How Two Day Painting Built an $8.5M, 25% Profit Painting Machine

Jon Bryant:All right, hey guys, welcome back to the Price Sell Paint podcast. We are here today with Garrett Martell from Two Day Painting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once again, I'm Jon, this is Michael. We are excited to chat with you, Garrett. It's been a while since we've had a guest on the podcast. And quite honestly, I'm getting a little bit tired of talking to Michael, so it's a nice little break for us. Yeah, it's mutual, it's good. But yeah, we're pumped because I think for our listeners, this is a great time for us to talk to somebody who has run the gauntlet, so to speak, in business. I think you've managed to build a business that is very substantial in our space. So just maybe run us through a few of the facts, a broad overview of what you guys do. And then I want to dive deep today into sales, marketing, how all this actually works. And hopefully for those listening, you can get some really good takeaways for what you can do today to make your sales process better, maybe run your business a little better. But Garrett, why don't you take it away here, just tell us a little bit about Two Day Painting.

Michael:Beautiful.

Garrett:Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it. Two Day Painting, we do a little bit over eight and a half million right now in the Waukesha, Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. Mostly residential repainting. We do a little bit of commercial as well. We probably did about a million in commercial. We just started getting into deck resurfacing as well. So we're trying to get into a little bit of that. Just kind of dipping our toes into that at the moment, but it's going well.

A few things I like to talk about with the company. So we did a little over eight and a half million, but we really like to focus on high quality and well margin jobs. This year we grossed about 60% average, we netted almost 25%, kept marketing margins down below 4%. And this year was a little bit of a tougher economic year, a lot of companies struggled to grow and we managed to grow about 10%. So yeah, I'm excited to talk with you guys about everything.

Jon Bryant:Yeah, those are obviously, I mean, we know pretty impressive numbers. So yeah, excited to ask some questions. Can you give us a bit of an overview of the sales team? Like how does this work to be able to get that kind of volume?

Garrett:Well, right now we have six sales reps. One of them is a hybrid. We're going to be adding on another one next year. We really love hybrid type strategies where we train project managers to be able to kind of do both. We give them a shot at sales. We help them benefit. And they can kind of bounce in between sales and production as needed to help us add redundancy to either operation. With the six sales reps, our top performer did about 2.3. Our lower performers are doing just over a million. We're probably averaging around 1.7 this year. A little bit lighter than last year comparatively, but still going pretty well.

Jon Bryant:Pretty good. Cool. Michael, over to you.

Michael:Yeah, Garrett, just a couple more background questions. So you're in the Milwaukee area, the suburbs of Milwaukee. I noticed Madison, Wisconsin's maybe somewhat close. Do you guys do work out towards Madison, or is it really just the Milwaukee suburbs? How big is your area?

Garrett:Not really Madison unless it's a really good maybe commercial project. It's a little bit out of our radius. So we mostly focus on southeastern Wisconsin.

Michael:Cool. Is the work being done mostly by employees, subcontractors? I know that's a question that we always get asked and people want to know about. How do you guys structure that?

Garrett:That's a great question. It's primarily 1099. We do have five in-house guys right now, mostly for support, warranty, kind of saving the day if there's a problem. But yeah, most of our work is done with 1099.

Michael:Awesome. And I guess the last little background question I'd love to hear about is just how did you get into the industry? How long, I don't remember if you said it yet, but what year did you get started? How long you've been doing it? Things like that.

Garrett:Yeah, so back in 2012, I did College Pro Painters. I feel like a lot of the guys in the industry came from that route. Learned a lot about it, decided I graduated college, didn't want to get a job somewhere. So in 2014, I started Two Day Painting. Basically, opened up a $10,000 credit card, had no money in my name, printed flyers at my school library, door knocked, bought a 93 Plymouth minivan with a wooden ladder rack and found some used ladders. Basically cash-filled my business and after the first year saved up everything I earned and was able to start actually investing into marketing and better equipment and employees and was able to grow from there.

Michael:Awesome. Yeah, I love it. The hustle.

Jon Bryant:So the progress from 2014 to 2025, did you find that it was slow at the start and then ramped up or was it kind of pretty consistent?

Garrett:In the beginning, the first five or six years, I was doubling or tripling my business every year. In that period, it's a little bit easier to rapidly scale comparatively to when you become a little bit more mature in your industry. So I was able to rapidly scale. And then the last two or three years, I was focusing more on margins and culture and stuff like that. But we were still able to grow 10 to 20% a year.

Jon Bryant:Yeah, I mean, let's kind of dig into some of these things, because I think Michael and I have been on this journey a long time too, and it's interesting to kind of compare some notes. So how long did it take for you to get your first sales rep? Do you remember when you hired that person?

Garrett:2016. I was primarily handling the sales for my first two years of the business. First year we did a quarter million, second year we did a half a million, and then the third year, this was probably my toughest year in business, I was trying to grow way too much, way too quick. I got a little cocky, hired on four sales reps, got an office. I was able to grow four times that year up until about 2 million, but the margins were just, I was trying to set myself up for the future, grow even further than that and took too big of a leap. So we barely made money that year. It was the most stressful year of my life. I was working a hundred hour weeks for not really making any money. Definitely learned a lesson from there, but it did give me the foundation to continue building on top of that. All those lessons learned in those experiences to have a good next year. But yeah, definitely do not recommend trying to four plus times your business in a year. It's a little scary.

