Annual Goal Setting for Painting Contractors in 2024

Jon Bryant: All right, Michael, it's 2024. We are getting ready to have another successful year, and I thought, what better thing to talk about than some goal, annual goal setting. What do you think about that?

Michael Murray: I love it. Yeah, Happy New Year. I think it's that time of year. The possibilities are endless. The sky is the limit. Let’s set some great goals and go accomplish them. I think that's an awesome topic.

Jon Bryant: Totally, totally great. Well, it's lucky for us — we've developed an annual goal setting sheet. It's going to be available for download in the PDF; I guess there'll be a link probably on this video, but as well on the educational section at PaintScout.com.

And it's just going to help you kind of set the tone for your year, get your sales reps, get your team in the right headspace for a successful year, and make sure we accomplish those goals. So I figured we could go over that today. And yeah, so let's get started.

I guess the first question — when you're coming into a year, every year, what's the tone? Like what do you tell your sales team?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think it depends on: how did last year go? So it's the start of 2024. I think generally across the industry, 2023 was a little bit more of a challenge than the past few years post-COVID, right? 2020, 2021, and 22, for the most part, were kind of like the best of times in our industry — to varying degrees and all of that stuff — but in terms of being able to make sales and leads and demand, it was pretty great.

In 23, if you're paying attention in the Facebook groups and at the PCA conferences and things like that, the tone has changed. And one of the things that we're really focused on is, you know, we talked about it in earlier episodes: controlling what we can and realizing that we are not just like a ship bobbing along in the water, but we actually have control over what we're doing.

Let's set some goals that are realistic, but also that stretch us to be better in terms of how we go out, how we go and close jobs and things like that.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yeah, I think the big thing is — yeah, I mean, control is a big one. You know, projecting a future self is proven time and time again to be the way to achieve success and achieve your goals.

And so I think, you know, writing things like this down for our team at the start of the year has always been really helpful; kind of giving you that guiding point to be like: what are my goals really? Both not only work, but work is a method for us to achieve our life goals. And so we need to understand these things are aligned and we need to bring them together, right?

So creating that vision for your future self, getting the steps in place of how it's going to be achieved — often that's kind of the hardest part. Once it's actually written down and you understand what you're doing, time and time again, we achieve our goals when they're actually written down.

And so this process of doing this can be uncomfortable, it takes a bit of time, but man, it's so, so valuable. So yeah.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, I think I love it. I mean, we spend a lot of time teaching reps and teaching everyone on our team about goal setting — you know, the concept of SMART goals — and what you're describing reminds me a lot of what Stephen Covey said: begin with the end in mind.

Understanding, like, why are we doing what we're doing? This time of year, a lot of people are setting goals for health and fitness and savings and all that stuff. If we don't have a really good reason for doing it, we're not going to accomplish it.

But also, if we don't have a good game plan — and I love that you said we’ve got to write it down. Because if we don't have it written down, there's a ton of books that have been written on the science behind habit and goal setting — it's much less likely that you're going to accomplish those goals.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. And then tell a friend, right? Write it down, tell a friend — and it's pretty much done, you know?

So yeah, let's get into this annual goal setting sheet. Obviously, you know, we've developed this. I will say, you know, some of these elements have been taken from different places. Specifically, some of the stuff at the start that we're going to talk about has been taken from Matt Easton, Easton University as a sales coach. And so I want to make sure that's well noted here.

These are not original ideas per se, but we're trying to, you know, implement these into the painting business — starting with the end in mind, big life goals, moving into how we're going to achieve them, then moving into the actual tangible numbers that we need to hit in order to make those goals happen.

So we both have a copy of this. You can obviously, like I said, get the download through the link — we’ll have it alongside this episode and in the PaintScout education hub.

Let's just start at the top. So, generally what we're doing is: we're at the start of the year, getting the team together, and we're creating this sheet in order to guide daily activity. And that daily activity is what propels you to the goal.

In addition to the annual goal, there is a daily check-in sheet that would be highly recommended to go with this, just to make sure you're achieving the activity. Because that's really what it comes down to: activity breeds results.

So I got it right here, right there. And let's go over a couple of sections. So when you see this form, you’ve got the top section here. And that top section is what's referred to as a vision board.

It's a place for you to put pictures of things that you are going to get yourself once you achieve your major life goals. The things that we've mentioned here — it might be a house, vacation, watch, something that you feel is a reward. And it's a visual representation of that, right? So when you're seeing this, you're saying, “Okay, that is what I'm going to do when I get that goal.”

