Good-Better-Best: Is Tiered Pricing Right for Your Painting Business?

Jon Bryant: All right, guys, welcome back to the Price Sell Paint podcast. I am John Bryant. This is Michael Murray. We're here today to talk about good, better, best. This is a fun topic, one that we've seen in the Pricing Painting Projects Facebook group that Paint Scout runs. It's one that we hear from customers all the time—people in our network, people doing sales. Good, better, best: does it work? Should we do it? All of those fun questions. Michael, welcome once again. Let's chat about this.

Michael Murray: Good to hang out. I love it. I think it's a very interesting topic. In a lot of other industries, it's generally accepted practice that that's kind of the only way to do it. I think a lot of times in the painting industry, it seems like maybe kind of a novel concept. It's also just trying to figure out if we do want to do this, how can we do it well? What are some ways that we can offer different packages versus maybe just asking the customer what they want and here's a price for that—one price versus maybe multiple options.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. I think the thing we've thought about over the years is what is the approach that works best? What's the approach that leaves the customer feeling like they have control? There's got to be a reason why people do this in other industries. Is it confusing? I think those are some of the questions that come to my mind. Do you guys do it, Michael? Do you give options, packages? What do you do?

Michael Murray: We definitely give options. I would say we do not have a formal good, better, best system, mostly because it feels a little forced to me, which I haven't figured out a way to do this that doesn't. But it's not because I don't see the benefit to it. One of the industries that I like to study a lot is the HVAC space. It's similar in that it's very home service, home improvement based, blue collar, local services, local companies—very similar to what we do, residential or commercial. This good, better, best strategy is very prevalent there in the HVAC space.

The biggest challenge I have—actually just, we're getting a new air conditioning unit at my home. We have a company that comes out, they check on our stuff every six months. They told us a couple of months ago, "Hey, you guys got some leaking going on in your system. It's like 15 years old. It's time to get a replacement." So they send me over a quote and it has three different options on it. For the sake of argument, think of that as good, better, best. The difference between the three options is essentially the manufacturer of the equipment. Each of those generally have different warranties and things.

The option that the sales rep suggested was actually going to save me some money because they're certified with this company, so they're able to offer a longer labor warranty on it, even though it's going to save me a little bit. But I think generally speaking, the idea behind this concept is if we offer three different options, good, better, best, it's going to allow a customer to choose which option from Textbook Painting or whatever painting company that is utilizing this should I go with, versus choosing between three different companies.

Is that your understanding of the pros of doing something like this?

Jon Bryant: Yeah. It also puts the control in the hands of the customer, which is always a good thing. At least that's the perception of it. Now the salesperson still has to guide you because honestly, our customers are not experts in our product. That's why they're hiring us. Some of them might be, but really they're just trying to figure out what to do. Good, better, best, I think can build trust because the customer now gets to decide. They're not just being told what to do.

I think a big struggle in the painting industry is that people show up and they just assume what project the customer wants. They create a price for it, and then the customer is like, "That's lower." Then they come in and they're like, "Actually everything's change orders. Everything's different." And you lose the trust of the customer and that customer gets jaded.

Having control, I think is good. Now I would ask you, Michael, if that HVAC company came in and just gave you one price—obviously they're a known company to you—how would it have been different?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think to the point you just said, I do certainly rely on their expertise because I've been working with them for years. They've done other work in my home. It's like a lot of the HVAC companies, they do some plumbing, electrical. When I've had a couple other little things going on that I couldn't do myself, that's generally who I'm going to call to do those things.

I think some of the challenge that I have with it is kind of the experience I had where they give me these options. And I just simply said to the sales rep, "All right, here's kind of what I'm looking for. We plan on being in this house for a while. I'm not necessarily looking to just make the save-some-money option here. I do want something that's really good. What would you do? What are your recommendations? You're the expert here."

I feel like that's a lot of times what we experience when we go out and meet with a client. If we just have a good conversation at the beginning and get a really good idea of what their needs and expectations are, what the pain points are that they might be experiencing, how long do you plan on living here—things like that are going to help us to recommend, "Okay, so it sounds like you're going to be here a while. You probably want paint that's going to be a little bit more durable, something that's going to last you a little bit longer, something that we can feel comfortable putting a good warranty on as the company. Okay, great. So based on this, I'm going to come up with a price to do what you're talking about here."

I think the adjustments that we make are typically around the areas and the substrates. Maybe we don't need to paint all of the rooms in the house. We could save you some money by painting just maybe the most pressing areas, and then next year we could come back and do some of these other ones. Which is slightly different, I think, than what we think of when we talk about good, better, best.

