How to Grow a Painting Business Fast

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN TO RICH’s REVEALING INTERVIEW

All over the nation, painting contractors struggle to grow their painting businesses fast. Many sweat and toil for years, when the business-growth problems have already been solved and packed up in off-the-shelf systems that…

1. Drive Leads in Abundance with Regularity
2. Increase Sales Closing Rates and Profit Margins
3. Keep Competitors from Stealing Customers with Low-Ball Pricing
4. Eliminate the Unpredictable Nature of Painting with Steady Referrals
5. Close Huge Commercial Painting Contracts

In this interview, Rich reveals exactly what he did to take an already successful painting business and move it to the next level of success.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Brandon: Hello, I’m Brandon Lewis with the Academy for Professional Painting Contractors and I have Rich Bardy joining me. Rich is an assertive and proactive marketer and sales professional for his painting business. He’s impressed me with his implementation of the Core 5 strategies in a very short period of time. Rich, I wanted to have you join me so we could share some of your results, but more importantly your practical insights with APPC members and other fellow painting contractors. Rich, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rich: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Brandon: Well Rich, your painting story especially as of late is rather nontraditional at least from my vantage point. Initially we talked about the fact that you stayed stalled and small for quite a while in your painting career even prior to joining the APPC and then something radical happened. I mean you really started growing your business. I can remember when we initially spoke. Can you tell folks about your background, a little bit about specifically your transition in advance of joining the APPC and what prompted it?

Rich: Well, I was doing the painting myself for a long time and I noticed a large shift in the market. We made it through the recession on a smaller scale and we had noticed as we hired and started implementing some basic sales strategies, I’d been in sales and marketing for kind of my whole career pretty much from car sales to mortgage sales, sales management, went to business school and then started the painting company, and I realized that there are so many practical applications of sales. In a painting company you don’t necessarily have to always be the painter you can be an entrepreneur.

So from that point about seven years after doing the painting and becoming an expert in my field, I won several awards locally for the skill of painting, but I really wanted to kind of transition out of that and enjoy more time at home instead of painting for eight to ten hours a day, needing guidelines with customers to go into more of a sales environment, so that’s what we did.

Through that transition we’ve implemented a lot of basic sales strategies that you can find out there that are complimentary to many different businesses but you can always orient sales to any sort of sale, which is a painting contractor is a sale. So we took some ideas and started to hit the road with it, you know, got some great employees to kind of take over the in the field work and we started to get some small lead development coming on and we noticed that there was a really good opportunity to look at the painting as a numbers game instead of house to house to house as a painter.

So after the seventh year I just had a couple of challenges. I wanted to create more time with family and less time being tied down to the business working as I mentioned before working the eight to ten hours in the field and also doing the customer relationships at night and on the weekends. I noticed that that was a big strain as far as time in the day. So we did that and obviously implementing all of that it led to a huge spike in revenue per month, even per week. And then you grow frustrated even with new challenges and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I look for experts in the field to kind of start a mentorship that can help me and the APPC was the perfect set for that.

Brandon: Well let’s back up just a little bit before we get into that. Seven years essentially doing the same thing, or something similar. It always amazes me to talk to owners because, and this is the question I would put to you in a little bit more pointed fashion, did something happen? Did you read something, see something, often people turn for two reasons, either because of pain which is about 80% of the reason most people turn in any situation, or aspiration? Now there’s a little mix of both but what was it, I mean you just didn’t wake up one day and decide, “Okay, I’m throwing all this out the window.” Can you talk a little bit about what made you take that initial journey when you just started improving your sales processes and backing out of the field. What prompted that?

Rich: Well, I started to realize that I need to be able to stop micromanaging and delegate. That was huge for me. I was always very nitpicky with everything, but I’ve come to realize that with the right systems in place you can maintain quality and production at the same time with systems. Systematic ways to let guys know what type of materials they’re going to need or equipment they’re going to need, hiring strategies, you know, from start to finish.

What I’ve experienced with the pain, I keep going back to that word, there’s pain in feeling stuck. You can only be so many places at one time so you have to figure out what are, like you said Brandon, you have to stop doing the mundane activities in the business and start doing what makes money or what grows the company because the more revenue you pull in it doesn’t have to be about becoming rich. It can be about becoming happy. And it can be about becoming a good provider, not necessarily for my direct family but also for the families of the people that work under us and taking that responsibility to have three project managers that rely on systems to provide for their family and also the painters under the managers, production, office management, sales management, whatever it might be.