Jon Bryant:One of the things Mike and I talk about all the time is how, especially when, and this is really common for most people on a podcast or speaking at a conference, it's always the positive side of stuff. It's always like, look at me, look what I did. And I think that in this business, we've talked about it before, that it can be kind of like a knife fight all the time. It's like you're in a dark alley every day and you're just trying to fend off things that are coming at you. And I think to your point, year three going four times the business, it sounds sexy, it sounds great, but the realities of some of that growth are you just can't avoid them, right? Being able to manage that type of volume, train those people, get the pricing right, it's just really hard. So anyways, after that third year, what did you decide to do? Did you keep those people on or did you let them go?

Garrett:Yeah, some of the people stayed on for a few years. I was new in business, so our sales systems were not fantastic. They were adequate at best at the time. There's a lot of pieces to connect to keep everybody fully busy, fully happy from a marketing perspective, have the production funnel turning around, producing quality work. It took time to build, so I did end up losing most of those four. But then I readjusted in 2017, I learned some lessons and I hired on three sales reps then and actually all three of them are still with me today. I was able to definitely learn a lot of lessons but lost most of the staff in that 2016 year.

Jon Bryant:It's crazy. What, looking back, what would you have done differently there? Have you thought about that at all?

Garrett:Yeah, definitely. Well, I would have taken a shorter growth attempt. I would have targeted, when you're running a half a million dollar business, you can grow two to three times without it breaking you. But you got to do it smartly. You got to have the systems built. You got to have a strong foundation before you do it. So definitely start by having all those pieces in place, not targeting four times growth.

And yeah, just really focusing on your team and the culture and making sure everyone is trained well. You have all the pieces in place to be able to connect production to sales, to marketing where you're being efficient. Right now, I really focus on efficiency. My sales reps during most of the year are 100% busy. I try to have the right numbers in the right places. I never overmarket. I slow down my marketing if I'm getting too booked up and make sure I have the right amount of crews or project managers where everyone's efficient.

Michael:Can we go back just for a second? What do you mean when you say we're getting too booked up? What does that look like?

Garrett:So sometimes, especially during the COVID era where marketing was a little easier than it is now, it's easy to all of a sudden get backed up three, four weeks on estimates where your sales team is just swamped. And then you're losing a lot of efficiencies with marketing because you're spending the money. People are canceling their appointments. A lot of people don't even take on the appointment when you're three or four weeks out to get an estimate. And you're not really operating efficiently and you're not providing that level of customer service. So I try to watch my calendar really diligently and make sure that I'm predicting the future outcome of all my marketing efforts. So that way when it starts getting a little bit ahead, I can pull back on some direct mail spend or some other marketing or pause some certain campaigns.

Michael:What have you found to be the ideal sweet spot for you there? What's the target?

Garrett:I like being about four or five days out is kind of ideal. I like running the three to four day window. It does get a little stressful when you start getting to three days because it takes time for your marketing to build.

Michael:When you say you're trying to keep the reps busy, what does busy mean? Like how many appointments per day or per week or however you might think of that?

Garrett:Yeah, most of my reps like taking four appointments per day. We have two and a half hour time blocks during the warm weather season. It's usually mid-March through late October over in Wisconsin. So they usually take on, they can choose which two and a half hour blocks they want to choose, but most of them will take four. Some of them will take three appointments a day. And usually they have some buffer time in between to do follow-ups and handle their emails.

Michael:So would you say that an appointment typically takes two and a half hours or is that buffer time built into that? Like how long are they actually meeting with a prospect or homeowner or whatever?

Garrett:On average 90 minutes.

Jon Bryant:So at this point, you said you have six sales reps. It sounds like a few of them have been with you a while, right? So three of them have been almost seven years, is that right?

Garrett:They're going on nine actually.

Jon Bryant:Nine. That's incredible. What do you attribute that to? Why have they stuck around so long?

Garrett:Well, I think it is mostly attributed to culture. Our sales team gets along really well. In general, we have not had any employee turnover that are not painter or sub-related in two years at this point. We have a happy team. We have a good culture. We treat everyone well. We have a fantastic benefits package. A lot of PTO. We're really flexible. I've never yelled at an employee my entire life. We just have a, over time we built a good culture. We hire people that fit in with our culture. We don't hire the assholes. We hire the people who are humble and happy and have the right personality. And then we train them in. So we get to a point where we have a strong team and that's half the reason why they don't want to leave. I mean, yeah, we pay fairly. We have good benefits. We treat them with respect, but all that said and done, I think we have a happy team. So that alone has gone a long way to our success as well when you're not having to constantly train in and hire people every year. I can just focus on one or two positions and focus on running the business and improving our systems or marketing versus just constantly a funnel of training people.

Michael:Yeah. You don't have to get into specific numbers or anything, but what does the comp model look like for your sales team? Is it based, is it like a hundred percent commission or all salary or how do you think about structuring that?

Garrett:Yeah, ours is pretty simple actually. It's 8% commission. We do allow for draw salary opportunities where they can essentially get a base that they can use against future commissions if they choose to. Or they can just take out their full commission every week and a lot of them will go on draws over the winter months when things are slow and then they will make it up later in the spring.