Jon Bryant: For sure. There's always pros and cons in the sales process. One is that I feel like I have control, but two—as someone who's done a lot of sales and kind of understands it—the psychological effect of good, better, best, which is price banding. You're trying to essentially create the middle option as the one that you really want the person to pick anyways. It's like, "This one's way too much and this one's way too little. You should go with this one."

I always get a little bit like, "You guys are using good, better, best. Okay, cool. I know what this is all about. So which one should I use?" The middle option. Crazy. Shock. Wild.

Michael Murray: Right.

Jon Bryant: So what did the sales manager tell you? In some ways I've become jaded towards it. Not to say that it's not an option that customers enjoy. I just know that it's a little bit better than going to McDonald's and seeing the small, medium, large cup. That price is fixed. That doesn't change. It might go up a little bit, but I know from if I go in Monday and I go in Friday, that price is the same. I'm just not always convinced when I'm dealing with the trades that's the case.

I'm not sure. That's just me being jaded from sales where I'm like, I just want someone to work with me to tell me what the best is. And if I trust them, I'm going to use them. If they've built the package that I'm looking for—not to say though that I wouldn't use a company that does a better, best either. It really comes down to trust in the end for me, and it can be lost any place in the sales process. So that's my feeling on it.

Michael Murray: I think what the challenge that we've had—we have spent a lot of time here at Textbook trying to come up with ways to do this well, offering different products, offering different warranties and things like that. What we often come back to is: how much are we willing to water down—not literally, but figuratively—the experience we want to give our customers?

Do we want to be the premium best option in our market with the best warranties? We use the best products. We're going to give you the best experience and yeah, we're going to cost more money than maybe our competitors, but you get what you pay for. Or are we trying to capture a bigger percentage of the potential market size so that we can get more of those customers that are maybe more price sensitive and maybe don't necessarily care about the best paints or the best primers, and they're willing to sacrifice maybe the warranty and some of that kind of stuff?

That's where we struggle a lot because it's like, we know in our heart of hearts that if, let's just say we're going to use a premium paint from Sherwin-Williams—let's call it Emerald. And we're going to use maybe a middle tier paint, let's call that Duration. And then our lower option is going to be maybe SuperPaint. On a typical paint job, we're looking at, I don't know, 15 gallons, 20 gallons of paint. Does that sound about right to you?

Jon Bryant: $5,000 job, 10%—I spent $500 on paint. How much per gallon for paint? Yeah.

Michael Murray: So it's like, what is the price difference for somebody with a contractor's gallon at Sherwin Williams? What are we talking? Maybe 10 or 15 bucks a gallon difference between those. Between SuperPaint and Duration, about 10 or 15 bucks. Even Duration to Emerald, 10 or 15 bucks or less. So the options I give that client are going to be $100 to $200 different based on that.

I don't know. Is that the goal here? Are we trying to give a customer—it's like, for $5,200 you can get this, for $5,400 you get this, and for $5,600 you get that. If I'm a client looking at that, I'm just like, really? Which one do you recommend? Which one should I do here? And then we end up right back to where we started.

Jon Bryant: Let me play the other side for a second on this argument.

Michael Murray: I would love to be able to do this well, to be clear. I see the benefit of this. I have not figured out or seen a painting company that is doing this really well. I'm sure that it exists. I'm just not there yet in my understanding. But conceptually, I get the value in doing this.

Jon Bryant: For sure. We've dabbled in this over the years as well. Product seems to be the place where it has the most impact. But what's funny is that you talked about it being like a $200 difference. Does the customer know that? In theory that is the difference—it's really minute. But can you create more of a value difference based on that?

Michael Murray: So you're saying essentially upcharge more on the more premium products and instead of 5,000, 5,200, 5,400, make it 5,000, 5,500, and $6,000. And on that $6,000 price, you should be significantly more profitable because the actual difference in your paint cost is not that much. That's kind of the point you're bringing up.

Jon Bryant: That's essentially, yeah. We have this thing in our industry where we talk a lot about product and whether you mark up product and whether you should. It's like, you don't go to the—obviously this is my opinion, so take it as you will—but that same HVAC company isn't going to give you the machine for free and charge you for the labor.

Michael Murray: Okay, sure.

Jon Bryant: Or not for free, but no markup on the machine. They are obviously marking up that work and that material. I think we have some barriers in our industry to thinking about material as if it's like, the customer can get it on their own, therefore we shouldn't mark it up. And I think there's room here for value, perception of value, and whether it's just paint, whether it's warranty, whether it's a different type of ASAP scheduling—there's a bunch of options we have around our service as well. I think it's quite common to devalue those things and say, "They're not—we couldn't possibly charge any more for that."

