Jon Bryant: Michael, it's trade show season. I am for the first time ever doing a trade show for our painting company. I've tried to stay away from it like the plague. When I say trade show, I mean home show season. Here we are going to a home show. We've done other trade shows commercially, but home shows are new. I know you've got a ton of experience in this area. You've done it for a bunch of years. You've gone around this track before. I know you have opinions. I've heard your opinions before, but I want to talk about this. Home shows - what to not do. Have you done anything recently or where are you at?

Michael Murray: We're actually in the middle of a home show right now. Here we are. We're recording this in early February. It'll come out a few weeks from now. But like you said, it's February, March, April - typically a busy home show season around much of North America. There's all sorts of these shows going on at convention centers or malls. I've got a lot of experience. I first started doing home shows for the painting company I was running in college and have been doing it ever since. So about half of my life or more - more than half my life - been going to home improvement shows and working them. I have a healthy love-hate relationship. It is a lot of time, a lot of effort, but if you do it well, it can be very, very profitable, a great way to drive a lot of leads.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Well I'm excited to learn from you. Talk to me, what are you guys not doing? What can you offer?

Michael Murray: I think we've learned a lot over the years, a lot of trial and error. I've kind of come up with a little bit of a list. Here's some tips and tricks for somebody who may be new to doing home shows, or maybe it's somebody that's been doing it a while but not getting great results, from my experience as well as just from what I've noticed doing this for years and seeing some of the other booths and companies.

Let's dive in. First one - no chairs. Nobody's there to sit. We're not gonna be comfortable. It's not gonna be a whole lot of fun.

Jon Bryant: Michael, my legs hurt.

Michael Murray: Yep. This was a lot easier when I was in my 20s, I'm not gonna lie. But here's the thing - when our sales reps or painters or whoever we might have working in the booth are standing up, a few things happen. One, we're at the same eye level as the homeowner or the consumer who's walking around, talking, looking at our booth. It's not like this odd dynamic where I'm sitting in a chair, maybe behind a table or something - we can talk about that in a second - and I'm talking up at somebody. They feel awkward. They're not like, "Oh, am I supposed to kind of crouch down a little bit to have a conversation or maybe I'm going to stand up as I start to have a conversation?" It's just this very awkward dynamic. Imagine if you're having a job interview or something and one person's standing and the other person's sitting - it's just an awkward conversation.

Jon Bryant: The power dynamic is a little bit off for sure.

Michael Murray: For sure. Exactly. I just think it's very awkward and unapproachable. But I also think there's something to be said for the energy that I think comes from standing. We've probably heard of like have a quick standing meeting so that we're not just going to sit and get comfy and hang out. That's the energy I want our team to have, or I want to personally have when I'm working in the booth - a higher energy. Let's go, we're here to engage with people, we're not here to just hang out and relax.

No chairs. I mentioned a minute ago too, sitting behind a table - that's another thing that really goes with it. I think the standard home show setup is ubiquitous - some kind of big banner in the background, big logo on the table, and then somebody sitting, maybe two people are sitting behind the table playing on their phone or whatever. They've got some stuff sprawled out on the table and people are supposed to come up and talk to them. I just feel like it is so uninviting. We've got this table that's like a barrier between me as the consumer trying to talk to the person in the booth. Then they look pretty comfy. They're playing on their phones. I don't want to interrupt them. Oh, I'll just keep moving on. That's the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish with some of the setup stuff.

Jon Bryant: Totally. I was going to try to question you a little bit on this, but I just agree with you too much on this one. You get the energy you receive - the energy you put out. If you're sitting there, how many times - I've been to a few home shows - and the thing is, when people are there, I feel like I'm bothering them. If they're sitting at a table, I feel like I'm getting in the way of whatever interesting thing they're doing. Usually they're sitting there, maybe they're bored on their phone or something. They're not engaging. That energy just isn't there.

