12 Sales Mistakes That Cost A Painter Plenty…

There are 12 mistakes that may be costing you a small fortune, and I am sure that you’re doing a few of these. This training may save you more money and make you more money than anything else you’ve ever watched. For me, it’s Brandon Lewis with the Academy, for Professional painting contractors. And it’s just as important to know what to do in a sales process as it is to know what not to do. And I’m going to reveal things to you that can really help you. So take out a pen and a piece of paper. You’re going to want to take these notes, maybe even watch this video again. Let’s get right into it. First off, this is a cool parlor trick I do. Not many of you know this, but I was raised by carnies and I used to travel with the carnival. I ran away from home very young and I had the ability to predict the future, to divine what was going on in people’s lives.

And I made a good little side hustle as a fortune-teller and as a psychic on the carnival circuit. If I wasn’t doing that, I was doing midget wrestling. And so at any rate, I’m going to now predict what you do in your sales process. If you’ll give me a moment. Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve done this. I may be a little rusty. I’m getting a vision. Here it is. So the phone rings. Sometimes you answer it, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you get a lot of calls from spam callers and you let it go to voicemail. But at some point you’re on the phone with a client and you want to know, “What type of project is it? When do you need it done? What’s your contact information? Where can we meet?” And then you show up, whenever you can get around to it, and you pet the dog.

You talk about the bowling trophies. You try to build rapport and find some real good personal connection. And at some point that gets awkward, in which case you say, “Show me what you got.” And you walk around and you look at stuff and you kind of eyeball it and you write things down. And at some point you say to the client, “It’s nice to meet you. Here’s a business card. Let me email you an estimate.” And then later on that evening or the next day or maybe two days later, you email them an estimate. And then at some point you send them another email, maybe call them or text them and ask them, did they get it? And if they have any questions. And maybe you do that once more. And all that lasts about a week and a half for follow up. Now, have I predicted with my magical abilities, what you do primarily to try to sell painting services?

If so, I’m here to tell you that that doesn’t work. Does not work. And the reason I know that you’re doing this is because I’ve conducted 2,500 assessments. I have worked for 150 painting contractors. I’m not psychic. I had a guy come up to me at the painting Profits Summit and I have folks tell this to me all the time on the phone. “It’s like when I watch your videos, I feel like you know exactly what I’m going through and you know exactly what I’m doing.” And it’s not because I’m a genius or I’m a mind reader, it’s because I have talked to so many painters. I’ve worked with painters for eight years and I used to own a painting company. So that’s how I know. So let’s get right into this. The first mistake that you are making, is misunderstanding the math of sales.

I will have people tell me all the time, “Brandon, I close all kinds of jobs and I’m so busy, I can hardly get to anything.” Or whatever it is. And some people are in that category, they’ve got more work than they can do. And then other people are really trying to get ahead. Well, I’m going to address the first group first. What I typically see is if people have a sales process similar to what I just described, and if they are booked real out, real far out rather, most of the time the reason for that is because they’re too cheap. I get on the phone with people and they don’t do job costing and say they really don’t know what they make per hour if they paint in the field, they have no idea. They don’t know what they’re getting per hour. They don’t even know how much money they made last year.

All they know is that they’re busy. Now they’re broke, but they’re busy. See, the sales process controls three big metrics. Number one, it controls… Actually, controls about four. Number one, it controls your close rate, which is what most people know. Look how often people say yes to you. The second thing it controls is, your average transaction size. If you have a persuasive sales process, you might go from an average sales size of 3,200 to 4,200, or 4,700. Okay? The other thing it controls is your optimal… Or not your optimal, but your maximum ethical charge rate. So let’s say right now if you do job costing, which most of you don’t, and you’re actually charging and getting $55 an hour or $50 an hour. If you had a more persuasive sales process, you could increase your price to $60 or $65 an hour while still holding the same close rate. Because customers determine the worth of your services and whether or not they’ll buy from you based upon the experience they have in the sales process, because it’s really the only place they can go to get reliable information that’s in-depth.