I'm always one to say, you know what, let's think critically about this. And I think we can as an industry charge more for it and then create that value difference for our customer. Because honestly, the customer doesn't know. They just want to pick what they believe is the right fit for them.

Michael Murray: The question though that I come back to, which I brought up a minute ago—I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, either as somebody who plays devil's advocate if you want—it's just like, if I strongly believe that, let's just use those three examples. Every paint manufacturer offers this. As a consumer, as a painting contractor, we are the customer of Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore and Behr and PPG and all of the companies. They are selling to us. They have a sales rep who comes out and meets with us and does the little dog and pony show. They offer this. They have good, better, best options. If you go to Sherwin-Williams, they have like 50 options.

As the painting company, am I okay with—again, maybe what I consider to be an inferior product that is just not very high quality—am I okay putting my name on that? Am I okay saying, "Yeah, we'll do that, but we're not going to give you a warranty. We're not going to really stand behind that work." It's just like, we can save you $500 bucks. I have a hard time there.

Jon Bryant: Do you think in your situation, your example of the HVAC company, do they have the same issue? Is that lower grade option worse?

Michael Murray: I mean, the prices were really similar. All of the prices were between $7,000 and $8,000, and they were a few hundred dollars different. And so that's why part of the reason I was just like—there's a list of all the specs on all of this technical stuff on there. And I'm like, honestly, I don't want to understand this stuff to that level. And I think most people that are getting a painting job done are very similar. They don't want to talk about the percentages of whatever chemical goes into the paint and all the different binders and things. It's just like, which one's going to last longer? Which one's more durable? Which one—when my kids put their hands all over the wall every time they go up and down the stairs—which one am I going to be less likely to see those handprints from in a year or two?

That's the question in their mind. And that's kind of where I'm coming from as an HVAC customer here. I'm just like, all right, look, I don't want to do this for a while. We're going to be in this house for a long time. And I'm not looking to save $300 bucks. At the end of the day, this is a fairly expensive price point—seven or $8,000, very similar to maybe buying a painting project. I don't want to regret saving $300 bucks because it doesn't last for—it lasts maybe a year or two less than the other one would have. That's going to be the most expensive $300 that I've spent or saved.

So it's just like, that's what I just said to the guy: "What would you do? Which one do you recommend?" And I think in my experience, it would be the argument that the good, better, best was just kind of silly. Because at the end of the day, I just said, "All right, what do you think I should do?" And he's like, "Yeah, you should do this one," which was essentially the good option. He recommended, "Yeah, you can just save some money. This is actually just really good. We can give you a better warranty on this one." It was like the best of all the worlds, and it made sense to me.

Jon Bryant: So I think one thing I'm kind of taken away from that, and it just made me reflect a little bit, is that the real benefit here—so good, better, best, what it does is it opens a conversation. I think a lot of people, I don't know if you've run into this situation, but you're bidding a job and you get a chance to review with the customer your bid versus another one. And the other bid says they're using Benjamin Moore paint. And you say, "Which paint?" "They're using high quality. It's Benjamin Moore."

And that's the customer's knowledge of what paint is. Similar to your knowledge of HVAC—what does it even stand for, HVAC?

Michael Murray: That's the hot and cold air in your house.

Jon Bryant: Finally, someone told me. It's like, we get to have a conversation. So whether good, better, best actually structures it properly, at least we're able to say, "Look, we've listed out maybe a couple of paints for you to choose from." And I get your point. I don't want to be associated with a bad job. That's not what our brand is.

Now there is—somebody just wants an apartment painted quickly before someone gets in there. Not a big deal. We'll talk about that for sure. But for the most part, our customers don't understand the paint and nor should they. And for a lot of them, it's just okay if it says Benjamin Moore, that actually means high quality. Meanwhile, it could be—I don't know what the lowest grade of Benjamin Moore is. I know there is one and it's really bad and that's probably what you're getting.

So I found that even if the customer doesn't really care about or understand the product—and nor should they—at least we're talking a little bit about the fact there are levels of paint and that a brand name doesn't equal guaranteed success of what that actually means. So that was one benefit from us actually doing it. Now really good, better, best for paint. But I arrived at the same point you did, Michael, which is that I couldn't—I just wanted to give my customers what they wanted, which was really a great paint job.

It was so much cheaper for us anyway. The cost difference isn't that much. Look, you trust us because we're a quality name. And so we're just going to give you a quality project. And putting SuperPaint on—our sales team will mention like, "Hey, look, this is just a cheaper—this, you want a cheaper price? That's what's important to you. Use this brand of paint because that's what you get." So maybe we're missing opportunity, but that's where we've arrived to right now.

