Streamline Your Painting Business with Virtual Assistants

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. I'm a CPA that works exclusively with painting business owners, helping them know their numbers and what they mean and save big in tax. And today I'm really excited. I have Cody Hall here with us, and we're going to talk about hiring a back office admin. So I'm super excited to jump into the conversation, but before we do, I'm going to go ahead and read through Cody Hall's biography. So Cody Hall has a diverse background in the military, technology, and business that makes him capable, capable of leading the organization effectively. Cody led customer service and human resource teams from an early stage startup to industry-leading tech giants, creating benchmark customer experiences and employee journeys for teams large and small. After his time with larger organizations, he began to impact fast-growing companies, starting and assisting multiple startups in developing world-class teams, customers, customer experience, and technology workflows. Years later, Cody started and led a multinational business processing organization, a BPO, supporting companies from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv with various remote staffing and call center needs. Now Cody leads marketing at Booking for Painters, and he seeks to provide expertise to painters that need to know their numbers and saving in taxes. Super excited to have you here, Cody. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Daniel. I hope to live up to that bio. Man, I don't know who wrote that thing, but that thing sounds nice.

I know, I'm just super excited to talk to whoever owns this file. Yeah, me too. So yeah, so today we're going to talk about how to get someone on your team to help you get to the, to the next level. So a lot of painting businesses that I, I work with they're between like revenue of $350,000 to $1 million, and oftentimes there's like a bottleneck in their company where they're trying to wear all the hats and they really need someone to just do some basic things, uh, like answer the phone or send off some invoices, but they're doing everything and they just need like some simple— like someone to come in the organization, help them out with those simple tasks that can really you know, help him— help that painting business owner free up their time so they can focus on things that are more important, like marketing and sales, to grow their business to the next level. And you have some expertise in this field of placing people in organizations, so I'm really excited to get your insight on, like, how can someone do this? How can they do this effectively but also in the most inexpensive way possible? What are, what are like the biggest admin bottlenecks that slow a painting business down that you've, uh, and then how can like hiring solve them?

Yeah, Daniel, you know, you said it well. Um, at those stages, and those stages exist in many industries, that $350,000 to $1 million, where they're trying to grow the very thing that themselves they sprouted from a seed, right? And they found like, well, I've done everything up to this point, and now they're trying to do that while growing, while having a family, and while trying not to make mistakes. And oftentimes we see it in the small things that don't generate revenue. It are the things that oftentimes weigh people down. This is something, you know, talking about the accounting piece, you know, I myself speak to many of the oncoming clients for Bookkeeper for Painters, and they're trying to grow their business, right? And they're trying to get someone who has an expertise on the painting and the accounting side. Well, it's just like that with the virtual staffing piece. You know, you have phone calls coming in, you have things that need to be filed, customers that need to be followed up with, invoices. And, you know, a great example that you mentioned beforehand is many people are spending a ton of money on marketing, right, and time. They're posting Shorts, recording podcasts, and when those phone calls come in, they don't have anybody to pick up the phone. And oftentimes, just like you said, and everyone here listening, I'm sure know, if you don't get that phone the first time, they're going to the next person on Google, the next person on Google. So having someone that kind of sits in that intersection of non-revenue-producing tasks is what oftentimes people use a virtual staff member for.

Yeah, it's huge. Like what you mentioned in terms of like those leads coming in, like if If you're too busy to answer the phone, that's just costing you a huge amount of money. If your phone is ringing and you're missing it and it's from leads, I mean, just count up how many missed calls you're getting and, you know, multiply that by your close rate, you know, and that's basically in which your average job size is. So like, let's say over the course of a month, if you're still answering the phone, if you miss like 10 phone calls, which is, you know, may not sound like a lot to some, but let's say you missed 10 phone calls, and if they were all leads that were coming in and you have like a 50% close rate, that's 5 jobs. If you have average job size of, you know, $5,000, let's say, that's $25,000. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, one thing they don't like to highlight, because oftentimes people hear that like, well, great, I'll get a phone answering service. You know, I caution you there as well. Having a phone answering service and a staff, a dedicated staff member oftentimes cost about the same. The difference is, is having a dedicated staff member, you'll have someone who knows your business, right? You'll be able to coach them on how to communicate to your clients the way you want your clients to be communicated with, where an answering service will just answer the phone, put them on a spreadsheet for you and say, hey, call them back later. You also have the side of things where you can give that person additional tasks while they're waiting for that phone to be ringing. They could be doing whatever you want for them, updating your Facebook, updating your LinkedIn, updating your website. You can have that person be multifaceted, which oftentimes in my experience with my previous organization was that regardless of the industry that our folks would find themselves in, they often were a general marketer, would be the best way to describe it. They did a little bit of everything and they did a little bit of marketing.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, it's huge. And, uh, I think a lot of hesitation for, for painting business owners that I've spoke to is, one, they're not sure where to go to get this, and then two, they're concerned about the cost, like bringing on somebody to be full-time in their business. You know, they might have hired painters before, and it's kind of like a straightforward, okay, I have projects, like I get, get Cruz. But like having like a full-time person, or maybe, maybe even just part-time, but full part-time to full-time person like in the business every day, that might be, oh man, that's, that seems like it's gonna be a lot of money that's coming out of their pocket. So what would you say to, to folks, um, like where can you find people to, to fill this role, and what are you looking, looking at in terms of cost?

