Nick Slavik on Sales, Marketing, Lead Generation & the Future of the Painting Industry

Michael Murray: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Price. Sell. Paint. Jon and I are really excited. We've got a special guest. A guy you've probably never heard of before, especially if you're in the painting industry. So we're going to ask him to introduce himself for most of you. It's probably the first time Nick Slavik is joining us. Nick, who the heck are you? Tell us about yourself here.

Nick Slavik: Boy, I am a father of four kids. I've got two dogs. I really love plants and animals and outside stuff, lakes and rivers. I also happen to be a 32 year master craftsperson in this industry. I own a painting and restoration company for the last 16 years. It's an outlier in terms of things we do inside and size. I am the Ask a Painter Live guy. I travel the country giving master's classes. I have a weekly live show. And also I am your humble board chair of the PCA, the Painting Contractors Association, a 140 year old nonprofit that shares in the core values that I know you guys have and the mission that you guys devote your lives to, which is improving this industry and the lives of people who are in it. So yeah, I could go on and on, that's enough to fill my week for now. So, my God, okay, five nine, normal average white dude from the Midwest, you know, just that guy. Yeah. Lots of hunting photos. Hold a fish up and that's about all you get. So, I forgot about that stuff too. Yeah. There's some other stuff I did back in our previous life. That was like my kids like to say that was back from the late 1900s. So...

Jon Bryant: Nick, we asked for introduction, not your dating profile, you know.

Michael Murray: Ha ha ha!

Jon Bryant: There might be some hunting photos in that profile. All the fish are absolutely.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Military background, awesome, awesome dude. Yeah.

Michael Murray: That's right. I heard that recently. People are calling the 1990s the late 1900s. I'm just like, what are we doing?

Jon Bryant: Yeah. Totally.

Nick Slavik: The late 1900s, my kids equate the time between the Revolutionary War and the time that the last Woodstock was in '99 as about the same time period in history.

Jon Bryant: Ha ha.

Michael Murray: You. Basically there's the before the iPhone and after the iPhone and that's kind of all it is. My goodness.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. Before Snapchat.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. My first car had one horsepower. It was just a horse. Yeah. That's awesome.

Nick Slavik: Just a horse.

Michael Murray: How funny. I love it. I don't think any of us can say we don't have time for that after hearing Nick's introduction. So I love it. So you've been the PCA board chair for how long? A year or two?

Nick Slavik: I think we're going on a year and a half now. So, and we're bumping up against some eligibility things and I may be eligible. I believe I'm eligible for another year after this. And I'm actually privately speaking to every single person on the board to see if it's most appropriate for me to lobby again for another or to hand it off to somebody else. Because that's the ethos of that is do your time, but don't stand in the way of somebody else.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely not.

Jon Bryant: Gotcha. Yeah, cool.

Michael Murray: That's good. Yeah. Well, we're excited to chat about PCA. You know, John and I are big proponents. We love coming to the expo and you know, being a part of everything that's going on. I think we'll get to that, but John, do you want to kick us off and maybe talk a little bit about what's going on at Nick's painting company?

Nick Slavik: Yes you are.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. I think I mean, I have a lot of questions. Obviously, Nick, I tune in, Ask a Painter. I listen to all this stuff. When I was first starting, I mean, that was great content for me. So I'm always very curious to what you're doing. But I know that you've just brought on a new sales rep and here at Price Sell Paint, we love sales. So I want to talk to you about that. I think any time that we do something again, every time it's a new person, new things come to light. What's on your mind? What are you learning? Maybe walk us through a few things, maybe sticking points, stuff like that.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. So, and you guys can drag me into the ultra technical, ultra nerdy stuff, wherever you want. I will try to stay three steps back from it and just give some really big business owner, macro human stuff for now. So what's really interesting for me is it's amazing how much success is determined by setting proper expectations. So when you think about even what the job description is, what the comp plan is, what the incentives are, what's the interval of incentives? What is the size of it? What's the total comp plan? How do you set up time blocking during the day? And then you get into, you know, the next level of success ratio, average job size, weekly sales, things like that. Those are like the easy stuff, but just everything outside of that, like delivering estimates on site, uniform and appearance. It's when you put all that together, there's so many ways that that can go sideways and set an otherwise good human up to fail.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: Sure. So talk a little bit about some of those expectations. What do you, first of all, I guess maybe how many sales reps are currently working in your company now that you have this new one? Two?

Nick Slavik: Two, and we've had two for probably four or five years, give or take.

Michael Murray: Cool. Yeah, we're pretty similar. I know John, I think you're fairly similar at your painting companies growing a little bit beyond that now. Yeah. Last few years though, I mean, you guys have been in that two, three, would you say?

Jon Bryant: I think, yeah, we've got five now, so we'll move on.

Jon Bryant: Two, three, yeah, yeah, two, three of pretty big numbers. But that's, I mean, they're like three, four, five million kind of areas. So you get used to that a little bit, but someone new like expectations, Nick, what do you see kind of as they come in and what are indicators for you that they're having success?

Nick Slavik: Yeah.

Nick Slavik: Yeah, there's like a million things going off like fireworks in my head right now. But number one is like the ethos of like, it's pretty simple, right? Do these estimates, sell some jobs so we can keep this company going. But how you set that up, how you think about it, how you act towards it, your level of assertiveness, nervousness, empathy as a boss can set that. So really the ethos, that three steps back thing is the ethos of estimating in my company is high velocity repetitions, as many as we can do, micro bursts of professionalism, make it easy for the client in and out. As opposed to, I'm going to do five estimates this week, I'm going to spend six hours on each one, I'm going to learn the people's kids' names. I love that, and that's how I wanted this all to work. Turns out, people don't need a painter until they need one, and then when they need one, they want to make their life easy. Right. Just I need a plumber or an electrician. We've before like you talk about setting expectations. The ethos is if you give me a choice between two hours with one client or one more estimate a week, I will tell you one more estimate a week because so little is up to us. So when you bring in a new estimator or a sales rep and you start talking about this, you can set the tone by saying, we want to be relational. We want to be personable. We want to be trustworthy, but for one hour. After that, we see diminishing returns. So it really is, I need 18 to 20 estimates a week out of each one of my people. There's many other companies that set it up 10 to 12, and that's just fine. Our ethos is that. It's amazing that if I were to say, you'll barely get 10 done in a week, you'll barely get 10 done. It's so hard. It takes so much effort. Magically, they'll barely get 10 done. If you look them in the face and say, 18 is a minimum, you've got this, you've got a whole support team. Here's the process. Here's your training. Magically, they can do 18. The same human will give those two results based on how you set it up.