I think of the booths that I do talk to people at - usually they're more open, inviting, more free space, something that just feels like a conversation can happen. Because even though people go to these things, the mindset is "I'm going, but I don't really want to talk to anybody." If the opportunity is not there, I'm just not going to put myself out there because that's weird. It's confrontational. So anyways, agreed. What else you got?

Michael Murray: Just on that last setup thing, and then we'll move on to the second point. We have at the current show we're at a 10 by 20 booth - it's 20 feet wide. The only thing that is not on the back wall is a small round bistro table. So if you can imagine, it's like three foot round. It's a great little spot with a little tiny sign on it. We have a little bowl of mints because people love to grab a little mint or a piece of candy or something like that. I think that's a great thing. But it also just provides a little gathering spot for two or three people to come up, hang out around the table, and we can have a conversation, just like if you were at a cocktail party or something like that. That's the kind of atmosphere that we want in the booth - that mingling and getting to know somebody type of an atmosphere. So it's very intentional how we do that type of a setup.

Let's go to point number two. The logo. Nobody really cares about your logo. So when you're setting up your booth, don't make your logo the main focus and all of the signage and everything that you're putting out there.

I see this so often - it's huge logo in the background, maybe logo on the front of that six foot table like I mentioned before. It looks great. You and I both know not all the logos in the home improvement industry are any good, but we'll save that for another podcast. Even the best logos aren't - we're not like Pepsi or Coca-Cola. There's not a whole lot of brand recognition, even for the companies that are around for a long time.

I'm not saying don't have any logo. I'm saying don't make it the main focus of the signage in your booth. Instead, speak to the pain point of your ideal customer, whatever that might be. If you're selling interior and exterior residential painting, you might have up on the biggest part - the backdrop or whatever it is - it might say "Dallas's Highest Rated Painting Company." You can back that up because on Google, you are the highest rated painting company in Dallas. Put that up in the biggest font you can fit on that full backdrop, and then in the small section underneath, put your logo.

That might be an example of how somebody could set it up without making their logo be the dominant part. What are your thoughts?

Jon Bryant: Someone listening is like, "Well, then how are people going to remember my company? That's really what I'm looking for - creating some brand recognition." What do you think? No?

Michael Murray: No, nobody's going to remember your company. So a home show is a direct sales opportunity. This is an opportunity to get leads and - we're going to talk about this in just a minute here - but we're not here to create brand recognition. To be honest with you, pretty much everybody in the home improvement business, we're not big enough to spend our money on branding activities. We need to spend our money on activities that are going to directly drive leads.

So I need to know how many estimates did I schedule or how many people's contact information did I get from the show? That's where the value is. The value is not in the residual that happens afterwards from passing a bunch of stuff out or whatever. Again, there can be some residual, but that's in my opinion very much less important and should be less of the focus when I'm thinking about the setup and the signage and stuff when I'm creating my booth.

Jon Bryant: Can you give a couple more examples for everyone listening about what the message might be? I know you mentioned the highest rated painting company in Dallas. What other good statements would you put up on there?

Michael Murray: I think it comes back to what are the unique pain points of your customers? We've talked about this in a previous episode. What are those unique pain points? What makes your company special? Call it a unique sales proposition. Is it your warranty? Is it the fact that you have an interior designer to help with colors? Is it - I was going to say how long you've been in business. I think that needs to be secondary to why does that matter to a customer?

If you've been around for 25 years, I think that's awesome. But tell me why do I care as a homeowner? It's like, "We've been trusted with painting homes in your community for over 25 years." That resonates with me better than "We've been in business for 25 years."

For us, typically when we're at a show, we're really focused on our cabinet painting business and division. It's one of the biggest things that we do. We're talking about our warranty as our main headline banner. That's where we want to stand out. It basically says in biggest, boldest letters, "Cabinet Refinishing Lifetime Warranty." It's what we call our lifetime touch-up promise. So it's literally "Cabinet Refinishing Lifetime Touch-Up Promise."