Michael Murray: Yeah. You brought up the point that it's like, what this does is it forces the conversation. It allows a sales rep to maybe ask some better questions and have a conversation. I think that's the point, that if that's not happening, if you show up to the customer's house and they say, "Yeah, we want these three bedrooms painted," and then the response is like, "Okay, great. Give me a little bit here. I'll have a price for you"—that's a problem.

That is not necessarily a great consultative, asking a lot of questions, figuring out exactly what somebody wants done. And so if you do that and then you're just like, "All right, great, here's the price. It's $2,500 bucks to paint these bedrooms." And then the customer says, "Okay, thanks. We'll get back to you." And you leave. And then you call them a week or two later and they say, "Yeah, we found somebody to do it cheaper. We went with them."

And you're frustrated. And then you have maybe a conversation and they're like, "Yeah, we actually had somebody that can do this for $2,000." And then you might say, "Well, what kind of paint are they using?" So the point that you're just making. And they're like, "Looks like ProMar 200." And you had priced it for Emerald and you're just like, "Well, wait, I could do it for around $2,000 with ProMar 200." They're like, "We already signed with them." It's just like, yeah. That is a really bad job by the salesperson.

As opposed to: go there, we have a—let's get there, sit down at the kitchen table or whatever, and have a conversation. What's important here? Do you want this to last? Are we about to sell the house in a month or two, but we just need a quick freshen up? Yeah, ProMar 200 might make sense. You're going to be—that's just a guest room. Nobody's ever really in here. Okay, cool. We might not need Emerald or Aura or whatever. But again, I think it's like, can we do that without the good, better, best? Yeah. I think for some sales reps, yes. But perhaps to the argument you're making, it makes that conversation easier.

Jon Bryant: For sure. Yeah. And I think even just thinking about right now, if you can build that in as your thought process when you're actually meeting with a customer, it's like, we're building the product as the customer's trying to purchase it. Like they're telling us what they want. We're trying to figure that out at the end, have a product that works for them. And I think as a consultative salesperson, if you can look at it as good, better, best when you're chatting with the customer, it's so helpful in the process to discover what they truly want. And whether that's incorporated in your estimate or not, it still should be part of every conversation you're having. And for them to understand there's options here.

We talk about price engineering a job. It's like, "Hey, I'm coming at $5,500. This is for premium everything. Is that price and that project makes sense for you?" And they're like, "I don't know. I got to talk to someone." You're like, "Hey, I'm sensing maybe—maybe this isn't, maybe the price isn't right. Is this worth trying to cost engineer this a little bit, price engineer, and say we can bring this down if you're willing to make some changes and sacrifices."

And typically our kind of customers never are willing to do that. But now they understand the value that could be missing out on. And so I'm a big believer in that, whether we give the option or not, at least we're talking about options and we're understanding value.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I like that. Another way to frame what you were just describing that we've taught to our sales team is: have a conversation with a client to be able to explain, "This is how I would make this price cheaper. These are some of the things that we could do in terms of maybe lowering the labor cost. We could go and subcontract work to a bunch of people that we've never met and see what happens."

Jon Bryant: That's always fun.

Michael Murray: Yeah, see what happens. Yeah, that could work. We could definitely save some money. I would imagine versus maybe a full-time employee that has full health insurance, retirement plan, paid time off, company vehicle. Yeah, that's less expensive. We don't even have good, better, or best. We should just have bad, awful, and—

Jon Bryant: Would you list that as an option, Michael? Like option good: just anyone we can find. Better: people we know.

Michael Murray: Right. So we're having this conversation, but then we get to the product. We might say that, "Okay, look, if you want to save—if I were to do this job for less money, I would have to save some money on the cost of labor per hour." And it's just like, okay, let's just assume that we're hiring people—my company and the other company you got a bid for, we're both hiring skilled people who are going to show up. They're background checked, drug screened, do all the things. They're going to do great work for you. Let's just assume that those prices are pretty equal.

Let's talk about the paint itself. I could—we're only using the premium option here. So I'm coming at this with the idea that we're going to give you the long warranty. We're going to use the premium—again, let's just use that Emerald example or Aura or something like that. Okay, that's kind of maybe where we're coming from. But I could save you a few hundred bucks if I was willing to sacrifice that. Maybe on the outside of the house, we could use Duration. It's not going to last very long. It is going to fade significantly sooner than Emerald, but that's one way I could save myself a lot of money, and then I could pass on some savings to you.

And then the third way, which I think is probably the most impactful, is the amount of prep time and the number of coats and the amount of labor time that we're bidding on your project. If I give my team less time to do prep work, that would be the most impactful way for me to lower this price. And then we just directly ask the customer, "Do you want me to do that?"

