The Business of Painting. How to market and writing painting bids.

this paint life tv i'm christy idaho painter this video is all about the business of painting if you want any tips estimating any tips marketing or branding your painting company or any type of service related construction company this is the video for you it is kind of a long video this is a compilation video of all my business related painting videos so grab a beer grab a soda a bag of popcorn bag of chips something just to check out this video and enjoy learning all about the business of painting if you haven't subscribed to my channel hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell that way you get notified every time i come out with a new video it's been free for 10 or 11 years it's going to be free for another 10 or 11 years to subscribe subscribe but if you don't hit the notification bell you won't get notified every time i come out with a new video you got to do them both it's simple way to help support us in making all these free videos now on to the business of painting all right so let's talk about how i go about doing estimates when i first started doing estimates early in my career i would go out and meet every single customer i would customer call up ask for an estimate i'd go to the house i'd walk the house with the customer sell my company sell myself i'd go back home after i gathered all the information which typically took about you know an hour driving there working with the customer driving back home i'd write the estimate on a computer then i would print it up and it was about a 20 22 to 20 page document i put it in a folder with all kinds of other stuff that was my bid packet and then i would deliver it back to the customer hand deliver it to them if they were home or just leave it on the porch if they weren't and that was a very time consuming process driving time gas meeting with the customer the printer the paper the ink all that stuff it was just very time consuming but early in my career it was very important to do that because i had to sell myself and um to every single customer because i had no work and so it was important that face-to-face interaction as years went by and i started getting more and more estimates more and more referrals it it became really difficult to meet every customer and almost impossible and too time consuming and so i started adopting this process of doing paperless estimates and not even meeting the customer and i started using um online means like um google earth zillow and realtor.com and i'm going to talk about you know how i use those uh those online resources to not even meet the customer not even drive out to the house and write effective estimates and and get jobs i didn't get nearly the percentage of wins uh jobs you know doing it that method but i had a significant uh more amount of bids coming in by referral so it all equaled itself out and i still um had just the amount of same amount of work i was month or and booked out for months and months so uh let's talk about how i go about doing that process i mean first off the bid comes in uh somebody answers the phone my wife answers the phone customers says and it's usually i you were referred to me by so and so and um i want to get an estimate on my house and my wife begins gathering uh information and one of the things she'll gather is you know the age of the home do you want to change the colors of the home um you know the paint colors and um there's some certain information she'll ask what's the timeline you want this paint job done by and can we even make that timeline but some of the information she's gathering she doesn't even need it because we're going to use online resources and it's amazing what you can get on somebody's home online nothing's private anymore these days but when she has that interaction with the customer and that interaction is extremely important to explaining your bidding process how you're going to go about doing the bid and they'll receive the bid typically the same day and she'll get off the phone once she's off the phone the information is passed over to me or she will even do the research to begin writing the estimate um herself and the first thing we do is we get on google earth and google earth is just this incredible um resource on the internet now that you can look at homes worldwide and what we typically do is get on google or type in an address it'll just place you right on the street and you have this little like little icon this little man you can place this guy anywhere on a house and it gives you a view of that house and you can almost get sometimes a 360 degree view of the house you can look down um a view of it down you can look at you know sideways at all different angles and now it's just like i'm there in person so i'm starting to gather information of the home how difficult is this home going to be is it gonna be one story is it gonna be two-story um you can see you can even determine you know how much prep work is gonna be on this house um is there brick is there stucco you could even see is there other um buildings that they possibly would want paint or do they want this shed painted is the houses of a detached garage there's a lot of information that you can look at uh using google earth to study and you know come up with your estimate you know do um estimate on the house now with a lot of this being said i do want to say uh one thing after painting for so many years eventually you begin to learn if you really study the art and craft of painting and doing exterior repaints most houses take a typical amount of time a standard amount of time to do the prep work to power wash it and prep it and paint it and they're very um very standard now in your location it could look a lot different but where i'm at it was very insane most of the houses we're painting or 15 to 20 years old have the same amount of prep and so this this method worked and was very effective for us but we'll look at um we'll use google earth look at the house then we'll take uh an application on the internet like zillow.com or realtor.com type in the address and now you can get all kinds of information about the home and one of the key things is is the four square feet our estimates my estimates are based on four square feet and four square feet only on exterior estimates and so i'm going to gather the four square feet my wife asked she always ask on the phone you know how many square feet is your house and then you're going to compare what the customer said with what zillow said if there's any type of discrepancy there could have been some type of remodel some