Production Rate Estimating in Commercial Painting

Jon: Hey everyone, John here again, Michael, and it's the Price Sell Paint podcast. Welcome to the show. We're excited today. We're talking with Brian Struble from Shaver Painting and Decorating out of Omaha, Nebraska. And we're talking about the problem that comes up a lot with people asking us at PaintScout whether PaintScout can be used as a commercial tool. And a lot of people have hesitations and we're here to talk to Brian because Brian also is one of those people. So anyways, Brian, want to hear a bit about your story, a bit about who you are. Why don't you introduce yourself to the PaintScout community and the Price Sell Paint podcast community.

Brian Struble: Yeah. Thank you so much, John. I appreciate it, Michael. Thanks for having me on here today. I've been in the paint industry for going on 27 years now. It's a long time started young second generation painter, but I've had an interesting path. I spent about 10 years with Sherwin Williams, working in their marketing department, working in sales training, training all the sales reps, and then ended up here in Omaha, Nebraska as I traveled the country with Sherwin. Here in Nebraska and fell in love with the quality of life in Omaha. And I knew I wanted to get back to being an entrepreneur and owning my own business. So I left Sherwin and at that same time, I met Tom Shaver, the founder of the company that I own now, and I bought that company and it was historically residential and commercial, and I just took that company and just brought some life into it and we were able to double revenue very quickly, first year that I owned it. And I'm going on my third year now owning this company and we can get into it a bit, but I'm all commercial now and very excited for our conversation today.

Jon: Awesome. Well, Brian, yeah, welcome to the show. We thank you for taking the time and being on here with us. We know how busy life can be as a painting contractor because we are also those as well. So thank you very much. And yeah, we have a ton of questions. We just want to have a great conversation. And at the end of this, we might find out that PaintScout is a horrible fit for commercial painting contractors, but I have a hunch just from my own experience and what we've heard before from other people in the commercial space using it that there can be some great impacts here. So I'm excited to dive into it.

Brian Struble: I'm going to be honest with you today. All right, good, good.

Jon: Please, we expect nothing less. Nothing less, yeah. So yeah, I mean, Michael, any questions you have?

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mean, Brian, I'd love to hear. So you referenced it a minute ago. So, you know, when you bought the company, it was mostly residential three years. I think you said three years ago and now pretty much predominantly commercial. I think you made that change over the last like year or so. Love to hear just maybe more about why you made that change and how that's gone.

Brian Struble: Yeah, absolutely. To be really clear, historically, Shaver Painting was into everything. HOA, residential, commercial, it just did everything. We even finished, refinished furniture. So we had our hands in every segment, it seemed like. I bought the company and we really went as fast as we could in residential, got Facebook ads turned on. We hired a team, sales, production, sales leadership just for residential. And then we took our commercial team and put some fuel into that as well and grew it. But what I found out as an owner, I was spending 90% of my time dealing with the headaches of residential because I was fractured in my focus. I'm dealing with a commercial job and then I'm dealing with residential. And I felt like I was running two different businesses at the same time. And mind you, I'm going into year three of owning this company. So my first year or two, I'm feeling pulled in two different directions. So I read a book called The Pumpkin Plan, and it talks about if you want to build a great company, if you want to grow an amazing pumpkin, you cut out all the rest and you focus on one thing and you go really deep. And so I said, okay, last year, June, I said, June, I'm ditching residential. I mean, you can make great money in residential as we all know, but I'm going to go deep in one area. And that's commercial. You go to market differently in commercial than you do residential, everything is different. So now I'm just running one company in that transition of going from doing everything to now one focus, I set down PaintScout because we were using PaintScout daily in the residential side of our business. And so I set it down and I haven't touched PaintScout since June of last year.

Jon: So yeah, I mean, is this a good place to start asking some questions about that decision?

Brian Struble: Yeah, yeah.

Jon: Yeah.

Michael Murray: So how do you, we'll talk a little bit about how you do estimates now. I'm curious, so you were using PaintScout, let's say nine months ago for the residential work, but you find that it's not, maybe it's not what you're currently using for different reasons. And so let's explore those reasons and maybe just talk a little bit more about your current process and what do you do when you're doing a commercial bid.