And the answer is almost always, "Well, no, of course not." But now at least I've helped them to understand. I provided them with some education as to some things that—as they're getting other bids or maybe they've already gotten other bids and they're trying to compare apples to apples, but it's really apples to bananas at best—where some of the places are that they need to go investigate. And maybe they need to go have some—ask some questions to that other quote.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's really—I think the saying that I've heard before is a little bit of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And part of that comes from understanding this process of delivering a paint job. And I love those questions. They're just great. Let's have that conversation, give the customer some context of where issues will arise and what different costs go into this so that they can actually decide what result they want.

Because chances are if those same questions are asked to another—if someone writes their estimate on the back of a napkin and gives it over to them, there's about 500 questions you should be asking. But at least giving them three or four critical ones has always been helpful for at least for us to help our customers buy. Because they're thinking, "Paint job. I need a paint job." And they're not thinking about the process of getting it done and then the options they truly have, because they don't know. Honestly, they just thought paint job and it's a commodity in their mind. And so it's up to us to break that down.

But I will say, maybe it's a good moment to kind of transition a little bit. Because I loved your example about the labor in bad, worse, and horrible. But let's talk maybe for those listening—the options that we can provide customers. We've mentioned them a little bit, but how would we do this or how have we done this? We've talked about warranty and paint. Let's just go maybe through step by step on each one so that everyone knows what we're talking about here.

Michael Murray: Perfect. What type of project? Yeah, because I think it makes a big difference. We're talking interior, exterior, cabinet painting. Some of the other main services that painting companies might offer.

Jon Bryant: Well, let's start—I mean, we should do all three. Why not? But let's—I know you love cabinet painting. You guys do a great job at it. It's a core part of your business. Any thoughts around cabinet painting? Let's start there.

Michael Murray: Sure. Yeah. I think this is a place that I can see good, better, best making sense. And the way that we do this—again, it is very conversational. We don't just offer all the options to all the people. It's just—let's just have a better conversation and get a better understanding of what it is that their needs are.

But one of the things that we will do: we use a premium Italian 2K polyurethane on our cabinets, and I think that helps to separate us in the marketplace. We offer a lifetime touch-up promise on the cabinet painting that we do, which again helps us stand out. We're very confident that the work we do is going to last for a very long time. So that's something we're not willing to sacrifice. We want to be known as the company that has the best warranty, uses the best products, and is going to give you the longest lasting cabinet painting project in the markets that we serve.

And so that is what I would describe as the base option. And then from there, we can offer some upgrades to that, which again is slightly different than good, better, best, but trying to explain maybe how we think about it. And that's going to be things like we can replace all the doors and drawer fronts in the kitchen. So that's going to definitely push you up.

Jon Bryant: So new doors—like just get new doors completely. Yep.

Michael Murray: Yep. So we're going to replace all the doors. They're going to come with other upgrades: soft close hinges, new handles, things like that. Obviously we're still painting them with the same products, still giving them the same warranty and things like that.

We've talked about like, what if we offered something with no warranty or maybe just a one or two year warranty and maybe some of the other products that maybe our competitors use. But when we investigate it again, that's like, there's not that much savings where the amount that you save in money is, in our opinion, not justified because of the sacrifice you're making in the quality. And so it's like, I can't offer that in good conscience because I'm like, you just need to spend a little bit more money and get the way better job.

Jon Bryant: So let me ask you this, because I totally agree. But in terms of options, where has your mind gone? I think of initially—and we've toyed around with this a little bit—but just timing. We save space in our schedule. If you want to get this done next week, you can pay more. If you're okay to wait three months, hey, you can pay less. Do you see that as a viable option or is there something else you guys have thought of?

Michael Murray: 100%. Yep. So I think we've definitely talked about some winter discounts and things like that where we absolutely use scheduling as a way to offer somebody a lower price because it helps us to meet some of our scheduling capacity and things like that. So yes, I think that is definitely a good way to do that for sure.

Jon Bryant: What other levers do you have there? I mean, because it's such a premium product you guys provide. And honestly, what you're saying is true, which is that you have to stand for something, not even stand out. So crafting your service around your result and what's important to you and the customer is important. So what else we got? There's timing. Is there anything around color, help of color? Do you guys do color consults on that stuff?

Michael Murray: Yeah. We do. A couple of things that we do: the paint that we buy has to get shipped to us. And so we limit the—we have a standard color option. We have a palette that we—we have an interior designer on our team. And so she has essentially curated, I think there's 24 colors that are the most common based on what's popular, based on what colors our customers have chosen over the last couple of years, and just based on her design experience and intuition and trends and stuff.