type of addition and you might have to go back and ask the customer but you're going to compare those numbers but you you can even on realtor.com there's a lot of times the homes will have um if the house was recently sold or something you can get these uh video tours of the house you can walk right through somebody's house have a video tour if you're doing an interior estimate this way and we've done it this way before but they do exterior tours of the house too so you can gather all kinds of information but the key thing is square feet and then the age of the home the age of the home is going to tell you uh how much prep work there is going to be on this house if this house is only five years old there's probably going to be significantly less prep work than if it was 25 years old uh one of the age things we're looking at is that cut off i think it's like 1974. um i'm not sure but there's if it's beyond um older than that then there could be lead-based paint in the house and we do not paint houses that have lead-based paint in them anymore so i don't want to take on that liability responsibility so we don't even write an estimate for it so we'll ask the customer you know on the phone and if they say you know my house is 60 years old then we'll just write down the phone say we don't uh do lead-based homes because there's pride lead-based paint in it and we'll refer it out to somebody but you can gather all this information up and you look at the house and my estimates and i it's very simple i uh a lot of the things when i'm painting i'm trying to you know create systems and processes that make things fast and efficient and the bid process is the exact same way that i came up with um in the the score of the explore square feet price you'll fluctuate based on supply and demand how busy i am right now it's a dollar sixty five a square foot is my base price and so i'm going to take the square feet if it's 2500 square feet i'm going to multiply it by a dollar 65 and there is my base price that i'm going to add in my estimate after i've also looked and studied the information my base price if the house is three stories uh there's gonna be significantly more work so that dollar 65 could could go up if it's um you know single story uh and you know it's only five years old or three years old and it's brand new and they want a color change it could go down there's some certain things that's gonna make it fluctuate go up and down but the key thing is is you don't have to drive out and look at the house you can do all the phone call comes in you can look at it on google earth you can get information statistic data off of zillow and you can have an estimate back to the customer you know within 30 minutes it's absolutely incredible and it's emailed to them using a pdf format and but you just have to have um you know the knowledge the painting knowledge and look at the house closely i know there's been times that we've looked at the house it's single story in the front we can't see the back it's two-story in the back but you know when it comes to all the houses we're doing or doing four or five houses a week if there was one that was more difficult there's going to be somewhere in a 30-day period one that's more easy and it ultimately ends up working itself out in equine itself out in the end you know over the months time so you know sometimes you know the system you you're going to be surprised but you can zoom in look at the house and you know if it's 20 years old you can see a lot of prep work or maybe the house is all stucco and you can um you need to paint the stucco but you can look at the front door is it stained front door and if you didn't get any some of that information on the phone you can contact the customer back before writing the estimate saying you know i noticed you have a wood front door do you want the front door stained i notice you have a shed you know in um on the side of the house do you want that shed included in the bed there's all kinds of data and information you can get by looking at that house and so it's just a matter of looking at it just like you were there in person if you're uncomfortable there are times when i can't see certain things you know on google earth i'm just unsure you know on the age of the home it looks like there might be more prep work than uh you can see and so i'm just unsure i'll actually just do a drive by the house and i'll just quickly drive by and do it and um and to look at it and sometimes we even get out and take a look at it and walk around the house but the estimate it's it's a very fast and efficient system and we get a bit sent back to the customer right away and and our estimates are always written with two colors so i know there's a lot of times the houses you know there's there are single color um two colors they could be five colors but in our estimates it always um there's a disclaimer that says you know there's a charge for additional colors our estimates are about um the s the big packet is about 20 pages and there's a list of additionals that you know you could have on the house i mean you could have some like bug juice a paint additive um they could have five uh choose five colors because you never know what the customer is going to choose you know color wise until you actually start doing the color consulting but you know the process is very quick simple we use uh quickbooks so i use quickbooks so that the bid is entered into quickbooks uh estimate is spit out and so you have a one page estimate document and then in quickbooks we also have our bid packet that populates the customer's name right in there so it looks very personalized and that's like a 20-page document we do make that available you can take a look at that you can check out our store where we sell copies of our estimate if you don't have a really good estimate packet [Music] all right now i'm going to walk you through the entire process you know what this process looks like doing the paperless estimates and the call will come into the office lisa will handle the call and she's going to gather you know the information necessary from the customer offer great customer service on the phone and then once she's off the phone she's gonna use um a computer and she's gonna use that computer on google earth and she's gonna use zillow or realtor.com and gather the information look at the home get a great view of the home study the home and then get the square footage that information um in studying home is going to be entered into the estimate on quickbooks the estimate is and the bid packet is then going to be printed up it's going to be emailed to the