3 Tips for Painting Contractors in the Busy Season (AVOID Burnout!)

Michael Murray: Welcome back to another episode of the Price. Sell. Paint. podcast. Today, Jon Bryant and I are going to be talking about how to handle the busy season as we're heading into the summer. At this point, by the time this episode comes out, we're going to be into pretty much early summer. And there's a lot of activity in the painting industry for sales reps. So Jon Bryant, I'm excited to hear some of the tips and tricks and maybe we can just help people avoid burnout this time of year.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that would be great, man. I'm anxious going into this season as I am every season. So 16 years doing this and every year I think, wow, winter was hard. We survived and oh man, there's too much coming our way. I'm now overwhelmed. It's the joy of our business. So I'm excited to talk about it too. Hopefully it helps some people. Hopefully it helps me at the end of it calm down, but yeah, I'm excited to chat.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I feel like every year the difference between the winter and the summer seems less dramatic or shorter. I feel every year I'm like, wait, how did we get so busy so fast? Like what just happened? So let's get into it. The first one that comes to mind for me is just being really intentional about time. If we're not careful, the calendar can really get away from us. So leaving time aside that we don't just get caught up doing way too many estimates, that we leave time for other things. Love to hear some of your thoughts and tips on how somebody might do that.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So over the years, we've kind of started to think about summer in a different way, which is that it can't just all come to us. We have to, I have to plan better for it. And we need to set parameters around what we're going to do and how we're going to approach things, because as it comes at you, it's just like stuff coming in endlessly. I think this is a wild statistic, but I think on like Monday of this week, we had 68 leads come in. Let's just think about that for a second. That's 68 people that need to be phone called. They need to be communicated with. It's a lot. And you know what? A lot of that stuff is all about managing your time. And I think we're going to talk a bit about some of the ways to do that. But the initial part is just that there's planned out activities that we do. We don't run estimates 20 hours a day. We don't do that every single day, because for those of us who have done it before, if you do that in a month, you're going to be wondering which way is up and down. Like it's just really hard and you're going to get really burnt out.

So what we do is that we plan things into our calendar and we're looking at what a perfect week looks like. We still have to have as a sales team the time to network and prospects. Those are our highest value leads and connections. We don't want those to die out for the winter. And so we've got to plan those activities into our calendar. We also plan time just to get other stuff done, right? I think that's key and it's something that we kind of forget about. And so I think I want to hear you talk about that because I think you've got some good thoughts around being intentional about how much time things take. But overall for me, it's about getting a vision for what that perfect week looks like, setting it up, getting the parameters in place and then allowing that to pan out over the summer so you don't overbook yourself and all that type of thing.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big topics and questions that I always wrestle with is how many estimates should an individual do in a week? Our experience—you and I both come at it from a residential repaint with some commercial repaint focus. You guys do a little bit more commercial than we do, but I think we're both talking similar here when we're thinking about how many estimates, how long does an estimate take, project sizes and things like that. And I know you and I aren't exactly in line here, but I think I'm getting closer to where you are. So I'm going to give you a chance to explain that here in a second.

I'll say where I've come from was, "Hey, this is the busy time. We need to maximize opportunities. It's harvest season—doing 15 to 20 estimates a week. Let's go, make it happen." And what as we've done that over the years, what has usually happened is we see a big decrease in close rates and win rates. So two different things we've talked about on the podcast before. Both of those things go down and they usually track pretty well with each other. We've talked about this before, that if we're getting closure on deals, we're going to win a higher percentage because we're just avoiding all of the ghosted, never heard back from people.

And when we are trying to do, let's just go to that extreme 20 estimates in a week, it is really likely that we don't get to spend as much time with each one. We didn't have the time to do some sort of setup call, discovery call, whatever you want to call it. We don't have a whole lot of time for follow-up and people just slip through the cracks and we ended up doing a ton of estimates. And we don't necessarily sell at the same high rate as we do when we get to December, January and February, when we have fewer estimates and we're able to spend more time with each one of those. And so I think the big thing for this year and somewhat last year, we were trying to be more intentional here is really putting a cap on that. But that's hard too, because not everybody wants to wait. And then we run into sales rep capacity and maybe book estimates for three or four weeks from now or whatever it is. And it's like, oh man, that doesn't work either. And so I'm just constantly conflicted between those two things. And I know you guys are really intentional here and I've learned a lot from you in this way. So talk a little bit about maximizing opportunities here.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, maybe before I do that, how do you actually do it right now? Like what, how have you dealt with that?

Michael Murray: Yeah. So one of the things for us, we do have some newer sales reps on our team. And so that is a factor. I think experienced sales reps are able to do things a little more efficiently, they can see around the corners a little bit better and they're having better conversations on site, which is maybe eliminating some unnecessary follow-ups. A more experienced sales rep compared to a newer one is going to find out more often on the estimate, "Hey, if we're not a good fit together, that's okay. Let's get to that point here in this 60-minute conversation at the estimate." And they're just going to avoid maybe some of that follow-up, where a newer rep is going to maybe miss some of those cues and maybe avoid some of those difficult conversations. And they end up spinning their wheels and having too many bids that they're trying to follow up with.

So for us, again, we have that capacity constraint I guess of having some newer reps. Generally speaking, we are right now keeping our reps at right about like 12 to 14 as a max capacity in a week. Which is again less than we've historically thought. I can specifically remember in 2018—I personally, so I was still pretty involved with our sales stuff at that point. I had let a sales rep go right at the end of May and in the month of June—

Jon Bryant: Great time, great timing, man. Well done, yeah.

