How Much Should I Charge for Painting in My City? (+More Listener Questions!)

Michael Murray: Welcome back to another episode of Price. Sell. Paint. I'm Michael Murray. I'm joined by my good friend and co-host, John Bryant. Today we are doing a listener question and answer session. I'm excited, John. We get a lot of really good questions in our Facebook groups or even started to get some questions on the YouTube channel and things like that. So there's a handful of things that we've responded to maybe individually offline that I think are going to be some valuable common questions that a lot of people in our industry, sales reps and business owners are going to be able to get some great value out of. So excited to get into this with you.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Yeah, absolutely. So I got a list of stuff that people are asking and let's just jump right in here. So we got Ty. Ty is asking, he's a painter in the UK working for himself. Work is going really good and he's booked out for about four months. He'd love to grow the business. What he can't wrap his head around or mind around is getting other good painters on board and paying them well and making a profit. Any advice on where to start?

Michael Murray: I love this question. I think there's a few things here, right? So I can't wrap my mind around getting other good painters on board and paying them well and making a profit. And so to me I feel like there's how do I hire good people, how do I onboard them, manage them and things like that. We can talk about that. What I really hear though is paying them well and making a profit. It is the money side of this equation more than it is the how, like where should I use Indeed or how do I find somebody? Is that where you're reading this?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I mean, it's that moment of like, hey, I need to get somebody else. And how do I do it? It's a big friction point for a lot of new businesses. And I remember that point of like, okay, what comes first? Is it the job or the people? It's a chicken and egg kind of situation. So I know you had given a response, maybe you want to share that with everybody.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think from the way I interpreted this question is from a how do I afford financially to bring somebody in to help me so that I can grow the business, maybe reduce that four month backlog, produce more work, but also make sure that I'm still profitable and we have enough money to support the business growth and do all the things. So I really took it from the how do I afford this person? And I think this is the question. This is the question that we deal with at every level of our business is how do I afford that next person that I need? Whether it's that sales rep, whether it's the production manager, and eventually it's the sales managers or somebody to come in and run the whole business. But where we start is how do I afford that first painter? How do I afford that first admin person and some of that type of stuff? And so really what it comes down to for me is we need to make sure that we can afford these people before we need them by charging the appropriate amount. It really comes back to raising our prices, figuring out what does it take for me to have the type of business that I want financially, charging that appropriate amount even before I hire that person. What are your thoughts?

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah. I think you can't run it like a job. And if you want to run it like a business, you have to run it like a business as if you're an employee of the business. And in this case, when you're on your own, you're wearing multiple hats. So you need to be paid for all of those hats you're wearing. But part of that is that you need to charge appropriately for all the hats you're wearing so that you can start to take hats off and give them to other people. And so I think it just becomes a mentality of I'm running a business versus I have a job and I am the painter. And once you get that, once you understand it, it feels uncomfortable at the start because you're like, wow, man, I'm charging quite a bit. And if you're comfortable just continuing to do that on your own and wearing all those hats, great. But I found after I was working 16, 18 hours a day burned out to the max, I was very glad to give up those hats and take less in order to make the business work. So that was my experience.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think too many times we price our hourly rate, our services, just for our current needs for the business and maybe outside of the business. I think the way that a lot of painting companies start, for better or worse, is somebody's working at a painting company and they're making, I don't know, whatever, 20 bucks an hour. We'll just make it up, right? Whatever, 25, that part doesn't really matter. And they say, I want to make more money and I'm sick of working here and frustrated because of X, Y, and Z. And so they leave and they say, well, I know before I was making 25 bucks an hour and I want to make more, so I'm going to charge 35 bucks an hour. Plus the customer can buy their own paint and I'll charge $35 an hour.