Anybody walking around that's thinking about - their cabinets are ugly or there's something that they don't like about them - immediately it's like, "Oh wait, that's what I'm looking for. I need to go talk to them." As opposed to putting just really big up there "Textbook Painting." Then people can come up and ask us if we paint textbooks and it's just weird. It's like, what is - why are you at this show? "Oh, I need to update my kitchen. Those guys, that's who I want to go talk to."

Jon Bryant: I guess for a lot of people, picking one statement is hard. They're like, "Well, then what about everything else? What about the interior? What about the exterior? What about everything else?" I think there's more power in being specific than there is being broad. Even the show that I think we're going to, there's going to be eight to 10 other painting contractors. There's already enough of a sense of commoditization in our industry - everyone's the same - that you just putting a logo off and being like "we're painters" doesn't help the customer identify what the right conversation is to have. So yeah, a hundred percent. You're making a lot of sense today.

Michael Murray: Well, every once in a while. Glad I could surprise you.

Jon Bryant: Thanks.

Michael Murray: All right, I'm going to move on. Maybe you'll disagree here in a minute. Number three - again, this is going to go back to the branding thing. We are not at the show to hand stuff out. I see people walking around the shows. They've got their huge bags and they're carrying the pink or the neon blue yardstick and all the things. I've got a couple of yardsticks. They're fun. I don't know what companies they're from. I don't really care because that's not the point of the home show.

The point of the home show is for the business to get leads. There's two ways you can do that. One is you can get people to just generally give you their information - name, number, whatever - and then you've got to follow up with them later. That is okay. It's way better than passing out a bunch of flyers. But the best way to do it is just schedule estimates at the show on the calendar for you to go and do the appointments.

Jon Bryant: I think we're going to - I hope we'll get more into that later. But it's funny - most of my experience with home shows has been through my parents. My parents go to the show twice a year, and they always come back with that bag you're talking about, just full of stuff. I think that's the reason why I'm anti-stuff in my life now, is because of how many of those little things were around our house. You know what? None of those guys got hired. Let's just put it that way. They have the craziest collection of things. I think we get, as business owners, we get joy out of putting our logo on stuff and giving that out. But like what you're saying is totally true - you've got to think about the point. What's the point here? The point is doing business. If the point was to produce things, well, we were in the wrong business.

Now, what would you say - one thought process I've had is, what if you do book an estimate with your company? Go through that process, you actually achieve the thing. Do you give them something or do you just say, "Hey, thanks"? What are you doing there?

Michael Murray: Yes, 100%. We like to have some sort of take-with-you piece. I'm going to call it a flyer, a postcard, something. All of our appointments are done electronically. When somebody - we use like Calendly. We have self-service on the website where somebody can go schedule their own estimate. We're really using that same system through Calendly. We're using that at the show. We bring iPads. Somebody walks up. We're going to have a conversation just like in any sales approach. Best thing to do is ask a lot of questions.

So it's like, "Are you thinking about doing some painting this year?" It might be a great way to get somebody to come and chat with you a little bit. They say, "Well, yeah, maybe." Or you see somebody just make eye contact with your booth and they're reading that headline that we just talked about. You might ask like, "Hey, do you guys have any questions?" That can be just a soft intro into a conversation with someone.

Our goal is to get them to sign up, schedule an appointment on the calendar. When they do that, they get an email sent back to them with the calendar invite and things like that. Then we hand them a flyer. The flyer has a discount of 10% for signing up at the home show, as well as all our contact information. Some of our value statements - what makes us special - and it looks really sharp. The website, phone number, whatever.

But here's the important part. We do not have those sitting out on the front table at the front of the booth. One, we don't have the front table at the front of the booth. But two, I don't want somebody to walk up and just say, "I'm just going to grab a flyer. Thanks. We'll be in touch." That's not an option. I like to keep the flyers somewhere basically hidden - literally hidden, behind a sign or in my back pocket or something like that where I'm in control of the conversation.