So you’re able to have a broader scale of people you can help. You become more professional when you can focus your time. It’s those activities that are not the $12-$15 an hour activities, but the real activities that turnover large revenue and profit margins to increase the size of your company but also not pull your hair out at the same time.

That’s why the Core 5 was very important to me because it really helped with time management. It helped me pull away from phone calls and answering the phone and traveling on the road five-six hours a day because our territory is relatively large here in New York, we’re from Westchester County up to Duchess County. We cover about 61 Townships and cities within our coverage area and I was doing it all myself and as I stopped doing the painting and even into the sales we’re taking more calls, we’re getting more leads and then I find myself that I’m on the road all day and my phone’s ringing and my wife’s hating me more because the phone becomes more important than family time and it all correlates down to quality of life. You try to do everything your attention gets distracted from the important things.

As you build your company like you always stress make sure you delegate to the right person, but make sure you’re delegating the activities that don’t necessarily need to engulf all of my time so where I can worry about, like for example, training a salesperson instead of doing all the sales. It’s important to find the right person or figuring out a way to have someone answer the phones but then ask if they’re too busy reflect those calls to a qualified call center. All of these things. Having a mentor like yourself, I first and foremost will just thank you for helping me become a better father and not being a dad to my company but being a father to my son and a better husband to my wife. I thank God for that. And I don’t really know how much more I can get involved I just got tired. I just got tired of the business running my life. It was like a ball and chain after a while.

It’s great, you know, you grow a little, a little spike increases and now you’re going from like a job a week to two jobs and you have four employees and then you have eight employees but you notice that there’s touchups here and call backs, maybe an upset customer, so the APPC helped us put in systems that help increase our profit margin, also help decrease our touchup ratio and have more happy customers as a result of it. Is it difficult to implement when you’re busy? There’s no question about that, but if you do it systematically like you outlined one per month, slowly but surely, and make sure you’re doing 100% of it not 80% of it you’re going to get the return.

So I hope that answers your question.

Brandon: You’ve already given a ton of value just here. But outline this for the people on the call because I have a little bit more intimate knowledge of what was going on in your business. You were processing lots of leads from internet sources that are frankly very, very difficult to sell and the fact that you have sold them as well and is a high percent in closing rate at the price margins you’ve done is a testament to the fact that you were a true student of sales before you ever found our system. So I want people to know that on the phone.

So often I get people on the phone and every single solitary system in their company is broken or absent. Your real strength and what you leaned on and what brought you the success that you had leading up to finding the APPC was phenomenal which goes to prove in many cases that you can get a long way doing one thing exceptionally well, but it also takes a little bit of wisdom and courage to go, “Okay, well let’s add in some missing pieces.” So let’s fast forward a little bit to maybe around the month through the weeks leading up to when you joined the APPC. Can you tell me what was happening at that time? Do you even remember how you found our system or what made you go on the hunt to go from really a pretty good painting business that the majority of people would go, “I’d like to have it as it was before you even joined,” to saying, “I’d like to take it to the next level.” What was happening there?

Rich: Well, what was going on was is that we had a very strong sales process. We would implement pricing software that would give us the opportunity to make sure that the customer had pricing on the spot. Attire was important, a collared shirt, business logo, slacks tucked in, things like that. Just to present a professional impression of the business so people can realize they’re getting a professional on the estimate and a detailed estimate on site, solid pricing, and that’s what they can expect through the whole course of the process of actually doing the painting from start to finish.

We were purchasing internet leads, very competitive, there is I’m sure there’s many companies out there that do it, they were sold over to about four contractors in total and we just noticed based off questions to those clients, our main question was what is the other painter doing? If we lose a sale. Like what is it? And it was usually because they came in cheaper, but I’d never ever heard we lost a job because we weren’t professional — ever. It was more of a budgetary problem. So you know what? Those customers at the end of the day maybe weren’t the right fit for us. We had noticed, and I have noticed over the years, when you go in cheap you end up having to do a lot of favors or wanting to make the customer happy, but you know, you give an inch you take a mile. But I really think it’s more on the contractor letting people do that instead of on the customer being not taken advantage, but they just want to know.

