Painting contractors should measure success by gross profit, not how busy they are. Use a simple 50/50 rule: estimate your total job cost and charge double it. This targets a 50% gross profit margin and lets you work less while making more.
I gotta say, I love this idea of gross profit because so often I think we look to see how busy we are as a metric of whether we're being successful. I mean, who wouldn't want to work a little less and make a little more? And so I love this idea of gross profit giving you this metric to shoot for. And it really is so easy to kind of figure out, you know, especially when you're doing that 50/50, you know, it's gonna cost me X amount to do the job, so I'm gonna charge double that. That is a very simple, easy-to-remember shortcut so that even if we don't have, maybe we don't have the, you know, a fancy, you know, estimator, or maybe we're not, you know, at the point where we're using, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? You know, production rates or whatever. Maybe we're just starting out. You know, we kind of, we still kind of know what it's going to cost us to do the job and we can just double that.
What’s REALLY Holding Your Painting Business Back? (Find Your Bottleneck in 5 Minutes)