If the first thing somebody says is, "Hey, do you have a flyer?" my answer is - I usually don't answer the question and it's just like, "Are you guys planning a painting project?" I want to change the topic to have a conversation. They say, "Well, yeah, we're not really ready. Just if you could give me something, a flyer." "Tell me a little bit more like what part of town you guys live in." I'm just trying to get them to open up to the fact that I'm a normal person, you're a normal person. Let's have a couple minute conversation.

Sometimes it ends with "We're not ready to sign up for an estimate. We probably are going to do something, but it might not be for months." Then they won't sign up. No problem. I'm going to give them a flyer, but I know that low chance - like 5% of those flyers are going to ever call us later. So I'm going to try hard to avoid that. What I see a lot from somebody that's newer in our company working in the booth is the flyers are sitting out on the table and they're giving them out like hotcakes because that is easier to do than to try to have a conversation, especially when somebody's first question is, "Can I get a flyer?" and the easy answer is, "Yeah, here you go." "Do you guys have any painting questions?" "No." Oh, they're already gone.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. You're just now just in a giant shred pile. I think everything you said is correct, except for the fact that you said you were a normal person, which I think we've got to dive into in a future episode because that seems presumptive.

Michael Murray: I actually don't work the home show all that much anymore because of that reason. I've been told that I'm not allowed to go. No, I'm just kidding.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, great. No, I love that. It's great.

Michael Murray: So again, we can hand stuff out after the appointment and things like that. Next one important here - goals. We're going to have some goals. We're not going to show up to the show without any goals as to what are we trying to accomplish here?

Jon Bryant: So that makes sense. Can I jump in here for a second? Because goals - I've heard people talk about three types of goals. SLE goals are sales, leads, exposure. Can't make a lot of painting sales at a home show. Do you guys do anything around leads or exposure that makes sense?

Michael Murray: For sure. It's not surprising from what we just talked about, but it's all around leads. The easy thing is we're going to look at what did we do last year and set a goal around to beat that. So if last year we got 108 scheduled estimates, this year the goal is going to be 115 or something like that. There's a lot of different factors, many of which are outside of our control. Weather this time of year in the northern half of the country is a huge factor. We've done home shows in the past where major snowstorms show up - you're not allowed to drive on the roads - and here we are sitting in the big convention center and it's like crickets. There's 40 people walking around and it sucks.

But you can only control what you can control. Having no goal is worse. We're going to go, we're going to have some goals, and obviously we can make adjustments depending on how long the show is.

Jon Bryant: How many days are the shows that you go to?

Michael Murray: Most of the shows are Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The one that we're currently at is really long. So it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday through Sunday of the following week. So it's 10 days. It is really, really long. I wish it wasn't quite this long. It's the only show that we do that is this long and we will do typically about five to seven types of shows throughout - most in the spring, I think there's one or two in the fall.

Jon Bryant: Wow. For sure it's 10 days. What would be a fair expectation for you for the leads you're getting per day? Obviously weather and stuff - let's take all of those variables out, but on average, what are you looking at?

Michael Murray: I think there's two numbers that we're looking at - how many scheduled appointments, and then how many other contact information. So some people will come and maybe they're a little bit outside of our service area. So we won't schedule them on the calendar, but we will take down their contact information in a form on the site to follow up with them afterwards.

The people that schedule the appointments, the conversion to actually getting an estimate is very high. We have a scheduled appointment. Sometimes they will still cancel. When we call to confirm, "Hey, just checking, we're still coming out tomorrow," "Oh, no, we're not interested." That does happen. But the people that just gave us their contact information on the form, it's fairly easy to hide behind not calling us back or responding to an email or text or whatever. So those don't convert quite as high.