Michael Murray: Great timing, it was awesome. Yeah, I highly recommend it. Yeah, but it needed to happen. Probably should have happened sooner so we could have replaced them. And you can imagine I wasn't able to replace somebody right away. And in the month of June, I did over 110 estimates myself. And literally was dying. I was sick. Like just not good. Being sick in the middle of summer is like, there's something wrong. And I knew like, this is not sustainable. This cannot happen. And luckily hired some better people and am past that now. But I did 110 estimates, sold, I don't know, maybe 30% or whatever it was, because I was just an estimating machine and it sucked and it was no good. And it was just a waste of a bunch of opportunities and marketing money.

Jon Bryant: So yeah, it really speaks to what we're talking about today, which is that there is a number, there's an efficiency—what is it? Quotient. Is that the word?

Michael Murray: Yeah, the law—I would say it's like that law of diminishing returns. I don't know if that's what you're getting at. Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Right. There you go. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Every time it comes up, I'll let you talk about it. Cause obviously I'm not that great at it, but exactly—find that spot. And we've really found, I mean, and like you said, this is hard because of what's coming at you in the summer, but we do the best we can. We're going to talk a little bit about lead vetting later because it's super important, but we try to limit the times that our sales team can be out on estimates. And so we know those other activities still have to be there.

So the way that looks in practice is, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, those days can have up to five estimates in the day. Just go, go. Tuesday, Thursday are all about those other activities and your business development. And so you do Monday, you get that all done. Tuesday, you get the chance to do all your rest of it. Monday, Tuesday, you're getting all your follow-up. Wednesday, you're doing another big chunk of it. So you're just driving, meeting people. Thursday, follow-up again, business development. Friday, typically we would do another estimation day or estimate day, but that's not always the case.

And I think one of the parts about our company culture is that we want people to enjoy—there's got to be a work-life balance, and you and I have had discussions, and I'd like to hear your opinion again on this, but we do allow for people to take some vacation time in the summer. And so as a team, we've got to cover that. We've got to cover those needs for the company. But maybe it's a Friday you take off because you got all your work done. You know, you've done those two, those four days, 10 estimates total, and you've hit your sales goals. So you take the Friday off and we're okay with that. Now, the only thing we're not okay with is multiple people taking it at the same time and not having coverage for the business. The business really comes first. So I don't know what you guys do for vacation this summer. I know we kind of alluded to this before, but how do you see it?

Michael Murray: Yeah, for myself personally, I try not to schedule too much vacation time in the summer. I mean, part of it is just, you know, it's baseball and softball season and I'm coaching my kids and we've just got a lot going on. And plus here in Cleveland, the weather in the summer is really nice. I want to get out of here in the winter. And so it's like, I want to schedule my personal vacations for like December, January, February, somewhere in that time block, just because I don't like the winter and I want to go somewhere warm. But it also I think makes sense with the time of the business and the busyness of it all. But from our team members, yeah, I mean, generally similar to what you just said. For the sales team, it's somewhat challenging. You take a week off, it's going to be hard to hit your goals. But not impossible. I mean, again, depending on how experienced you are and things like that.

Jon Bryant: Do you guys plan that stuff or is it just ad hoc? Like someone wants to take a Friday off, how do they do it?

Michael Murray: Yeah, they just have to give notice. I mean, at least a few weeks notice. Again, more from an estimate scheduling perspective and things like that, but nothing too crazy.

Jon Bryant: Question about this, because I mean, obviously you alluded to it, which is that you get a lot coming at you. So you get these rules in place and then all of a sudden, three weeks in, you're changing your rules or breaking your rules, just trying to meet the need. What do you think is the longest someone's waited for an estimate in the summer?

Michael Murray: So yeah, this is where—I think this was a huge problem for us last year. I think one of the biggest—one of the metrics that we realized last year at Textbook, our lead conversion was a major problem. I think it was a major problem for a long time, but we just didn't pay attention to it or track it or look at it.

Jon Bryant: Can you explain lead conversion just for those listening?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, that's what we call it, but essentially it's like, if a lead comes in, what percentage get an estimate? And I think just like any other stat, you can manipulate that to show whatever you want. Is it a qualified lead? Is it within our service area? Things like that. And so we think of it from a marketing qualified lead, meaning it's in our service area and it's generally something that we could do. Right? If you call us from some city four hours away, and you're looking for a concrete coating, well, we don't do concrete coatings, and we're not going four hours away. So you're definitely not marketing qualified. And that is something we want to look at, because that might tell us that we're marketing in the wrong areas for the wrong services. And so we still want to track that stat.

But it's slightly different than a sales-qualified lead. So once it's marketing qualified, okay, we do want to do an estimate. So we're going to schedule that. And then, for whatever reason, we don't. So either the sales rep calls that person and realizes that, hey, we're just not a good fit for what you're looking for. You need this done next week. We're booked out for the next four weeks. It's just not going to work. Okay, that's some slippage there. Or maybe we schedule your appointment for three weeks from now. And in those three weeks, the client reaches back out and says, "Hey, I actually just can't cancel that. I hired somebody else or we decided we're not going to do this project or we're going to do it ourselves" or whatever might be their explanation. And so we want to track that. And so again, last year we were pretty bad. I'll share just because why not be transparent. All leads—so not just marketing qualified—we were about 65%, which again is pretty low.

Jon Bryant: It's like, once you find that number, you're just probably horrified. It's brutal.