Michael Murray: Just to be clear, would you say that 18 is the expectation or are you just throwing it out there as an example? Got it.

Nick Slavik: No, that is the number. That is the number. If a win for me is if I can get 18 estimates for each one of my estimators every week throughout the year, we will surpass our sales goal if we can do that consistently.

Michael Murray: John, I know you want to talk about, I mean, I think John, you and I have talked about this a little bit on the podcast before. And I find myself somewhere probably in the middle of what Nick just said and I think what your opinion is. And kind of like the strategy you guys use, it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on that number.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to, like, we want our team to process that many. Like, 20 is great. Sometimes 20 site visits can be futile. Like, we found that the jobs that we end up looking at, I mean, if we could get 20 solid jobs, 100%, but a lot of times we're trying to reduce time. And the reason is that we've set our team up to try to network. And so we know that our highest value leads come from those relationships and relationships take time. And so if we actually stack it too much for them and don't allow for that time, they end up not getting those high value leads that close higher and are often higher value. And so it's a balance. Like when you're new with us, it's like you go and do 50, go do 50 a week. Some of those are going to be like a one hour deck painting job that we're never going to take on. Because I agree, volume and reputation is just so important. But one of the metrics we follow is just how much relational time we put in. What's the metric? Because it's a late indicator of where those big jobs are going to come from in the future. It's just a slightly different approach. I don't think either is wrong. We still have an overall sales expectation for our team that they have to meet, which is high. We've seen that percentage be something worth chasing, I think.

Nick Slavik: Mm-hmm.

Nick Slavik: And I should say too that in my company, literally written down in my job description are those big relationships. So where my guys are doing the residential repaint, the commercial jobs and things like that, typically there's the concentric circles of where it's a retail walk-in residential repaint somewhere between 500 bucks and 5K. Those are repetitions, right? But when we start getting into commercial and light industrial, we will foster relationships. I will spend the hours and hours and hours creating those opportunities. And then when the opportunities come, we do sort of lean into that. So I don't want people to think that we're out there running and gunning, but we also do understand that, you know, we agree with retail residential repaint for private clients. I believe that. And I've, this was advice given to me years ago. I can't prove it's wrong, which is a third of the people will always buy, a third of the people will never buy and you might be able to sway a third. And the problem is with that third, you don't know what will sway them. So for us, we know we're not psychologists and we know that so many things are not up to us and humans are irrational, especially as consumers. So trying to figure out what that is to me, if you give me six more hours with somebody or six more estimates, we're always going to close at the same rate over the long period of time. So we just do more estimates for retail residential repaint.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Mm.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely.

Michael Murray: You.

Michael Murray: I would think that, you know, so John, I mean, I think to put a number to it, your guys' target on-site estimates is in the neighborhood of like 10 to 13 a week for your reps. Is that pretty accurate?

Nick Slavik: Mm.

Michael Murray: Big.

Jon Bryant: I mean, it depends on the experience level. So we see, for example, Dave on our team. He's going to limit his estimates because he's looking for jobs in the $20 to $50,000 range. And so those don't just happen from Google leads, typically. And so our lower experience reps are going to be doing a higher volume than that. But it seems to be that the more experience you get, the more time you have, the higher value of the jobs, the more you can sell. It's just kind of this weird formula that we've seen. But when you're new, when you're new the first couple of years, like just getting out there, grinding the pavement, I totally agree. Like it's a numbers game for them, but you don't get there without that. So yeah.

Nick Slavik: Hmm.

Michael Murray: And I think some of where the argument or the differences are is going to be things like follow-up time. It's going to be things like maybe pre-visit time, whether we're calling a customer before we get to their house to set up that appointment better. And I think some of the ways that somebody listening might see these numbers play out is in that win percentage, sales success rate, we're trying to call it close percentage. We've talked about it on the podcast. We want to close every job out, right? Yes or no, but it's that win percentage. And so I think that's where the argument is going to, you're trying to find what is the most amount of estimates we can do and not decrease that too much because we're still following up and doing all that kind of stuff. And Nick, I think you would agree with that.

Jon Bryant: Mm.

Nick Slavik: Yeah, agreed. No, I think we're all the same philosophy. And John, when I hear you describe what a $20 to $80,000 job entails, I think we do the same exact process, which is lots of phone calls, lots of site visits, and I will block off time for my estimators for three to four hours to actually put the initial thing, you know, the initial estimate through. So yeah, I think we're aligned there. Yep.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: For sure. It's, yeah, I think, Michael, when you have talked, it's like, there's the experience of my team at the time when we were talking, it was very high. You know, these guys have been estimating for five plus years and they were really vetting jobs that they were hoping were big. And we do change that. And when performance goes down, reps go up. So when you're not getting the volume you need, it's due to activity. And either that's activity in networking or that's activity in actually doing estimates, I think.

Michael Murray: Yeah. And I would say too, I mean, you can't make up for like hitting that estimate number, that volume you know, is the core metric for what's your overall sales volume going to be. If you're, you know, let's just say doing 12 estimates versus 18, you know, yes, you should probably be selling at a slightly higher percentage, or an average job size that's a little bit higher to what we just talked about. But it's like what I have found in residential repaint is like to what Nick is saying, there's only so much juice to squeeze there. And like, you have to be careful that if we're not doing enough marketing, if we're not generating enough leads, you're not going to make up for that on just higher conversions too much. Like at some point, yeah, you can a little bit, but Nick, to your point, like it's, you know, you can be the difference between a great sales rep and a pretty good sales rep is probably not that much in their win percentage. And a lot of it's just going to come down to volume.

Nick Slavik: Well, you know what's really interesting? One of the greatest pieces of data that I extracted from my company a few years ago is that in order for us to be an abnormally profitable company is the difference between one job per week per project manager, one job sold per estimator. So when you look at hitting sales goals, hitting production goals, and you think, my god, insurmountable numbers, so much hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our average job size is only like $5,700. And when you break it down, if every single one of my estimators sold one more project a week and one of my project managers produced one more project a week, we would be one of the most interesting profitable companies in the United States. That is not a big goal.