For us, we're typically going to end up with something in the neighborhood of about 150 give or take for that on a 10-day show. In a weekend, I think a pretty good number - there's a lot of factors here. Some of the shows we go to are very small and very local and they cost like maybe $200 or $300 to be an exhibitor there and they can be great. But our expectations are a lot lower. If we get like 12 or 15 scheduled appointments from that, that would be an example of a great show, even though it's only 10% of what we might get from this bigger show.

Jon Bryant: You may not know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Do you know what an average lead, once you break down costs, might be at a home show?

Michael Murray: I don't know offhand. I mean, I can work our way to that number here quickly. So like this bigger show again, a booth for that show is $2,500. We have a double booth. Typically a booth is 10 by 10. So we have a 10 by 20. I don't remember getting any discounts or whatever. So let's just call it $5,000. The big cost that many times is not factored in enough is the labor time. Whether it's the business owner or a sales rep or somebody, everybody's time is worth something, even if they're on salary or business owner, whatever. You've definitely got to factor that in.

The 10-day shows, there's a lot of time. We typically try to have two people at the booth most of the time so that we can have multiple conversations with different people coming up. It also makes it so that it's not quite so boring if you're standing there and you're the only one. It's also a really good way to do some bonding. If you're standing in your booth and there's somebody else from your company there, you can still have a good, fun conversation.

I've actually been there a handful of times this week, just working with some of our newer employees. It's been great as an opportunity for me to just get to know them better, chat. We can talk about the core values of the company and some of those types of things. It's actually one of my favorite ways to spend my time - going to the show with some of our newer team members. But again, then it's adding to the cost of it. I would say we're at least $10,000 of cost for this show.

Jon Bryant: So then you're bringing a lead in - say you get 150 - I think that's close to 65 bucks a lead. I want to say quick math. People can check our math later on their calculators, but it's pretty cheap. That's actually pretty decent. Obviously there's some time investment. There's probably going to be some brand help later, but that's not bad. So it's kind of interesting to consider.

Michael Murray: Out of 150 leads, we're probably not going to do 150 estimates, just like anything. There's going to be some fall off from that. We close at a fairly high percent, but not quite as high as some other things. I would say we're closing over 40%, but probably in that 40 to 45% on home show leads. It'll drive a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue for us each year from all the shows that we do combined.

Jon Bryant: Crazy. That's really good to know, especially this time of year when things are slower for people and you need that boost to get you to the summer.

Michael Murray: Oh yeah. All of our estimate slots for pretty much the rest of February will be close to booked after this week long show, the first week of February basically, and that's for three or four reps. We've got probably 50-60 slots or so in a week. So we'll have close to about 150 or so appointments filled more or less from the home show. We know that once from a sales perspective, once we get to February, things are going to be fine.

Jon Bryant: Dude, amazing. It's got to feel so good this time of year, honestly. It's great. You guys have a slightly earlier spring in Cleveland. What are you talking, early April, mid April?

Michael Murray: Yeah, mid-April. We get outside around mid-April.

Jon Bryant: So you're talking about maybe filling up a month and a half with the home show. That's amazing. I can't believe we waited this long. Thanks for rubbing that in.

Michael Murray: You're welcome. Once we get to March, that's when we start to feel like the phones start ringing - we're to that season. But the home shows in February kind of help to bridge that gap.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Number five. What do you think?

Michael Murray: We got some good goals. So this one we're going to say here is don't leave it at the show. Meaning there's a lot of work to do after the show. No matter what you do, you have to follow up with the people whose contact information you just received. If you schedule appointments, which I again recommend, you still need to follow up. We love to get people on our website. We want them to check out our Google reviews, all of that before we ever get to their house to make that sales process a lot easier. It's kind of like pre-selling. We're going to send them some emails in an automated drip campaign. It doesn't have to be automated - just to try to warm them up a little bit beforehand.

If you're not scheduling estimates or maybe you don't schedule it with everybody, obviously you've got a lot of work to do to get them scheduled. Phone calls, emails, text messages, all that kind of fun stuff.