And I really don't know how long everything's supposed to take, but I've been doing this for a few years. I can guess. So I'll charge whatever, five hours to paint a bedroom times my $35 and it's 175 bucks plus the cost of the paint. And then they bring in somebody to come and help. And now all of a sudden they're not making that $35 anymore because they've got to pay somebody and they've got to pay for taxes and all of these different things that weren't accounted for. And so it's like, okay, cool. So how much should I be charging? I know we've talked about it, but pricing has to be a lot more complicated, I guess, but it's not that complicated than just as a business owner, how much do I want to get from a customer for one hour of my time? Because ultimately what customers are wanting is more of a full service experience. They need and want perhaps a company that's going to have a reliable vehicle so that we can make sure you're going to show up on time. Well, we've got to price that in and things like that. And so what we can do is we can figure out how many hours for a year and break down the cost maybe of a vehicle or different things like that overhead into a per hour basis by doing that type of math.

Jon Bryant: Yep. Absolutely. I agree.

Michael Murray: I think the simple answer for Ty, make sure that you're charging enough so that you should be making extra profit right now, more than you think. So one, you're booked out for four months, that's probably a good time to raise your prices, and it's going to give you that confidence that you're going to be able to bring in somebody, pay them well, and still be able to make a fair profit.

Jon Bryant: Cool.

Michael Murray: Awesome. All right. So let's kind of change gears a little bit. So I like this question here. Looks like it's from Jay. Do you have any thoughts on setup calls? Would love to know how your estimating process goes. I think we had a couple questions kind of related to setup calls. So this is a pretty good topic here. What are your thoughts? I know you guys do a lot of really good things in your business.

Jon Bryant: Yes. I mean, setup calls, I assume what we're referring to is when the customer first contacts us or is it setup for the actual before the estimate? What do we think we're referring to here?

Michael Murray: I think we could touch on both. I actually interpret it more as we have a scheduled appointment and maybe we're going to reach out before going out just to kind of pre-qualify a little bit or just have a good setting up of that estimate experience.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. So here's the interesting thing is that I think too often we don't respect our own time enough. That's kind of where I come from with this. And so we get a lead and we're like, ooh, it's a lead. I should go talk to them. I'm going to drive. I'm going to take all this expense, all this cost on to provide the free estimate that our industry gives for the most part. I know some people have tried to charge, harder to do, but without knowing whether that customer is a potential fit, it could be a massive waste of time. I've seen this with so many reps over the years where the reason they lost the job was because the person was just looking for a price for insurance quote, or the person never had an intention to do the job. The person's budget was so far different. It turns out the person's location was in a different town that we don't even service, but they drove there anyway. I think part of the setup call is we need to have a couple of questions to see if we're good dance partners, depending on what your company's like. Hey, we've got an estimate. This is kind of what I understand the project to be. Here's how, if you can give a rough ballpark of price, is it still worth me coming out and doing that? I think there's value to these questions to save yourself a ton of time. And so you need to figure out how rigid you want to be. That's going to change depending on different seasons. For us in the summer, we're very rigid. In the winter, we might go to that town that's a little bit further away. But we need to ask a few questions rather than just are you going to be home? That's my thought.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I've got some specific things to add, but you mentioned we're going to, before we waste our time as a sales rep or owner or whomever is going out to do that appointment, it's also the prospect's time, right? Whether that's a commercial client, whether that's a homeowner, whatever that is, we're also being respectful of their time, especially if we're doing this well. To your point, you mentioned, let's have some questions. Are we good dance partners? Instead of coming out there doing the song and dance, spending 30, 45, 60 minutes, whatever, maybe more, let's have a couple of questions on the phone that we can ask somebody to figure out, does this even make sense for us to have a conversation? Could we possibly work together? Some of those questions that you probably want to be asking are schedule related. When do they need this work done? If somebody perhaps just bought a house and, hey, we get the keys next week, but our moving company has to come in three days later and we need this whole thing painted in between getting the keys and those three days later. And you're booked out for four months, like the last question, it's probably a waste of time for them and you to schedule an appointment. Right. Customers are going to be super frustrated if they schedule an appointment for two days from now and you show up and they're like, yeah, so we need this done next week. And you're just like, what? I can't do this for four months.