Michael Murray: Oh yeah. I mean, when I think about the amount of money we spend on marketing. I mean, right. If we're generating all these leads and nothing's happening with them, it's like, man, there's a lot of wasted spend there for sure.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's such an interesting one though, because I think there's actually two factors at play there. One is that, yeah, you can't do the estimate for a while, but maybe you also can't do the job for a while. So if you did the estimate tomorrow and can't do the job for eight weeks, well, that's also probably not a great fit either if the person's looking to get it done sooner. I know when I hear eight weeks, I'm always like, really? Eight weeks? I mean, I'm a whole different person in two months. I'm sure I'm hiring more people, do what you've got to do, but I get that. We're trying to manage that expectation in the summer. And so yes, it gets hard.

Michael Murray: I think we should answer that question though. I mean, just like how long should somebody wait? I'll just share this funny anecdote. It's like a week or a few days ago, I ordered a pair of shoes online and they're not coming from Amazon and they're not going to be here for a week. And I'm just like, what? Like I have to wait a week? This is insane. I need these by the end of the day. And so I think, you know, again, I'm using this, but that's I think where we're at as a society, as consumers. We don't expect—if I schedule, I can schedule an appointment for three weeks from now for you to come out and give me a price. And then in our industry, most people, most homeowners' expectation is that's the day you're going to come out and I'm not going to get anything then. You're going to then, maybe if you decide to, send me an email three days, four days later. Or I'm going to have to call you a week after the appointment as the homeowner and say, "Hey, I never got anything. Can you send it to me?" And they're like, "Oh my goodness. What a hassle."

I've heard—we don't do this—I've heard at some conference or, you know, I remember talking about it in the mastermind call with some other business owners, there's some other company that has like this rule of three. And it's like a three by three. The phone has to be answered within three rings. The estimate has to be scheduled in the next three days. And the project has to be completed within the next three weeks. And I'm like, that's interesting. I'm not sure—I think we're pretty far away from being able to do that, but I can see the benefits to it.

Jon Bryant: That's a nice rule. Yeah. I mean, show me a unicorn. I'd love to see one too. They sound pretty. But yeah.

Michael Murray: But it's like, yeah, I don't know. I think it's possible. I mean, it's not impossible. I don't know if unicorns are possible, but I think that three by three is possible. It just sounds really challenging.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, man, I think there's—I mean, it's a great goal. Don't get me wrong when I hear that. I'm like, man, that'd be phenomenal. And we've talked about before, like if you get a job done tomorrow, like if that's your goal and you could spin up another crew immediately, that's good quality that you can trust, that does good, like all of this stuff that we promise, tomorrow, that would be the ultimate goal. But it's really hard, and I think in our world with labor to make that happen.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I think you just alluded to it. It's the labor side. I think the only way that works is with a bunch of independent sales reps doing the estimates, commission only, and a bunch of independent subcontractors doing the work where you have the super flexibility that you're not tied to anybody. So it's just like, "Hey, you know, independent sales reps, some weeks, we're going to have tons of opportunities for you and other weeks, other times of year, there's none." Otherwise, I don't understand how you flex from being able to do estimates every three days in the summer to being able to do those within three days in the winter with the same workforce. It doesn't track.

Jon Bryant: It doesn't transition. Yeah, it's almost like you're seeing the problem like it's coming from the software world. It's just like spinning up new servers. It's like, well, the servers are all the same, so we're just going to spin up another one, but that's not the reality. Like we're trying to give quality and make sure that people are trained. It's actually kind of hard to price a paint job. I mean, we're making it as easy as we can with PaintScout obviously, but there's some element of trust here where you've got to verify and make sure people are doing the right thing. Because if they sell a bad job, you're hooped.

So it sounds great in theory. I just, you know, we can't get there. And honestly, we're doing better than we've ever done at this, but inevitably in the summer, we're going to be booked out far. And that sounds great as a business. I think a lot of people talk about this. They're like, "I'm booked out for a year. I'm doing amazing things." That's not a good thing for business. Right? You're missing out on so much opportunity.

Michael Murray: You're talking estimates or projects right now?

Jon Bryant: I'm talking projects, but estimates themselves, I think, play a factor in that too, because you reduce your ability to sell. And so you want to have a short time period because you want your sales reps to be hungry.

Michael Murray: I think if we can do an estimate within two weeks, I think that is not ideal. I'm not saying that's the best, the most excellent. Again, three days sounds really good. I just can't figure out how to get there with an employee sales team. But I think within two weeks, at least, I feel like we're starting to have a good conversation. So it's like, we're going to get to you this week or next kind of idea. What feels like a right, or at least like a pretty good benchmark to you?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I mean, I'll say two weeks, but with a caveat: two weeks and you provide pricing on the spot. Because if you come out in two weeks and then you don't provide it for another week, summer is almost over in Cleveland. Right? So you better be able to perform, talk to the customer. Also, this flows back into time management, everything else. Like you want to get to yes or no as fast as you can. Make sure you deliver on the date that you said you're going to deliver or else if I'm waiting—I've had this experience so many times. I wait two weeks for something. And the person gets there and then I don't hear from them for three weeks and now I'm just pissed off. Like, I'm like, come on guys. Like really? It was that hard to get me a price. Like you said you'd do it after two weeks and then it took you five weeks. So that's my caveat. Two weeks sounds reasonable. That's pushing it. I think a little bit. I'd love to be able to get an estimate done in a week.

Michael Murray: What's reality for you guys? Like if I called right now and said, "Hey, I need an estimate," when am I getting one?