So yeah, any comments there, Michael? What do you think?

Michael Murray: Yeah, no, I mean, I think again — let's start with the end. Where are we going? What is the desired future state?

There are books written on this. I'm reading something kind of recently from Cameron Herold. I think he calls it a Vivid Vision. I've heard it called a Painted Picture. I like it, right?

Jon Bryant: Ooh, Painted Picture. That fits well. That hits.

Michael Murray: So yeah, I mean, again, these aren't brand new concepts. And somebody — I think somebody watching or listening at this point is saying, “I've heard this before.” And I've heard it for a long time too, and I haven't always done it.

But when I do, I am shocked by what I accomplish. I remember it was probably about five years ago, I sat down and wrote out all the goals I had over five years — something like that, five or six years ago. And there were about 20 things I had on there: financial goals, home improvement projects I wanted to get done, all sorts of stuff. I wanted to coach my kids’ sports teams and just, you know, things about how I wanted to spend my time.

Looked back after about four years in — I had accomplished about 95% of those things already. And I honestly, like, I didn't even look at it all the time. I just wrote it down once. I probably looked at it a couple times maybe, and then I pulled it out and I was like, holy heck, I have done most of these things.

I think it’s — I've heard it said before: we often underestimate what we can accomplish in a long time — let's say three, five, ten years — we underestimate what we can do. We overestimate what we can accomplish in a short amount of time. You might not lose 15 pounds in January, but you can over the next year or two for sure. And you can certainly change your diet and fitness habits.

Jon Bryant: Now question for you — and it's funny that you say you had this five-year goal and you achieved them. Are you good at celebrating the successes when you have them?

Michael Murray: You know, it's funny, I will say I've gotten a lot better at that. I've always been a very goal-oriented, driven person. And so I'm constantly thinking about what's next.

I don't do a good job of pausing and celebrating, and it's absolutely something I've been intentional about for the last few years. You and I both like watches. I bought myself a watch that I wanted a couple years ago when we accomplished some big goals at work — which is an awesome reminder because it's something that I can see every day.

But I think there's still room for improvement for me there. How about you?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think, you know, that's one section where like I — you know, it's really good to celebrate those things, because I think goals can kind of pass you by a little bit.

So this section of the planning sheet is really designed, I think, to remind us of that — of how to celebrate and that these are worth celebrating, right?

So yeah, kind of moving with your point — the next section of the goal sheet here is to write down five goals. And you write them down as if you've achieved them.

I think this helps us get in the mind state that these are possible. Examples might be, you know, how much money you want to make a year or how in-shape you want to get. “I've taken this vacation.” “I've bought this car.” That kind of stuff is, I would say, part of those goals — although some of the things I just mentioned probably fit into the vision board themselves.

These goals are meant to be business and personal as you're writing them down, kind of present tense, written in a tone that it's something you've already done.

Any thoughts there? Have you ever done that for yourself?

Michael Murray: I have. Yeah, I have. I've heard it described as: almost imagine you're having a conversation with yourself. Imagine you're at a party and you run into a friend you haven't seen in five years and you're catching up — and you're catching up on the most recent stuff.

And you're having that conversation and it's like, “Oh, wow. You look great.” And it's like, “Yeah, I've been working out regularly. I weigh 180 pounds. It's amazing how my diet has really changed my energy. And I just got back from this amazing vacation with my wife. We actually spent two weeks in the south of France. It was so amazing. We got to go visit this winery that we had always wanted to go to.

“And man, work is going so great. I only have to spend about three days there. And it's just so much fun. You know, I spend a lot of time just working with the leadership team and just kind of helping them to develop. They're handling most of the day-to-day problems and stuff, and they really enjoy it. It's new for them and it really allows me to focus on some of my other hobbies,” and, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

So it's like, you can go on and imagine you're having this conversation. For me and my brain, I've always really kind of liked that. It makes it fun. It makes it real. I'm like, “Wow, I like that vacation. It sounds amazing. I can feel it. I can see the pictures from it.”

And it's like, that is what makes the work that it takes accomplishable, because it's like, man, I can taste how awesome that's going to be.

Jon Bryant: For sure. Have you read the book The Dream Manager?

Michael Murray: Yeah, thank you.