So we realized that when we came in with a stronger professional image or package that even though we were at a higher price point they felt much more comfortable working with us because we had the reviews, we had the experience, we had the right guys but most of all it was the process of the sale that led them to that so you set a good appointment, have a conversation with them on the phone, get information, as many questions as they’re willing to answer asked, go to the house, present yourself professionally, show up on time. We weren’t even really confirming a lot of the calls and we really didn’t have many no-shows at all. So we would go through our sales process of measuring the house with the customer and making sure that they saw us physically measuring the rooms with a laser measure or tape measure, usually a laser measure just because it’s quicker, and with the right software you can do these estimates within 15-20 minutes and they actually physically see you measuring the room so everything is done based off the square linear foot.

So after we’d done that we would present them with information and just let them know, ask for the close always and if they say no we have other people come in. It was no pressure. We’ll follow up in a few days and we’ll answer any questions you may have. And then we would leave. At that point we were at a 73% close ratio, but the leads for every 100 we purchased maybe 50 or 60 were actually turning into estimates. So there was a lot of wasted income there on the leads. But out of the estimates we did we were at about a 73% close ratio. But the funny thing is even after we had our initial (inaudible 00:14:01) and we went through your questions for us to see where we were and what we need to do to improve you still found things within our sales process that we’re slowly implementing, we’re trying to make sure we get our newsletters out and make sure that we’re doing our reactivation program for our customers and we’re slowly implementing —

Brandon: Let’s talk about cost of sale for a moment because it kind of backs into this. You’re one of the few people that I’ve ever talked with, and I talk to tons of painting contractors, folks that you would think — people that go to industry training events, you’d think, “Gosh, these people have got all these systems together and in place,” but they don’t. And you knew where your cost of sale was. Do you remember? And I may be misremembering this. Do you remember where it was?

Rich: On a month-to-month basis the average throughout the year sometimes it was a little bit more sometimes a little bit less, but the month average was about $360-$365 per customer.

Brandon: And so what you basically able to do is you were able to mine in a pretty barren mine and still bring out the gems because of your sales process which most people cannot do. But the gems were very expensive to get and it was cutting into profits. And we started talking and running the numbers about where it was going to take you to get to a million dollar painting business and it ended up looking like about a $80,000-$90,000 something investment using those particular sources with your existing infrastructure and you saw as many painters do when they finally start being less emotional and more rational, more number driven and less reactionary that that wasn’t going to work. So fast forward a little bit to your customer reactivation campaign which I was just exceptionally impressed with and you kind of mentioned it to me as an aside as if it wasn’t that big a deal. And I just got the information out of you at the time. Can you talk about the customer reactivation? That’s the first thing we worked on with you. It’s the first thing we work on with everyone it’s where the lowest hanging fruit is. Can you talk about kind of how many customers you had, what you invested, what the results were because you tracked that very well.

Rich: Yeah. We started only backtracking a few not even two to three years if I can remember correctly, two to three years. We only really started keeping detailed records at that point because again it was time, you know, you pick and choose what you can do. So when I was doing the work myself and doing all the sales at night the customer would just kind of pay and it would just kind of go into the background. I knew at that time our biggest problem was keeping in front of our current customers so we could get more referral work down the road. And I knew that for years. I just really was comfortable and complacent and, you know, a big mistake on my part.

But anyway, leading into the customer reactivation program we took about 150 actual past customers and we had about another 150 customers that we did estimates for, but we actually didn’t close the sale. So we packaged them all together under your recommendation as though we did the job, as if they were real customers. So we got the letters printed, packaged up, off in the mail, just the way you said to do it. Sent out the letters, did the follow-up call, I actually hired my mother-in-law to do all those calls, and within the first week it was funny because you mentioned treat that 150 that we didn’t close the business with as customers because none of the other painters that they probably had do the painting are keeping up with them anyway. So it was funny you were right. A lot of those customers actually — some remembered and said we didn’t get a letter from you but the first thing you did was say when you’re marketing you’re not going to please everybody and you’re going to have people request to be taken off the list which was fine. It was only like three people, like 1% out of 300.

But we ended up getting a $25,000 bid off of one project in Carmel that was a property management. We did another estimate in Cold Spring, New York. We did about 13 estimates from it in total, roughly the total revenue from those jobs was about $85,000-$90,000 without pulling up specifically what they are. And we actually landed now that we’re about a couple of months beyond those estimates, some of them closed right away some of them didn’t, but we closed around 45% of all of those bids, but the people that aren’t closing aren’t doing the work not because they don’t want to it’s just they just want to do it next season and that’s about it. So it looks like down the road from what we’re learning we have call backs for next year September if I’m looking at our calendar correctly. We have another one that’s a call back for January for interior. So I’m presuming we could probably do about 85% of those sales.