Jon Bryant: It's really interesting you say that because one of the, you know, we'll talk about PCA here in a minute, but we were able to do this presentation about top reps and what they actually do and how they operate differently. The win percentage is one more job with like a week with a one or 2% higher win rate makes a difference in your yearly performance, like insane. And so if you're not doing everything you can at the point of sale to increase that win percentage and do that extra job a week, you're leaving so much money on the table. And I think that's the one point I try to make to everyone is like, you know, how you're perceived, like customers are irrational, totally agree, but there's ways to subconsciously influence trust, subconsciously influence the sales process, do these things, and it's going to mean so much more money. And so put the effort where it's needed and don't overlook that. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Sorry, that was a rant, but thank you. Thanks for making that point.

Nick Slavik: I think we're completely aligned there. I think we're completely aligned, which is honestly like when watching your guys presentation about the top reps, I know these people and what from I know from them, honestly, it is probably the most unsatisfying reality and realization you can have, which is they do a whole bunch of unsexy mundane, seemingly boring things consistently to the point where it's disgustingly consistent. It's just that drip every day. It's not, they say a magic phrase and sell more. They don't wear a magic colored shirt. It's literally an exhausting amount of mundane things done very well consistently.

Jon Bryant: Mm.

Michael Murray: I think we see that in a lot of different aspects of life, right? Like, I mean, somebody who's just like, you know, fitness guru, rips, six-packs, all the things, you know, maybe somebody like John, obviously, is, you know, it's not because he's working out six hours a day, but it's probably because he's, you know, working out six days a week. It's just that consistency to the point of what you're saying. Yeah, I agree. Love it.

Nick Slavik: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: That's nice.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. One thing that's interesting, like one quick point though too, is that like, when we introduced in PaintScout, we introduced the presentations, like those online presentations represent your company on the estimate that had an impact on win rate community wide from a perspective from the client being like, I trust this company more. And so it's like, it's this balance of finding those little levers where you can actually increase it little by little, that one extra estimate per week, be watching these things that actually at the end of the day is going to generate so much more money on a yearly process. I think a lot of people see these as like, I didn't win that job or that job went slightly over budget. This is a long-term game here. And so we got to extrapolate our thought process and be like, you know what? My accountant sees things in a year. It's like, how's the fiscal year going? It's like, well, and we get fixed on these little small parts and we got to open our mind a little bit. But Nick, let's get back to you. Enough about my thoughts here. We're here to talk to you. So Michael, any other questions here about the sales rep stuff or can we, what do you think should we move on?

Nick Slavik: Mm.

Michael Murray: No, I've got a metric question I want to get to, but you want to go somewhere or you. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, obviously 18 estimates a week is, you know, times two reps. Are you doing any sales still Nick? Or is it really just those two guys?

Jon Bryant: Sure. No, no, go ask the metric question. Let's go.

Nick Slavik: No, I've tried to almost to an abnormal level. I've tried to make very clear blood brain barriers between the silos in my company. And I realized too, in setting expectations, if boss man who's got his name on the company shows up at estimates and starts dabbling around a little bit, you're really muddying the waters between who actually owns this stuff. So I was very clear that my job description is the big relationships. They actually execute the estimates and the sales.

Michael Murray: Good. Got it. So for the sake of argument, you know, we're doing 36 estimates a week. So that gets to like the leads question, the demand question. One of the things that we see, you know, people talking about a lot, and even just like the personal relationships is it's harder than it was certainly maybe two or three years ago. And even maybe it's harder in 2024 than it was in 2023. I think the industry wide has been talking about this for at least 12 months, if not more. Love to hear your thoughts on, you know, demand industry from your own company, but obviously also just as the, you know, PCA and Ask a Painter, all the influence and impact that you have. What are you saying?

Nick Slavik: Thank you.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. So unique perspective, which is I call upon you guys. I mean, John gets sick of me saying, John, data and feelings. You have data. Please hand over some of that data. Right. And we, I do a bunch of this in the industry and I have the biggest hack ever, which is I'm the Ask a Painter guy. I can call up, you know, the number one sales rep for PaintScout in the country and ask him some very pointed questions. And he hands over his data and feelings. So I get, I look at the zeitgeist. I look at Tanner Mullin's Facebook group, Corey Leister's Facebook group. I talk to my people who I trust their data in the industry. I look at data aggregators like you guys in the industry, and you can form a pretty interesting economic picture, which is thought leaders in the industry all sort of agree now, which what you guys are saying sometime in the last 12 to 24 months, it has gotten easier to find labor and harder to find leads. What this doesn't mean and what we're not saying is cataclysmic recession, economic downfall, unemployment up. What we're saying is incrementally, it costs more to get a lead or it takes more effort to get a lead. And it sure as heck is easier to find labor, which is a market difference from two years ago in the industry, 18 months ago, when literally all the chatter was, where's all the good people? I haven't heard that conversation in a long time. Now people are saying, where's all the good leads? So it's been interesting to sort of pivot and people think, my God, this is horrible. The economy is going to go down and this and that. And we'll say, listen, turns out you just freed up a bunch of resources you would otherwise use for recruiting. And now you just recruit clients instead of employees now. So the same time and money that it took to get labor is now freed up and you just transfer it over to this area. So there's opportunities in every ups and downs, but I will agree with you guys, which is we're entering a period where, you know, they say every seven years there's going to be an economic up and down. It's been 15 and you throw in a little COVID, you throw in a little other stuff and one last pit on the data too, because that's all feelings. I'm not a stock trader. I'm not an economist. I don't want people to think that I'm some prognosticator. I don't know what's going to happen. If I did, I'd make different decisions, but I will say this, that this year, our total number of leads were down. There's seven asterisks at that, which is every year I do marketing experiments. You know, we change the amount of estimates, all that other kind of weird stuff. So it's not a pure experiment. But I will say this, that our leads were down and it got me super scared that it was out of our control. It's an externality. So I went back one year in data and John, you were saying sometimes you can zoom into data and zoom out from data. One year ago didn't give me the answers I was looking for. It's like, well, leads were great last year. In fact, all time high. You go back to 2022. Hey, another good year. You go back to 2021. Still kind of okay. I had to go back to 2019 pre-COVID times to find out that my graph of leads coming into the company on a weekly basis matched exactly the gross domestic product output of the entire United States. So what you saw, and what was cool for me is I found this gross domestic product graph. I zoomed out to 2007 when I started my business. And if you guys remember back then, cataclysmic downfall, great recession, high unemployment, housing crisis, things like that. And there was a drop in the gross domestic product, many, many points and the entire country felt it. And then it went back up. And so there was pre-2007, there was 2008 and '09 all the way up to 2019 gross domestic product was the same, waffled around. COVID hit again. And we had a huge drop. Wasn't as deep as the drop as 2007 and '08, which is very interesting. And then guess what happened? It shot way high. Because like money was raining down like confetti, PPP loans and everything else. And guess where it is right now. The exact level between 2009 and 2019 again, the leads again. So it depends how close you zoom in, how far you zoom out. My leads were down this year, asterisk compared to what? Compared to the last three to four years where we've had completely unique times. So I was getting a little scared. Now I go back and I say, well, leads are down now, but what I misappreciated was the last three to four years where we were getting 75 leads a week. We're now getting 45 again, back to normal.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Mm.