Now, if you are super-duper busy, why would you not want to process more jobs that are larger and at higher prices? And if you’re real busy, why would you not want to get more profitability out of seeing fewer people? See, you can’t say, “I’m too busy to figure out the sales process.” It’s kind of an idiotic argument, but I hear lots of idiotic arguments all day long from painters. I can’t help it. I just try to help the ones that’ll listen. So it doesn’t make any sense if you’re busy that you wouldn’t want to do this more efficiently, because you’re going to spend the same amount of time. It takes about 30 minutes to go get somewhere. By the time you get in the car and get loaded up, it takes 30 to 45 minutes with a client. It takes 30 minutes to write up the estimate and come back to the office or your house.

I mean all that kind of stuff. And so you can do a real crappy process or you can do a Rolls-Royce process. You can get a lot out of your sales process or you can get very little out of your sales process. It’s more or less about the same amount of time except for this, if your sales process is lower, now you got to see more people. Which is not a time savings at all. Put another way, the math of this is, if you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over. And finally, the math is what you deposit in the bank. It’s not your feelings, it’s not your opinion. It’s math. And this is all math-related stuff. And I could go on about this. There may be some overlap as I go forward, but that’s the big math of it.

And if you’re wanting to scale your painting business and get it larger, grow up bigger, those numbers all matter. I mean, I’m telling you, when you have a average transaction size that’s 1500 larger, when you’re charging $65 instead of $55. When you don’t have to see as many people, that just all flows into your income and it makes tens of thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands and multiple hundreds of thousands depending on the size of your business. So the math really matters. And one other metric I failed to mention is, it helps control, to a large degree, your cost of sale. Okay, how much money and marketing are you going to have in your average transaction and your sales cost per transaction? So it makes your marketing more efficient, your marketing budget more efficient when you have a persuasive sales process and it reduces the amount of the job that is marketing-related, which means more profitability for you.

And because your people close more jobs and see fewer your people, that expense of the salesperson is more effectively used. Okay. That’s the math, okay. For those of you who like math, which is like three of you. Underestimating the difficulty of your job. This is the other place where people just fail miserably. When you sell painting services, after a while… And if you own a painting business, and in particular if you’ve always been a painter, you quit thinking about how big the transaction is. I mean, for most of you it’s $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $25,000 for a job and you’re trying to sell it with a shuck and jive, and a smile and an email. And that’s not how expensive things are sold in our culture. What you’re selling is the cost of a middle class divorce. It’s the cost of a new car in many cases.

It’s the cost of major cosmetic surgery. It’s a huge expense. Often when people write you a check for your painting services, it’s the largest check they will write all year, maybe for two or three years. And you can’t be casual about it. And you can’t underestimate the difficulty of the job that you have. Not only that, you are selling a very high-priced service, very expensive service in what is now a pretty darn shaky economy. And you’re selling it from a profession, a service category that has a terrible reputation. I mean, painters have a bad reputation. Drug use, felonious behavior, and then not showing up, not doing a good job. People in home services continually lie to clients and they have had bad experiences with them. So if you think that if you just show up and “I’m a good guy and my reputation precedes me. I’m just going to give them a price and if they don’t buy from me, it’s their fault.”

That is just the dumbest thing ever. You’ve got a big huge job. Every time you see a client to sell a large job in particular, but really just any job. It’s amazingly risky to the client, which leads us to the next thing. You got to see things from the client’s perspective. You do not write yourself checks. You don’t write yourself checks. You don’t swipe your own credit card. Therefore, your opinion about the sales process does not matter, because you don’t get to make the decision. Your opinion is beside the point. They make the decisions, you don’t make the decision. So your sales process has to be built around the desires and inclinations of the client. And they’ve got concerns about safety, background checks, warranties, guarantees. “Who all has used you? What did they say? Is what you’re telling me true?” All that kind of stuff.

“I’ve had bad experiences in the past. How can you tell me or relay my fears that you won’t be like that? I’ve got young teenage daughters in my house and this is primarily a male-dominated industry.” Now this goes double for commercial. People go, “Oh, it’s commercial. You just email a PDF.” I had somebody say that in a comment and that’s why I don’t ever get into the Facebook groups because people are just idiots. And I just can’t. It just makes my blood pressure go up and I can’t help these people because they don’t want to be helped. And I’m like, “So you’re trying to tell me that when the job is bigger and there’s more on the line and you could stand to benefit more, that’s the time to do a crappy job in sales. That’s the time to do things at a distance. That’s the time to not be persuasive.”