And so we keep those generally in stock. And so if somebody selects from one of those colors, we can offer them that standard price or we can save them some money because we know that almost every cabinet or every painting project, there's always that half gallon left. We can save that half gallon from your house. If we're using, let's just call it SuperWhite, we know that within the next few weeks, somebody else is going to be using SuperWhite because we only have 24 colors to choose from. And so we can bring that half gallon back because we know that somebody else is going to use it. And so we can save a little bit of money there instead of having to charge for all of that. We can save some money to the client.

So somebody can select a color that's not on that chart, and it costs an extra $300—one, to try to sway them from doing that, but two, because there is an actual cost to that to us because we have to overbuy the paint to make sure that we're going to have enough to spray it out and do all the things. I think anybody listening can understand that.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So it looks like there is some room for packaging, I guess. Whether it's timing, I've always thought of like, you know, we do free color consults, but there's got to be a premium version of color experience. There's got to be a way to separate that of like, you know what, we're going to do a phone consult for most of our jobs or a Zoom consult. But if you want to upgrade to the better package, we actually do an in-person. And if you want the best, that person's going to help come and apply paint, whatever some wild difference. And I think there's room there. So I've always thought about timing.

Michael Murray: Yeah, full dry-downs of paint products and different things like that. Yeah, I like that idea. I think that's creative.

Jon Bryant: Exactly. I like that. That experience is an interesting one. I think timing for us has always been interesting because we've been booked out so far. And so a cabinet job, some people want it done tomorrow. It's like, "Hey, great. Guess what? Option A is you wait three months. Option B is you get it done in three weeks. Option C is actually, you're going to get this done next week. But option C is going to cost you $2,000 more."

And so really the struggle for me with this stuff, and we'll kind of get into your exterior as well, is that in the case of HVAC, they've got what, three different types of machines—heating, cooling machines, whatever it is. Whereas we actually have a few more levers than that. And so I've always struggled with the packaging of this because do you go after product, do you go after timing, do you go after color? And I think a lot of us focus on product. But the reality is there is good, better, best of everything we do.

Michael Murray: And that—yeah, I mean that again is kind of like, you have to limit somebody's choices artificially a little bit, right? Or it's just like, this is the package. So can I—you know, can I get the—I'll use a generic answer, a thought that's just hit my brain, but it's like, you can get vanilla and chocolate ice cream in a bowl or in a little cup with no sprinkles. Okay, that's the good option. It's not bad.

Jon Bryant: Pass. Hard pass.

Michael Murray: If you want the better option, you can get cookies and cream and mint chocolate chip, and you can get it in a cone. And then the best option, you get the cone and the sprinkles and some of our seasonal premium flavors. And it's like, "Okay, cool. Well, what if I want vanilla in a cone with some sprinkles?" Like, "No, no, you can't have that. That's not an option." Yeah, pick one of the packages. It's just like, I feel like why not? I'll pay you a couple of extra bucks for that cone and the sprinkles. But I can't have it. Not an option here. Got it.

Jon Bryant: Totally, right? So you run the risk. In that other industry, they have very defined—your service is defined pretty strongly by what you're looking for. Whereas here in what we do, it's like you're building the product while the customer is trying to buy it. And it's a weird one because we—and so you've got to pick your lane.

Because if you create that package, it's like, "This one, you get it done next week and you also get the premium color package." It's like, "I don't want that." And so I've always struggled with that—to pick exactly what the lane is for us. And if it's product, great, but actually we have so many areas of our business that can be improved or slightly taken away from, and trying to figure what we want to focus on.

So should we move on to interior? Yeah, let's do it.

Jon Bryant: Anything different than cabinets you think?

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think one option on the interior could be—and I've heard of people doing this—where if you're willing to move your furniture to the middle of the room, maybe take your switch plates off and, you know—I don't know, that's probably about it, but maybe there's one or two other little prep things that I'm not thinking of. If you're willing to do that, I can save you some money. Like, yeah, okay. I can see that. I think I'm not—it's not really, again, we like to provide a full service experience.

But I'm not arguing against it. I can see it. That could work and that could be part of that good, better option. It's like, "We'll do all that for you." I don't know. Best option is like—I don't know, we'll bring a moving company in and they move your furniture. And it's that white glove service and they're going to move it into the storage pod in the driveway and move it back in once we're done with the project. And that really expensive furniture was perfectly taken care of. I'm just making this up, but something like that maybe.