Because they just set aside time on their calendar, they stop calling other local contractors, only to find out that you're not even close to an option for them. And we can be frustrated like, this is ridiculous that somebody wants their house painted next week. And that's fine. It's just going to save everybody a lot of aggravation if you just can do that over the phone. Any other specific types of questions might you ask on a setup kind of call like this?

Jon Bryant: I might try to start the conversation around what type of project they're looking for, whether they've had work like this done before. How, price, like I mentioned before is potential depending on the type of project you're looking at. You may have been able to do if it's exterior, some type of a pre-estimate using Google Maps, Google Earth. And you have some type of a ballpark. Pretty much anything you can do to qualify the customer and make sure that it's worth the conversation, I think is valid and valuable. Should we move on to the next question?

Michael Murray: Yeah, let's do it.

Jon Bryant: Okay, we got, I think this is a funny one. So Jonathan in our Facebook group asks, in terms of what challenges do you face in sales and estimation? His answer was undercutting from Six Pack Joe, which I love that response. So I think it...

Michael Murray: I like it. I think you get called that every time you go to the beach, right? Like people, Six Pack John, obviously. I think, do you think that's what he means by this? Like he's just intimidated by this guy's physique?

Jon Bryant: Pretty much, yeah. Obviously it's a little different. His fitness level. It's very specific. There's a Joe in his life that he's worried about that is undercutting him.

Michael Murray: That's how I feel every time I go to the gym. So I think we're referring to maybe the lower quality contractor that may or may not be sober when they show up to do the work.

Jon Bryant: I think it's even more than that though. It's just people's perception that they're losing based on price. I think that's what the root of this question is.

Michael Murray: I agree. Yeah. And that the reason that somebody's charging a lower price is because they are Six Pack Joe and a chuck in a truck and they just, they're no good and they can't run a good business. And they're so unprofessional and all the things. We're big proponents of raising your prices and to be able to afford to provide your clients with an amazing experience. But I will say that some of the places that I shop at a lot and many people do like Costco and Amazon seem to be doing pretty well with this whole idea of trying to save their customers some money. Walmart's pretty good at that too. So I think it is maybe a little bit of a misnomer that somebody who has a lower price than you just is going to provide a completely awful crappy experience.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, so obviously there's some judgment about Six Pack Joe here. I'm going to go and say something wild. I think 95% of our industry doesn't know how to price. And so...

Michael Murray: That low, huh?

Jon Bryant: I think, sorry, there's room for improvement in learning how to price better. But I think based on other comments, this is kind of crazy. There's a lot of comments here from people who it's their first or second year saying I am not charging enough. Okay, so for reference point at Paint Scout, we work with contractors in all different areas. When people join the groups, our Facebook group, the Pricing Painting Projects group, people comment as to why they joined. And so if you're a first/second year contractor, the overwhelming issue that seems to be something people face is how to price, okay?

These are good people. These are people trying to run businesses who come in and don't know. I mean pricing is relatively hidden in our industry for one reason or another. This idea that you can use a system to price paint jobs. And I think what's occurring here, correct me if I'm wrong in the comments, please, call me out. But I think there's people coming into the industry who don't know how to price, giving a price they know is too cheap. They're not making any money. Other people are like, my goodness, you're not charging enough. What's wrong with you? And what's wrong is that there's a need to understand better your pricing. That's why we're here. We're here to help with that. But I'm not giving so much judgment to that because I see good people struggling trying to figure it out. And also a few of those people losing their shirt on these jobs. So it's not that you can charge not enough. You can charge not enough and not be successful. Anyways, done with my ramble. Was that crazy, Michael? No?

Michael Murray: No, no, I mean, preaching to the choir. So yeah, no, I'm on the same page with you. 100%. Yeah.

Jon Bryant: So if you're feeling undercut, I would say, look at your value proposition. See if you're actually having a good discussion with your customer. That's what they're looking for. Being consultative really helps. Consultative, thank you. I'm working on my English. And maybe the value that Six Pack Joe is bringing isn't the same as you're bringing and the customer needs to understand that. And maybe the customer just needs Six Pack Joe and that wasn't the right job for you. That's my thought.