And “Oh, these people in commercial, they’re completely different.” I’m like, “No, honey. They go home to a house. The homeowner and the commercial client’s the same person. They’ve just got an extra layer of concerns and worries and fears.” And one of our members, Matt Orme did a good job of covering that at the Painting Profit Summit. I’m not going to rehash that. I can’t cover everything here, but you got to look at it from the client’s perspective or just think like you. I mean, how many times have you had somebody give you a big, huge proposal for something that’s very risky and expensive? I mean, did you just want them to not give you any information and just email you a PDF and be real casual? No, of course not. This is a small thing, but it’s a big economic impact and that’s failing to answer your phone twenty-four seven.

You are in a service business. People say, “Well, I get a lot of spam calls and so I call people back.” 65% of leads, listen to this, write it down. 65% of leads that come into your painting business that are not picked up on the phone, are abandoned. Now if you got an average transaction size of $4,000, most of you have higher and inflation has driven it even higher. But for simple math, $4,000 and let’s say that 50% of that’s gross profits, which gross profits are almost exclusively net profits after break even. That means it’s $2,000. And let’s say that your average close rate is 50%. I’m just throwing something out there for simple math, again. A thousand bucks. Well, if 65% of those calls are abandoned, then every time that phone rings, in that situation, it costs you about $650. If it’s a lead coming in.

And if you know it’s abandoned at 65%. So every time that phone rings, you might as well take out six $100 bills and just cut them up, burn them. Answer your phone, get an answering service. If you don’t know of an answering service that is economical and one that you would trust, send me an email. I’ll give you a referral. Okay, brandon@paintersacademy.com, get the phone answered. And the other thing is, getting the phone answered is something that’s to your benefit if you’re a smaller painting business or a bigger one, because sometimes you’re on the phone, sometimes you’re using the bathroom, sometimes you’re painting something, sometimes you’re writing an estimate. And if you’re trying to get something off your plate so you can focus on your business, as a small business owner in particular, getting the phone answered is something that’s fantastic and liberating and you can’t spend yourself into trouble with it. And it’s not that expensive anyway.

This one burns me up. There are people out there who are trying to teach a painting contractors to basically lose the sale before they get a chance to sell it. This whole thought of, get on the phone. And if you can ask people a bunch of mysterious questions to gauge whether they really like quality or not, is a bunch of BS. How many of you have absolutely thought that you were going to lose a job? It’s an expensive job you thought this person will never buy. I mean, you think this job has been lost before you even go. You go, you do a crappy job and you get ready to leave and the person goes, “Well, aren’t you going to let me sign the contract? Or aren’t you going to do it? I want to do it.” How many of you have been wrong about someone buying? You didn’t think they would buy, but then they bought it?

And how many of you thought for absolute certain that somebody was going to buy after you had spent maybe an hour with them. And you knew them. Maybe you even did business with them previously, and then they don’t buy? So here’s the thing, if after going through the entire sales process, you have been proven to be wrong on multiple occasions, both ways. To think that you can ask some magical questions over the phone and come up with the answers, is just idiotic. And people that teach this ought to be ran out of town on a rail. Pitch them over the phone, throw some numbers out there, lose them before you go see them. When you’re selling something remarkably expensive and risky, trying to do all that mumbo jumbo on the phone is just ridiculous. You want to build all that value, reduce all that risk, then talk about the quote.

You don’t want to bring all that stuff to the front of the sales process. Nobody does it that way. You won’t see a plastic surgeon do it that way. You won’t see a dental cosmetic surgeon do it that way. You won’t see an upscale funeral service do it that way. Or a good attorney. Or a renowned advisor of any sort because it doesn’t work. This mantra primarily is appealing to people who are lazy. Or who refuse to hire an estimator ever. Or don’t ever want to hire any painters. They got capacity issues. Now, if you ain’t ever going to hire another painter and you just want to make the absolute most money with six people, that’s kind of sort of a different story. But even so, you’re going to sacrifice what I said, the average transaction size is going to be lower for you.