Jon Bryant: For sure. Yeah. I like that. I mean, a lot of customers are asking for that stuff. And again, for us, it's almost indicative of the wrong customer. So asking those questions. But if you're listening and looking for those options, I think that's something I've seen a lot of. You could go as far with that thought process as if you're doing a paint option. It's like a good option: you go buy your own paint. Better: we buy SuperPaint. It's like how far down that rabbit hole do you want to go before you're like, "This is actually not the kind of project I want to do."

Michael Murray: Well, yeah, because it's like, what happens is—I think most people listening, if you've been doing this a little while, it quickly becomes like, the customer chooses the lower quality paint that has really bad coverage and they want that Navy color on the walls. And you can already tell where I'm going with this. And like, we quoted for two coats normal. And after two coats, it looks like crap.

And then you got to go to that customer and say, "You chose the package that looks like crap here. You chose the low quality paint that doesn't cover very well. Now you just pay me for my job because I did what the package said." That's not a way to run a successful business. And again, that's when we end up back to the consultative, having to steer the conversation in the direction based on like, "So tell me more about what color you're thinking," and things like that. And it becomes this consultative experience that makes this strict bracketing thing harder, not impossible, harder.

Jon Bryant: For sure.

Michael Murray: I mean, I think you could offer—again, I think, you know, then we get into substrates, right? So it could be, you know, package one is paint the walls. It's walls only. Package two is walls and ceilings. Package three is walls, ceilings, and trim. But then I get back to the question: it's like, but then walls and trim is not an option. And maybe that's okay. Or maybe it's like closets included and not included, but it's just like, you got to include all the closets or none. Those are your choices. That's the package.

And I feel like if I had to go compete with that, somebody else that was doing that, and I have a consultative approach and I just say, "Hey, great. What are you guys looking to get done here?" They said, "Well, we really need—I think the walls and trim need to be done." The other guy said, "If we do that, we have to paint the ceiling. There's no other way to do it." I would be like, "What? No, we can paint your walls and trim without having to paint the ceilings. Sure, I can save you a couple hundred bucks by doing it that way." And they're like, "Yeah, it sounds like this guy's listening and willing to make fairly reasonable accommodations to give me what I want. I think I'm going to win that bid."

Jon Bryant: Absolutely, yeah. That seems like a slam dunk. Yeah, it's interesting because when you say that, so we're obviously talking about good, better, best. Obviously, options is a slightly different discussion probably. And we've talked a little bit about options we can give our customers, but structuring good, better, best in that discussion—we've always seen a quick aside—options are great, really great, but creating those options into good, better, best is a little bit more difficult.

For example, you come into a home and they're like, "We want the walls painted." With Paint Scout, you just put all the trim in, bring it into surface view. And the next thing you know, you have a price for all the trim and you can throw that in as an option. It's like, "Hey, if you've thought about doing the trim, here's what it would cost. Any interest to you?" Or the ceiling. And so now you're able to give these amazing options to customers, which actually in my mind is a huge benefit to using a system like Paint Scout where you can actually see the surface level view of what you're bidding. I don't think any other system has this by the way, where you can actually see the surface level view of what you're bidding.

And so that has power. So to your example, if you're creating rigid things where it's like good, better, best, I think you're missing what the customer is looking for. But upgrade options are super, super valuable. So I don't want to miss that in the discussion.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I agree. 100% agree. Yeah, I do want a client to see pricing, understand that—again, you mentioned before, the ability to make choices for themselves. Because a lot of times, customers can't tell the sales rep what they want until they have some idea of what it's going to cost. And that's something that we work with our sales team on a lot, is that when we give a price, we don't want to just say, "Okay, the price is $5,750."

It's like, we want to be able to have a conversation where it's like, "Okay, based on what we've already talked about, my price came to $5,750. But we're really—I think there's probably an option here somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 to do more or less what we're talking about. And I've got some different thoughts and options of ways that I can get closer to $5,000 and ways that I could get closer to $7,000. Give me some feedback. What is your budget for this type of project? Would you like to talk more about things that could get us closer to that $5,000 number? Or are you more interested in ways that we could actually upgrade, give you a more long lasting project or a better project, but might be closer to that $7,000?"

And then based on whatever they say, we're going to have some different options based on maybe the paint, maybe the substrates, maybe scheduling, and some of the things that we're talking about.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. And that's a constructive conversation in terms of helping a customer with what they're looking for. Nothing better. Now, kind of getting back to the good, better, best. I mean, it does the same thing, just a little more rigid. And so trying to figure out how to work that through is, I think, the difficulty we've both experienced, which is how do you do it?