Jon Bryant: That book was really interesting for me because it reminded me that we just don't dream that much. We really just don't have a vision for what we want, and going through that exercise of learning how to dream a little bit — getting back to thinking about how fun life can be — is really important.

And so, you know, when we — when I go through this personally, when I do my annual goals, I'm always trying to figure out what that dream is. And it's usually not small. It might not be a “tomorrow” thing, but it's really pushing myself into a state where I'm like: there's some fun in life, I've got to get back to it.

Work is, you know, obviously there are some goals to be done at work as well, but I've got to have a dream for what life is about. And I think that process plays really well into this, because for a lot of people this process is hard.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Well, I think that a big takeaway from that book for me was that as a leader of a company, I need to help my team members to dream and help them to accomplish their dreams.

And that's what a lot of what we're talking about is. A lot of the people listening — this might be great for somebody that's a sales rep in your company. We're going to talk about specific sales goals today, you know, to bring it back to exactly the topic that we want to focus on here on this show.

But in general, whether it's our painters, our crew members, our office staff — whoever it might be — there's an opportunity to do this with them. And it can be life-changing; something that no one's ever taken the time to do with them. So this can be a really powerful thing.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. So once you've got that down — and five, I mean, we've listed out five, you might have more life goals than that, but these are major milestones — and as you go through it, just, you know, again, write it down in that future state.

Really important.

Third section here: so this is kind of where we start getting into life as a sales rep, life as a business owner. So we’ve got the fifth one — “the things I need to do each day,” or “things I'll do each day in order to accomplish these goals.” Sorry, get my grammar right.

So these are things like, you know, if you know that you want to achieve a certain sales number, you know that you're going to have to make so many calls, so many appointments per week. And this is a section where we start breaking that down.

This is also a place where you can talk about — say it's getting in really great shape or whatever that might be — it's putting those patterns in place daily of how that's going to look. How's your week going to look in order to achieve that?

And in the daily goal setting sheet, you'll see that that's broken out into checkboxes, ways for you to actually look after that for yourself. And again, that's, I think, a really powerful idea from Matt Easton — just that you write down these things and you just tick them off. And every day you do the activity and it's a reward system essentially. But you're going to design that at the start of the year.

And so yeah, I think for our reps, always, it's been about activity. Activity really drives everything. And we can see how successful someone will be strictly based on activity.

I don't know — what's your experience with this? Do you think this is valuable?

Michael Murray: Yeah, 100%. I'm a huge believer — and talk about a lot — the power of compounding.

We talk about it a lot with our team members, again, in terms of maybe financial goals. We talk a lot about compounding interest and compounding debt and just the power of that. But the idea of compounding habits and compounding activities, I think, is really, really relevant here.

It's amazing what you can accomplish with just a small effort each day, done consistently over time.

Again, if you want to lose weight, science shows us that it's not the crash diet, right? First week of January, everybody's going crazy at the gym. That's not sustainable. It's not going to work. It's cliche. We all know it. And unfortunately we all fall habit to it.

The problem is that we really maybe don't know what we're supposed to do. And really what it is is, again, these small daily habits. It might be, you know, maybe one of the things that you need to do to lose weight is you just need to go to bed by 10 PM so you can get up in the morning with a good amount of energy so you can go work out. Right?

Like that can be the daily habit that is missing. It doesn't have to be, “I'm going to run X amount of miles.” It's just, “I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock and then I'm going to have the energy to go do the workouts that will create the results.” But if I go to bed at two in the morning, you're probably not getting up and going to work out. I know I wouldn’t.

Jon Bryant: So you're going to have one checkbox on your list so far, and it's just: go to bed by 10. There you go, there you go — go to bed by 10. Okay.

Michael Murray: Yeah, good. Yeah, I mean, come on, I'm kind of like the old man, so I'm already doing that one. So I don't know that that's going to help me move the needle there. But again, it depends on what your goals are.

My point is to say that you can break it down to something you can do on a daily basis. Instead of thinking, “I'm going to make 200 sales calls. Let's go.” Like, that's great, you should do that. But what if you just made ten a day, every day?

Jon Bryant: Right.

Michael Murray: It's like, “Well, that's easy. I can do that.” It's like, yeah, maybe. It's easy to do it once. It's hard to do it all the time — to keep that chain going.

Yeah, I actually think that idea of keeping the chain going — I heard from Jerry Seinfeld. He was asked once by a young comedian, like, what's the secret? How is he one of the greatest comedians of all time? And he said, “I write a joke a day and I don't stop. I just write a joke every single day and I don't miss a day.”