Jon Bryant: We can do it next week. Yeah. We still have time. We've got three reps. Yep. Three going on four reps. The thing we do in the summer though is we have a sales support person. So usually somebody junior who's looking to get into sales and it's a chance for us to feel out the whole thing and see if they're going to be good. And that flows into potentially an opportunity in the fall to add another rep, but they're doing all that support stuff, which really takes a lot of time. So getting back to customers, following up, helping the sales team get the estimates ready before they even go out. They're doing some of the lead vetting, which we're going to talk about after, but that really has helped kind of free up the sales team because those other micro tasks—anytime someone calls in, even if they're looking to get a small piece of furniture painted for their kid's playhouse and they've called the wrong number, we still have to get someone to call them back and talk to them and that takes a lot of time, right? Like we want our sales team selling and servicing.

So by introducing that person, it's really kind of oiled the machine, so to speak, where we're able to get estimates done faster and also alleviate some of those inappropriate type visits that we've been doing. And so yeah, I'd like to say a week, two at the max in the summer.

Michael Murray: And I think too, it's like, there's a way to do that well and a way to not do it well. Is our prospect not hearing from us for the next two weeks or do we have some intentional, maybe some emails, text messages, phone calls that are happening to provide some education and keep in touch with that person? Because we can assume they're getting some other bids, maybe from our competitors. And if they haven't heard—they scheduled an appointment with us, but they haven't heard anything. And yeah, I've got an estimate next week, but I might as well just book with the guy that's here versus like, I've been super impressed with all these emails and all this communication I've been getting from this other company. I'm willing to wait a few more days to meet with that person before I make a final decision.

Jon Bryant: Dude, I love that idea. It's almost like a pre follow-up. What would you call that?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, we have a specific sequence of automated emails that are a part of this pre-estimate sequence is what we call it. It's kicked off by booking an appointment and then there's certain dates based on—some happen based on the date that you booked the appointment and others work backwards from the actual appointment date, stuff like that. So I think that helps a little bit.

The other thing, real quick, and then I think we should talk more about the lead vetting that you were just describing, because not all leads are the same. And I think that's an important point here. But one other thing that we're trying to do this year is have the ability to have some capacity flex. So again, we're not hiring independent sales reps, which I think might provide for some of that. One of the things that we did is over the winter, we trained our two field managers on how to do some basic estimates. So they're not going to go out and do maybe a big commercial repaint or something like that, but for an exterior residential repaint or some basic interior stuff, cabinet painting, some of those types of things, our field managers are now trained on how to go into PaintScout, build a quote, have conversations. It's probably not as good as the full-time sales team. And certainly our field managers have some of their own time constraints this time of year, but it gives us a little bit of flexibility where it's like, "Hey, we're going to have one of the field managers do two or three quotes this week, just to take a little bit of the steam off so that we're not booking people out too far. And we're also not scheduling 20 quotes on one of the sales reps calendars or even 16 to 17 quotes or whatever."

Jon Bryant: Yeah, that's super helpful too. So you can kind of see who's in the area and maybe they can just go out and do a quick visit, meet with them. Yeah, that's a great idea. Love that. I will add one thing on there for you. So I think when things get busy, the quick answer to slow it down is to push out estimates. You're like, oh, we have no capacity for production. So we push out estimates, right? This happens a lot of times in July, August. It's like, well, we can't really get to you until September, October. So why even bother doing the estimate right now? Just push that out.

And one thing that's really helped us is that we've also opened up production capacity. So we have that flex capacity for production so that our sales team can always sell a job for next week. And so we don't fill the schedule completely. We always hold back two or three crew schedules a week or two out. And so that helps for a few reasons. One is that we want the sales team to still be working on relationships. And when you work on a relationship, like a realtor, designer, home stager, and they're like, you've worked really hard at it and then it comes summer and you don't have the capacity and they call you up and they say, "Hey, I want to do a job." You've put all this effort in and they're like, "Well, we can do that in 12 weeks." And they're like, relationship over. We just broke up.

And so it's been super helpful for us to have that flex production capacity because it keeps our team engaged. And so they're still able to do their activities that are relationship building and they have opportunity always for next week. And that has been a huge change for us. So it's been hard on the production team. Because they're like, "I want to fill it. We want to fill it." Well, guess what? Thursday every week you can start selling a job for not the next week, but the week after. And so now our team is like, oh, there's always opportunity, always opportunity. Our clients are happier and those activities we're doing aren't just for nothing. So that's been super helpful. So I like that kind of flex on both sides, right?

Michael Murray: That's genius. Yeah. No, I think that's so smart. I mean, again, to your point, if you've built that relationship with a realtor, they have a client that's moving into their house in two weeks, they should have called you earlier, they screwed up, they probably know it. I think most painting businesses are just like, "This customer's an idiot, I don't want to work with them, how dare you wait till the last minute, don't you know how busy we are?" And it's like, no, they don't. They're not thinking about painting. That's not their problem. And it's also, oh, by the way, like that's our problem as a business to solve. You know, I referenced Amazon, right? But it's like, you know, I think the Walmarts of the world that had—if we went back 20 years, you know, Amazon's coming out with all of these like two-day deliveries and stuff. And I think Walmart's perspective probably at that time was something on the lines of like, that's hard. That's, you know, we can't do that. And, you know, do people really care?

And, you know, that's unreasonable expectations. And now again, it's like, now everybody should try and catch up because that is the customer's expectation. And it's like, if we're not going to be available, that's going to leave an opportunity for one of our local competitors to be available. And now we just lost that relationship and that customer.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yeah. No, very interesting stuff. So let's move on to some lead vetting. So obviously the summer is—we've talked about work-life balance, scheduling, but it all plays into what kind of jobs you're bidding on. And so the one thing that we really have a hard time with is that concept of somebody calling you with, you know, "I have a two by four that needs painted. Can you guys do that?"