Jon Bryant:Yeah. When was the last rep you brought on? You said it was recent?

Garrett:We trained on a project manager actually as a hybrid rep and he worked really hard to earn his spot on the team and he was promoted to a full-time rep this fall. So in general, we try not to hire new outside sales reps if we can. We try to have them be a project manager for at least a year, learn the ropes, they understand production, they learn a lot about painting scenarios through that role. They get to know our crews. We make sure they fit in with the culture. And by the time we start training them for sales, we try to hire project managers who are really personable, who have an ability to get into sales. And then we teach them from there. And it's so much easier of a process. Training a project manager that's already been in your company for a year. And we make them earn their position on the team. They have to sell. They have to sell well. They have to do everything right. And they fight hard for it because it's an amazing opportunity. Our sales reps are all making six figures. So just that extra motivation helps them really go a long way. And that's kind of our philosophy. We're training a new one this year as well as a hybrid. And we're trying to keep that funnel going.

Jon Bryant:So do they know they're essentially trying out for the sales team? Is that something that's very clear? Do you post an ad, are you saying sales rep and they come in and you say, here's how it works? Or do you advertise for a project manager and then try to convince them otherwise? How does that work on your end?

Garrett:We advertise for project managers and then we just sort the pool of people. We find people that we think would be good for both roles. And our project managers are trained to upsell throughout the year. So they're trained to get reviews. They're trained a lot of sales skills. They know how to use our CRM. They know how to, besides knowing the full sales process, they know almost everything that the sales reps know. So they can work on it throughout the year. We can teach and train and develop them. And the ones that prove that they have the motivation and ability, the personality for sales, they're personable, they have the ability to use the CRM, write accurate proposals, be detailed, and are motivated and driven to get upsells, get reviews, and those are the ones that we promote into the hybrid.

Jon Bryant:Quick side note, I mean, that's the same conclusion that we've sort of come to is that at the end of the day, some of our best potential people to train for sales are actually in the production team. And we look for that additional work, sales, reviews. It's like those little critical points that show you can actually do it, which is interesting because it takes a little bit of the guesswork out of this. I feel sometimes with the sales professional role, it's kind of like flipping over, like it's like that carnival game where you pick a duck and you kind of look under the duck to see if you won a prize. And I just don't like playing that game because I know that it's like a game of chance. And so to your point, this is a better, more predictable way. You can do the personality test, you can do the ride alongs, all that kind of stuff up front, but these people are going into people's homes, which is a wild concept when you actually think about it. I know Michael, you've talked about some of your stories, but it's like, we're sending these people blind into strangers' homes. And if you're there, you can kind of make it weird. You don't get the full picture, but it's better to get a little bit more feedback before you just jump in. At least I think that's a perfect scenario, but when it's a year time period, Garrett, do you find that you're kind of getting antsy? You're like, I need another sales rep. When are you going to be ready? Or do you just have so many people in the pipeline?

Garrett:Well, we've gotten lucky because we don't really have turnover with our existing sales team. They've all been employed for several years now at this point. So they're happy. We can just essentially bring on, if we need to hire outside sales reps, we will. Not all of our PMs are good fit for sales. There's only, we're trying to bring on all new PMs that are also good fits and it's been working well so far. Whenever we hire outside sales reps from Indeed, they're usually about a 40% chance of working out. You go through the training and you understand that things are just not clicking. This person's not going to get it. And then you just waste all that time.

Michael:How many project managers do you guys have? Like this past year?

Garrett:We had four plus the hybrid, so kind of like four and a half.

Michael:Yeah, so that gives you a little bit of a bench to look to. That makes sense. I'd love to hear more about your sales system. I don't know if, Jon, you had more questions on the structure of the team, but I'd love to hear what they're doing on site on the estimates and how they're so successful.

Jon Bryant:My only question was about expectations because, maybe I love that question. But just before we get there, you said they've earned the spot on the team. So they have the ability, you've seen that, now you get the role. What do you expect? First year, second year, third year. Do you have kind of a sense of that?

Garrett:Yeah, well, we expect, obviously, we talk about their goals, we do consistent coaching with them. Most of their goals are between somewhere between 40 and 50% close rate with a $7,000 to $8,000 average job size in our company. Some of them hit those numbers directly. Our top sales rep is a little over 50% with a $7,800 average job size. Other sales reps are closing in the mid 40s, but they have a $5,200 job size. So we're coaching with them on how do you get that up? Are you subconsciously trying to cut the job short to try to win the bid? Trying to get the mindset right around price. Others have a great average job size, but they have a closing ratio in the low 30s and that's low for us. So it's a constant coaching. Sales is a head game.

When it comes to sales management, you go through waves and roller coasters. You have some weeks where you're killing it, everything's going well, and other weeks where you're distracted with life or you're feeling like you had a couple too many customers tell you your price is high and all of a sudden that's getting in your head and affecting your motivation. So a lot of, no matter how seasoned they are, nine years under the belt, everybody still needs consistent coaching and tracking and once you see them go through a slump, reach out, get out there with a buddy estimate, talk about what's going on, try to correct whatever's happening to reduce that slump. But as far as expectations go, we kind of have goals for them. We don't have like, you have to do 30% or you're fired. In our company, we don't put as much pressure on as most sales organizations do. We kind of keep it a happy team, but we have goals and we help them achieve those goals and we constantly work with them. We're not threatening their position if they don't achieve it, but we are just kind of doing what we can to help them achieve it.