And I might be slightly mis-paraphrasing that, but I think that's such a powerful concept.

Jon Bryant: Totally, yeah. Such a powerful concept. And yeah, with reps that we've seen be very successful — sales reps — it's about the consistency of the activity. And it's pointed activity too; it's not random, right?

So that ten calls — they just get them done every day, and they're lapping the competitors because the competitors are just not taking that much action.

So yeah, I think that's the point of that section: get that down. Take a look at the daily goal setting sheet as well that can be filled out each day. That’ll have some ideas of how to keep track of that stuff, get that reward system down, and just be really proactive.

So this is the part of the goal setting that is really relevant to selling paint jobs. It’s the second sheet here of the annual goal setting. And yeah, I'll let you talk about this one, Michael, because I think it's— you've done a lot of this with your team and it's super powerful. So yeah, go for it.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I know we both have. And so I think really, again, what this comes down to is: it's really just understanding the math behind sales. Sales is really just a math equation.

Starting with the end goal: what do we want? What do we want our sales to be at the end of the year? Total for the year — “I'm going to sell $1 million, $1.5 million,” whatever that might be.

And, you know, I think a lot of it might be based on previous results. A lot of it should be based on: what's the industry norm? And then breaking those numbers down to: okay, what do I need to do on a regular basis, on a daily or weekly basis?

I'd love to hear your thoughts though. What do you think is possible? Let's give some context. Maybe they're new to the industry or maybe they're new to setting goals — it's just, “I go out and sell as much as I can and see what happens.” What do you think a good goal would be for a sales rep in the painting industry for annual sales? Give us a range or something.

Jon Bryant: Man, so there's a few variables at play. I mean, I've said it many times before: I think a million dollars in your first year is a good target.

That said, you have to be involved with a business that can support that. You have to have the opportunity to sell that amount. And so those are critical pieces to it. But a million dollars as a goal for the first-year rep, I think, doable.

1.5 probably second year, and then it's kind of like — 1.5 puts you at middle of the road for a seasoned painting sales rep. And we see this from the statistics that come out of PaintScout — we see this in a bunch of other areas too — but there are reps who can push it.

We see reps that are at $3.5–4 million a year, and that's selling residential repaints. Like, that's significant. Commercial — the numbers can be a little bit higher depending on the area you're working in.

But I'd say in that range, after year two, it's really about the drive of the rep. It's them understanding how this works, how to push their goals, how to push themselves to do the activities.

And if you do that, like the range is big, right? It all depends on how you do it. But if you have a rep — if you are a rep or you have a rep and you're in your second, third year together and you're not pushing past a million, I think you’ve got to really look yourself in the mirror.

It seems like you resonate with that.

Michael Murray: For sure. Yeah. I mean, first of all, any sales reps listening that are selling three-plus million and want to move to Cleveland — standing job offer, you know, come on out.

Send me that list, please.

But yeah, no, I mean, that’d be — right. I mean, we both see it, we both know people that are doing those kinds of numbers. And so it's amazing what is possible.

I know I talked about that on an earlier episode where we chatted — that was one of the biggest takeaways once I got more involved in the industry: just understanding what is possible.

And honestly, what that's done is kind of raised my expectations for our sales reps. You know, now with some pricing and expectations and our reputation and things like that, we now expect the first-year sales rep to do about 1.25 million — inflation or whatever.

But in general, I resonate with all the numbers that you're describing. And yeah, I think as we break these down, we'll see what that sounds like.

If you're looking at selling 1.5 million — “Wow, that's a lot.” Okay, great. Maybe it is. Let's break it down. Let's break that number down and see how. Because people are doing it. There's lots of sales reps that are doing that in our industry. Some of them in big cities and some of them in small towns, some at big companies, some at small companies.

There are a lot of examples to pull from. And it's really just understanding the activities that it takes. And then you can decide if you want to do those activities or not.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yeah, so I mean, this planning sheet — we've got total sales for the year. So start with the end in mind again.

Gross profit target, because we want to be watching that — super critical in the painting industry.

Number of self-generated leads — we've talked about this before too. Self-generated leads are really where the big-time jobs are; that indicates activity, networking, all that kind of thing. And so that's an important one to be watching.

Win rate — how many jobs do you win that you bid? That's essentially what that is.

And average job size. So all of these things play into what activities you're going to do throughout the year and keep you focused.