Michael Murray: And I would say too, make sure that if you want to charge a higher price, make sure what you're providing is consistent. It has to be a consistent experience. You can't charge a high price and maybe you show up late or you don't, you're not responding to the customer's calls quickly, right. All of those things. What kind of clothes are you wearing to the estimate? All of those things, right? Every little tiny piece is being judged in conscious and subconscious ways. And so clients are trying to figure out, are you actually just overcharging me for a, I don't know, let's call it a typical contractor experience, which is leaving something to be desired, or is this actually the special place that has this all figured out and is going to provide me with that exceptional, amazing experience, and I understand that that's going to cost more. And the clients are absolutely trying to make those value, understand the value based on all the little things that somebody might be doing.

Jon Bryant: Totally. Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Murray: All right, let's jump over to another question, try to get through as many of these as we can. Juan asks, how do I charge for each color when there are more than two different colors? What are your thoughts?

Jon Bryant: So we do that in just an extra color fee. And so we know there's cost to having more different applicators. Possibly you have to get a full gallon of paint or maybe a quart of paint. So you've got to have separate paint. So we're just charging a dollar amount per extra color. Typically, for us, it's been, I think it's $150 or $200 per extra color.

Michael Murray: I think it's something too simple. I think we get over, this is a place I think where we can get over complicated. There is some actual cost to having more than one color. Let's just say we're painting the inside of a house and we've got the whole house to paint or half the house, whatever it is, really doesn't matter. It definitely saves us some time and probably some material cost if the customer just selects one color. It's also not that much more difficult to have to clean out your equipment and brushes or whatever and switch to the other color. If a customer is picking a separate color for every wall, that's probably kind of getting to the level of this is going to be ridiculous. I don't know. We generally just try to price things so that we can afford to accommodate some, a little bit of second color, third color kind of stuff without having to necessarily charge a whole lot for that. Baking it into the original price.

Jon Bryant: You know, I once had a customer who wanted 24 different colors on their walls inside a 2000 square foot home. And that just was like red flags all over it. And so I told him it was $200 per extra color. He absolutely lost his mind and we never worked together and that was the best solution that could have occurred. So, yeah, everyone left a little unhappy, which was perfect.

Michael Murray: Yeah, right. There's a joke to be made there, but you know, I don't know about your, anyways, we'll just move on. All right, so what else you got? Where do you want to go next?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think Mario has an interesting question. It's one that we get a lot and it's kind of a common one in the industry. And that question is, is there different pricing per area and what's the right price in my area? I mean, Michael, I know you and I have talked a bunch about this. It's a very common question that I think people believe that there's this correct price and it's geographically oriented and that somehow there's this secret price that people know that they aren't telling other people and it's probably $2 a square foot. No matter what. So anyways, is that what you take out of this question?

Michael Murray: Yeah, it's nothing to do with square feet. If the answer has anything with square feet in the answer, then we're wrong. But yeah, I think that's what it is. Right. Like in my geography and my city, how much should I be charging? Or maybe it's city versus rural or big city, small city, coast, not coast, all of the things. And again, we've talked a lot, pricing is specific to your business, to your needs, to your value proposition to kind of what we were just talking about. There are different ways to run very successful painting companies. I like, so here, I mean, I'll just give myself as an example, right? So what we try to do is we are trying to provide an amazing experience to clients who live in, I'll say the upper middle-class suburbs of Cleveland who want to pay us a little bit more money to have a really reliable experience with great communication. They want to have people come to their home that they're going to really enjoy being around and things like that. But they're not necessarily looking for the crème de la crème of the most technically skilled painters. We don't pretend to necessarily provide the absolute level six finish amazing high gloss stuff like that. That's just not what we do. It's hard for us to hire and train and to get to the volume that we're trying to do. But there are people that do that. I actually have a friend of mine who I work out with at my gym, he runs a business. His business is very different. They have, he has three employees. He's been doing this stuff for a long time. He's getting close to retirement. The owner of this business that goes to my gym is super skilled, super talented. There's nothing he can't paint, stain, drywall repair, whatever it might be. It is going to be pristine and they charge for it. And they don't do a ton of work. They only work on, I don't want to say only, but generally they work on really nice houses. The houses that are just the mansions, if you will. And it takes them a long time to get their projects done and they charge for all of that time at a very high rate. They probably charge in the neighborhood of like 20% more per hour than we do. And they have a much more targeted audience. There are not that many customers that can afford what they're doing. But there are people that are looking for that and that is an amazing business to go and run, especially if the goal is not to make it as big as you can, but maybe to make it as profitable as you can. And the business owner there is making really good money. The painters make really good money. Their clients are happy and it's a great business, but it's completely different than what we're doing.