Michael Murray: My front door.

Jon Bryant: And that really bogs down the whole process, right? Like we have somebody who's now on the phone who can't take another call, who has to—but then they don't have the answer. I mean, obviously we have minimum costs. They can tell them like, "Hey, this is the minimum cost." And the person's like, "That's okay, no problem. I can handle that." It's like, okay, now we've got to get a sales rep to call them. And so we've had to develop really, I don't know if it's sophisticated or not, but we can't take on every estimate, every job, and that is hard in the summer. So, I mean, how do you guys deal with it?

Michael Murray: I don't know. It depends on the day. I would answer well or not well. Yeah, it's such a challenge, you know, because going back to what I was just talking about, like there is a lifetime value. One of our core values is to build lifelong relationships here. And that's not just with clients, but with everybody—employees, vendors, et cetera. But from this client perspective, we try not to think of it as this project, this transaction. A customer needs their front door painted, or I shouldn't say that—a prospect, right? We've never worked with them before. They need their front door painted. It's like, part of me is like, that's not the only thing they're going to need painted in the next five years. Let's treat that really well. Let's go crush that front door and just give them an amazing experience, knock their socks off so that when they want the rest of their inside painted or the whole outside or whatever it is, that's a $20,000 project. There's only one person to call. So that's one side of the coin. Not to mention they can refer us. They can do the Google reviews. They can do all the things. This is great. That's the one side.

The other side is, damn it. It's a front door. How am I supposed to treat this the same when somebody else is actually calling and they want the whole outside of their house painted? It's a $20,000 project. What we do is what you just said. We do have a project minimum. It depends on the type of project and the time of year. It's typically in the range of maybe around $1,000 to $2,000, depending on what type of service it is and time of year. We waive project minimum for referral partners and repeat clients. So if we've worked with you before, or you're one of our referral partners, there's no such thing. So if you need your front door painted, we want to paint it. But if that's our first project together, that's going to be a challenge, especially this time of year. That's how we do that.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I mean, that's a very fair approach. And I think when we were at the PCA, I sat on a panel about estimation sales and somebody asked about lead vetting and it can be quite a delicate subject for some people, because we're all in different places in terms of how many leads we have. And when leads are slow and you need work, I mean, the answer is you're probably going to look at different jobs than you would when things are busy. And so the one thing we do is we try to have a bit of a metric around the value, customer value and customer fit. And so like you're saying, you know, you want to create customers for life. Well, they have a different value set that's going to mesh well with your business versus a customer who should be a lifetime customer of someone else's business, right? Like these are just different things. That's going to depend around price, quality, servicing, and then ultimately, income level, type of property, blah, blah on the other side.

And so we try to identify the fit. Like, is this a neighborhood that we've had success in and that we work in a lot? Is this a timeline that is reasonable for the customer? Is this a type of project that's going to reflect well on our company? Is this the type of thing that somebody might be willing to wait a little longer for? And so we're trying to identify those at the point of sale. And we're checklisting that stuff and evaluating it and getting a metric for whether they're a good fit, because I don't think that every customer should be a lifetime customer of ours, unless they are a good value fit.

Michael Murray: Sure. Yeah, I agree with that. And that's where, you know, again, building lifelong relationships, what we also say is relationships go both ways. So it's like I don't want to be in an abusive relationship. And, you know, that's an extreme way of saying a little bit of what you're saying, right? If customers don't pay us or if they're jerks or all of those types of things, I don't want to be in any relationship with them. So it's not a "the customer is always right and we're going to give them whatever they want" kind of mindset. And so whenever we do talk about the core value, that is also part of that conversation. I agree with you. Yeah, so how do we do that? Well, I mean, is it just like person answering the phone? Are we looking, you know, pictures? I know for us, we will often ask them to send us a video. We use the software called Groundwork, which allows clients to send us a video kind of easily, I guess, or just keeps it all organized for us instead of just ending up in a text message inbox or something. And that can be a way for us to maybe get eyes on a project that we're not sure—does this fit what we're looking for in terms of size and scope? And maybe it's, you know, maybe they're far away, so we're trying to save some drive time or whatever. But that's one way that we handle that. How about you guys?

Jon Bryant: A couple of questions about that. So yeah, we don't use Groundwork and I've heard great things, but who does that call? Like who's actually making the call after they get the video? Is it sales rep, office? Who does that?

Michael Murray: Depends. So if it's something that we're interested in, it's going to be a sales rep. If it's something that, you know, it's going to be more of a minimum kind of conversation, it's going to be more of that admin team, receptionist, if you will, whatever you want to call that person.

Jon Bryant: And so initially who's viewing it? Is it the office? And then they'd send it through to a sales rep and be like, you might want to contact this person. Yeah.

Michael Murray: Yeah, exactly. Yep. So it looks like, yeah, whatever they're looking to get. I'm trying to think of what they might say, you know, "We need to get a little bit of trim painted on the front of our house" and it's like, what does that mean? And maybe we're just not getting there. It's like, if you could just send us a video real quick explaining what you're looking to get done. And they send it and it's just like, you know, I don't know. It's like a Tudor style house and it's just like tons of trim. It's like, oh wait, when you said trim, I thought you meant the trim around the front door. There's $2,000 or $3,000 of trim on the front of this house. Like let's have somebody come over and talk to you about that or whatever. I don't know, that may be a bad example, but there's an example of how that could work.