Michael Murray: And I want to—I feel like I'm the person on this episode that's kind of pooh-poohing the whole thing. And I know that it—I have listened to and talk to people in other industries and this is a game changer. Good, better, best is a game changer in other industries, again, specifically the HVAC we've been talking about. And it perfectly makes sense to me in that space.

And I have a harder time in ours because of how custom each project is. And that's—I would love—I'm hoping we can get some comments, we can get some conversation going. Again, this all started from one of our Facebook groups. And it started a conversation between you and I before we started recording and we were like, we just need to talk about this and put some thoughts out there. I would love to maybe hear from some people that are doing this really well.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah. Or if you've tried some ways, we're not even talking about—I would love to have my eyes opened to that because not only am I looking for that as well, but I think there's opportunity for Paint Scout to help, software to help. And we've talked a lot about that internally, just being like, what do we do here to help contractors? And we haven't settled on anything in particular. And so love the feedback. Please leave your comments. We would—for or against, you have great ideas about this. Have you had something that you've had success with? Love to hear all about that.

Michael Murray: We didn't touch on the exterior. I mean, the thoughts here, again, are going to be very similar to things we've already talked about. Certainly scheduling, warranty. I think it's a big one when we talk about exterior. For us, one thing that we do, again, it's more of an options-based approach, which is slightly different, but it's in the same line of conversation—paint and primer upgrades, where we can upgrade you to maybe a peel bonding primer or an oil primer or things like that on an exterior project. Again, sometimes it just needs that. But sometimes it's like, yeah, we could get away with a latex primer, if you will. There's some upgrade ability here with something a little bit better. Certainly paint products we've talked about.

Jon Bryant: Yep. I mean, level of prep. For us, it's always been like, we need to do the whole thing. Like, why are you doing this project? It's a hard one.

Michael Murray: It's tough.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We'll do 15 scraper pulls on each section.

Michael Murray: Good luck setting expectations if that's what you're doing. Yeah, right? And then the customer is going to come out and say, "I saw peeling paint all over my house." And you're going to say, "Yeah, but you said you wanted the good option. You should have upgraded to that better option." Which is like, that's where we actually try to profit.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. 30 pulls, yeah, exactly. 12 sandpaper swipes, 30 pulls with my scraper, and that's the best option. It's hard. And so all the things we've talked about before, I think apply—timing, color, types of customer service, warranty. Sure, you can do all this stuff, but again, finding that lane that works is hard.

Michael Murray: One of the things that we do, and you guys do as well, I believe, is carpentry. And so that's an—again, call it more of an upgrade because I keep coming back to it's not this rigid thing that we provide on every quote. But it might be in an older home with a bunch of peeling paint, things like that, where we've just got all these layers. It's just kind of like, there's only so much we're going to be able to do to make this look good. It might just be time to replace some of the siding.

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: Yeah, it's not rotten. You don't have to replace it, which is a slightly different conversation. But from an aesthetics and longevity, it just might be better. And so that is definitely a conversation that we can certainly have with a client.

Jon Bryant: For sure. Yeah. I think upgrades, we'll do another episode here on upgrades. Because I think upgrades and options are something that is super impactful. And not to say that good, better, best isn't. I think it's a great thing for us to consider. And like we've said, if you do this well, let us know, leave the comments. We'd love to—maybe if you do it well, even have you on the podcast, honestly, because this is something that needs to be shared. There's a lot of opportunity in our industry.

I believe it's something that we can figure out if we choose a lane and that the industry, our sales will be better if we can do that properly. So that's my final thought, Michael. What about you?

Michael Murray: Yeah, no, good stuff. I feel—if I think back to the conversation that was started on Facebook, I think we were kind of talking about the two different arguments, if you will, towards this. One is just like, you know, of course you should do this. It's a no-brainer. It gives the customer the options, allows them to be choosy, allows them to kind of funnel towards that middle option. They're not having to get other bids from your competitors to have different price points.

Makes perfect sense. Absolutely agree. And the other argument was, "I'd rather be consultative. I don't want to water down our brand. We don't want to just offer inferior products just to give a customer what they think they want, even though they might not actually understand what they're sacrificing with that."

So I think that was generally kind of the debate, if you will, that we saw, which I thought was great. I think it's a great conversation and hopefully we were able to bring that to light here in this format.

Jon Bryant: Totally. So guys, yeah, thanks for tuning into Price Sell Paint on this episode. If you're looking for that Facebook group too, that's Pricing Painting Projects. It's a Paint Scout group where we talk about pricing and selling painting projects, kind of continuing this conversation online. And so feel free to look out for that. Guys, subscribe, like, do all the things. We love doing this for you if you appreciate it. Show us. So we look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks again, Michael.

Michael Murray: Awesome. Thanks, John. Take care.

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