Down below that, we've got the yearly breakdown. So this is a chance for you to actually put your numbers in and start to calculate how you're going to do this. And, you know, keep in mind, this is a seasonal business for most people. If you're not in a seasonal area, it must be awesome, because I've never experienced that.

But being in that seasonal cycle, you’ve got to adjust this. It's not straight across the board. You're not going to sell the same in December as you're selling in May.

And so yeah, jump in.

Michael Murray: All right, so can I go back? I want to — I can imagine, right, if I'm watching and listening to this, and I'm thinking to myself, “Sounds great. Give me some numbers, give me some context here. What does good look like?”

All right, so we talked about total sales. So let's say, for writing a number down: 1.5 million. Right. So we're going to fill this out. Maybe we can even provide a filled-out example of this page too with some of the resources here — I think that'd be great — you can grab it with the annual goal-setting PDF and follow along.

So we're going to do 1.5 million in sales. Go me.

And gross profit target — what are you thinking? What's a good gross profit range?

Jon Bryant: So, residentially, you're talking a gross profit of 40–50%. Forty being on the low side; I would say shoot for 50. Best contractors out there are doing plus 50.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think 45 to 50 would have been my answer. To your point, you know, that's the bell curve, right? There are people above that and there's people below that, but I think that is where the vast majority of the professionalized companies in our industry are targeting and achieving most of the time.

Jon Bryant: I mean, for our purposes, I always write down 50. Fifty is the goal.

Michael Murray: Yeah, me too. Yeah, and I also think too, when it comes to gross profit, I'd rather shoot a little high knowing that things don't always go like we planned. Every once in a while we're going to have a job that doesn't go well — that happens. And that— yeah, we'll save that for another day.

All right, so number of self-generated leads.

Jon Bryant: Really? What—

Michael Murray: That is an interesting — that's a spicy topic. I'm going to put that — somebody put that in the suggestion box that we need to have that as a topic.

I think two years ago, nobody was talking about self-generated leads because we were all just drowning in phone calls. But now the phone's not ringing like it used to, and we're starting to talk about self-generated leads just like we did back in 2018 and 19.

And so give us some idea — like, we talked about an annual goal here. What are we writing down for that one?

Jon Bryant: I mean, it depends what your experience has been in the past. If you haven't generated any leads for yourself, let's start small here — generate three a month.

But, you know, I've mentioned this before — Dave on our team will generate one self-generated lead a day. And those leads are so wildly valuable to him and his time and the business that we are trying desperately to structure our sales team around this number.

And so we've now put in place — you know, each month, we’re looking at probably ten self-generated leads a month. For some people, that's a lot. And this number needs to be one, I think, that pushes you to be active but doesn't seem overwhelming.

Like, one a day — if you wrote down the number 30 there, that would seem crazy. It’s doable — I mean, we've seen it — but those, you know, if you could start with three to five and figure out what that looks like, monitor it, watch it — through just having good relationship-building activities, you can, and get focused on that number, you can increase that.

Am I off base there, you think, or—

Michael Murray: Three to five per month — is that what you're saying? Say it one more time — per?

Yeah. Again, I think it's— I'd like to think that that's low. I'd like to think we can do more. I'd like to set goals that we can accomplish. So if we said, you know, an annual goal of 35, 40, 50, right? I think that falls within that range. And sure, I think that's a fair starting point, especially if we go back to what I said before — for reps that maybe aren't used to doing that and that's a newer skill set, which I know for our reps, that's something new.

Okay, so that's— you know, we'll set a goal there. Say 40.

Win rate — obviously it's going to depend on a lot of different factors. Where the leads are coming from, right? You have a better chance of selling those self-generated leads, which should be a pretty good motivator. But if we average it all together — throw it all in the bucket, all the Google leads and all the things — what's a good target average across the board for the year?

Jon Bryant: I mean, 50% again. It's funny how that number keeps coming up. You've got 50% gross profit, 50% win rate. But, you know, I'm not the first one to have said this, but it's about — you know, 30% will no matter what, 30% won't no matter what. Those 60% are out. So now you're battling for that 40% in the middle, and you should be able to win half of them over with a good sales process and asking for the sale.

So we're talking about 50:50. I think that's a good baseline. We see reps that do higher than that. We see a lot of people do lower, and I think at that point you've got to look at your sales process.