Jon Bryant: So there's two things there. One, you mentioned hours, hourly rate, price per hour. And for those who are just tuning in, obviously we're talking about what we believe is the gold standard for pricing, which is a production rate style estimating, time-based rates. And so that lets you break a project down into time and then charge appropriately for your time based on how your business is structured. That's just to clarify, right, Michael? That's what you're saying.

Michael Murray: Exactly.

Jon Bryant: And so if you want to learn more about that, we have many other educational opportunities for that. Podcasts, PDFs, webinars. You can check that out at paintscout.com or the Price Sell Paint podcast as well. But the big thing here is that no one's price is the same or it's unlikely to be perfectly the same because we all have different business costs. We all have different things that go into it. And so regionally, what you're going to find is that you may have different costs of labor and that's going to impact your hourly rate, but ultimately it should take not much more time for someone to do something on the East Coast as the West Coast. And so really it's about figuring that hourly rate for your area, your labor rate, your business, and then multiply it by the time. And that's the formula. So please check out some other stuff that we have because it is going to change your life if that's a question you have right now. Okay, what are we onto next?

Michael Murray: All right, I like this one a lot. So John asks, what's the best sales management practice? And he provides some ideas here. Weekly sales huddles, digital high fives every time a sale is made. Should we do pooled commissions? How can I keep my sales team engaged, collaborative, and motivated? Sales management is a topic that we haven't maybe covered as well or as deeply here on Price Sell Paint. I think we both really do enjoy talking about this. So I like this question because it's going to maybe take us in a slightly different direction. What are your thoughts? Where do we start?

Jon Bryant: Man, it's so dependent for every team, honestly. I think everyone should be consulted in this process. What are we going to do as a team? At this point, obviously sales management, you have some people on your team, some sales reps you're trying to manage. I think it's important to get buy-in from everybody. It's better for everybody if there's buy-in on how do we want to celebrate it? What do you want to do? How do we stay engaged? What can a manager do for you guys to help you stay engaged? I don't think this should be completely a top-down approach, although sometimes you got to bring ideas. And maybe you have things that have worked in the past, but as you build your team, I think there's a culture that occurs and make it fun. I think we can celebrate lots of things. I believe, and Michael, you can tell me if I'm crazy here, but salespeople by nature should be driven. If you're finding you're having to coach too much on being driven, that might not be the right seat on the bus, so to speak. Now, do you want to hone that in a little bit? Because there's lots of different activities you can do. There's also an emotional roller coaster people can go on here based on wins and losses. And so engage, to me, collaborative, motivated. These are all kind of big things. Would you agree?