Brandon: Well and that would, depending of course if you have a couple of large closings on the frontend it can skew just doing some of the percentage. But I tell people that —

Rich: We actually had one person call from the list side that wasn’t a customer that we just did the estimate for. She actually said, you know, Rich we never ended up doing the work. We received your letter. It was really great and we’d like you to resend the bid and we ended up doing that job in Cold Spring about a week after. That was for roughly about $9,000 in revenue.

Brandon: Well, you’ll end up getting somewhere around 65-70% eventually as I mention to people over and over again and I cite this, and people get tired of me telling them this, but I try to repeat things because people don’t often remember it the first time around. I mean GE Capital says that most homeowners spend around 13 months making a $700 purchasing decision in their home. Now it’s a little bit different with painting because by the time they’re ready they can’t hide from us. They can’t come in our store and leave without us knowing it. It’s not like retail which is where GE Capital does most of its financing. But what it reveals to people is that the sale cycle is longer than what we want it to be and we often presume that those people are tire kickers when instead it’s just human nature and when we’re faced with human nature we have two options, we can stomp our feet and be mad about it or we can say okay, if this is how people buy then let me adapt my actions to get the revenue even if it is two or three months further down the road than what I would prefer. Better to get it then than to not get it at all and I’ve already put the time and effort into the estimate I’ve already marketed to them. Let’s reap those rewards a little later.

It’s almost like when you plant a garden some things spring up immediately and you get fruit quickly some things don’t really get where they need to be until August. And so you’ve got to be there to tend it until the fruit comes in.

So do you have any idea of the $85,000 or so that you’ve generated, do you know what the whole thing cost you?

Rich: Well, pretty much the cost of stamps, envelopes and paper actually and maybe $100 in phone calls. That’s about it.

Brandon: So would you round that up to a thousand bucks though?

Rich: I would say $500 maybe.

Brandon: Okay. So the thing that I’m trying to get across is marketing that works doesn’t have to be expensive. You can put in small amounts of money if you’re going after the right market and of course there’s a little bit of luck that goes into it, but I’ve never seen this process fail. And so the thing that I think that the takeaway is that the value in a painting business is not in the painting it’s in the list of people you accumulate over time. And I don’t want people to hear this and miss that.

Well, let’s fast forward to talk about sales. I’m always real frank with people on the diagnostic call when they call to sign up. Do I want people to join? Yes, but frankly you would probably admit Rich, sometimes you wonder if I’m trying to sell you at all. I’m a little bit forward and I’m not very polished when it comes to selling people. I’m sure you would, frankly, I could probably bring you in here, you would do a better job of selling people. I just tell them like it is. I’ve told you when you told me about what you were doing in your sales process I said, “This is really good. Now here’s some things you can bolt on,” but you’re already doing exceptionally well and the one variable that I can never account for is the salesperson and so you’re a really good salesperson.

Now if you hire somebody to be an estimator they’re never going to be as good as the owner, in particular would not be as good as you. However, you’ve implemented parts of the Power Paint Presentation Process for the things that you do yourself and now you’re bringing on an estimator. How important is it when you’re not doing the selling yourself to have a very strong structure for maybe a less competent, less enthusiastic, and let’s be honest less motivated financially estimator. How important is it to have structure so that you can plug them into it?

Rich: Well, I have actually learned that based off mistake. At the same time, I brought in Phil to start doing estimates and I actually called him about it several weeks after we were doing the estimate because we were still behind on the implementation of the newsletter and of the Power Paint Presentation in specific to get all the material printed, set up the space in the office. I was showing him during estimates how to price out and I noticed that even little simple things as far as spending time with the customer and doing everything that you outlined in that particular module even taking out some of the — because while we were doing the walk around instead of being with the customer I was with my new estimator. And I noticed we had almost a 30% drop in numbers on sales. And it’s super important to understand the module before trying to implement it yourself as the owner. This way when you go into training an estimator you understand exactly what it is that you’re supposed to be training them on not what in your head you think you want to get across. So the systems are very important, very important, and I mean it costs us 30% just that month.