Michael:Garrett, are you the sales manager? Or do you have somebody on the team that fills that role?

Garrett:Me and my general manager kind of split responsibilities for that.

Jon Bryant:Back to your question, Michael, because I think it's kind of a great segue.

Michael:Yeah, so obviously, I mean, 40 to 50% were selling $7,000 $8,000 average job sizes. Pretty impressive numbers. Obviously, it sounds like you guys have a pretty good system. I think I selfishly want to hear more about your system. I think anybody listening does. You mentioned 90 minute appointments. So if you could just kind of walk us through, what does that look like? What is an appointment? What is the system that the Two Day sales reps are following?

Garrett:Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we have our confirmation emails and calls obviously before we arrive. We might touch base a little bit about the job. We don't do much of a pre-call unless we have specific questions. But we mostly show up, we introduce ourselves. And we used to start by going to the kitchen table. We don't do that anymore. We start by trying to build a little rapport if we can, about the dog or whatever you see, but we kind of go into the walk around pretty quickly. So we start with the walk around and as we're doing the walk around, we're trained to make sure that they identify obviously any painting issues, any problems and really go in depth about why your paint is peeling, what's going to, what our solution is, what are the better products we're going to use and how the process goes, their caulk, if that's failing, why.

A lot of times painters use the cheapest caulk that they can possibly find at Home Depot. They don't specify the level of caulk. We always specify using premium level caulks in our proposals. We sell against that because no other painters do. We specify certain higher grade levels of primer and why they're going to be more beneficial to them. So we go through, we kind of demonstrate ourselves as the expert and make sure that we understand their needs and kind of set ourselves apart from the competition a little bit with the walk around. And we also find their needs. We have needs questions that we ask. We usually start out by seeing when they last had the painting project done, who did it, how did that experience go, anything that they liked about it, keep probing into things that they liked until they kind of run out of answers, what did you not like about it, what could they have done better, and then probe into those and then once you get those answers, then connect them with solutions of things that we do to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Michael:Got it, love it. So basically, that's all happening in that first, I don't know how long that takes, maybe like 10 to 20 minutes. We arrive, quick introductions, build a little rapport, we start walking around. And while we're walking around, we're going to be asking a lot of these questions like you just described. Am I following along so far?

Garrett:Yep, yeah, it's all kind of in that walk around. And then once they've kind of finished the house, they've asked questions about every detail on their project, the gutters, the sidelights, everything. And they've asked those needs questions. Then we get into our PaintScout presentation where we go over a little bit about the company.

Jon Bryant:Hey, what's up PaintScout!

Michael:Hey PaintScout! I've heard of that. All right, sorry, I digress.

Garrett:We try to get to their kitchen table if we can for this step, if it makes sense in the situation. But then we kind of go over that. We have a pretty built out PaintScout presentation about us, the things that we do. We do a ton of charity work, so we always talk about that. What makes us different? Why choose us? We go through our workmanship. We talk about our color consulting process, our project managers. We have unique programs like free touch-ups for life where we literally, any customer gets five hours worth of free touch-ups on work that we've done in the past and it never expires. It's a way to get in the door on future projects and customers love it. It tends to work pretty well.

Michael:Is that free touch-ups for each year or for as long as they live there or what's, just give me that context. The five hours thing you just mentioned.

Garrett:Yeah, as long as they live in the home, it's not every year, it's just a one time program. We oftentimes do go back at the request a little bit more, but it makes them, they're impressed by it. Most painters don't offer free touch-ups for life. They're surprised that we even do it. So it's an impressive sales tool. And ideally, even if paint is peeling 10 years from now from exterior work we did, we're going to come back and do five hours worth for free, but hopefully we get the rest of the house then.

Jon Bryant:I think Michael and I talked last week about the things you bring to an estimate and just that package of stuff that can be so helpful. And we talked at length about the PaintScout presentation and how to use that to your advantage in a sales situation. Can I mean, selfishly, I want to talk a little bit more about it because I mean, in designing it, there was a bunch of thought put into that. And I'm curious to know how you guys use it and kind of do you scroll through the pages and show them how it works? Talk a little about that.

Garrett:Yeah, yeah, we, I guess what I forgot to mention before, we start with the product section. So we have an exterior painting page and interior page, a cabinet painting page, a deck resurfacing page and we have the product PDFs from Sherwin-Williams. We have a product builder of our eight top products for each type of situation, our top caulks. We really promote upselling Emerald Rain Refresh and Woodscapes Rain Refresh and the high-end products. And we have extra brochures and videos about them in our presentation. So we go through and we talk about the products and we help them choose their product together, help them choose their sheen, all of that. And then once we figure that out, there's a whole bunch of pictures too on those pages if they want to scroll through those. Then we go to about the company. We talk about charity.