Michael Murray: No, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, these are books are written on this topic. One of the things that I always come back to, I forget who originally said this, so I can't give the credit where it's due, but you've probably heard this is that as a manager or as a leader, I cannot motivate someone else. All I can do is put the conditions in place for them to be motivated. Motivation is self, it comes from within. It doesn't come necessarily from somebody else. It is not this command and control. If I want it more than they do, they might be able to fake it for a little bit, but ultimately that's not going to work. And so I think I'd like to maybe just say that first. But there are a lot of things that I can do as a sales manager, the business owner fulfilling the sales management role to get my team to want to be self-motivated. I personally like the idea of pooled commissions does not seem like a very motivating proposition for most people that are in a sales role. I think most people that are in a sales role are pretty competitive. They are results driven. They want to not only maybe compete with others, but compete with themselves. They want to be able to say, what can I accomplish as an individual? And they want to be rewarded for that. So they want specific rewards financially as well as just some of the praise and recognition of being a top performer, somebody who doesn't necessarily, isn't necessarily motivated by those types of things is probably not the person who's going to be in a sales role to begin with. Would you agree with that as a premise?

Jon Bryant: Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be very hard to have success if you're not self motivated. It just is.

Michael Murray: I'll say a couple of things that we do. So our sales manager has every other week, one-on-one meeting with each of the sales reps for about 45 minutes to talk about where are they at with their goals for the month? Where are they at with specific projects that they might be quoting, stuck on, how can we help kind of stuff? So that's a formal structured scheduled conversation that happens every other week. We also have a team meeting every other week to talk about training related topics. How can we do this better? What's going on? Every time it's different, right? It might be, how do we better utilize financing? It's a lot of topics that we cover on the show. How do we have better setup calls? Like we talked about earlier in this episode. How do we better follow up? What's working? What's not working? What kind of challenges are we facing? So I think those types of things are really helpful. In our company, we use Slack as a method of communication. The method really doesn't matter, but having some sort of group conversation where we can give some public praise, I think is great. I'm a big fan when we have a channel in our Slack where it's automated. So every time a deal is sold in Paint Scout, we set up an automation through Zapier to send a message into the deals won channel in Slack with just some of the notes, right, sales rep, client, amount. And every time that happens, everybody can go in there and give the emojis and the high fives if you will, right, the atta boys and girls, right? We have a lot of, we both believe that female sales reps are very successful.

But the idea there is that it makes it easy and our team can have a lot of fun with that. We also have a big whiteboard in our office where we can have our company wide sales goal for the month can be on that. We put that on the whiteboard and then every time a sale is made, our office admin goes out, updates where we're at for the month. And so as a team, we're all pushing to hit that company sales goal. Individually, they know exactly where they're at with their own goals. We don't necessarily put those publicly all the time. It's not to say that we don't ever want to share that, but just not the constant thing that we need to see. Company wide number, are we on track to hit it? That way then everybody can see like, yeah, look at, we're getting really close. This is exciting. How can I help? I want to go sell something today. I want to go chip into that company goal. And then we all get to celebrate as a team when we are hitting those goals. And yeah, so those are some of the things that we do. But I think we have, I don't know, pretty successful. Hopefully that helps.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the word collaborative here is one I've always struggled with, candidly, for the sales team, because it is such an independent role. To John's point, pooled commissions, we've kind of messed around with it a little bit. Hasn't been great because inevitably someone else is like, well, I contributed more to this than they did. It's like, okay, that didn't help. That actually created more animosity than collaborativeness or teamwork. It's going to depend probably on how you compensate your sales team a little bit. You could probably create that as a bonus structure for everybody, but ultimately, things that have come to mind are month end prizes. Sometimes we've done like a draw. So every sale you get, you're in a draw.

Michael Murray: A raffle ticket, you mean? Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, like a raffle ticket. Every time you make a sale, it goes into something. And we did that a few years ago. It was actually pretty fun. It's something fun, I think is what I take out of this is how do you, like, hey, there's, I made 20 sales this month. That's great. I'm entered into the draw a bunch of times, not reflective of my contribution to the overall goal and the prize. You had a great idea the one time about hot dogs and steaks, which I just love. It was like, let's all go for dinner. We're having hot dogs in the winter.

Michael Murray: Yeah, we have a cookout here and yeah, exactly. It's pretty obvious where everybody stands.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's just something small you can do to have fun with it. Whether it's, I don't think it has to be big. It's just kind of tradition, something fun, something small, and that can keep engagement. But overall, if you have a sales rep that's not hitting their sales target, engagement and collaborativeness is going to be pretty hard. So anyways, all right. What are we doing? We have 10 minutes left. So I'm just going to go through a couple of questions here. I got Armando asks, how to not do more than asked and not charge for it? I think this is probably...