The average close rate’s going to be lower for you, okay. The maximum ethical charge rate’s going to be lower for you. So doing all this stuff costs you a bunch of money. Yeah, is it quick and convenient and easy? Yeah. But it comes at a high price. And here’s the other thing they don’t ever tell you about. Most of these people that recommend this stuff, they also don’t preach what I preach, which is, staying in touch with clients because that repeat transaction is 65% bigger than the first transaction. And now that person has additional value because they can refer you. A new client can’t refer you. So you’ve lost that future transaction revenue for 10, 20, 30 years, however long you want to be in this business. So this whole, “Well, I just try to get rid of them on the phone and the ones…” I mean, it’s just nonsense.

It’s nonsense. And it is trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator with the least understanding of metrics, who is lazy and/or has a very limited mindset. This is a bad idea all the way around.

Misunderstanding the sections of the sales process. You’ve got pre-positioning, which is everything that happens from the time you answer the phone until the time you arrive. That time needs to be used to the utmost. If you’re just setting the appointment and then having radio silence or just sending a confirmation email that’s all administrative. That’s just about, “Hey, we’re coming.” That’s a bad idea. That presentation time, you need to think about from the initial meeting, the handshake, what you’re going to do with them, to what happens when you sit down with them, to what happens when you’re doing your measuring call, what information you leave while you go to the car to print out the estimate. What happens when you come back in. All this stuff. And then all the way through follow-up and how long does that last, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Thin slice, every experience that the client goes through, and at every step make that experience better and more persuasive. It’s not just one big gobbledy goop mess. It needs to be sectioned out. And every section has different things you need to do. Here’s a good one. This really doesn’t have anything to do with the persuasive elements of sales, but it does to a degree. If you’re not taking measurements and other people are, you look like a goon. Not taking measurements is the same thing as if you go to a restaurant and you place a complex order and somebody else places a complex order and somebody else places a complex order and the lady or guy, the waiter, the waitress never writes it down and just goes uh huh. You know all those orders are going to be wrong. You’re going to send them back five times. The shortest pen is better than the longest memory. And if somebody else measures and you don’t, it just lets them know that you’re guessing.

Guessing doesn’t work. I’ve tried this experiment over and over again. I may be doing it at a speaking engagement just as a parlor trick here coming up. You can put four people in a room, make them all guess the labor hours. You’ll get four different guesses, has no reality, has a huge variance. You can’t take a 10-foot board in to the back of your yard and cut it exactly six feet without a tape measure. Can’t do it. It’ll be five and a half feet, it’ll be six feet and three inches. It’ll just be all over the place. Yet you think you can go to a house and that you can just eyeball it and guess something that has maybe 50, 60 different measurements. Soffits, fascia, square footage of siding, number of doors, number of windows, handrails, decking, steps, and that’s on every side of the house.

You’re going to guess all that, right? And it’s going to be accurate, without a whole bunch of variance. If you you got 20% variance and you’re shooting for 50% gross profit, three over five or two over five, is either over or almost over half your profit. Guessing doesn’t work. You can’t teach somebody to cock their head to the right and pull a number out of the ether. It is the most ridiculous thing. And people try to persuade me that they can do it. And I’ve never seen anybody that can. It’s the number one reason every painting franchise in existence can take somebody with zero painting experience and turn them into someone who can accurately estimate to a degree that is more proficient than somebody who’s been doing it for 30 years out in the field. Production rates. If you don’t have them, don’t know how to develop them, reach out to me.

We have a course for it. We have a course for the whole sales process as well. But guys, guessing is ridiculous. Nobody goes to a pizza shop, orders a pizza, and then the cash register looks back at the cook and goes, “How much is this pizza?” You paint the same 20% of surfaces 80% of the time. Measure it. You wouldn’t go down to a track and look at it and, “Well, it’s about 10 minutes.” No, you’d set a clock, you’d start running, you’d stop the clock. And that’s how long it takes to run a mile. Same thing on these surfaces. All right, I don’t want to belabor that point. So, trades people have a reputation for verbally promising the moon and giving people a moon pie. They are liars. I mean, most people’s experiences with home service providers are about 60% negative.