Then there's a section in there about what other painters, why it's important to hire the right painter for those customers who don't think there's a difference in painters. Some people who haven't had experiences don't know that there's a lot of things that could happen with hiring the wrong painter. So the people that are in that bucket, we talk to them about it. We give them stats, like there's different stats about how the painting industry is the most complained about business according to the Better Business Bureau. Bunch of different stats about...

Michael:Is that from business owners or just customers?

Garrett:Both.

Michael:Well, business owners and customers. OK. Got it. That's interesting. I've actually never heard that stat. Yeah, that's interesting. OK. Anyways, I like it. Sorry to interrupt you again. Yeah, I like this section for sure.

Jon Bryant:That's no, that's really cool. Keep going. This is fun stuff.

Garrett:Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff about what some painters do wrong with their prep or their process and it kind of helps them understand that we're not all the same. It's not just a cheap commodity that you can go out and hire and you can just hire the cheapest price and you get the exact same results. So we don't go over that page with everyone. If we gauge that they are a customer who had those experiences, they've expressed that, you know, it can be a negative conversation, but we go over that with everyone who needs it.

Then we go into the why choose us section where we talk about our painters and how they're skilled career tradespeople and not college students or fly by night guys. We talk about our project management, our office and our communication policies and support. We go into our insurance and we give them our certificate of insurance in the PaintScout presentation. So they have access to all that. We're fully insured and bonded.

We offer free color consults, but we also paint the samples on the wall for them. So we'll go to the store, buy color quart samples of the colors they want and physically test them on the wall. That's a service a lot of customers love. And they oftentimes don't realize that the colors look different than they do on the swatches. So a lot of times they end up changing their mind and that's a huge value added service. We do charge $20 per sample for that. We don't charge for the labor, but we make a little profit off the sample and it covers kind of our costs with the testing. We go through our accreditations and we actually pull up a project map. So we use a software called Project MAPIT that we incorporate with PaintScout. And it basically places a pin on all of your projects that you've done. So you can zoom in on a neighborhood and show them like, hey, look, these are the projects we've done nearby.

If they leave a five-star review on Facebook or Google or whatever, it'll actually sync it with that so then it'll be able to show, this is what Kathy had to say about us. She lives three houses down the street from you. So you can kind of show them that. They will have that tool. Then we kind of go into some of our testimonials and we have over 1,300 five-star Google reviews. So by the time we go through this whole process with them, if we did it right and we really listened to them in the first part of the stage and we found the perfect solution for them, we identified the right product, we demonstrated our trust and our competence and our professionalism. Now, after we're done with all that, we go and we do our measurements and we type up a proposal and we create a bunch of plan B options in case they think the price is too high, like maybe they could remove the ceiling, the powder room, and have some prices prepared in the price conversation. Then we go in, we present the proposal to them, we go through everything in detail, we present the price. And Mr. Customer, so after our 15% discount, this comes down to $10,000 to do your project. Would you like to go ahead with it? And then this is where the skill kind of comes into place.

Because a lot of customers, people are nice. Most customers are not just going to be like, you're expensive and open you up to the negotiation table. But a lot of customers, they might truly be happy with your price, but a lot of them, especially if you have a decent price point that you can support, a happy company culture, you're not competing on price, there's a good chance that they're going to think you're a little higher than they expected. But most people are not going to open up and just tell you straight away that you guys are expensive. They're going to be like, thank you for coming. Can you send me an email? And we will get back to you in a few weeks. And then you never hear from them again, because you didn't get to the bottom of their price expectations.

Michael:Wait, Garrett? Hold on. Are you trying to tell me that customers lie? What? What? This is breaking news on the Price Sell Paint podcast.

Jon Bryant:I thought they really just were going to work with their neighbor's friend.

Michael:So Garrett, I want to hear, you're about to tell us some objection handling and closing techniques. We're going to make everybody wait for a couple more minutes on that because I want to hear something you mentioned a minute ago. You just kind of threw out there this 15% discount. And I don't, unless I missed it, I don't think you explained that context. You just said like, Mr. Homeowner, after your 15% discount, your total price is $10,000. Where did this discount come from? Discounting is a hot topic in our industry. Help me get my mind around that if you could give us some context.

Garrett:Yeah, I mean, so we advertise and all of our advertisements have some sort of discount or offer to them. In fact, most painting contractors would love not to put a discount or an offer on their cards and just go straight. It makes the conversation easier with the customer. It's more ethical, easier, but at the same time, we've done a lot of experiments. We even spent an entire year where we did not do any discounts whatsoever on anything.

And what we found was not only the marketing response rates dropped on all of our forms of advertising, especially direct mail. So a lot less people would call us in similar market conditions and similar areas than they had been with the discounts. And it would actually make the sales process harder, which is one thing you wouldn't instinctively think. But what we found is people like a deal. People want a deal. If you don't give them any sort of discount, you're like, hey, this price is $10,000 and that's what it is, they are just going to be like, okay, I'll get some other quotes. People like to feel like they got something. So our ratios actually went down when we stopped offering discounts. So I personally am a big fan of having some sort of offer or discount on everything you do.

Michael:Does that fluctuate throughout the year or is it just kind of like a standard, hey, no matter when you get your quote, we provide a 15% discount or talk a little bit more about the strategy.