Do you have a sales process? Do you facilitate an experience for your customer that gets them the job they want? These are questions you've got to start asking yourself when you don't see 50%.

But I believe so strongly it's possible because I see so many companies doing it.

What do you see? I mean, do you guys hit around there?

Michael Murray: I would say historically — at least the last handful of years as we've gotten better and been really intentional about this — we're somewhere in the 40–50% range. And that's kind of what we base our goals on.

For the sake of argument, for writing down a number, we would write down like 45%.

I would always like my rep to go into the year thinking, “I'm going to have to work a little bit harder because I'm only going to sell 45%,” and then they sell 50%, and things are maybe a little bit easier — “I have to do a few fewer estimates,” easy to say, than originally planned.

Rather than, “I thought I was going to sell 50%, I'm only selling 45, and I'm not mentally prepared to have to work this hard.”

So yeah, anyways, when it comes down to what we're going to write down here, I think we're going to have pretty similar numbers between those two things.

And that's where, again, we've all talked to a lot of people in the industry; I think we're seeing a lot of similar numbers, 40–50%. And to your point, more than 50% is absolutely possible, especially for a rep that has a little bit more experience, has been doing this for a while, and is doing more than that minimum of self-generated leads. Those are some of the big factors I've noticed — and it's exactly the kind of thing you can monitor inside something like PaintScout’s Sales view.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah. Once you start getting into the self-generated leads, I mean, seeing win rates around 70–80% isn't out of the question.

And, you know, that really helps. So much of painting is about trust, right? Especially when you start dealing with interiors — you only want to have people in your house you can trust.

So those word-of-mouth leads, those influencers in your life play such a factor, and you're going to get a better price for your job, you'll get it priced properly, and a customer that's far more willing to deal with you just by going through that route.

So those two things, you're right, play a factor for sure in the self-generated and the win rate.

So, all right. Average job size. Oh yeah, sorry.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, the other little quick touchpoint is how long your company's been around. To your point, repeat customers.

You know, I think we've both been in business 15–20 years, and so it's like we're starting to see a good amount — I would say enough that it's noticeable — of repeat customers. That it's a good-sized chunk that we can count on.

But there are companies that have been around 20, 30, 40-plus years where it's like, wow — now all of a sudden you're going into the year thinking, “Maybe a third of our sales are coming from repeat customers.” And those should really close at a high rate.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a very good point.

So the average job size — what are you thinking?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think this one's going to vary. The company sitting here thinking this — you just need to go back and look at your numbers, first of all. I don't think you should base that on anybody else's numbers. That's one you've got to have.

Your area makes a difference here. The type of work you do — if you do a ton of exteriors or a ton of interiors or whatever, it's like those are dramatically going to affect your number here.

I think the numbers that I see, I would say, are like 4,000–8,000 for the residential-focused contractors. Certainly, generally, commercial painting projects are going to skew that average up sometimes really quickly. It's not uncommon to have commercial projects in the hundreds of thousands plus.

So yeah, we generally see stuff in that 5,000–6,000 range, especially recently with pricing changes and stuff.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I resonate with that 100%. Yeah, 5,000–6,000 for residential repaint contractors seems pretty average.

And what's interesting is we do see that kind of across the board with PaintScout — residential contractors are hitting about that number. So you've got some people that are lower, some that are in the 8,000s, but I've always thought of 5,000 bucks as an average — seems to be an average paint job.

Now with inflation, that's probably increasing, and I bet you in the next few years, we'll see average 6,000–7,000 just from inflation.

But yeah, if you break down your goals as a residential repaint contractor, sales rep, or if you're doing the sales — 5k per job seems to be a good number. At least it'll get you a goal.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I would say, you know, I think it's a decent benchmark, right? So if there are contractors out there that are below that, know that that's probably a benchmark worth shooting for.

And maybe it's some better sales skills, maybe it's raising prices. You have the opportunity — there's an opportunity there to maybe increase your average job size. Then you don't have to have quite as many customers. You probably have higher profitability on those jobs. Things like that.

All right, so we made it to the bottom here. Yeah, let's break it down.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, let's break it down. So we're talking about the yearly breakdown here at the bottom.

Michael Murray: So again, it's just a math equation. And so we know that the bottom-right number — total sales for the year — is 1.5 million. That seem fair?

Jon Bryant: That seems like— yeah, sure.

Michael Murray: Okay, so again, we're just filling out an example. And so how— maybe let's talk peak season, the busier months.