Jon Bryant: Gotcha. Yeah. So I think we do that approach with pictures. Customers can send us pictures and they can submit those on the website. And then we take a look at them and we essentially try to use that sales support person to go through all those and communicate with the customer, and then figure out the rough value of that project. And then put that into a sales rep's schedule if that makes sense. And so that's good, but man, it can get overwhelming too. Like I think that portion of our sales process often is the first one to get behind because there are so many projects that we need pictures on. I wish there was a better way because, and also we're asking the customer to do more work for us and then if we don't get back to them fast enough, I can understand their annoyance. So when it gets busy, we need to do a better job. I mean, do you have any suggestions there?

Michael Murray: We've struggled with this a lot where we get videos, they get assigned to a sales rep and the sales rep says, "Yep, got it, I'm going to get to that." And then days go by because they're off doing in-person quotes. And, you know, inherently if it's in the video and we're talking about this is a smaller project, but it does seem like one that we want to do. They know that it is a smaller project and they know that it is a less desirable project. And so they're kind of putting that on the side burner a little bit. And then we have customers calling and complaining like, "Hey, I sent you guys a video three days ago. I haven't heard from anybody." And it's like, I can say, "Oh, it's only been three days. Don't you know how busy we are? Like, how dare you?" But again, it goes back to this Amazon thing of like, that's not the customer's problem. We have to solve for that. And they're right. We need to be able to be easier to work with in that way. So I don't have a great solution, other than trying to have some more office admin involvement, having people that are a little bit more tethered to their desk. I like your idea from before of just scheduling more time for that. You mentioned the Tuesday and Thursday in the office kind of thing. I think that could certainly be a good possible solution for some of those issues.

Jon Bryant: For sure. It does. I mean, even with the Tuesday, Thursday, though, we get behind. I mean, some of our bad reviews that we've ever had in our company's history is just that it took too long to get back to them or we didn't get back to them. And in a lot of ways it's like, you know, I sit there being like, why didn't we get back to them? This is crazy. And then I look at the volume that we're trying to deal with and, you know, ultimately what used to be before we had this position for the summer was like, sales rep goes out, does five estimates, comes back to the office and has been assigned seven picture leads that have to be called before tomorrow. And it's like, no wonder these people are drowning and burnt out. Like that's just not a system. And so what they do inevitably is they don't call back the picture leads. Now the next day comes and they've got another seven picture leads assigned to them. So now they've got 14. You know how hard it is to call 14 people?

Michael Murray: They're screwed. Yeah, you're already underwater. It's been two days. Welcome to summer.

Jon Bryant: And so we really had to look hard at that and be like, our prospects are upset. They believe we don't care. When in reality, we care a ton, they just don't see the volume on the other side you're trying to deal with. And it's like the flood gates open. I mean, they will open next week for like a month and a half. And so we need to have all hands on deck. Like we're going to deal with people, we've got to get them pricing. And so we do a couple of things.

I mean, we do a couple of things to help out to get some pricing in their hands quicker. And I'd like to hear what you're doing too, Michael, just because I think at the end of the day, people would love to know rough budget and see whether it's worth waiting because some people just don't have a clue. And so we'll use, you know, Google Earth. It's a big one. So we're checking out exterior properties on Google Earth. We're measuring. We're figuring out what it roughly is in terms of a ballpark. And then we're delivering that.

Michael Murray: Sorry, who's doing that part? Is that the assistant?

Jon Bryant: So that's going to be our office, you know, the sales support person is going on, getting those dimensions. Before they make their calls, they might have a quick run over with the rep who's in the office. Like, is this a range that makes sense? Cool, we'll deliver that, see if it's worth it. Then the other way is, yeah, having someone in the area go check it out. So just be like, "Hey, we've got a crew in the area, they'll go check it out in a day here. Let's see if we don't get some more details." What are you guys doing? I mean, that's not—I know there's better ways.

Michael Murray: Can you—well, I want to ask a couple of questions because we don't really do what you just said and I like that. So help me understand. So the sales support Google Earth idea. Let's just focus on that for a minute. So if I call and I want to, let's say an exterior estimate, because if I'm thinking Google Earth, I'm thinking exterior, do I always—is step one, let's get you some preliminary numbers from Google Earth and then if we're on the same page, then we schedule? Or is it only for certain types of projects? How do we—which ones or how many go through the Google Earth sales support person? Or is it everybody?

Jon Bryant: So it's not everybody. Obviously, I think for a full repaint, we know we have to go check it out. It's worth the time. It's more of these mid-range projects where you're talking about the Tudor home, where they can send you a video, but we can also just go take a look at Street View and see what's going on. And so I've always liked that because we're doing the work. And it takes—for exteriors, it helps us take away from those "send us pictures, go send us as many pictures" and then we don't get back to you. It gives us a chance to impress them. Be like, "Hey, I'm just looking here at Google Earth. It looks like this is the kind of home we're dealing with." Now, for the summer for us, it's probably projects that are $2,000 to $5,000. Those are the ones that are kind of like, do we have a dance partner here? Because those are the ones that take time. They can eat up a lot of time. They're just not high enough value in the summer for us to be maybe as excited as we should be.

And so it's like, you know, can we just give you a ballpark here? Like this is probably $2,000 to $4,000. Is that within reason for you? Because if it is, I'd love to get a salesperson to swing by next week and take a look. And if it isn't, hey, totally get that. There's a lot of other options out there. And again, these are people doing it for the first time, first time people, not referrals, because I agree with you 100% on those.

Michael Murray: Who's having that conversation? So that comes in. Let's just say I call and say, "Hey, I need some of the wood—I have a vinyl-sided house, and I have some wood trim on it. I just need the soffits and fascia done." I don't know. Whatever. Everybody's area is a little bit different. But it's something like that. And that's where you're thinking, the person on the phone or whoever's thinking, "Oh, this sounds like it might be one of those mid-range projects you're describing, smallish projects." And they're going to say, "Yeah, no problem. I'm going to take down your information and have somebody in our team give you a call here to talk more about your project." Is that kind of what that might sound like? Yep.