No, Great question. And I'll talk about the cost that you're gonna be paying, not the opportunity cost you'll have by missing phone calls and things like that, because that's out there as well. You have two paths and the first one's one I don't recommend 'cause I've seen it go awry so many times. It's hiring a freelancer. You can go to Fiverr or many other freelancer-based pages and hire someone for $500 a month. Right? They'll be out of South Africa or some Southeast Asian-based country, and you'll spend $500 a month and you'll get somebody who will work for you. That's on the really low end. However, oftentimes we found ourselves— my previous organization, we were a value-based organization, not a, you know, cost competitor. And so we were about $1,500 a month, um, was our average spend, actually Can't even say it was average. That was our lowest entry point was about $1,500 per month. Um, and that was because we were hiring straight out of Mexico. Um, we— English as C1 was requirement tested, uh, written and verbal. Uh, we also required education verification. So everyone had a degree. So you can get a variety of people, but I would caution people to go straight to a freelancer because you have no protection there. Uh, you're going to entrust this person to answer your phone, emails, and maybe even make payments for you and send invoices. You're going to want someone there to guarantee your protection and support, which is what a BPO is, a business processing organization. At Telehealth, my previous organization, that company would ensure that the people had background checks, that if they did something wrong, they would have some sort of of course, uh, you know, some reaction would happen, whether it's disciplinary, legal in any way. So it gave you a stronger sense of protection versus just hiring some random person out of Africa, which a lot of people do, Venezuela as well, and then they're just rolling the dice. You don't know what you get, though you are getting it very cheap.

Yeah, so it sounds like going to like Upwork or Fiverr, you can go direct to folks outside of the country, you're just taking on some additional risk there. It might be cheaper, but the cost is hidden and it's the risk of them not following through, not doing your process, doing something with the sensitive data that you have access to, that sort of thing.

I've heard stories about virtual assistants that were hired through Upwork using credit cards, maxing them out for their clients, stealing proprietary information and starting their own company that did just the same thing as that company did. And so I've heard all the horror stories. You know, I used to always say at TeleHelping, we were back-to-back lawsuit champions. We never lost a fight, whether it was persecuting— sorry, not persecuting, sorry, prosecuting, different word— prosecuting someone who did something that violated their agreement. Or, you know, likewise, you know, there's also the ones where clients take the people from you, but we always protect our clients. And put a lot of money into ensuring they're always protected. You want those companies between you and that international freelancer.

That makes sense. And so like you said, a company like Telehealth will make sure that the folks that they have as a plug into your business, they have like, you know, a certain level of English that they speak, a certain level of education. And training, so they've been vetted at some level before, you know, me as the painting business owner even gets to interact with them. Will they also help with like placing? Like if I say, hey, uh, I need someone who can do some marketing tasks, answer the phone, maybe do some phone calls, outbound phone calls, do they, do they help place that if I give them that information?

Or, you know, that's a great question, and I can only speak to what Telehealth did. Um, I know that industry practice is to have a large group of folks waiting and standing by to be assigned to a person. So it's more so having a solution waiting for a problem. I, I think that's the most military way in the world to look at things. As two veterans, uh, I like seeing a problem and drafting a solution. And so a place like Telehealth, we used a jobs-to-be-done approach to things, and And we was like, oh, what does the client want to achieve? And from that, they would develop a job description that then would be applied through a search. And so it would be exactly what the client's looking to achieve that would result in the person that they'll end up interviewing. One of the great things that we haven't, we talk about just the hiring piece, but people are people. And with people comes payroll, concerns about payroll, HR, concerns about performance, concerns about job security, all these things that go into the overhead of a human being position is taken care of by the BPO. And so, and they make sure that really the virtual staff members' only focus is whatever task you have them doing. That's their focus. If it's payroll, if it's, you know, sick time, all those vacation things, all that's taken care of by the BPO so that you can focus on making money. Yeah.

