marketing director, probably you're probably not going to really be in a position where that makes a lot of sense for your company to do that, to hire a full-time person, because someone who really knows what they're doing is probably going to be minimum $60,000, $80,000 a year. You can figure out how to do it all yourself, which again is also probably going to be not what you want to do. Uh, or you can hire an external party, right? Like an outsourcer, essentially, like an agency or some consultant or something along those lines, right? Then you want to go to $2 million and you start spending into marketing, you start investing into marketing. So now you're running, let's say, the paid social ads. You're— you're— you figure out how to run Google Local Service Ads. They set those up for you. You know, maybe you're— you're— now you're doing your organic, your SEO, your other stuff like that. Now you get to $2 million, but then you go look at your cost of, you know, let's just focus on your— your marketing as a percentage of your revenue. And let's say that— let's just say we hit that 10%, right, for the additional million. So now you look at it and it's like 6%, 5 or 6%, because we have the 1% that you're spending for the first million. And then there's now another, you know, 5 or 6%. So we have like 6% cost of marketing. And you think, man, I was doing better off by myself. You know, I was, I was only spending 1% of my money. Now I hire these guys who are supposed to know what they're doing. I'm sitting here spending 6% or 8%. But you're not factoring in the, the differential, right? The repeat referral, that's automatic. You will get to $2 million if you run a good company. You'll get to $3 million if you run a good company without ever doing marketing. It's just going to take you a long time. Just run a good company. Just run a good company in an area that has any sort of reasonable population over an extended period of time. And you will get to $1 million, $2 million, $3 million. If you want to get there in a way that doesn't take you 20 years or 30 years, then invest into marketing and view it as, okay, here's what I spent on marketing, here's the revenue that came in through it, here's the profitability that came in through it, here's how I took those leads and I further monetized them through an active repeat referral process. Here's how many reviews I was able to generate. And now I've seen, oh, my close rate's actually improving as my review and my reputation goes up. My organic presence and my, my leads that are coming from organic are also improving as my reviews go up. Which again, the reviews are coming from past projects. And now I'm seeing that the company is growing a lot and I'm still making money on those dollars. So don't view it as, well, this is what it was before, is 1%, now it's 6% or 10% or 12%, whatever it is percent, and therefore it's not a good idea. View it as, are you making money on your marketing? View it like a, like an investor. View it like you're in finance or like you're— that's how I view it.

Mm-hmm. That makes sense.

I feel like you're asking me fairly straightforward questions. And then I'm just going on, on rants and like diatribes and hopefully I'm not messing up your podcast, Daniel.

Yeah, we'll have to rerecord this one. No, I'm just kidding. No, it's good stuff.

Scrap it. It's, it's like we're too far out in left field on this thing. Like you say it's 10%, I just say yes. Next question. Yes, that is what you should do.

Yeah. No, that's awesome. It's good stuff. So, uh, one of the things that you do is you have the, uh, Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, right? That's the name, right? Yeah.

Um, made it long and difficult on purpose, but you passed the test.

So, uh, you've interviewed a lot of folks on, on that. Uh, you've been doing that for a little while. Um, and it's a great podcast. Definitely anybody who wants to improve their business, definitely listen to that. So what, what kind of key takeaways that have you learned doing that podcast? Have you any particular people or ideas that you've kind of gleaned, you know, by running that podcast over the last, how long you've been running it?

About 2 and a half years now.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've been running it for a little while. The number one, I think I figured out why I'm enjoying your podcast so much and why I'm going off on so many tangents, because normally I'm the host. As a host, you have to be pretty comport— you've had to listen to me and, and I would have to listen to you if the tables were turned. But now you have to listen to me, Daniel, because I'm the guest. So I think that's why I'm like really getting into this one. Now that you bring it up, I'm like, man, why I'm like really enjoying this. But the What I've learned is there's tons of different ways to succeed. And I've come up— I've heard of just the most interesting marketing tactics, just the most interesting philosophies. There are standards there. There are consistent things across the board that successful painting companies do. They know their numbers, they understand their profit margins, right? So people listening to you probably already understand the importance of understanding their financial metrics. They know their marketing numbers. They typically know where the leads are coming from, what percentage of those leads close by a channel, you know, how much they can pay to acquire a customer and it still makes sense. And they typically think about their company as a business. So a lot of the people that I have had, not everyone, but a lot of the people that have come through the Painting Marketing Mastermind podcast were not painters. There have been painters that come through, but there's been a pretty high percentage of people who are not painters. And so it comes back to that idea of, you know, painting mindset versus a business ownership mindset. And are they the same thing or are they different? I think there is somewhat of a difference in there, you know, in terms of how you look at it. But the— but there's a lot of ways to win. There's a lot of ways to win. If you're listening to this podcast, you're already educating yourself. You're above 99.9% of the market. You truly are. So do the fundamentals well. One thing I would caution against, and which I have yet to come across in the podcast because I'm interviewing people who are doing really, really well, they're really successful. I've not yet once come across some crazy convoluted marketing strategy. I've never asked someone how they're growing their business and they say, well, you know, I run a TikTok and then I sync them over to YouTube and then we hit them with a postcard and it's like 10 different step process. I'm like, okay, this is kind of, you know, we use programmatic ads and at the point where I don't even know what they're saying has never happened. But I've been asked questions like that. So many times, you know, by people. I'll go be presenting and then someone will come with, with just this crazy idea. They watch this YouTube video about this. Just do the fundamentals well. That's all you have to do. Just do the fun. Just do the basics really, really well and you will succeed. But also check out the podcast. There's a lot of cool stuff. And then there's a book, Painting Millions. It's on Amazon, but that's actually a written anthology of, of the entire second season of the podcast. It's written after the Tim Ferriss Tools of Titans style, but it's a really cool— there's— I go back and I read it sometimes because there's just really interesting stuff in there for— in terms of innovative marketing and other strategies, employee compensation, all kinds of stuff in there.

Awesome. That's good. That's good stuff. Uh, cool. Well, if someone is interested in working with you or wants to, you know, listen to the podcast, how do they get a hold of you? What should they do?

Yep. Yeah, they can send me an email. Brandon@paintermarketingpros.com.

Cool. All right. I appreciate your time today, Brandon.

Daniel, thanks for having me, man. This will be a one and done. It'll be like, man, I'm not having this. I'm not having this guy back.

I'd love to have you back.

We, we were supposed to be shooting a webinar, but I failed to get you. The topic and the email introduction, so you had to call an audible. I appreciate you working with me.

Yeah, absolutely. We'll get it, we'll get it knocked out. Um, yeah, and, uh, for those that are listening, if you'd like to ask Brandon some questions, um, definitely note his email, or you can go to the Grow Your Painting Business, uh, Facebook group and ask him questions, and, uh, I'm sure he'll He'll be happy to respond. Or if you have any ideas for future podcasts, um, definitely let us know. And with that, we'll see you next week.