Michael Murray: You.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I think the word you just used normal is kind of my experience as well. I mean, our companies are about the same age and you John, I know you've been doing this long time too. And it's just like, yes, like the 2020 like middle of 2020 till 2023, 2022 is just going to, we're going to look back on that the same way we look back at 2007 and '08 and like the opposite of just like, that was just an abnormally crazy time.

Jon Bryant: Right.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Nick Slavik: Yeah, I don't think we understood how abnormal it was. And so what's even crazier to me, you go through these mental gymnastics and you realize how do you even talk about this? Because the average lifespan of a painting business in the United States is 18 months. I have been in business 10 times longer than the average painting company. There has been two entire generations of painting companies in the United States since COVID. Like there is no continuity. How do you begin to take a long view and say, hey, who remembers the great recession of 2008? Like most of these people were still in elementary school that are now running paint businesses out there. And so it's, I say this not good or bad, but how could you ever have that perspective of what is good and what is bad if literally you've been in this industry for 18 months? You have only known COVID, champagne, confetti times, and now it's not that, and you think the world's falling. Turns out it's a great economy and things are still happening.

Michael Murray: Yeah, crazy.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Nick, what's your reaction? So when you see that, so leads are down, what's your reaction given, I imagine you're still trying to grow the business, right? So what's your reaction when you see that?

Nick Slavik: The pattern that I, well, okay, so reaction is different from the action I take. Reaction is data plus feelings. And the feeling is, man, I never blame externalities for my wins and losses. I always think, you know, this is still in your control in the residential repaint industry. So first I go to that and I start being very, very interested in my actions, how I block out my time. Am I supporting my people? Are the systems in place? Are we reaching? Is my marketing good? Am I doing the basic things before you blame it on an election year, before you blame it on the war in Ukraine, before you blame it on interest rates? I think, is your marketing rigorous? Are you doing what you need to do as a supportive human in your company? Right? And so I go down through all those things and I can kind of check the box in each of those needs improvement everywhere, but still good. In the end, you realize like, okay, times are different and we need to buckle down and see what these externalities are actually doing. And the externality is, everybody's savings is dwindling. Credit card debt is going up and there's not a lot of free floating money going around. So that is the externality and it could be consumer confidence as well too. So that was a long trailing thing. I don't know if I actually answered your question. You might have to center me.

Jon Bryant: You.

Jon Bryant: So controlled your emotions, I hear. Ask an eye question, which is like, what can I do versus blame it on something else? But tactically, do you change anything? Do you start spending more money on tactics? What do you do in there?

Nick Slavik: Your. Yep. Yep.

Nick Slavik: I feel very comfortable in saying this, which is over the last couple of years, in my business, I have learned that shoveling cash at another human and expecting them to fix it for you is not a great strategy for large professional businesses, even smaller businesses. So what I've learned is that we are so good at what we do. We need to put more effort on our end, leverage our money to have people do some things that would otherwise take up our time, but really we have to do our effort. So 24 months ago, I started substituting more effort and less money and sometimes more effort and more money in areas and not just in one area, a diverse amount of areas. And I believe that's a good strategy for uptimes and down times. But when this hit and I started looking at those leads and I had to go back four to five years to find this, it just confirmed what I felt, which is it's a time where connections, personal connections, reactivating past clients, substituting more time for a phone call instead of one more Facebook ad seems to be the winning strategy right now. And we can get into the results, all my marketing experiments, but that's literally what I've done. It is the pattern is use your effort. It's the thing that people don't want to do, but it's actually what produces results.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, I think, you know, and I think one of the things that we've talked about, I mean, John, you and I did an episode about a year ago on like preparing for winter. And you know, some of the things that Nick just talked about were things that we have talked about, right? Is like get back to those relationships, get out there. I think it's, you know, it's become easy to think that like, if you can run a Facebook ad, you can run a successful painting company and not knocking the idea. I mean, we all have done these things, but there's something to be said for the local relationships, building those connections, whether it's for commercial or for residential work, being that trusted person. And that just takes time, energy, and effort building those relationships. And I think that stuff will always work.

Jon Bryant: Michael.

Nick Slavik: It will always work. And it's the old proverbial thing. And everybody knows this to be true, which is if you are going to have a big open house at either one of your offices, slash shops, facilities, if you just put a Facebook ad out there versus you call 150 people, I think you know which one will bring in more humans. I mean, you guys are smiling because it's so obvious, but yet when we market or recruit, we think I'm going to put out that good old Indeed ad and all my problems will be solved. And it's like, I know that's one of the 10 things you can do to help solve that problem. It is going to take your effort.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: I'll be.

Michael Murray: Yeah, yeah, and the consistency which we talked about. Yeah.

Nick Slavik: Consistency as well too, huge, especially with marketing. I mean, literally right now, you could take the strategy of personal connection and go like hell for one day, 18 hours of calling everybody you know, not do it for three months, you're in a worse position. Segmenting out three hours twice a week for making those calls, infinitely better results.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: And it's sustainable. Yeah, right.

Nick Slavik: Sustainable.