Jon Bryant: I think that's a big place where things can fall apart. You think, "Oh, did the show. Great. Let's pack it all in. See everyone here next year." But really that's when the work starts. You can't do these estimates when you're at the show. You can't really close sales. So making sure that you really foster those leads and that interest is so important.

When I think about the show where you've got multiple painting contractors and they've got multiple bids - speed and getting into it is so important. Making sure that you show interest because some of these other people aren't doing that. They're overwhelmed. You have a team to pull that through, but a lot of people who show up at the shows, they don't. You need to show that initiative and get in front because they were thinking about it now. I think speed to call, speed to lead is really important after that.

I love the other nurture stuff you're talking about because really how many conversations have they had at that point? Their mind is spinning. So how do we differentiate ourselves and make that sale a little bit easier when it comes time to do the estimate?

Michael Murray: You mentioned it. Just to tie back that point - you said it's like the home shows are a lot of work, especially really for any size company, but for a smaller company, it's a lot of work. I was over at our show this morning for a few hours and I was chatting with one of the vendors next to us. It's a roofing company. This lady works for whatever, and she's like, "Oh, it's last weekend of this big, long show." She's like, "Oh, I can't wait for it to be over. I'm so tired. I've been here every day." Her energy is just dragging.

First of all, that sucks, because the weekends are the busiest and you need to be game face for the weekends. But second of all, to your point, Monday after the show, you're going to be super busy if you did well at all at the show. You have to maintain your energy to really go hard for one to three weeks afterwards. After that, people are already booking with your competitors. There's four or five, six, whatever other painting companies in the show. Somebody's working that lead and making sales. If you're slowly calling people, calling them once a week or whatever, you're going to really miss out.

Jon Bryant: Totally. The show's the start.

Michael Murray: The show's the start. And then the last tip here, or the last don't, is we've touched on it a few times - don't sit back and relax. You are there to work. This is a huge opportunity. This is not a time to feel comfortable. I would say I'm not necessarily an extrovert. Going and just meeting a bunch of people is not exciting to me. It's not energy bringing. But I love going to the home shows. I love talking with people. Part of it is because I have just done so much self talk around going to the home show - this is a great opportunity. I'm going to take advantage of it. This is going to springboard us into a great spring and summer. When I get to the show, I'm bouncing. I have an energy that is I would say unmatched. Anybody that met me at the home show would not think I'm an introvert.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, really contributed to that normal factor you brought up early. Bouncing around.

Michael Murray: For sure. I'm like hugging everybody. No, I don't condone hugging people. But I am bringing the energy. Somebody's walking by, if they make eye contact with our booth and they're reading the signage, I'm going to engage with them. Like, "Hey, how's it going? How's your day going? How you guys enjoying the show?" I have that home show voice where it's like, "Hey!" I'm getting excited. Let's have a conversation here.

Jon Bryant: Is it lower or higher? A little bit higher, okay.

Michael Murray: A little bit higher. Which, for anybody that's listening, that's saying something because I don't have the deep tones here. But I try to show up and it's like I try to - again, part of why I go to the show is to show our team the example and I'm getting them pumped. I'm trying to really bring the energy that hopefully they will feed off and other people coming up to our booth will feed off.

One of the things that I've really learned over the years - we really try to get people to walk into our booth so they get off the aisle. I don't want you standing in the aisle having a conversation. Come on in, let's have a conversation, let's look at some colors, let's look at the cabinets that we painted. You should feel them - they're amazing, whatever. What happens is people that are walking by see that and they're like, "Wow, there's 10 people standing in this booth over here." Sometimes there is, literally 10 people on a weekend. It might be a couple and then we've got three people working it. We've got a few different couples that are having conversations with us within this space. People are walking by and all of a sudden it becomes like the bakery with the line out the door. It's just like, "What is going on over there? I need to go and check this out."