Mine included. And I think, I’ve fallen into the trap of hiring some real dumb asses over the years. The cobbler’s kids never have shoes, right? And so when you go to show up to somebody and you’re just good old, my-reputation-precedes-me, Bob. And you just glad-hand and “We’re going to do this.” And I make all these verbal promises. Well, guess what? Everybody else makes a bunch of verbal promises too. Now, very few companies deliver. And because of that, the way that this would be like if you could think about it from the client’s perspective, which is something we just talked about.

It’d be like if you went into a warehouse and it was completely empty and there were three cars in there. Three cars, they all look the same to you. All three cars have car covers on them, so you can’t see the cars. But there are three salespeople. They stand beside three cars. All of them are good glad-handers and they’re going to promise you just about the same thing. All of them hand you a business card. One of them gives you a price of 20,000, one 25,000, one 30,000. But the sales presentations are the same, and the information you receive is the same. Which car do you buy? The cheapest one probably.

This does not work. So if you’re going to tell them that your guys are good, give them background checks, show them pictures of them, put bios in your sales. If you’re going to tell them you’re going to stand behind your work, give them a written satisfaction guarantee and maybe some testimonials from other clients. And pictures and handwritten notes and reviews pulled from their native environment, that you do stand behind your guarantee. If you went to a court of law, you could not tell a judge, “Well judge, I’m a pretty good painter.” And that’s not proof. You’d have to bring in documentation and witnesses to testify to and to provide third-party evidence that you’re good. So those things should be in your sales process before, during, and after the sale. So when people compare their experience with you and another painter, number one, the experience is completely different.

The messaging is completely different. The proof is different. The tools are different. The feel is different. Everything’s different. But if everything’s the same, but you’re trying to be a premium price painter, good luck.

Trying to sell by email. This is a specific thing, but it’s an important thing. Email doesn’t work. It’s idiotic. Trying to sell something really expensive by email is one of the dumbest things that I hear people try to justify in this industry. When I ask people what they do in their follow-up when they sell by email, “I call them and text them to make sure they got it.” Wait a minute, let me get this straight. The thing that makes all the money for your family, which is the customer saying yes to the estimate, signing the contract, is put in a place that is so routinely lost, that you think that’s a good place to put it.

If you put your car keys somewhere and it was only there… The car keys when you woke up in the morning, were only there, I don’t know, 30% of the time, 50% of the time. Would you keep putting your car keys in that spot? No, you wouldn’t. Important things do not get put in places where they are lost. Print out your estimate on the spot. Ask for the job on the spot. We’ll get to that in a moment.

“Well, how do I do that?” Hit print instead of send, put a printer in your car. Come on now, Gutenberg invented the printing press back in the 1400s. Here we are. It’s 2023. Print the damn estimate in the car. Old people are your best demographic bar none. People 60, 70, 80 years old with lots of money that have no interest or time in painting, can’t do it, won’t do it. They don’t want to hunt through a billion emails on AOL and Yahoo where they get a 100 to 200 emails and things are spammed and cut out. And now if they want to share it with their spouse, what are they supposed to do, leaf through there, find the thing, print it out, show it to Earl. The hell they will. When you print and leave an estimate, they have to take an action to discard it. When you email an estimate, they have to take an action to keep it.

Do you see the difference? If you can’t see the difference, you can’t be helped. I’m going to move along. You might as well just not even listen to the next point, because you’re hopeless. Not asking for the sale. This is the one that perplexes me. Spend an hour and a half of your time with somebody and not say, “Well, given everything that we’ve gone over here today, what’s your opinion of this proposal?” Listening to them, restating things, answering concerns. “Well, with everything we’ve discussed here today, would you like to go ahead and move forward so we can put you on the production schedule? Yes or no? Yes. Would you mind signing the contract? It’s the only way that we can get you on the schedule.” Push it across the table and get the signature. If you’ve tuned out, tune back in. The number one indication of the persuasiveness of your sales process is this number, your on-site close rate. Of all the jobs you see, what percentage of them say yes while you’re there?