Garrett:So usually in our marketing pieces, we have like, let's just say 15% summer discount or summer special or whatever. So then they get there and we give that 15% discount to everybody because it's in our summer special time window. So we also have some other type of discount options that we can give in certain situations as well. Like if we have a production gap. If we have a gap coming up in the next two weeks, which we honestly try to cater our production schedules. We almost always have a gap in the next two or three weeks. We try to figure that out the best we can. Usually in the fall, it's more doable than the winter. But then we tell them, hey, we can get you an extra 5% off if you help us fill this gap in two weeks. We don't put a lot of pressure on in order to do it. I completely understand, take as long as you need to make your decision. But if you do help us fill this spot, we can get you an extra 5 or 10% off your project and we can get you going right away. Customers love it. It works almost every time, when it works. But it really helps create that urgency and helps create that sale in a non-pressureful manner. In order to do that, it's not easy because if you're constantly booked out two or three months, it's hard to pull off that technique. But you got to manage production well enough.

Michael:Yeah, I love it. Jon, any other thoughts on discounting or you want to hear some of these objection handling?

Jon Bryant:I mean, I think it's great. The discussion about discounting is just like Michael said, so prevalent. And there's this like, I think a big hesitation about whether it diminishes how our services are viewed. And that's always the concern. And when you hear that, what would be your kind of rebuttal on something like that?

Garrett:Yeah, I mean, once in a while you do get customers that are like, are you just giving me a discount or is this real? And that's the mindset I think a lot of painters have. But in the reality, those customers, at the end of the day, they don't care. They just want the best value, I should say. But it doesn't matter if you have a discount or not. It's not going to make a difference in their decision factor to go with you or the other person. And so as much as it's nice for us as painting contractors not to have to play any type of discount games and just give the price, the price is the price, it will hurt your marketing and your sales efforts. We've done extensive experiments on that. This is over a course of thousands of estimates. We have the data. So I was hoping at that time I did the experiment that I would just be able to be done giving discounts. I was hoping maybe my logic was, maybe I'll spend a little bit more on marketing, we'll improve our sales, offset each other. And I found that on both fronts that was wrong. So it's up to you and your business. If you're trying to run a large business where you're doing a heavy amount of marketing, I would highly advise not ditching discounts personally. I know there's some other companies that do do it, go ahead.

Jon Bryant:One of the things you said is really important, I think, in this discussion is that there's a reason for it. I think when you blindly just say 15% discount on everything, everyone's like, okay, you're doing something fishy, but you mentioned like a summer booking discount, immediate window discount. And I've always felt like you can do that when you have a reason. Just give me one reason why this is being done versus you just cutting corners or elevating the price to cut it down again. And I don't know, would you agree with that Garrett? Or does it work if you're just like 15% Two Day Painting, always 15% off?

Garrett:You know, I agree you do have to have a reason if you're giving a discount later on. The 15%, people don't, you don't really get concerns about that. They see advertisements. They're going to pull out their postcard if you don't give it to them anyways. They're just happy getting a discount. It's when you start at the end of the job, you gave the price, they say you're high and then all of a sudden you just start dropping things that you become unethical. I like to present a lot of the discounts upfront.

And then when you do have that price negotiation, we have a different tactic for that. So our sales reps, we basically have a structure where they have a few different discounts that they can give in different situations. If they're previous customers, they're military or the production gap discount. But besides that, the price is the price. They don't have, they're not starting out with this high price and lowering it down like some companies do.

Customers get the perception of discounts because they're used to the window salesperson that starts out at 20 grand and then by the time they object, now it's all of a sudden down to $8,000. And it's like this massive price drop. And it makes our just home services industry look bad in general. And honestly, it's gouging because if the customers didn't object to that 20 grand, they would have just gouged that customer unreasonably, which I think is wrong. So we have our fair price point.

Jon Bryant:And it's always 20,000 even, right?

Michael:Or like 80.

Jon Bryant:Sorry, keep going.

Garrett:Always. Yeah. Yeah, so we don't do that. We have our price points. We have our discounts that they can give, but we give that to them upfront before we present the price. This is what we do. And then when we ask them about the price and they say that this is higher than I expected, or they give you some sort of price objection, or they even just hesitate and you could just tell they're thinking about it, but they're not going to actually say anything.

Then what our sales reps are trained to do is we tell them, just out of curiosity, what do you think about the price? And that way they can open up about it. And they can be like, well, I think you guys would do a great job. You're really professional. I'm not saying anything, but it was just more than I expected or whatever the case is. Some people will just be straight out and be like, that's high. But most people will kind of dance around it, be polite, at least in Wisconsin. Maybe it's just Wisconsin. But most people don't want to tell you that you're high unless you kind of fish for it. So yeah, maybe that's a unique thing here.

Jon Bryant:Passive aggressive, yeah.

Michael:Midwest nice. Canada knows something about that too.