Jon Bryant: Sustainable, yeah. I think we've talked about this a little bit with our sales team that those times where you block that off is really important. But also tactically, what you do at that time is also important. Tom Reaver had a good phrase that he uses, I think, is unexpected intentional touches. And so it's calling people and saying, how's your job? How does the job look? And it's been a year. They're not expecting that, but you're re-engaging that relationship. And we've tactically seen so much more benefit from that than what used to be our go-to, which was, let's find a Facebook person. We're going to shovel a ton of money at them, realize they don't know what they're doing. And then that was a fun money fire, but didn't really work very well.

Nick Slavik: You.

Nick Slavik: Fun money fires, that could be. That's the road of a business owner. Fun money fires. And you hope to God you pull the data and the feelings from it so you can make better decisions. The worst fun money fires are when you do it and you're like, let's try another one. I didn't learn my lesson. Hey one quick data point for you from that which is one of my controlled experiments from this last winter was just that Jon. Which is when my guys make 75 phone calls, the return on investment in that is seven more estimates consistently. So you can make 75 calls, which I'm going to be honest, I track production rates on this. That's a long day. That is a lot of calls, right? But the return is almost 10%. If you need seven estimates, the data shows in my company, you call 75 of your past clients or past estimates, you can make seven estimates.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, exactly. I'm getting cold. I'm getting cold.

Michael Murray: Yeah.

Michael Murray: Players hot.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: I think somebody listening right now, you know, driving to the job site or whatever is going, okay, who are we calling? So give us a little more details there because there's people out there that seven, like seven more estimates is a big deal. Give us a little more details. Who are we calling?

Nick Slavik: Cool. For a single owner operator, that's two to three weeks worth of estimates. That's a monster. So in orders of importance and low hanging fruit is past clients. And when you talk about past clients, people you've done work for recently, right? And so we start working in the immediacy and start working back in time over the last four to five years. Then there are people you've done estimates for, but not sold a job to. And then the third order of low-hanging fruit, the fruit a little higher on the tree is people who have been leads, but not turned into estimates like that. So if you want the biggest return and what you're going to find is it goes from about seven out of 75, you get about a 10% return on immediate past clients. You probably get about a 3% return on the past estimates. And you maybe only get a one to 2% on past leads, give or take.

Michael Murray: Huge.

Michael Murray: Love it, there you go.

Jon Bryant: It's still a return though. It's better than direct mail. Absolutely. It's funny because I think most people when they sit back there in a bit of a low point, they haven't closed a lot of work. I think most people go to what marketing would work, but just pick up the phone. I've heard someone once say that like, it's really hard to get a date from an email, like a mass email campaign. How am I going to get a date if I just, I'm going to email 5,000 people I don't know and see if I can get a date versus walking up to one person and saying, hey, you interested in a date? You're going to get feedback way faster and you're probably going to have a better time than that 5,000 person list you just purchased randomly off someone or a Facebook ad, you know. Anyways, yeah.

Nick Slavik: It's a return! It's better than direct mail, even at its worst!

Michael Murray: For sure. It's true.

Nick Slavik: I like that.

Nick Slavik: Well, and one thing I tell my estimators too, because sometimes it can be discouraging when you're hammering phone calls and you've made 30 phone calls in a morning and you're literally just being like, talk to talk to talk to, and nothing's coming out of it. I will tell them, listen guys, 40% of our jobs come from word of mouth, repeat and referral. And if you made 30 phone calls, you just did 30 marketing touches to somebody that now we're top of mind again. We reset ourselves from going into the abyss of their memory of they don't remember who we are to touching again. And the one thing, and this is why marketers can prey upon people, but this is also one of the awesome parts about marketing is you're making soup out there, right? And between yard signs, between vans, between social media ads, between direct mail, between phone calls, between seeing our people at other people's houses and things like that, you're creating this soup of touches and you're accumulating these touches that you'll never know and feel, but magically 16 years into business, 40% of our business comes from word of mouth, repeat and referral. That's an amazing amount for a company of our size. And it's solely due to the things you will never get an immediate return on, touch, touch, touch, touch, touch over and over.

Michael Murray: For.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I love it.

Jon Bryant: Do you, Nick, do you, one really quick follow up question there. Do you have a metric of how long you think it takes for this stuff to start working? Like for the return?

Nick Slavik: Yeah. So there's obviously some, there's long play marketing and there's short play marketing. The coolest short play marketing is we've been doing a bunch of door hanger experiments with our humans walking. The production rates are wild. We can talk about those later, but we can do a few hundred door hangers in a day and track them on apps and see the leads come in immediately through the website from those neighborhoods. That is a marketer's dream. That is a business owner's dream. It's not going to happen elsewhere. Flyers have a long tail in my area. So the one impression from our flyers, so door hangers, you're going to get, you know, it's that reverse hockey stick where a lot of stuff, if it's going to happen, happens right away. And then it's got a long tail. I don't, I can only give you feelings based on this because it's not a piece of data I can pull up and share with you. But for me, we've been doing every door, direct mail flyers, the longest. And for me, it feels like there is an 18 month tail and everything substantial that's going to happen is going to happen in one to four weeks. But then there's this weird accumulating factor where you get diminishing returns, but it doesn't go to zero. In fact, I think it stays relatively high for a very long period of time. Because when my estimators go to job sites, there are some people who will have three of our flyers on their table and just say, well, we didn't need this two to three years ago, but we've always kept them, we liked them, and now here you are. So what's weird is that there's the thing, but then it goes to five or 10% and it sustains for a very long period of time. That's my feeling about the mailers. So hard to quantify, but when you see years and years ago when we started these, a lot of money, not a lot of results. Incrementally over the years, the cost per lead per flyer is going down because there's this cumulative soup effect out there where they're just hitting so many times and they're accumulating and we may be getting a lead in an estimate and a job from a flyer we dropped two years ago. So...

Michael Murray: Love it. Yeah, go ahead.

Jon Bryant: One quick point on that Michael is that we see the exact same thing Nick and I think it's hard for people that get into direct mail because the results are so poor off the start. Like you're like, why would I ever keep doing this? It's like I got one call and I sent out 10,000. Like how am I going to keep doing this? But Michael, I know you do this too where it's like it's actually building trust and you don't see it. And it's on the fifth one where you actually, people now trust you for some reason they don't even realize. It's because you've built up the brand in their mind as something trustworthy. So anyways.