And if you do a good job and you have a persuasive sales process, you’ll close about 30% to 35% to 40% of all the jobs you ever close, on the spot. Even ones that are $15,000, $20,000. Our members routinely do it. I know it can be done. “Well, you can’t none.” Bull crap. You don’t even know. You run one painting business, one painting business. That ain’t a lot working with 450, and running one ain’t like fixing them. Those are two different jobs. This is the kind of stuff that fixes them. Okay. So you ask for the damn business. If you’ve not heard no twice, you hadn’t asked. Now you don’t have to be pushy, you don’t have to be bossy, you don’t have to be ugly, nothing.

But you need to learn how to ask for the business and then try to get the real objections out of people and deal with them, and then ask at least one more time. If you didn’t like doing this, then don’t own a painting business. You’re in sales. Did you know? Did you know? Did you know? Did you know that you make anywhere from 20 to 10 times, 20 to 10 times as much money when you do follow-up as you do when you write an estimate, in the same amount of time? So when people say, “Well Brandon, I ain’t got time to do follow-up.” I’m like, “Well, you sure as hell don’t have time to go write another estimate.” Next time somebody calls you for an estimate, hang up on them. Do your follow-up, you’ll make more money.

People don’t always say yes right away. You need to be using mail, email, phone, and text. Those are four mediums at your disposal. Use them all.

“Well, I don’t think, I don’t…” Yo, you don’t think, that’s the problem. Don’t project your feelings and excuses on the client. You are not your client. I have to tell that to people all the time. You’re not your client. You’re not selling yourself. Follow-up. Automated follow-up sucks. It’s better than nothing. An automated follow-up did halfway decent for about the first year and a half it was out. Because it was novel and people couldn’t tell that it was from a robot. But I guarantee you, if you go to again, the tippy top end of white collar professionals in your area that are selling services, that aren’t related to home services, legal, medical, accounting, software, you name it.

They ain’t doing automated follow-up. This is high-end large transaction selling. It has to be sold a certain way. If you want to make white collar money, you have to sell like a white collar professional. When people can tell that it’s automated and it’s got an unsubscribe button and it looks like a bunch of junk, and text three to opt out and all that crap, it doesn’t work. I know, because I’ve had people change from automated to good old-fashioned personalized follow-up, which is not hard to do, and makes a ton of money. I mean, there’s nowhere else in your business you can put money and time and get as much out of it hardly as putting your money and time into follow-up. Hire somebody, stick them in a seat. They come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they work 10 hours a day or 10 hours a week rather.

I just don’t get it. If you spend an hour and a half doing all this mumbo jumbo, you ain’t going to spend an extra 10, 15 minutes to properly follow up with people. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s illogical. Don’t let your emotions make your decisions, because you don’t get to deposit emotions at the bank. Next time you go to the bank, and you deposit a check and you think it’s a little smaller and your account’s a little smaller than what you want. Go up to the teller and tell her about your feelings. See if it helps you make any money. Probably won’t. If it does, let me know the bank you go to, I’d like to go there. Here’s another one. Inaccurate assumptions about the length of the sales cycle. Did you know the average American takes 68 days to make a $500 major home durable goods purchase?

And about 40% of them, I think, go to the store three times or more to touch it, look at it and think about it. You’re selling something that’s 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 and you expect that whole thing, that whole cycle to wrap up in a week and a half or two. You are crazy. People take months to make these big decisions. Your job is to hang in there with them until they say yes. Now finally, this is very much like planting a tomato plant. You plant a tomato plant, if there’s not tomatoes on it, two weeks from now you’re going to cut the thing down. No, you know that some things take a while. Well, this is one of the things that takes a while. And some of those tomatoes are going to come in early in the season, maybe even March. Some of them are going to come in in September, depending on your climate.