So you're only responsible for the monthly payment to the BPO starting somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 per month approximately. And then whatever task you're assigning your virtual assistant, like making sure they have some processes to work with and standard operating procedures.

Yeah. And I'd like to go ahead and plug Bookkeeper for Painters here because we would— and don't shoot at me, Telehelping, but we would give clients accountants from Mexico all the time that, well, a full-time person even from Mexico to do accounting was far more than they would pay for bookkeeping for painting services. And because accountings are very specialized, and then they still wouldn't be able to file the taxes. That's a really expensive niche placement for a virtual staff member. You see that with in the $2,500+ range for that and lawyers. Right. But most people don't need those particular placements. People hiring an accountant from Mexico is most likely an accounting firm who provides bookkeeping and taxes as a service, or a lawyer who wants translation documents and drafts. Those hire those really special ones. Everyone else, I'd say 70% of folks, they're hiring someone to do general staff, and they're also doing marketing associated with it. Because it's— in 2025, if you own a business, you're an influencer.

Yeah, yeah, social media is big. And speed to lead, uh, making sure your Facebook— because seems like when someone looks into your business, like, they— if they see your Google results, they'll also just check out your Facebook page to see what's going on there. And, and if it has a bunch of before and afters of how you've you know, blew your clients away with amazing results, they'll probably, you know, pick up the phone and give you a call. So yeah, those, those things are like really, um, they, they can be very impactful for your business, especially if you keep on top of them, doing it consistently. And as a painting business owner growing from, you know, $350,000, $500,000 to $1 million or more, you won't have time to do those daily tasks. And just getting that off your plate is will be a huge win, and you'll easily see the return on investment. Because, you know, we mentioned earlier, if you're missing a few phone calls a month, that's probably cost you thousands of dollars. You're probably missing one or two or maybe three phone calls a month. If you had someone always answering it, that would easily cover the cost of that, that virtual assistant just being able to answer the phone every single time, as opposed to missing, you know, when you're trying to answer it and you're missing a few phone calls a month, right?

Yeah. And if you're on the job site and you're out quoting people and you're focused on driving the business to its growth, it's hard to sit by and wait for that phone. You know, you're going to be putting money— you know, speed to lead was a great example. Many clients that I worked with, um, had the speed to lead problem because the truth of the matter is, is most businesses aren't incredibly unique, right? And if you're in the painting business, you probably live in a city where there's another painting business, right? And so you're competing for that person's quote. And oftentimes, you know, I quote my brother here, the user, the first person on the job, you know, has the greatest chance of closing the deal. And missing that phone call is, is half the battle. Can't do it. Yeah.

What would you say are some common mistakes that business owners make when trying to hire an admin?

Yeah, um, one is, uh, not knowing what you're trying to achieve. You know, oftentimes we would have folks who want to hire someone because maybe they don't want to do a task, but they're like, I'm going to make them do this. And like, great, what are we trying to accomplish here? Like, I just don't want to do it. And so we would dissect kind of the intent of the client. And oftentimes those who go looking for something, they find that what they're looking for isn't the original thought process they set out on. They'll say, I just need someone to do marketing. Well, marketing's entirely more complex than just marketing. You know, sure, manage the Facebook, but where's the content coming from? Who's writing the content? Who's targeting the audience? And so oftentimes when people are looking for it, they find out that what they need is different than what they wanted. And so that's where a BPO comes into play, a good BPO. Um, be very clear, you go to most BPOs, they will give you whatever you ask for. Um, the BPOs who question you, push back, dive a little deeper, those are the ones you want to work with because they're trying to get correct placement first, not the quickest placement to get paid.

That's a good point. What would you say, because one of the objections I've heard before is like folks have a hesitancy to hire somebody abroad, like even if it's just from Mexico, that they feel like, oh, they're not going to be able to speak English well enough to be understood. Or there might be just cultural differences. But I guess, what are some things that you've learned? You know, what are the benefits to having someone that's from a virtual assistant coming from Mexico or some similar country, as opposed to trying to find a local person to help you?