Brian Struble: Yeah, absolutely. So as you may know, commercial has many segments within itself. Myself, at Shaver Painting, we're probably 50% commercial repaint dealing directly with an owner and we're about 50% dealing directly with a GC, a new build within that GC. So regardless of if it's repaint or dealing directly with the GC, we're either reading blueprints or we're measuring buildings and we're taking those measurements into an Excel doc. And then we're plugging a price to that square footage, especially with the GC work, you know, we have our numbers 55, 75 cents a square foot. And we use that in an Excel, we come up with our number, and then we present our number through a Word doc and it's just bullet points of our scope of work and our numbers and like I referenced earlier, I missed the technology that I had with PaintScout.

Jon: So question for you about that pricing, Brian. So the square footage pricing that you work with, is that, talk a little bit more maybe about how you came up with that or where that's coming from.

Brian Struble: Yeah, you know, it's what I've understood as an industry average. I did some math to it. You know, how much does product going to cost me? Roughly, you know, how much square footage could we get done? And then I boiled it down to a price. And then I started throwing that price out to GCs and getting some feedback. We're too high, we're too low. And kind of playing around with that number at that point with some feedback based on if we were winning or not. And then whatever information a GC was willing to share as I compete with other painters. And then we just dialed it in. And, you know, I'm here in the Midwest in Omaha and I feel like that price of 55 cents, 75 cents a square foot gets me the work that I want.

Michael Murray: Brian, I'm just curious, you mentioned the 55, 75. What's the difference between the two? Just to be transparent, I've never used square footage pricing. I know, John, we did an episode months ago now on what is production rate estimating. And I've never used square footage pricing, so I'm a complete beginner. So just help me understand a little bit when you say 55, 75. What does that mean? Why might you use one versus the other?

Brian Struble: Yeah. Yeah, good question. There's no scientific formula to it. A little bit of it has to do with how bad we want the job. The other part has to do with are there found efficiencies within the job? For instance, do we have 400 feet of wall space with nothing impeding us and we can take an 18 inch roller spray and go? Or are we in a smaller office space with multiple colors? And then we would with no scientific, no mathematical decision, just our gut feeling, we would come up with a price of 55 to 75 cents a square foot based on what we felt like the efficiencies could be.

Michael Murray: And that is based on the amount of the floor square footage. This is a 3,000 square foot building or whatever.

Brian Struble: Wall. Yeah, no. When I'm talking square footage, I'm referencing the wall square foot. And I have to say something about floor square foot because this drives me insane. It in commercial it's absolutely worthless. You know, at some point, somebody's thinking, okay, I'm working for a builder, and we're building new residential homes. And they're all virtually the same in this neighborhood. And I can paint it, you know, so fast for 3000 square foot versus 2500. It all averages out to whatever nine bucks a square foot of floor space. And then we decide as painters to decide that floor space is good for everything. And I'm quite passionate about this. It drives me nuts to hear painters, contractors talk about floor square footage. It's worthless, worthless in commercial, unless you're painting the same house up and down the street. So you guys can stop me now.

Michael Murray: Oh, I like it.

Jon: No, no, I mean, we're all on the same page there. Yeah. Floor square footage is interesting because we don't paint floors. Well, we do. Some of us do concrete floors. Sure. That's a different thing. In which case you should have some floor square footage way to get your pricing. But when someone asks you to paint their walls, why are we measuring the floor? I personally don't get that. I think it's wild, but this is some of the fallacies in our industry that, you know, people, because the pricing structure of the industry is so hidden, right? Like it's a very difficult thing coming in to get the data you need in order to price and that's just a huge barrier. And so people tend to hide it. And what do they tell other people? Well, the crummy information they got from the guy who didn't want to tell them how to really do it or, you know, something they do track homes or something and it works for them. So I, I mean, yeah, I could, we could talk all day just on that, but that's not why we're here. So Michael cut us off, cut Brian and us off.

Brian Struble: Right. Yeah, no, I mean.

Michael Murray: Well, no, I mean, I think it's good to understand where we're coming from. So we're using Excel. We're calculating the, you know, I guess 50% you said is repaint. The other 50% is off of blueprints or? Yep.

Brian Struble: Right. 50% is with GC is off blueprints and then 50% is a repaint where we'll go out and walk the building, measure it up and then just virtually do the same. And with repaint, we're skewing on the higher end of my square foot number.

Michael Murray: Got it. Okay. So in my, and so you used to use PaintScout, you would go on site, residential, measure it up. And I'm curious as to like, why doesn't that translate at least to the repaint work in your mind? It seems similar to me.