Garrett:Yeah. So then we get them to open up a bit about it and they're going to be like, well, it's just a bit higher than I expected. I do think you guys do a great job. Or they might be like, no, that's right in line with what I was thinking. And then you can ask for the business or there's other different strategies. But if you do get a price objection, where they're like, that was a little bit higher than I was thinking, you can respond with, well, just out of curiosity, Ron, what price were you expecting? And then get them to hopefully give you a number or some sort of logic. Maybe they were expecting $1,000 less, or maybe they're expecting half the price. Whatever the logic is, you get them to kind of give you some information on it. And then you ask, Ron, why were you expecting that? And then they will probably tell you that their neighbor got it painted for that, or they got it painted last time for that, or they got another quote for that, or they Googled it and that's what Google said that should cost. Whatever the logic is, they're telling you it. Now you can rebuttal that logic. You can be like, I completely understand. So your neighbor got it painted for that. Do you know what that all included? Is the neighbor over there? Looks like he's got a smaller house or a lot of brick. Do you know if they're doing one or two coats?

Michael:That's scary.

Garrett:The product line they were using. You can get them to raise their bar. If it was another quote, you try to see if you have access to that quote. See if you're comparing apples to apples. Whatever the logic is, you can try to get them to raise their expectations to a more reasonable price point. And then when you get to that reasonable price point, you ask them for the sale again. If they don't go for it, then you simply, we have more of a technique of we try to get them to give us a price to be like, I would love to earn your business. I really want to do this job. I know it's exactly the type of job we want to do. I can't do anything on my end to lower the price, but what I can do is I can go to bat and talk to the owner and see what he's willing to do to try to get this done. Is there any price point at which you'd be willing to go ahead with? And you take it out of your hands, you get them to give you a price.

Otherwise, they're just going to be like, well, what can you do? You get them to give you a number on it and then you try to get them closer if they're far off. And then we have a conversation with one of us and we try to make a deal with them. And that's when we try to negotiate. But you kind of got to go down the whole rabbit hole. And if you just start dropping your price all of a sudden, especially a substantial amount, they're probably not going to trust you in the first place. Maybe they do the job. Maybe they're not going to trust you. I just don't think it's ethical. Plus, there's not that margin. We can't drop the price by half, it's not worth it for us.

Jon Bryant:Totally. And then after all of that, that's a very awesome process. When do you start threatening? Is it just after that? Or is it, I'm just going to... So with that, Garrett, so quick question. I know Michael has a question about objection handling. If you found, so you mentioned 15% as a discount. I just wanted to kind of wrap this up. Have you tested other amounts? Is that where you've settled being most effective or what have you seen?

Garrett:I've tested a lot of different things. 10%, higher than that. I've tested value offers like free paint upgrades or we're going to do something else for you for free, like paint a bedroom if you spend a certain amount of money or dollar amounts off. I personally love the 15% offer because I feel like most companies that do offers, that they do a percentage, they do 10%. So it makes you look a little bit better. And then when I think you go too high, it just makes you look kind of more, a little more untrustworthy once you start getting too high unless there's a reason for it. We oftentimes do 25% in the winter. We give them an extra 10% off in our slow season. An honest discount because we need to work and it's slow. And it gives people incentive too to wait to do their project until the winter. But I find that 15% just works the best for us because I feel like a lot of the other offers, they have caveats to what type of job they're doing.

You're painting a bedroom, well what if they don't need a bedroom? Paint upgrade, that's kind of confusing. I love the idea of doing a free paint upgrade and using mostly Emerald Rain Refresh, those type of level products, but customers don't know what that is. They don't know the value that that is. It doesn't really help them in their decision making process. A dollar off, that's kind of tough because you got to have limits where $500 off if you spend over $3,000. Well, what if they think they have a smaller than the $3,000 project? Or what if they have a $20,000 project and now $500 is nothing to them. So I know a lot of people I've talked to use different discounts and everyone has their own opinions. I'm not saying any of them are right or wrong, but what I found is the 15% is universally appealing to as many people as possible.

Michael:What I find interesting, just to kind of summarize the discounting conversation, it sounds like Garrett, you see discounting certainly as a sales tool, but even more so as a marketing tool. And I think too often when we talk about discounting in our industry, it's only as a sales tool. It's like not on the flyers, it's not on the marketing pieces, and it's only maybe with a price objection or something further down in the sales process. And what I hear you saying is that you're missing out on a lot of value because of that. And you could actually generate a lot more leads, lower your marketing costs, and just resonate with more people by having an upfront discounting strategy that might fluctuate throughout the year as part of your marketing. Is that, am I picking up on that right?

Garrett:Yep, and it also creates more urgency when you do that. If you just send mailers out with your brand name, your service, yeah, people are going to call you when they're ready to call you. When they're actually looking at getting quotes, they might call you as part of their quote process. But if you have a discount and it has an expiration date or something going on, they might just get a little bit of thought in the back of their head, like, I'm going to stop pushing off this project. Us as humans, we procrastinate everything, even after you get the quote. Half the time people take six months to make a decision because they just put it on the back burner. They're living their everyday life. But now you have a discount, you have an offer. It gives them a little more motivation to call now versus wait until the perfect time, which the perfect time might never come for a lot of people.

Jon Bryant:Yeah, one of the things we talk about sometimes is there's your competitor that's the competition, but actually indecision is the biggest competitor you have. You just don't quite realize it. And so this type of thing plays into that, which is that urgency, which is so important. It kind of competes against that competitor that you just don't see. So I like that.

