A painter explains how production rates help you estimate jobs accurately, set competitive prices, and motivate crews with bonuses. The speaker covers building rates internally or using the PCA production-rate handbook to guide your bids and scale your business.
Chapters
Painter Performance pay system, you're using production rates, and those production rates should be generating a set of budgeted hours for the project that you're estimating. How many man-hours is it going to take to paint this project? That should help you generate your price that you're going to charge your customer, that you will give to your crew lead, and they will then have that budget hours to work from to, uh, hopefully beat the budget. What you can do is incentivize them to beat the budget by giving them bonuses when they do. Production rates are specific amounts of hours it takes to paint a specific surface. For example, a production rate might be 10 linear feet of a specific type of railing, you would either internally develop these production rates by, through your experience, or PCA has a production rate book. If you go to the PCA's website and look up cost and estimating, they actually sell this huge binder that has a bunch of tables of production rates based off of the average painter speed. It has all these different surfaces. You get that to start out with if you don't have any internal production rates, or just develop them on your own based off of your observation of your team, how long it takes them to paint specific surfaces. The production rate is super important to make sure you're dialed in on your pricing, but also helps you scale your operation.