Brandon: You just said something unbelievably important and I hope people don’t gloss over it and that is this you’ve become a teacher after you’ve become a student and after you get really good at doing something then you teach it to somebody else in which case frankly it makes you a better estimator later when you have to teach it to somebody because you become more critical of your own activities. It kind of ups the ante on your own performance when you teach people how to do things because you have to lead by example.

But there are certain — we’ve got two things that are being said here, which the one thing that was said earlier and something that’s being said now that if you’re not careful you can confuse the two. You said earlier at the very beginning of our program today that you’ve got to delegate certain things. And that’s absolutely true. But, you’ve got to internalize and understand and own certain things before you can delegate them and one thing I think that owners need to get out of their head is that there are certain things in your business, especially the high value things like marketing, lead generation, sales, time management that you need to own as a serious student and that you do not for any reason hand off to someone else and expect great results because if you’re unwilling to master it yourself giving it to someone else is an invitation for disappointment.

Rich: Absolutely. There’s no question about it. I actually called Phil myself and said, “You know what? I need to apologize because I have not been training you correctly. So here’s what we’re going to do to correct the problem and move forward,” and we’ve been doing that and he’s actually having better results as a result of it and more confident to go out on his own without having someone there than he was even after doing 15-20 estimates with me and watching the process. He felt more confident and it’s very real. Very real. So unless you’re willing to learn it yourself I would highly recommend to not try to think you know, but actually apply, learn, master then teach.

Brandon: Yeah. That’s a great sequence. Let’s move into what’s down the road for your company and a conversation we had recently. You’ve got really aggressive plans. I admire that. I love working with aggressive, assertive owners. I say aggressive, people think that’s a bad term, I don’t. I’d much rather be in a room full of people that are doing things, going after things, assertive may be a better way to say it, than people who are very waffling and don’t really know what they want or want something very badly but are unwilling to do what it takes to get there. But recently we’ve been on the phone, even though you have all these systems, and we’ve talked through some of the mental roadblocks that were frustrating your progress, can you talk to folks about how your mental attitude, priorities and organization can make the chaos of growth feel a little bit more orderly and manageable?

Rich: Yeah. You touched on this with a conference call and I even after the conference call we had a conference call together and touched on it more. My specific problem was time management for myself, blocking out mundane — because we get overwhelmed — I get overwhelmed with things throughout the day. Every day has different people calling, has different things that need to be dealt with. We just had one of our painters, you know, a ladder went into a skylight and cracked the skylight. The customer called and had to deal with that. And that takes away from things.

So you need to have dedicated times for dedicated tasks. And I was only going a day out on my calendar. I wasn’t going as you recommended a week out, you know, two weeks out and dedicating that time and say I’m going, like you said, look at my emails at 11:30 and 4:00, and I’m going to dedicate two hours to, like the Power Paint Presentation I got very frustrated trying to implement it and also manage my day-to-day. So you said, take a time whenever you find it, 9:00 in the morning to 11:00 take those two hours and dedicate exactly that and don’t be distracted from it. Once you have it on paper, just like life, you know, you put your goals put them on paper, five year plan, ten year plan, whatever it might be.

I have a five year plan and that’s where the ambition comes from because I have that goal in front of my face every day. I look at my son and my family every day and I want to do something so even when we are experiencing difficulties to get through that hurdle not just go around it, but to actually smash that hurdle so hard it’s like a battering ram that you learn so much it never comes back. And it’s the light at the end of the tunnel, but obviously the tunnel is dark for it could be a long time, could be a short amount of time, but that time management is really important. And having it down specifically tasks, completions of those tasks or even goals to say I want to have the Power Paint Presentation oriented, I want to learn it first by this day, I want to start implementing it by this day and training it by this day, at least you have that goal set and it makes it a lot more manageable instead of looking at I don’t know like a house that every room is dirty. You can’t just do a little bit in each room because it doesn’t really look like you did anything you’re just scattered. But if you do one room at a time and you get that room done that room’s done you move onto the next and move onto the next. You actually see the accomplishment. You’re not just seeing a little bit picked up here and there because the house is so dirty at the end of the day doesn’t look like you did anything.

Brandon: And to recap — go ahead.