No, that's a great question. And that's exactly why I only hired and operated my call centers and people out of Mexico. Because most, I'd say a third of the company was native English speaking. They were born in the United States, went to college in the United States, and so they had a high degree of understanding. And everyone else who spoke English, if you don't know this, most affluent paths in life in Mexico start with a bilingual school. And so the folks we're hiring that are coming out of university, that are coming out of other jobs, they've been speaking English since they were kids. And so that's the great thing about— we don't see Mexico— we see it is a foreign country, but we have to understand that our paths in terms of culture, relationships, business are so intertwined that it makes Mexico the perfect partner for seeking to have someone who is competent, who is skilled, but who's less expensive than their US counterpart. Now, folks in Mexico can get pricey, but even the most pricey person that you'll get out of Mexico is going to come with a greater amount of experience education, and yes, the English than say someone at a similar price in the United States. You just can't beat it. And I would even go on a limb to say now with current tariffs being implemented, the power of the dollar, the weakening of the peso, right? Now more than ever, you're going to get Mexico at a bargain. And people down there want to work for strong American companies where they They know that they can wake up every day, Monday through Friday. They can show up somewhere, they're going to get paid. And that's what I love about Mexico-based culture and work. If they're really good at their job, they're focusing on keeping this job and staying in it forever. They're not sitting there, "Oh, I'm good at my job. I want a better job." That doesn't exist in so much of the culture of Mexico because they think more about stability and longevity than they do about hierarchical process and rising.

So if you, if you go with someone from Mexico, it sounds like you could, you probably have them for several years and they'll be, they'll be happy with that consistent work as long, you know, doing the same thing every day. That, that seems like fits in right in with their culture, not expecting to like, oh, I want to be COO at some point or something like that.

Yeah, I, I'd actually say that finding those people was very difficult in Mexico. Um, uh, you know, from the side of things of running the company, the headquarters side, I wanted business leaders. Like, I want individual leaders working for me directly because I want to push down to the very lowest level the authority to make choices, right? And, and then pick from them with consequences. Finding those people was difficult. Find the virtual staff for the, uh, clients, very easy. Because they want someone who's going to love their job and stick with it. I'm looking for someone who always wants to push the envelope, keep growing, make things better. And, um, when you're trying to grow a rapid startup into a multi-million dollar giant, you need people who live, breathe, and sleep the company versus someone who's like, give me a job, I'm going to work this, I'm going to do great at it, and I'm going to be happy where I'm at. Cool.

Awesome. Well, what would you say to a painting business if they're struggling with wearing all the hats and feel like they could use a back office assistant, virtual assistant? What, what do they need to do to take the next steps?

No, it's a great question. And first and foremost, realize that you aren't experiencing something unique to just you, which helps you take yourself out of your shoes. There are a lot of painting businesses, a lot of business in general that are going through the same thing. You're hitting a bottleneck with your task. And in order to continue the growth that you are, the health of yourself and health of the business, you need to put responsibilities outside of your own self. And I would say, you know, I spoke to Telehealth before this, and, you know, if you want to reach out, one thing that I implemented back, back in my day as part of the plan was, is to not charge people for looking for staff. And so if you just want to kick tires, Right. They have a department called placement that their sole job is to make sure that they try to find people to put in front of you, to let you fill it out. And so if you reach out to TeleHelping, um, you can go to info@telehelping.com and say Cody referred you. Uh, one, they'll give you a discount. I asked them to do so, but also they'll guide you through the process, help you identify the role, and they'll let you know if what you're trying to accomplish is best coupled with a virtual assistant. One of the founding principles I put on the company was not to do things that we're not good at. And so if they don't believe that a virtual staff member is going to be the right solution for you, they will advise you in the best direction. Maybe it is a call answering services, maybe it's a marketing service, right? But if you're looking for someone to kind of wear a lot of hats that you're currently wearing, I suggest you give away the hat.

Excellent. So that's info@telehealthing.com.

Correct.

All right, we'll include that in the show notes as well. And we, we've used Telehelping and Bookkeeping for Painters to do marketing and, uh, phone type tasks, and they've always been great, great placement. So I definitely highly recommend if you're looking for somebody to help get those admin tasks off your plate, uh, give Telehelp a look and, uh check out, give them an email, um, as Cody said. But I appreciate your time today, Cody. Are there any last thoughts that you'd like to give the audience before we let you go?

Yeah, and I think this is very important for those who are considering Bookkeeper for Painters and looking for accounting services or looking for general admin services. You're great at what you do, but you can't do everything as best as someone who's specialized in it. Whether it's your accounting, your bookkeeping, or if it's having someone whose daily job is to sit there to make sure things get posted online and phones get answered. Just remember, you're the leader of the business, you're not the business.

Yeah, excellent. All right, with that, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you go to Facebook and type in Grow Your Painting Business, uh, send an invite to join the group, post your questions or any thoughts for future episodes. Love to hear from you. And with that, we will talk to you next week.

Thank you, Daniel.