Nick Slavik: Yes.

Nick Slavik: Yes.

Michael Murray: Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're familiar with that idea of like sales is know, like and trust and you know, somebody has to know us and I think that's where this is coming in and then, you know, we can earn the right to get to that like and then eventually that trust part. One thing I just want to touch on real quick and then I want to wrap up just with some conversation about, you know, more industry, PCA and some of that. I think we'd be remiss if we have Nick on and we didn't get to talk about some of those things because anybody listening. Yeah. Okay, good.

Nick Slavik: Thanks.

Nick Slavik: Yes.

Nick Slavik: You don't have a choice. I was going to wedge this stuff in here anyway.

Jon Bryant: Hahaha!

Michael Murray: All right. We got to, you know, I'm excited about Expo. I've got Colorado Springs. I'm already getting excited, but anyway, so let's get to that in a minute. So you just mentioned something I found really interesting and I didn't want to lose this. You're putting out these flyers and you're tracking the data. You know, a lot of times we think of tracking marketing online, right? Where we've got codes and different things where we can go into Facebook or Google and see. And one of the arguments for this, you know, online marketing is it's easier to track. But you just mentioned that you're able to track to some extent the effectiveness of these flyers. I'd love for you to share how do you do that with maybe phone numbers or URLs or what are you doing to actually see whether or not these things are actually working.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. So I want to be very clear that I have a very intentional philosophy about this stuff because I am an extremist, right? If I can track data, I will. Like there is, there's a point where I can completely subsume my time where I forsake my people in order to track every bit of marketing through QR codes and special phone numbers and things like this. In the end, you can get too close to the specific data. Right. You can look at some drops and you can track it by the day and say, didn't get a good return. But when the long tail is two years, it's almost impossible to track some of that stuff. So my intentional philosophy is you need to take a few steps back. You need to look at your spend at least over the course of a month, even better as a quarter, even better as a year, and then track cost per lead estimate and sale. You can spend too much time fixating, just like I was fixating on leads going down in the spring of 2024. I had to take a five year look back in order to see that everything was okay. The same thing goes with marketing. So very intentional for me is we don't use QR codes. We don't use special landing pages. We don't use special numbers. I just consistently do marketing. And the way that I limit variables in this is with every door direct mail, I create a spreadsheet where I create marketing in a wave two to three to four times a year where I segment out the actual postal codes, the mail routes, and I have them go from one area of the Southwest Metro to another. And we can actually track. So the data all exists. I've never needed it, but if we wanted to, we can actually go week by week, highlight the section on a Google map, track our leads and see how many come immediate. And then over the next four to six to eight to 30 weeks, we can keep tracking where the leads are. Although it gets a little muddier because we do multiple drops a year. So you can't track it back to one thing. In the end, it's way more important. What is your cost per lead per estimate and per closed job? And when I track those things, I found I've never needed to get more into the weeds than that. And with this philosophy, I will just say, I have actually taken my cost per lead estimate and job down over the last 18 months. My marketing spend is half of what it was last year. And we are producing more leads than we did last year because I look at a few simple things. We market consistently. We substitute more effort and we've been doing better this year.

Michael Murray: Make sense.

Michael Murray: More of that community involvement and some of the things that might not cost as much money. Is that part of what I hear you saying?

Nick Slavik: A lot of that, but also instead of, I mean, at one point in the winter, and I would love to talk about the philosophy of winter versus summer marketing peak and low demand, but my initial theory years and years ago was it's hard in the upper Midwest to get jobs in the winter. So take all your budget and spend it there. I was spending $25,000 a month just in direct mail in hopes of keeping my people busy. And we never cracked the code. We just never cracked the code. So tracking that over a long period of time is important, timing of that marketing is important and, yeah, just tracking all the data from it.

Michael Murray: Mm.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think I hear you saying it's like spend the money more of the money when more of the people are looking. Right. Is that part of what you're saying? Okay.

Nick Slavik: Well, that's this year's experiment where I have been a firm believer that summer has been really overwhelming for the last bunch of years. Like we always get behind, we got a million two on the books sold ready to go in summer. We're scrambling to produce it all. That's not been the case, especially as leads are lesser than they were in years previous, but still strong. So now this year's experiment is lessen your spend during the non-peak times and go like hell in the peak times because we've shored up so many other things. We have four people on our production team plus a job coordinator, two estimators. We have an amazing amount of trade partners, W2s, part-time W2s. Right now, the biggest problem for us is we have more capacity than we can use because we've shored that up over the last five years. So it's been, next year's, I'm just putting together next year's plan for sales, production, and marketing. And it looks like I will probably do exactly opposite as this year, which is I'll take marketing down to about a bottom of 5% in the winter. And then I will ramp up to likely 10 to 12% in summer, knowing that our gross profit margins are way higher. And in the end, even though we're doubling, maybe two and a half times-ing our marketing in summer, our goal, gross profit and net profit will still actually be higher in the summer because the jobs are just more profitable during that time. So tracking that data tells you that.

Michael Murray: Yeah, makes sense. All right, let's make that transition to industry, PCA. So talk a little bit. Let's just start by talk a little bit about what's going on at PCA. What are you guys talking about? What are you focused on? I'd love to hear maybe talk a little bit about Expo and some of that kind of stuff.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, makes sense.