Rich: No, I just kind of had to put my brain is the owner. I have a lot going on and everybody can say that we have a lot going on, you know, Brandon has a lot going on, even my estimator Phil has a lot going on, I have a lot going on, everybody deals with it differently, but the bottom line is it’s like you said Brandon, and it all comes down to just understanding that you’re reaching out to the APPC because you need the help. And if you’re willing to learn it and apply it it will do a lot of good and the time management was probably my weakest, the weakest part of my business, structure, it was all day-to-day. And once I actually put that on paper and I moved forward I was happier and I was actually feeling like I’m accomplishing something.

Brandon: Well the owners don’t realize how golden their time is. They don’t realize that their mental investment in business growth, the time they set aside, the quiet when they’re in a good frame of mind, when their mental energy and durability is at its peak is important. It’s like the catalyst. I mean it would almost be like if you were trying to work out and build muscle and you were trying to do it absent of protein in your diet. Good luck to you. The building blocks aren’t there.

Rich: God bless them.

Brandon: Yeah. The building blocks for a solid thriving changing painting business are a little bit of money obviously. You have to invest some money to generate sales and to close sales, but more importantly it’s the steady application of the owner’s time with rapped attention to the details. And I always go back to this phrase, willingness to be a serious student, willing to pay the price of tuition if you will for greater financial reward not hoping that you can skate through the classes and get your D minus and go on to the next one, which is what so many people try to do with the marketing and sales aspects of their business.

And one thing I’d want to mention about what you just said again picking out some of these nuggets and expanding upon them is a simple time management system that is regularly used beats all of the complexity in the world that never gets implemented. So simple tools like a legal pad with everything you want to do on it. A Google calendar or even a day planner where you say, “Okay,” and you take a pen and you just highlight stuff and scribble it in there and then you just take it one bite at a time. I know a lot of folks that are burdened with technology who don’t do as much as someone with a day planner and a note book. And so keeping it simple —

Rich: That’s how I did it.

Brandon: Exactly. Keeping it simple but regularly applying the strategies is more important than getting it perfect because if you wait until you get it perfect you’ll forget to start it. Thank you for that.

The last thing I guess I’d like to say, or ask you a question, if you had to share a nugget of wisdom, maybe a key concept or something that would put a lot of this under an umbrella that you’ve learned through your APPC experience thus far that’s made a change in your outlook, we’ve talked more on this call about outlook than many of the calls I’ve ever been on, what would you say that was? What would it be?

Rich: The most important aspect of the call?

Brandon: Well I guess if you could put an umbrella around a lot of the concepts that we’re talking about, or maybe a concept that shifted your thinking that made you look at or approach the way you run your business differently.

Rich: Becoming a student all over again. Understanding that people are placed in your life for a reason. It’s really not by coincidence at all. I’d been doing research for months trying to find the correct program in order to find the information I needed and the APPC just kept coming up in searches and then when I went to the site it kept coming up in different websites that I would go to that had ad placement and it just really kept bringing me back. Becoming a student again was the biggest not roadblock, but actually the biggest eye opening and most comfort actually because I always felt like that there was somebody out there that could help me out. I wasn’t by myself. And that was really important for me. Regardless of the revenue or the growth of the business it has to be done systematically in a way that’s manageable because you can have all the success in the world but if you’re not managing it correctly it’s just stress. So I just wanted to become happy with my company and again and have some help and watch it grow and help other families and it all correlates back to becoming the student again.

Brandon: Well, I think that is a great place to wrap things up. Often people, in any kind of relationship it takes really three things if you’re going to advance from a teaching standpoint, you need a teacher who cares and is willing to put in the time and effort, you need a student who cares and who’s willing to put in the time and effort, and then this is the part that often people gloss over, it’s kind of important for the curriculum to actually work. I would say that that’s a thing that we’re wanting in our industry. There’s lots of hype new — and I love hype new stuff I use it myself. I mean you mentioned — I’m not afraid of the internet. I use everything that’s in my disposal in social media and ad placement and retargeting and lead funnels, etc., however most owners don’t need all that. They need to get back to the basics first and you’ve done that exceptionally well. So that’s a good place to leave things. I know you’re very busy. You’ve got a fast paced business. You’ve imparted a lot of wisdom to our listeners and I can’t thank you enough. I appreciate it.

Rich: I really appreciate it too. Thanks for having me over.

Brandon: All right. We’ll do it again. So stay tuned as we reveal more stories and strategies for financial success from owners just like you who are taking control of their painting businesses and their futures. Until next time I’m Brandon Lewis with the APPC signing off.