Brian Struble: Yeah, you know, as we began talking about meeting together on this podcast, it did dawn on me. The reality is, yeah, I mean, my commercial repaint is nothing more than a bigger home. It's that simple. There are found efficiencies again, you know, with a much bigger home, a much bigger space, warehouse space, whatever it is, exterior, especially. There's efficiencies, you know, I can get a lift. I can do other things that you just don't do on residential. It'll allow you to move faster. So you can be a little more competitive in your price. But at the end of the day, yeah, the way we estimated in residential last year can be the same way in commercial. What I want to understand though, is how, you know, as we're shifting more GC work we're 50% currently, and we're pushing to go just a little bit more of our work with GCs. Really, you know, John, I called you up a few weeks back and I'm like, John, what are other contractors doing with using PaintScout? Because I miss the technology. You know, I talk to the GCs and nobody's receiving a good looking bid other than a Word doc. I mean, that's the reality of the landscape here. My competition's not doing anything and I'm not doing, shame on me, I'm not doing anything to stand out either. I'm just writing a basic scope up.

Jon: Yeah. So, I mean, so we can kind of dive into this a little bit. Obviously Brian, you know, we did start that conversation and this is kind of an effort to give more people access to that information. And so at the end of the day, like Michael said, these projects are just bigger versions of the same thing, whether it's residential or commercial repaint or new construction, they're just a bigger version. And so that's always been my, I guess confusion with the question that I've gotten from a lot of commercial contractors of like, well, why could I use, what benefit would that software have? Well, it's just a bigger version of residential. Now the efficiency as you're talking about is something that we would have to tackle in your production rates. And so typically what my experience has been is that commercial is, you know, in the ballpark of 20 to 40% faster than residential because of those efficiencies you're talking about. And so, you know, that same, a same production rate in say, let's just take a hundred square feet of drywall, for example, in a residential setting, painting that two coats of paint, that now turns into 130 or 140 square feet you can paint in that same hour. And so that's how those things are taken into account. But at the end of the day, what PaintScout does is it streamlines your system, gives you control over the pricing and deliver something nice to your customer. So that's maybe where we can kind of dig into some of these elements and say like, you know, on the pricing side, here's how that might work. Would that be effective? On the production side here, so that might work, would that be effective? And then on the presentation side, would that be effective? So I think that might be a good format to kind of go through here in the next, say 20, 30 minutes, if that works. Yeah.

Brian Struble: Yeah, absolutely. And the other component to all that too is the reality for me is when I hire somebody to estimate residential, they don't have experience. And that's fine. I can teach them quite quickly. Now I think somebody who's estimating on the commercial side needs to be somebody with experience, you know, I don't think somebody should just jump in and start estimating a 97,000 square foot elementary school with very little experience. So when you talk about somebody estimating in the commercial space, I think it's safe to assume that they have some experience before, but I need to grow my team. And the question I have is, okay, am I going to find somebody who has bad habits working for another contractor, and I have to come in and break those bad habits with a new hire? Or can I create a system that I can train somebody with very little experience and hire somebody with very little experience and bring them into the team that way and let them start estimating straight away out of commercial, is that possible?

Jon: Yeah. So Michael, Michael's in this process right now. I mean, I've got a couple, I've got a number of sales reps, a little more experience, but Michael's a little closer to the hiring and training phase right now, just for things outside of his control.

Michael Murray: We like hiring. Yeah. We like hiring new sales reps often. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's a little hard. We don't do a lot of commercial work. We're like 95% residential. So in the work we, we don't do any, I don't know the last time we did a bid off of a blueprint, if ever. Sometimes we'll get a blueprint for a commercial, but it's like, it's for repaint work, we walk the building and they're like, oh, by the way, here's like the original blueprint just to help if in case you want it. So it's a little bit different. I mean, again, I'm a little bit of a novice with some of the conversation, Brian, just because we do different type of work compared to what you're talking about. But like you mentioned, at some point, it isn't that different. It is very similar to a residential. I think you said it's a bigger residential or whatever. So yeah.

Brian Struble: Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Jon: So I 100% think it's possible to bring someone in with no experience and have them bid commercial. And part of that is that I've had experience doing it. We've got reps who didn't have experience and we trained them, but the critical elements of that are that you have a pricing structure that's efficient and effective. You can manipulate it easily. And that it really allows them to do simple things like count and measure. And so I think you're like with square footage pricing. And the way I always feel is it's like 75% there, or it's like a more complicated, for those that do it in a really like efficient way, it's a more complicated version of using time because at the end of the day, I mean, you still have a team that's producing the work. Is that correct? And...