Here, let's do some— so get out the calculator. If we were averaging that, we divide that by 12 months, we're at 125,000. So I think to your point earlier about seasonality, some months are going to be higher than that and some months are going to be lower.

And so it's like, okay, how much higher than that should the peak months be and how much lower than that should the lower months be? Again, if you've been in business for a few years, go back and look at your data.

What did you sell in October of 2022 and compare that to what you sold in June of 2022? That might give you, at least from a percentage perspective, your seasonal fluctuations.

But short of that, let's kind of make up some numbers, if you will, based on experience and context. So what are the busier months?

Jon Bryant: It's going to depend on your area, but, you know, we're pretty far north here, so busier months are June, July, August, September, October. So we've got five months that are busier. Maybe a little bit of May, but it depends on the weather. You guys — probably May to October.

Michael Murray: Yeah, typically we include May in that. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. So I would generally agree. I think April we're starting to come up. It's probably not as low as some of the low months.

But again, for the sake of simplicity, we're probably just going to have high months, low months, and just go from there. So what are you thinking? I mean, high months of 150, low months of 100? You want to skew it more?

Jon Bryant: I like that. Sure.

I mean, there's some strategic planning that goes on here, but yeah, I mean, let's call it pretty simply half.

Michael Murray: So we'll just— let's do six. So let's put half the months at 150, half the months at 100.

So let's go 150 May through September. And then we need one more month. So which one — April or October — has been your experience?

Jon Bryant: For a high productivity month or high sales month? April would be the high sales month because you're selling into the busy season. October, not so much.

Michael Murray: We'd probably call them both 120.

Jon Bryant: Sales.

Michael Murray: Okay. Okay, I like it. I like it. I think that's where that intentional winter planning might come in and some of that stuff in October, right?

All right, so then, 100s. Perfect. All right, so I got that filled out on our sheet. We'll share — definitely download that afterwards.

All right, so now, in the month of January, we're going to go sell 100,000. And we have an average job size of 5,000.

I think average job size does fluctuate throughout the year. If you've got data, you're going to change that. I think for the sake of what we're doing today, I would propose we just call it 5,000 every month. You okay with that?

Cool — just to provide an example.

All right, so we need to sell 20 jobs at $5,000 average to sell 100,000.

So to do that, say with a win rate of 45%...

Jon Bryant: Let's call it 50 for easy math.

Michael Murray: Forty-five—

Jon Bryant: Let's keep this simple.

Michael Murray: I was going to say that. Again, I'm going to do the 50. All right.

So we'll, again — and really, all it is is just taking the number of jobs you need to sell and dividing it by your win rate. So whatever number you're using there, that's how you come up with that math. Since we're using 50, we can do it in our head and just double it.

So we need to do 40 estimates in the month of January.

And if we assume there's exactly—

Jon Bryant: So you've got to do ten estimates a week.

Michael Murray: And so it's like, okay, now you're going to come back to your marketing, your self-generated leads. And if I'm a sales rep, I'm like, all right, I can go make that. I think that's achievable.

All right, so in the six months — if you will, January, February, March, October, November, December, Q1 and Q4 — we're going to call those our slower sales time for simplicity's sake.

We need to do 40 estimates a month, sell 20 jobs, at $5,000 each, to sell our $100,000.

And what do we need to do in these busier months? Well, we need to sell — $5,000 average — 30 jobs and do 60 estimates. Resident math whiz.

Jon Bryant: Well done. Well done. I think you nailed it. I mean, those numbers don't sound crazy.

Michael Murray: And on the spot! Yeah, right.

Fifteen estimates a week in the busy season and ten in the slower season. And now we can get back to those— now we flip the page over, back to page one and say, okay, what are those daily habits? What am I doing to make that happen?

Jon Bryant: Exactly. Exactly.

Michael Murray: Two estimates a day, three estimates a day. Making calls to past customers, to referral partners, and self-generated lead opportunities. And I can start to list out those daily activities.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, and the beautiful thing too, is when you're doing ten estimates— I guess you need ten estimates in the week — that gives you a lot of time to do those other activities, right?

And so in theory, those self-generated leads are so much easier in the winter when you have time, or in the slower season.

Because now, ten leads — that might take you 10, maybe 15 hours, depending on driving, depending on meeting time. So of your week, you've still got 25 hours here to work with to actually help to hit your goals.