Your job is to be there when the tomatoes turn red. And to keep the chipmunks and the squirrels and the bugs off your tomatoes. Or in this case of selling to keep other painters away from your clients, takes a while. Don’t be impatient. Stick in there with them till you get a yes or no. So, now that I’ve told you everything that works and a lot of you that have a sales process that doesn’t work, are going to want to write nasty comments and just argue with me, even though you have no experience or qualifications to do so. Please send hate mail to HateMail@PaintersAcademy.com. That’s HateMail@PaintersAcademy.com. Now, it will bounce back and say, “This is not a legitimate email address”, and that is nonsense. I read every one of those that you send HateMail@PaintersAcademy.com. Go ahead and send it there.

Now, for those of you who are like, “Who’s this redneck with the Southern accent? Who’s telling me stuff that makes me mad because now I realize I got to do something about it.” But you’re curious. “Well, this all sounds like common sense. Sounds like common sense, but I don’t really understand how to do it, don’t know how to do it. But I ain’t going to call this guy. God knows I’m not going to call this guy. I’d have to admit that I was doing something wrong in my business. I’m a man, that’s too much. That’s too far of a bridge to go.” Or, “I’m a woman and he’s a man and he’s probably sexist. Anyways, I certainly can’t ask for his help.” So for those of you who are curious but not committed, you can go to paintersacademy.com and download this report.

It’s a slightly different cover image, but this is what it looks like on the website. 5 Keys for Finding Success In an Uncertain Economy. This is what it looks like. You can’t see it. I’m not holding it in front of the camera very well, but that’s what it looks like. And it basically just talks about when the economy’s all crazy and you still need to make money, how do you do it? And what really matters? And it’s all in this report. And finally, all for those of you who are super-duper brave, who realize that sales is important, as is marketing and client reactivation and retention and operations and production rates. And getting online reviews, maybe even selling your business, getting some equity in it, finance, cash flow, managing painters, recruiting and hiring.

And you’re like, “I don’t know how to do all this stuff very well. I just went from being a painter to a crew leader to an owner, and I’ve been doing this for a while, and the money and the millions and the billions and the hundreds of thousands are not piling up like I had hoped they would.” Email me. This is what I do all day long. Every day is just help painting contractors. Be patient. I’m in the middle of my busy season. I’m about to go to PCA Expo, which I hope you’ll join me at if you’re going toward Albuquerque. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday at 10:30 Mountain Time. I do believe, How to get to 30% cash flow. Look at your programs. And I just got out of the Painting Profit Summit where a whole lot of people joined and I’m just onboarding folks and I’m a little bit behind, but I am catching up.

But although I’ll get behind next week when I’m out of town. So if you email me, Brandon@PaintersAcademy.com, if I don’t get back to you right away, I will eventually get to you. And for whatever reason, if it’s been a little while and you think I didn’t get it, just hit it again. And you can always call the office (423) 800-0520. Usually Jennifer answers. You may get the answering service. And if you do leave a message and Fer, which is what we call Jennifer for short, will call you back. That’s all I got guys. In closing. Sales is like this mechanism. So here, here’s the mechanism and all the leads come into the mechanism and if this mechanism sucks, a few leads come out over here and the leads are smaller and they’re worth less money and they’re hard… Or the jobs are smaller, they’re worth less money and they’re harder to get.

But if this thing is really good, then the leads come in here and they’re bigger and they’re more profitable and they’re easier to get. But everything goes through this. And once you fix it once, then things go through here forever and they’re worth more money. And it takes less time. So it’s idiotic to keep this thing crappy, unless you’re just a dunce. So let’s fix this as quickly as you can. Brandon Lewis here with the Painter’s Academy, flying through this on a Friday. Listen, I stayed here late and I’m going to fight rush hour traffic, going up to Signal Mountain to help you with your sales process. So the least you could do is email me for a diagnostic. There’s a guilt trip. Guilt trips are free. Unlike vacations which cost more in today’s economy. The guilt trips are always free. So there’s a little guilt trip for you.

I hope you have a fantastic day and a wonderful weekend. This is Brandon Lewis with the Painters Academy. I hope you close them all and I hope you close them all for top dollar. And if I can help you, let me know. I’ll holler at you next time, guys. Take care.