Jon Bryant: That's exactly what it sounds like, yeah.

Michael Murray: And so then they pass it off to the sales support person and say, "Hey, John Smith just called. They said they're looking for the trim on their house, the wood trim, whatever. Can you do your thing with the Google street view and give them a call and talk to them about it?" Is that again, simplifying it?

Jon Bryant: Yeah. And so we put some training into that person so they know kind of what they're doing. They're using obviously PaintScout to get some general metrics together. Like if it's soffit and fascia, we've got that programmed in. So they kind of get their dimensions, put it in. We do get them to kind of vet that with one of our more senior people. So they might put together a list. Whoever's in the office, that person will go over and be like, "Yeah, that looks roughly correct, roughly clear, roughly correct." Then they're calling like, "Hey, you know, I'm Mark here from The Other Painter. What I wanted to do is discuss your project a little further, just to make sure it's worth both of our time for us to come out." And then once we get the go ahead, then we do schedule those. And yeah, that person is incentivized to figure out what best fit is and help presale the job essentially.

Michael Murray: That person is not themselves going. They're going to then schedule it for one of the reps to go out next week or next couple days or whatever. So, yeah, I like it.

Jon Bryant: Correct. Yeah. Correct. Because we found where the bottleneck was that conversation was happening. It just took five days. The person was already annoyed and then trying to let somebody down after calling them back after five days is super hard. Like, "Hey, just got to your job. Yeah. This is how it looks. Yeah. We're not going to come look at this." And so it's helped us with the bottleneck of customer communication, people are happier. And we're not giving exact prices, but it's enough to see if we're going to be an initial dance.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Well, and you're not just—it's not just a wild guess. I mean, you have put some time into trying to measure the house using the street view and the satellite views and stuff to figure some of those things out. I love using the measurement tool in Google Maps and Google Earth just to be able to get—let me get some rough dimensions on how wide is the side of the house or the building. And it's shocking with some of the 3D views and different things. You can really get a pretty good picture on an exterior at least some of the time.

Jon Bryant: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You can almost get all your everything you need before you get there. I mean.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we're that far away from that, for sure.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's getting the measurements and getting, I mean, that's probably, I'd say that's 80% of it. There's a 20% kind of feel factor, prep factor, all that kind of stuff that goes on. But, you know, exterior, you can get a lot of that from Google, Google Earth. So, yeah. So, any other thoughts here, Michael? I mean, obviously you have kind of a fun one here on lead vetting and anything else that stands out to you.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, no, I think this has been pretty helpful. Again, I think it is—not just thinking of sales as the sales reps capacity. I guess that's the big change for us this year with, I mentioned before, some of our field managers and, you know, some office support staff. And I like how you guys have the sales support person who is, you know, at least keeping in touch with the customer, giving them some information, helping to do some pre-qualifications, price conditioning and things like that. I think it's all really smart. I can definitely see we have an opportunity to utilize maybe Google Earth a little bit better. Again, we've done some things like that, but probably not enough. And I think there's an opportunity for us to maybe grab another 10% to 20% of the leads before they get scheduled. Let's have a pricing conversation like you just described, and it could save everybody some time. I like it. Anything else that we missed on lead vetting in your mind?

Jon Bryant: No, it's just important to understand what's good and what's not. And we can go in for the best value stuff. Actually, I will make one comment. I think coming out of winter, a lot of us are so starved for work that we end up doing really silly things. And I've heard this compared in other discussions I've had, it's like compared to a buffet, you know, where you show up at the buffet and they save all the good stuff for last. And you kind of know that, but you take like seven bread rolls anyways, because you're hungry and like a bunch of, you know, romaine lettuce. And then you don't have any space left on your plate for any prime rib. And I think at the start of the summer, when you're that hungry and work starts coming in, you're like, "I've got to fill the schedule. I've got to fill the schedule." Next thing you know, you just don't have the capacity for the good stuff. It's so disheartening because—and so I think just thinking about that and being diligent about how you vet the leads and how you fill your plate is really important to having a successful summer and also just running a successful business. So that's my final thought.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I know. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I know we've talked a lot about the estimating and the sales side, but from a production side, we're in lockstep. And one of the things that we've changed was we don't schedule just for the next available slot, unless that's what somebody needs, but at least half of our customers don't care. I mean, if they're, you know, you were saying like, maybe waiting six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks. Some of our customers have said like, "Yeah, 12 weeks. I don't care. I'll wait three months. Like whatever, it's not a big deal. I'll wait 12 weeks, four months or whatever," because again, depending on the time of year and what's going on, they just need—maybe they're just, they're calling us in March and they're like, "I just need this done before next winter. I don't care. I have no grad parties or something coming up."

And so in those situations, we'll schedule them out for, you know, July even, or whatever that might look like. And that way then we're not scheduled up for May. And so where we are, it's like somebody might say, "Hi, we have this big grad party end of May, Memorial Day weekend or whatever it is, our son, daughter's graduating from high school. We need the house painted." And that's, you know, three weeks from now, let's say it's early May. And it's like, "Oh man, like, sorry, we're already booked then because we booked up with projects in March and April for people that really didn't care." And it's like, so that's one of the things that we've been really trying to be intentional about when we're scheduling our projects. It's like, if people don't have a deadline, push them out for a while so that we can leave some of the holes like you were talking about earlier, to really give our sales team some better opportunities there. So, yeah, I agree.