Michael Murray: I was hoping we were going to touch on this. I like this question.

Jon Bryant: Okay, what do you love about it?

Michael Murray: There's this constant battle for we want to under promise and over deliver. We don't want to over promise. But we also don't want to necessarily just do a bunch of work for free. And it's trying to find this balance of customer service, great experience. And, by the way, I can't just do all this stuff for free. So I just think it's a constant battle that we all probably deal with in our industry.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think there's two things to this question. One is people asking you to do stuff that's on your contract and it seems small. And two is actually just not charging properly. That might be what Armando is getting at here. Like how do I make sure I charge for everything I'm doing? Because I get to the end of the job. There's another question here. Somebody, it was one of my first jobs and I ended up at it so bad, I might actually go under. It's like, yeah. And so trying to actually itemize everything, which I think, once you develop a system, like a time-based rate system or production rates, you can then start to price things based on a metric. And then you can check back on that using maybe good job costing or just overall. We always watch things just on hours. So it's like, did that go over or under? Let's adjust that a little bit.

And so that's one way to do it. So you make sure that you're itemizing everything and everything's going into your bid. You don't miss anything. Also, that's clear to your customers. So you have an estimate that actually outlines what you're doing and not so detailed that the customer is like, well, it's this much per square foot. What are you doing? It's just like, I'm painting the window trim, the walls, the baseboards in this room. That's high level enough to communicate it. Do you want to talk a little, like what happens when someone asks you, your crews or you when you were doing it, to do extra work for free? Do you have any lines, any word tracks?

Michael Murray: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we took from our experience with Nolan Consulting, and Nolan Painting specifically this idea of a plus one type of a service. And so I want to give credit where that's due. And I really like it. I like the simplicity of that is that we're always looking for a plus one, which would be, what is one extra thing that we can do for a client while we're at their house to give them a little bit more of a remarkable experience.

And so I'll give some examples. Some of those examples might be helping them bring in the groceries, if they get home on a grocery trip and our crew happens to be there. Or it's bringing the garbage cans up in the middle of the day when the garbage trucks come and we're the only ones at the house. Or bringing in the Amazon packages. Maybe it's cleaning the windows really well while we're up on that second floor ladder. We're going to get out the Windex and clean the windows for them, dusting the top of the fan while we're painting the ceiling on the big A-frame ladder or scaffolding or something like that. You get the idea, right? Those would be all good examples of plus one that, generally speaking, clients probably not going to ask us for. They're probably not going to say, hey, while you're here, could you dust that fan for me?

Jon Bryant: Make sure you take a video though and send it to them. Here's what I did. Just so you know.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I don't mind honestly, I mean the video might be a lot, but it's like, I don't mind having, letting them know. I actually think that's not a bad thing. Like, hey, just while I was up there, I noticed that the window was a little dirty. So I cleaned that off for you. Whatever. I think that's fine.

Jon Bryant: If you want the dirt put back on, I can do that too. I was just, I made an assumption. If you want the dirt put back on there, I can do that too. I just made an assumption.

Michael Murray: Wait, say that again. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think most people are going to be offended by that. But who knows? But the idea of the things that we would charge for. So the way that we think of that, right. If somebody asks us to do, while you're here, you've got that paint out, could you just, right? It always starts with, could you just, which is the problem. Because they might, the homeowner or client in this situation might not understand it's not a just. It actually takes more than you think it does. Our thought here is on a job, we'll give somebody an extra hour of stuff for free. So on a normal project, if it's just under an hour, just do it. It's just not worth coming up with the price and doing all the things and stuff like that. And so generally speaking, it's just like, yeah, painters, you guys know, if this is going to take you less than an hour, you can do that once. If they start to keep asking, then it just becomes a, yeah, I'm happy to do that for you. I am going to have to get you a price for that. Is there anything else that you guys are thinking about us doing? I can price this all together. So it's kind of like that first one's free, after that, we're going to get you a price. And so it's like, how do we afford that first one? Because our original price isn't so tight that I can't afford to do an extra hour.