I walk by so many booths and it's like somebody sitting behind the table, often on their phone, maybe with their feet up a little, and it's just so unapproachable. The amount of leads they're getting is a significant factor lower than what we're doing.

Jon Bryant: Totally. You have a team. How do you coach your team in that? To not sit back and relax and to really bring it all the time. You're setting the example, but is there anything else you're doing there?

Michael Murray: A lot of the stuff we just talked about is the training that we provide them. We've created some video content and even just some written content of like, here's the rules. You'll notice there's no chairs in our booth. There's a reason for that. We want you to have the energy, engage with people, have conversations. We've created some videos just to try to show an example engagement of what that might look like to hopefully help bring that out and get them to do that.

Jon Bryant: Cool. I think that's super helpful, but to make sure that everyone knows the plot when you're not there is important too. Overall, whenever we've done great events or interacting with people we don't know, being fun and having fun amongst our team, amongst the people we're dealing with, being - like you said - high energy, that squeaky voice of yours or whatever, which I can't wait to experience one day. That kind of stuff is really important, not only for people coming in, but also for your team to feel like, "Hey, this was a fun event. We should do this."

I think a lot of people are scared to interact with people. That's probably what the root of this is - why people sit back at tables, why they create barriers is that they know they should be there, but they don't actually want to be there. That's a different, a whole different thing. We really try to create an atmosphere where when you get a lead, that's success. We celebrate it together. We try to create these environments where we're having fun, we're joking with each other. Whether we bring Red Bull to the show and we're just like, "Guys, make sure you're amped up all the time" or not - that remains to be seen because we've had success at this type of approach. But sitting back, relaxing, waiting for people to come to you - it's just going to kill you.

Michael Murray: I think it's that fine line. We do these shows, there's a lot of - we always joke, it's the window companies. It's the frat bros that are like out in the aisle and it's so intimidating. I think it's off-putting to a lot of people. To be clear, that's not what I'm talking about. I am not talking about standing in the middle of the aisle and carnival barker style screaming at people about their painting job. That is obnoxious, and I hope you didn't put your logo on your booth because you will absolutely turn people off.

That's not what I'm talking about. It's like similar to having the mentality of I'm going to the cocktail party. I am there to meet some people and be friendly and ask questions and have a smile on my face and be welcoming and conversational. That's really what it's all about. Having some energy.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Well, I think that's great. For those who are just starting to tune in here at minute 40, what we were talking about was the six things not to do at a trade or home show in order to have success. Michael, thanks for the insight, man. It's super fun to chat with you about this because I'm learning. Like I said, we're doing it for the first time and I think these are really valuable points. So wish me luck. I can't wait to hear my voice when I'm there. I'll send you a recording, it's going to be fantastic. Drink some water and Red Bull, that's what I'm doing.

For those who have made it to this point as well, obviously there was something intriguing about the content and we would love you to like and subscribe. I've been told I need to say that because we need the encouragement and it's super helpful to us. So like and subscribe, follow along. We enjoy sharing our knowledge and if it's helpful to you, that's great. If it's not, well, don't keep listening to us, but we're happy here.

Michael Murray: I'm excited. I know we're going to have some guests coming on here soon. Our original goal when we put this together was to try to just share some hopefully helpful content and some experience that you and I have. Let's call it what it is - this is something new for us. We wanted to try to work out some of the initial kinks of two guys that run painting businesses trying to put together a podcast. We're not experts at this. I'm sure that has not been lost on anyone yet. But I think we're starting to get maybe a little more comfortable with it and we're excited to start bringing on some guests and start hearing from some other experts and stuff.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. There's some amazing people in our industry that just never get heard from. Through the PaintScout network, we just have such a wild opportunity to learn from people who are doing amazing things. I'm excited for that too. Tune in as we keep exploring this subject of pricing, selling, and painting, or PriceSellPaint as we call it. Have a great day. Talk to you soon. Thanks very much. Bye.

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