Nick Slavik: You got it. So boy, this is something that people know what to see. I'll give you a little personal insight, private insight to the board of directors at the PCA. We have been going, what's that? No, no, no, no, it's just us, right? Circle of trust guys, circle of trust. All right. So over the last eight to 10 years, there's been about four to five board chairs who have put in so much work that nobody will see to modernize this thing. The PCA was never bad, but it was in the late '90s, early 2000s, 2010s. It was still exactly the way it looked like post-World War II, which again has served for 80 or 90 years in a great way. The problem is there's a bunch of people like us, our workforce, our industry is getting younger, more diverse and more entrepreneurial. And in fact, 63% of our industry is native Spanish speakers or primarily Spanish speakers. And all of these things were not being represented in the PCA. Not good or bad. That's our core demo. Those are our clients and we want to make sure that we're taking care of them. Ethos of the PCA mission statement. Tagline is literally we build better businesses. And if we only focus on 47% of the businesses in the United States, not a win. So we restructured the board completely. We rebranded, we got a brand new leadership team. We're restructuring all the humans inside there, just the way we do with our businesses. And what we realized when we look deep into our hearts, it was the human connection, the friendships, the in-person get togethers that were really deeply meaningful and change people's lives. And I know you guys have always been huge supporters of that. You've always been there. I mean, I moderated a panel with you guys. Like you guys have been there shoulder to shoulder with the PCA since I've been involved. And it's because we are servant leaders. It's because we do believe in this. That I am where I am today. Literally because of the humans I met, including you guys. So it's hard to say, hey, what's the benefits of the PCA? Yeah, you pay 500 bucks. What do you get? I will say, well, it depends on what you put in, but it's the humans, right? You can get health insurance. You can get all this other stuff. Having said that we completely restructured the board. We have a committee structure now where these in-person events are important. So we have a committee made up of servant leaders from our industry experts to now ideate about these things. We hired a completely different, a separate person in the PCA who's an event planner, who literally knows how to put RFPs, negotiate food and beverage and lodging with these places. And they spend their entire year traveling the United States, personally looking into every meeting room, conference room, break room, where's the bar in the restaurant? What do the hotel rooms look like so that we can give the best in-person experience to as many people as possible. So PCA in short has doubled down on in-person events. We have women in paint. We have commercial. We have residential. We have Spanish events. We have expo. We have all sorts of these things now that are very focused, very specific all over the United States. And it's exactly what our people want. So that is the emphasis going forward, which is people always yell at us, increase your members, increase your members. And it's one of those things where it's like fine. We could go call somebody and ask to be a member. But what do they get? This is what they get. I don't care if you become a member or not. I want you at an event. I want your life to be changed like mine was because literally I'm a better human. I'm a better father. I'm a better husband. I'm a better craftsperson and I'm a better business owner. Literally because of the people that I met there. I mean, in fact, I vacation with some of the families that I met at the PCA not that many years ago. That's how life changing it is.

Michael Murray: We won't tell anybody. We won't tell anyone. No one's listening. Just between us.

Jon Bryant: We have one. It's just, it's a circle.

Jon Bryant: Trust.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, John, you and I have talked about it before you and I met at a PCA in 2020, like four days before COVID shut down the whole country. That was crazy. And John and I just happened to sit at like the same table at breakfast. And I mean, it was like 15 minutes later, we were, you know, realizing how much we had in common. And I mean, John, I count you now as one of my good friends and it's like, you know, that doesn't happen if we don't, you know, book the flight and just get your butt to the event and the rest kind of just takes care of itself.

Jon Bryant: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nick Slavik: Yep. And you're not going to do this over Facebook as good as these Facebook groups are. You're never going to vacation with somebody you met on Facebook. It takes that in person, those late nights, those hallway conversations. And honestly, again, like I told you, I can call the number one salesperson in PaintScout in the US because they're mine and they'll give the shirt off their back. And likewise, I will tell other people.

Jon Bryant: And the Nick Slavik suite is not too bad if you're putting that on again. Another secret between us. I'm sorry. That's awesome. Sorry, Michael, go ahead.

Nick Slavik: Love 19107, baby. There we go.

Michael Murray: Keep that on the down low.

Michael Murray: Oh man. So I was just going to say, I mean, so give us what are, you know, what events are coming up.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. So we do have, boy, we got the coolest thing ever. So women in paint is going down to, I believe Sarasota, Florida. It's amazing. And everybody in the industry, of all the events for registration, women in paint is far surpassing everybody else. It is the most rigorous, interested, just hyper group of humans. And they form this great connection that a lot of the other guys, Spanish speakers, commercial contractors aren't doing. Watch out. These are some of the coolest conferences. I'm there at every one of them. The Spanish speakers, the Spanish conference is a multi-day event that is going into SoCal, which is awesome. We have our commercial conference, which is going to Arizona. We have a residential. I left this one until almost the end because magically it found its way to Minnesota with me as the board chair. So lucky for you guys, you're all coming here in October, but cool thing about that is Jason Paris, all the Olive guys, me, my company is going to be there supporting this thing. And the penultimate event of the residential conference, the multi-day residential conference here is literally outside this window on my farm, native prairie, wildflowers, creek, woods, my box blind, my family, my dogs. We're having a party here the last night of that. So literally you can come party at the Slavik farm, the place that's the most meaningful place on this planet to me. I want to share it with everybody. So and now if that's not enough, we have expo in Colorado in February of this next year. And I will say this folks, people who have been to expo will literally say, I'm never missing another one. Like it's just an amazing experience. And for those of you who were there, you guys were there too. But for those of you who were there, it was a really interesting expo. Last time we kicked it off with a keynote speaker about taking care of others. We closed it out with my speech and there was a whole bunch of very emotional personal sort of things all in between and yes, we talked about apps. Yes we talked about the technical things, the job costing, the sales success rates, the average job sizes and things like that. But the through line through that expo was like those are infinitely solvable things. You just call John or Michael and you talk about average job size. The things that you can't solve with a phone call you solve there in person, that interpersonal stuff. So I will say this folks, you will never again have an opportunity to go to a five-star historic estate resort like the Broadmoor again. Our event people at PCA, I don't know how the hell they did this. They negotiated, we're going to basically take over that entire thing. They negotiated a lower room rate and make it easier for people to get there than even in Orlando. So this is the promise to our people, we will give you the most unique experiences you will ever have. I dare you to come to one of these events and not have your life changed. If you go to an event and your life's not changed, you personally call me and we got things to discuss.

Michael Murray: Hey.

Michael Murray: You.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, come find us because yeah, for sure. I love it. I'll be there. When is the residential forum in Minnesota? Okay.

Nick Slavik: That's how much I believe in it.

Jon Bryant: Love it. Yeah, I love it.

Nick Slavik: October, I believe. Yep. And there's a link on the PCA's website. Registration is open for all these. If you type in PCA paint events, it'll take you right there and get you set up. I registered my entire team. I think we're bringing six, seven people to the residential thing. Yeah.

Michael Murray: Nice. I think just to kind of wrap up, one of the things that we talked about just briefly before starting the recording is maybe like the future of the painting industry. And you said it before, you know, if we could predict the future, we, you know, I don't know, go work on Wall Street and become billionaires or I don't know, whatever. Right. And so nobody can do that. But one of the things I think that there's been conversations online and at these events is about maybe industry consolidation, private equity, what's the future of the painting industry? We've got you here. I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of those types of topics.