And that's what would be my big suggestion here is give bid and put it into your bid, into your hourly rate and into the hours in the project that your bid isn't so tight that you can't do a little bit extra to provide a client with a great experience. And start with that, which is going to give you the ability to lean forward in a customer service way. And but also don't be afraid to charge what you're worth. Do not feel like that somebody can, that it's your, you have to do free work just in the name of customer service. One of our core values is we build lifelong relationships and we teach our team, a lot of what I just talked about comes from that core value, but we also teach them that a relationship is fair and balanced and that it doesn't, that does not necessarily mean that we want to be in an abusive relationship where a client is just demanding a bunch of free stuff and holding us hostage because it's like, if you don't do this free stuff, I'm going to write a bad review. It's just like, okay, fair enough. You have a right to write a review. But I can't just do free work for you. Again, that's a relationship that we probably don't want to have any future part of anyway. So that's how we think about it. Love to hear maybe if you have anything else that you would add to that question.

Jon Bryant: I just would just add, whenever I hear just, I think, yes, and. So when I hear the word, can you just do that? I'm like, yes. And I'm going to have to get you a price on that or, and I'm going to have to create an additional work order here. And that was really drilled into me a long time ago, again, by Nolan Consulting, being like, hey, this is how we deal with that question. Because listen, we get this question on every job. And sometimes it's not the customer being a jerk. It's just them not realizing. And so yes, and I have ability to do one hour for free additionally, but after that, I'm going to have to get a price. I just love that approach of the yes, and because it makes it clear for everybody and it's not wrong. You have to say no. Right. It's not this harsh no. It's like, yeah, yeah. And I can't do this infinitely for you. So I think we want to, like you said, create relationships and good relationships can fall apart when you just start saying no all the time and no is wrong. It's these really aggressive, abrasive things that is what you want to say, but we need to kind of just make it a little softer. So, Michael, we're up on time though. I know that goes fast. Hey, yeah.

Michael Murray: Man, I like it. Yeah, we have more questions. We'll obviously keep collecting these questions, if you will, and we'll have to do another one of these, listener question and answer on a future episode. So hopefully there was some good value here. I think so. I think these are some pretty common questions that quite a few people have.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think it's great. Keep them coming. Leave more questions in the comments section. We're happy to do more episodes and help out as much as we can.

Michael Murray: For sure. Yeah, I think my big ask is if there was something that we said today that you found some value in, what I would ask is that you just share this episode with somebody else that's in our industry. Maybe it's somebody else in your company. Maybe it's somebody else that you met at the PCA Expo or maybe it's somebody that you don't really know personally, but they're in one of the Facebook groups dedicated to the painting industry. If you could share this episode with just one person, that would be a huge favor for John and I. Because to be honest with you, we've committed to create enough content essentially for a year to see if there's any value to see if this is helpful for people in our industry. This does take us a good amount of time to do and we both have businesses and stuff that we're trying to run. But we do believe, or we hope that there's some value here. So again, if you found it valuable, share it with somebody. That would be a huge way to repay John and I for our time and hopefully you can help out a friend as well.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, and if you're listening to the podcast, head over to YouTube. You can find this episode there. Leave your questions. Join the Pricing and Painting Projects Facebook group that we have. Great to leave questions there. We have an awesome community of people who are also interested in the same thing and can definitely help. So if you're a sales rep, business owner, maybe even a Sherwin-Williams rep, feel free to come ask the questions. We'd love to help solve some of these tougher questions that people have around pricing and selling that prevent them from running their business.

Michael Murray: I love it. Awesome. Really good stuff today. Again, always good hanging out. Appreciate these questions. And yeah, again, hopefully we're providing some value. So John, good to see you. I'm sure we'll do this again here soon. Take care.

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