All right. So one of the things that we haven't touched on, and one of my favorite things to talk about this time of year—you just talked about coming out of winter and we all have this mindset in the winter about, we're hungry, we're starving for work and leads. And as sales reps, it's hard to find enough opportunities and now it's summer and there's too many opportunities. And guess what usually comes after summer and especially after fall, Jon Bryant? Any—and you're a pretty smart guy, you might get this one.

Jon Bryant: Is it summer again? That's what I remember last year.

Michael Murray: No, I think in some parts and not in Cleveland. I can tell you right now. That's where I go on—I go on vacation to the places where it's summer all year round. No, we typically have this thing. It's called winter. Yeah, it's weird. You know, something to do with balls spinning in the air. And yeah, so guess what sales reps, the best time to get ready for next winter is right now. It's going to be building those relationships and doing all of those things, and if we're not intentional about our calendar, that's going to be really hard. I know you guys do a good job of that. Jon Bryant, what are your thoughts on when should we start preparing for winter? I mean, it's May or June right now. Are we really preparing for winter already?

Jon Bryant: I mean, you say we do a good job at this. Every year, I think I do a terrible job at this and think I've got to do better. So this is a great reminder for me too, but I think we're starting our marketing for winter. It's going to be early August. And I've heard of people doing Christmas in July sales. I know you've had great success with that stuff where it's just like, we're super busy now, but if you're willing to wait on your interior, let's put that in Christmas around that holiday season and give you a discount. So I mean, I love that approach. And I think, you know, in the past we've gotten busy and then we don't start till mid September, mid October. And then we think to ourselves like, why are we so slow? It's like, no, that's kind of our own fault. But the answer is something different. Do as I say, not as I do.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think you guys do a really good job of these relationships and having time for that. And I think that can be part of it. Right. So it's like, I think the relationships have less seasonality to it. You know, there is a seasonal nature to the demand in our industry and really in home improvements. We see those two kind of camel humps in the spring and in the fall. Summer's busy. Winter's really slow. And it's like, you know, but the relationships aren't necessarily, right. The good realtors are busy. You know, again, they have some seasonality, but they're pretty busy. And so the companies like you guys that do such a good job with relationship building and referral partners and things like that, I think can avoid some of the super low months of the winter if we're just relying on like Google ads and Facebook ads and some of that type of demand that can be pretty bleak come winter.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's a great reminder. And, you know, as much as I say that we don't do great with our—it's really our direct marketing. Like that's what gets shut off in the summer a little bit because we're just so busy and we can't feel like we're wasting money, but that's the whole reason why we looked at the business holistically and said like, what are we doing in summer? That's killing our relationships because the relationships are just so vital into what we do and we need to service those people. So we actually changed our whole business model and scheduling and availability and promise to really facilitate great relationships with those people. And it's been beneficial because we maintain those all year round. And so you're right, that really, you know, if there's those peaks and valleys, it helps us kind of stabilize where, you know, if we find people that are in, you know, different seasonality, right?

Like a good example would be a lot of facility managers have a budget they've got to spend before the end of the year. Right? And so if we can remind them and get in touch with them and be proactive about that, well, that's really going to help our November, December. Right? Like their interest level is different where they don't really care about the busy season. They care about their budget and spending their budget. And then, you know, then looking at January, February, and being like, well, there's people who are willing to wait from summer to fill that gap. Like those relationships matter too. And so, you know, just thinking about it holistically and as a whole year and a whole calendar really helps the process and there's always—obviously room for improvement here from myself. You say this out loud but I'm like I can do better. But honestly, yeah, now's the time to remember when the hard times are because you forget so fast.

Michael Murray: For sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it's that farming analogy. Now's a really good time to plant seeds that are going to produce fruit in six to nine months. And that's super difficult, right? It's this, you know, the Eisenhower matrix of the urgent and the important. You know, the urgent tasks right now are the people that are calling and they want estimates and they need work done and they're ready to spend money. And there's a lot of those right now. But there's some importance there too, not to say there isn't, but the non-urgent and important are going to a lunch meeting with the local realtor to either maintain or begin a relationship that will become your key referral partner in 6 to 9 to 12 months or whatever that looks like. That could really make the difference between a slow winter and a busy winter.

You know, and we both know that oftentimes some of these big commercial projects have a long buying cycle. You know, they don't—they're not looking—something that needs something painted in next January, they're already out to bid. They might have already decided on it. I mean, depending on the scope of the project. But they're already, some of those projects are already looking for bids and things like that. And so it's like, again, we cannot wait until November to realize that, oh crap, it's about to be winter. And, you know, so be intentional. If we're not careful, you know, you're going to look up and it's like end of the summer, it's going to be August. You know, summer goes by in a blink in our industry, it feels like, because it just gets so busy, so fast. And, you know, now we're going to—you and I are going to be recording episodes on like, what kind of last ditch efforts can we be doing from a marketing and sales perspective to try to stay busy where it's like right now, early summer is the best time to start really building those things up.

Jon Bryant: Dude, love that. That's probably a great place for us to end things. Guys, thanks for following along with us. If you've listened to some of this stuff and you enjoy it, share it with a friend. I think that's the best thing we can ask and we'll continue to make this content if it's helpful. So leave a comment, share with a friend and thanks for spending some time with us. We enjoy it.

Michael Murray: This is good. Yeah, definitely. I got some really good takeaways here that we're going to get started on too. So I appreciate it. Thanks, Jon Bryant.

Jon Bryant: Thanks, Michael. Take it easy.

‍