And that's what we preach all the time to our team, that: we're not going to be able to get you as many leads in the winter, but that doesn't mean that people don't need painting — because everything always has to be painted.

And so we work on activity. So it all ties back, right? That activity section.

Michael Murray: Yep. And I think too what doing this really does is: if you have a rep that does not sell. So now you can reflect at the end of the year and say, “Okay, you sold 1.4 million. So let's go back and figure out what assumptions didn't work.”

We go, “Wow, did you do your 40 or 60 estimates every month?” And we look at it and go, “Yeah, over the course of the year we averaged that. A couple months we came a little low, a couple months we were above, whatever the reality is.”

“Well, did we sell 50%? Did we—” you know, okay, some months we were a little high, a little low, but yeah, okay.

And now it's like, “Oh, maybe it's the average job size,” or “maybe it's the win rate,” or whatever it is — we now have a metric we can measure ourselves against.

What I would say to somebody that's setting goals like this is: if you think selling 1.5 million is unrealistic for a sales rep — “That's too high, that's unattainable” — that is like, okay, great, which part?

Is it the $5,000 average job size? Is it the 10 or 15 estimates a week? Or is it the 50% win rate?

And it's like, “Well, the 50% win rate.” Okay, great. So let's make it 40%. And so we've got to do a few more estimates per week. We're probably looking at about two more estimates a week if we did that math.

And then it's like, okay, is that unrealistic? And it's like, “Well, no, I mean I could do 12 estimates in a week. That's not impossible.”

It's like, okay, so then it's not impossible to go accomplish this goal.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Just break it down into really small pieces. Know what the next step is.

And this whole planning process does that for you, right? So I love what you're saying, because it makes complete sense to me. And I think I need to be reminded of that sometimes — that these are discussion points with your team.

Not only that, but if you have a team, if you have a sales team, it needs to be a discussion. Because at the end of the day, everyone's goals need to line up with what your production capabilities are, with what your schedule is looking like.

We can't just have the Wild West here. But it helps when people have both exceeded their goals — like, let's learn: how did you do it? What was your secret?

And when you did not achieve them, “Hey, what's going on?” We can see — like so often, when we're dealing with reps, I can see how their month went purely on activity.

“Okay, you did four estimates this week. You're never going to meet your goal. Let's look into what your daily activities are. Oh, you're doing one call a week and you're searching the web.”

Like, we can—

Michael Murray: Yeah, as a sales rep, I'm sitting around waiting for the company to schedule estimates for me, and that might not be it. So that's your answer.

Jon Bryant: Exactly. Exactly.

So, I know this process has been super valuable for us. It sounds like it's been super valuable for you guys. I mean, we wouldn't be talking about it if it wasn't.

So going into 2024, if you haven't already done this, get on, grab the sheet, start going through it, make sure you've got those goals set. And we can almost guarantee that you're going to see better results with this in hand — especially if you're tracking it alongside your numbers in a tool like PaintScout.

So that's what I'll say to conclude my— yeah, go ahead.

Michael Murray: One last note for me is: look at it often and reflect and make small course corrections as you go.

It is okay to adjust the goals or the monthly activities to be able to hit the goal. Maybe one of the assumptions we just made doesn't make sense because of life circumstances. If you're going on vacation in the month of July, maybe hitting those 60 estimates isn't the right goal. It's like, great — so let's just adjust as we need to.

This is something — we follow EOS, so we're doing L10 meetings every week. We're looking at that scorecard and we're saying, where are we off, where are we on?

“Man, we're selling a bigger average job size. It's great. But we might need to adjust production capabilities and stuff because of it.”

Or, “Man, our sales success rate, our win percentage, is a little bit down. All right, so let's make some adjustments. Let's do some sales training or some coaching or whatever to get that up.”

So don't just set the goal and put it in a drawer and hope that it works. Setting the goal is a big step, but also reflecting on that and making corrections — and remembering why we're doing these things — I think is really important.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah, thanks, Mike.

Great. So yeah, if you're looking for the document, take a look at the links below. There's the annual goal setting sheet as well as the daily activity sheet. You're going to fill that out, you're going to make it awesome for yourself, and we can't wait to see what you do.

So again, let us know your thoughts, comments as we go. Is this valuable? Should we keep doing this? And yeah, we'd love to hear from you. So have a great year, everybody.

Michael Murray: Yeah, share some goals. Let's hear some goals. Comment below.

Jon Bryant: Let's go. All right, thanks very much. Take it easy.

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