customer because on the phone call every phone call lisa will always ask for an email because that's how we do our bids is through email the email is going to be sent and as soon as the email is sent and that's usually within a half hour doing an estimate now sometimes it's not till the next day but we have a policy it's always uh get the estimates done within 24 hours and we're always shooting for the first couple hours you know if it's not too busy but the estimate is emailed as soon as it is emailed lisa will call the customer back because if we ask for their phone number also she's going to call back and say we email the estimate and um if you can check make sure you got it because it's interesting nowadays a lot of things will go to junk mail or on the junk folders so the customer is going to verify whether they got it and if not you want to verify um you know if the email address was right and everything so customers got the email then she'll say you know you can look over the estimates and if you uh feel you want to talk to chris after you i've seen the number you know i can schedule a time for you to talk to chris or if you want to color consult after you've accepted the estimate we could send chris up for a color consult in that entire process now has done one person and that's going to take about 15 minutes to do that entire estimate versus probably about an hour and a half the two hours the old way all right now let's talk about how i estimate cabinets in the estimating process i've taught on how to estimate um do exterior estimates online using google earth taught about how to do interior estimates and um estimating fences and stuff like that and estimated cabinets i'm working on a cabinet job right here and this is a vanity makeover video if you want to see this video coming up how i turn a 25 cabinet into a 500 cabinet stay tuned for that video but how do you go about estimating a job like this or how do you go about estimating a full kitchen if you don't have any experience and i estimated cabinets one way for quite a bit of my career and i came up with a different method that was very simple and easy to do and and when i do estimating i like my estimate estimating process really to be very simple i like to be able to do it over the phone if i have to not even show up at the job site so how do you do that you got to have like systems processes numbers that all make sense where you can just ask a customer a bunch of questions come up with a number and give them an estimate and like my exterior bids a lot of times they don't even drive out to the house i just look at it on google earth and i want my system or estimating process to be very simple and easy and how i come up with an estimate for a cabinet job is i start off with a um door or drawer price and there's a fixed price that i just count the doors or drawers and then that will give me a number and that's a base price now when i do estimating whether it's an exterior whether it's an interior i do have these fixed prices like on an exterior i have a fixed price of 1.65 square foot and that is my base price and everything is built off of that using numbers and also the human element there are times you're going to have to go out to a job there's times when i have to go out to a cabinet job and look at the job and use human judgment and see if my numbers are coming out right or is the job going to be a lot more difficult or a lot easier where i can make some adjustments to those numbers but i have a cabinet right here and i'll walk you in and show you a full kitchen set of cabinets and how i went about estimating the full set of kitchen cabinets but it's it's a door and drawer price so there's a there's drawers right here you got one two three three drawers you got a drawer right here a fourth drawer and then you've got a door and my base price per drawer is 95 dollars per drawer and then it's a hundred and fifteen dollars for door so here's a door and here's a drawer front right here so 95 per drawer 115 dollars per door and that's the base price that everything is built off from there but now there's going to be some things you're going to run into with cabinet paint jobs you have oak grain that's going to make the job a lot more difficult than a set of kitchen cabinets that's already painted and you're just repainting it versus starting with a really grainy bare uh grainy wood like oak and so i'm going to talk about some of the additional charges that are built into that base price are not built into it's added onto that base price of 115 and 95 dollars all right so i'm going to talk about one of the things you're going to run into in the cabinet repaints that is a whole lot more work that you're definitely going to want to add on an additional charge to your cabinet drawer or door price so right here this is one and it's oak wood grain and anytime you have a real grainy wood it's going to take a lot of work to get rid of that grain now let me talk about customer expectations a little bit because when you're doing a cabinet painting job this is where whether you're talking to the customer on the phone or whether you're talking to them in person a lot of times cabinet jobs are a lot better dealt with and estimating done in person where you can look at the cabinets and talk about your process how you go about painting but what is the customer's expectations are the customers expectations that this looked like a flat finish and not a wood grained and in the end result really because this thing right here was designed to be stained and lacquered and not to have a flat finish and look like a birch cabinet door but if a customer wanted this thing to look like a birch cabinet door not have any wood grain to it it's going to take a lot of work to eliminate the wood grain just like this we're using aqua coat on this cabinet door because we're trying to eliminate probably 90 percent of the wood grain effect to it and the like the pen holes and dark shadows created when you paint something like this white using aqua coat we got three coats of aqua coats sanding in between aquaco that takes a lot of time and effort to deal with that if you try to paint oak white without feeling any grain at all uh probably 90 of your customers are not gonna like the outcome of the cabinet but you do have to discuss um in the very beginning your expectations and then your budget i mean what happens is the additional charges just make the price go up higher maybe the customer doesn't have a budget that is as high to fill wood grain but they really want their cabinets painted and they're not as picky as eliminating all the wood…