Nick Slavik: Yeah. Again, hacking the industry is me and Jason Paris, we're best friends. We travel the country together. All we do is ideate about this stuff and Jason and the Olive guys were kind of the first ones to be very vocal and out front with a potential ideation about consolidation of the industry. So the thinking is, 99% of all painting businesses are single owner operators. There's not enough professionals to go around. There's a super high demand, which lowers the standard for everything. You can get by with mediocre business skills and still have work. And in every other industry, this has aggregated, it's consolidated and things like that. It just hasn't touched us yet. So I've gone on an arc of, man, when private equity gets here, they're going to figure this out. It's going to be crazy. It's not happening as quickly as we thought. Again, I may be too close to it, but what I believe will happen is enough John Bryants, enough Michaels, enough Nicks will be out there where we will be running three to $10 million residential companies. And it'll just assume the place of a lot of these other players. What will likely not happen is again, CertaPro could take over the entire United States. They've been in business a long time. They haven't yet taken over it, right? Neither have all the other franchises. So there seems to be a limiting factor with that business model. What is not a real limiting factor is regional big players, not that take over a market. I mean, you can look at like Jason Paris's company, $12 million in just painting. He's probably less than 5% of the entire Twin Cities if we're being honest. So what you're probably not going to see is one person taking up 60% of the market. What you might find is that you're going to find $8 to $10 million painting companies, maybe six to 10 of them in each market. And they'll just be way less of the unprofessional guys out there, which could mean a lot of things for clients, a lot of things for us. But I do believe that we're probably going to get consolidation only to a point. What I believe we'll see in the next decade is a whole bunch of $2 to $3 million businesses everywhere and again, you can support 40 families, give or take off of one of those. And that's a monster that'll assume the place of somewhere between 20 and 40 smaller painting companies, you know? And when you start getting critical mass of those now, all of a sudden the clients expect more. And then you start hitting this sort of like doom loop for unprofessional painters, which is when there's way more of us than them, it just makes it harder for them. Then there's less of them. And then the consolidation keeps happening. Not a value judgment, but it's way better for the client.

Jon Bryant: You.

Michael Murray: Bye.

Jon Bryant: Do you think, Nick, I got a question about it though, for sure, which is that like, you know, we've seen some consolidation in other industries, but a lot of those have some, you know, nationwide licensing or some barrier to entry. Do you think that plays an impact on our industry at all? Like that's the one thing that I kind of like stands out as being like, I can go get a brush and some paint and now I'm a painter. I don't have a clue how to price, which is a big problem. So now I'm just going to bring everyone down with me because I'm just thinking of things in my time. What do you think?

Nick Slavik: So let me know if this answers your question. Initially, the industry thought that we were going to improve the professionalization and consolidate this industry by getting more painters. Those things are not connected. Like, hey, we need more painters. Let's get more painters, and it'll be a professional industry. Those are disjointed, disconnected problems and solutions. And then we thought one company is going to come to rule them all. Typical, my god, we're all the way over here. Now we're all the way over here. I think consolidation will happen more on the whim and the wishes of the clients than it will the industry. If I'm being honest, the second that our clients demand a professional trustworthy experience where you can electronically invoice, send them a beautiful PaintScout presentation, things like that. If they call 10 painters right now, only one of those is going to send you a PaintScout, is going to have QuickBooks, is going to have a person in a collared shirt. When it reaches five out of 10, magically that other five will drop off immediately. I believe 20% of the industry will always be cash under the table, completely unscrupulous because there is consumer preference for some people just want that. They don't care. But overall, the reason you buy cars from a dealership is because it's a big transaction. You know you've got to trust the thing and that's why used car salesman have this unscrupulous sort of thing. Some people always buy used cars. Some people always buy new cars. So my hypothesis is the second the consumers demand more, we will change.

Jon Bryant: Yeah.

Michael Murray: Yeah, I agree. And I think too, I think the most exciting part about like these bigger, let's say $5, $10 million companies, like you just described is it gives talented people in our industry, other options besides I'm just going to go start my own. Right. That's one of the favorite things about at Textbook. We've got two people here that came to us that used to own their own small painting companies, had some success and realized that this is really hard. Running a business is not for everybody. And you know, they got here and they said, wow, I never knew something like this existed, where I could have full benefits, I can make a good living, and I could go home at five o'clock and not have to try to run this crazy business that was consuming my life. And I think there's a lot of people out there that want those types of opportunities, but because there's just not enough of these $5 to $10 million painting companies like you're describing, their choice then becomes, well, I guess I got to go start my own, or I just have to accept maybe a not so great job or whatever. I think I'm excited about that for sure.

Nick Slavik: Well, and you want to talk about like business incubation, a $10 to $12 million residential painting company could potentially partner with 80 to 120 subcontractors and trade partners. And if you want to talk about incubating businesses, a certain amount of those are going to carve off and start their own and be autonomous. I mean, that gives them the bandwidth of steady work, support and things like that. If we want to change the industry, you could look to big businesses like you guys have and like Jason Paris has is saying, they may kick off the next entire generation of people who have the standard of this custom software presentation and SOPs and kickoffs and closeouts. So I think you'll find that will hit a critical mass eventually too. The more that these big companies partner with other trades.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Nick, I think... Yeah, go ahead.

Michael Murray: Well, I think we probably, we, yeah, we probably got to wrap up. I know Nick's got a heart out here. Yeah. No, you're good. Well, we got to do this again.

Nick Slavik: Sorry. I'm old. Daddy's calling out here, guys. Sorry.

Nick Slavik: Anytime.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely, Nick. Nick, thanks so much for being a part of this, man. We really appreciate it. So many valuable insights and it's always great to chat. So thank you very much. Yeah, if you're tuning in, feel free to, you know, whatever you got to do to stay in touch with us, like, subscribe, whatever that means to you. And Nick, we'll be sure to have you on again. So thank you very much. This has been awesome. Guys, have a great day.

Michael Murray: Look forward to seeing you at the PCA events here coming up soon.

Nick Slavik: Thanks for what you guys do for the industry, supporting our people and means the world to us.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely.

Michael Murray: Yep, same to you. Thanks, Nick. All right, take care.

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