Garrett:It does and the other key to the sales process is try to create urgency if you can. If the customer is not that urgent on their project, they're like, oh we're going to do this sometime, especially if it's an exterior, talk about their house, all the peeling paint, all the caulk. I wouldn't let this weather another winter because you already have rotting wood on your house. Every time more and more paint, you lose more and more paint. There's more exposed wood. It's hurting the quality of the wood over time. And that paint is not going to last as long next time that you paint it. There's a lot of different reasons. Water can get in your house if you don't have proper caulking. You can create urgency in a lot of different ways. But ideally, the best way to create urgency is that production gap. Like I said, hey, we got a space we need to fill in two weeks. No pressure at all, no rush. But if you help us fill that gap, we could give you an extra discount today. But you have to have a reason. If you're going to offer, I personally hate so many businesses use the efficiency discount and they're, sign today and you get a discount. I hate that. You have to give them a reason why it benefits you like a production gap or something like that. If you just give it straight out, you're going to lose trust with a lot of consumers is my personal opinion.

Michael:I have two more questions I'd love to hear a little bit about. So you brought up earlier, I made everybody wait. You said the homeowner is lying and they said they're going to call you back in a week or two after they look over your quote. So how does your sales team handle that objection? We need to think about it. I need to talk to my spouse. How do you suggest handling that type of an objection?

Garrett:Well, what we train our sales team to do is we gauge if they are happy with everything or if they're concerned. If they show based upon very micro human movements or emotion, if they're thrilled with everything and they're just like, I need to talk to your wife, I usually try to be like, well, do you mind if we give her a call right now? That way I can answer any questions, explain anything while I'm here. That works a lot.

If they tell you, no, she's at work, she can't take any calls, you could try to be like, do you know when she'll be back from work? I can stop out later today, 5 or 6 p.m. and come back out here and answer any questions. If that doesn't work, you're not getting anywhere, but they are happy with everything you think and you don't want to burn any bridges. Then at that time, we do walk away and we follow up. And we set a follow up time if we can't get back there in person, we call them the next day and try to get ahold of them or talk to them.

Now, if they are concerned about the price or we think that they might be, then we ask them that question, just out of curiosity, how do you feel about the price? And that can open them up to the real objection, which is if you do everything really well, if you have a very thorough sales process presentation, you know what you're doing, you're professional, you're likable, you got everything else down, the only reason they're not going to hire you is because of price. They want to hire you over the other quotes that they got, but the only reason you're losing is because of price. If you don't get to that objection and you can't talk with them about that, then you walk away and you never hear from them again.

Michael:Yeah, I love it. Good stuff. All right, so a question I think we briefly asked you before we even start recording. So Two Day Painting, I think probably a lot of people are interested in how does that affect your productions? You guys try to paint everything in two days or not. Maybe talk a little bit about that and then I might have a follow up.

Garrett:Yeah, so we don't do everything in two days, but what we do do is we cater the size of the crew to the size of the job and work full continuous days until the project is complete. So if we have a larger project, we'll put a five, six person crew on there and work at least eight hour days, usually 10 hour days. We don't bounce around other jobs. Customers honestly don't, they don't want us to rush the job. We never, unless there's a tight deadline for a remodeling project or something, they do not want you to rush the job, but they do want you to care about their efficiency. They want you to be there. They don't want to question when you're coming. They don't want you to come by one day and not the other. So regardless if you have, Two Day Painting just helps us explain that to people. But they care that we care about their convenience and their service. So a lot of our projects do take longer. We never cut corners to get done in two days, but we just try to make it convenient.

Michael:Cool, makes sense. Sounds good. Jon, do you have any other questions? Anything else you want to explore?

Jon Bryant:You know what, I have so many questions, Garrett. This is a great conversation. And I feel like we try to keep our podcasts under an hour. And so in order to respect everyone's time, I would say not right now, but I would love to chat again. I think this is really helpful. And this is the kind of stuff that I know Michael, you've put so much thought into and we put so much thought into over the years and it's this kind of higher level thought that takes a while to get to. The amount of mistakes, like you mentioned it, the amount of times you've had to try different things and arrive where you are is, it's a lot of effort. That's not easy. I know that effort. It hurts. It's PTSD for me. All those terrible postcards I've printed over the years that didn't do anything. That was bad. And so I would love to keep this conversation going. Because I think it's super valuable. It's going to save a lot of people a lot of time and effort and pain just knowing how to get here. And I think it makes us all better. So from my point of view, thank you so much. This is awesome. We should have done this a long time ago. That's it, Michael.

Michael:Yeah, I echo that. I know we're trying to wrap this up and I appreciate, Garrett, I think you have a really intellectual and intentional approach to your business. You talked a lot about just the data, but also the culture. It doesn't seem like you're winging it. You have a reason for what you're doing and it's obviously helped you to be really, really successful running, I would argue, one of the best painting companies perhaps in all of North America. I got a lot out of this talk today. I hope everybody listening did and I really appreciate your time.

Garrett:Thank you guys, it was a pleasure to be here.

Michael:Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks again, everybody, for joining us on the Price Sell Paint podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, if you haven't yet, you should subscribe. We're going to be bringing on more guests, as well as just some more Jon and Michael rambling type episodes that you can look forward to here in the coming year. Thanks. Take care.

Jon Bryant:Thanks guys, this has been fun. Take care.

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