Brian Struble: Yeah, yeah, all my painters are in house with this commercial work for the most part.

Jon: Yeah. And so in order to effectively give them the plan to produce that profitably, how do you do that currently?

Brian Struble: Yeah, see, that's where the problem lies with this square footage pricing that I'm doing is an estimator of mine cannot take the job and hand it over to production, to the production manager with any confidence and say, hey, you guys should have this done in three weeks. And so we're going to the field with our foremen and not giving them clear direction as to when this job should be done so they could start budgeting how they move through the project. And then as we know, it might be human nature to take advantage of the fact that we don't know. And a job that should be taking three weeks, they're going to take four. And maybe they have no ill will in doing it. There's just no guard rails to, you know, yeah, there's just no guard rails there to keep them in line. We're going to take as much time as we're allowed. You know, you give me two weeks to do an estimate. I'll take two weeks.

Michael Murray: Work with it. Yeah.

Jon: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: I mean, I think too, it's like, you know, what we find is our crews want to have a target and if, you know, when projects get too big again, we deal, most of our projects are like, you know, in that one to three weeks again, with residential or smaller, but it's just like, if projects get too big, it just like, it almost just becomes like a slog. And when we give them like little targets, little sprints, like, hey, this section needs to get painted in the next half day. We find that it's just like, it's easier to comprehend like mentally. It's like, oh yeah, I can do, you know, from here to there in the next three or four hours, like, yep. Got it. Where it's just like, you know, you said before, like if we're painting this entire school, it's just like, Holy heck, this is daunting. Like we're going to be here figuratively forever. We're, you know, as opposed to just like, yeah, we just need you to paint this next wall, this wall in the next hour. It's like, oh yeah, okay. Well, I could do that. And if we do that just over and over and over and over again, we're on budget. It seems like the challenge is like, how do we give them or give the crew leader that like level of specificity so they can make, you know, make those little goals and set those benchmarks.

Brian Struble: Yeah. Yeah, and I have foremen that want to do well. They want to be acknowledged that they're doing well. And if there's nothing saying what good is, two weeks, three weeks, 400 hours for a project, whatever it is, if there's nothing that defines what good is, then it's just up in the air. I think you're doing great. Feel like you're doing good. And I can't acknowledge them with any proof that they're doing great. And I, yeah, I can go on about that for quite some time.

Jon: Yeah, it's really important. And so I think this is where like, so we've talked a little bit about your pricing and there's nothing wrong with probably the pricing you're delivering. You're getting jobs, right? I mean, that's like you said, there's a balance between it. But it's striking that balance between pricing and really effective production, where you have a team that understands it, everyone is in line. And that's where, you know, pricing on square footage makes that transition a little more complicated because now you probably have to take an hourly rate, I'm guessing, and try to divide that time by the hourly rate to give it back to the crew. And there's this extra step involved. Is that true?

Brian Struble: Yeah, if the job's $40,000 we'll divide it by $75 an hour, and that is a rough estimate of how many hours and then we hand it over. But yeah, that's a crude way of doing it again, because there's just so many efficiencies. And we're missing that. Either we're over, what that causes us to do is either overcharge or undercharge. And then the numbers that we're giving to the crew to get it completed are not accurate.

Jon: Right.

Michael Murray: But it seems like the biggest challenge is like in that flexibility, but also like, you know, from like a job costing perspective is going back in and saying, okay, like, let's just use that example. Like this took more than the 400 hours that we're supposed to. It took 450. It's just like, why? Like, was it because of the doors or was it because of the, you know, the drywall or the ceiling deck, or, you know, again, depending on whatever substrates were included in this project. And then it makes it so if you don't know why, was it, you know, we need like, how, where are we supposed to train or where are we supposed to adjust pricing? Because then we're just going to keep making that same mistake over and over on the next project, which is certainly what we want to avoid.

Brian Struble: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true.

Jon: So kind of going back to this idea of the trifecta of pricing and delivering a project to both the customer and to your crew. So we've got the pricing document, which is really, PaintScout operates with square footage pricing. We could do that, Brian. That might be an option. But it works so much better when you break things down into time. And that's really just a reverse calculation of the square footage anyways, because we can figure out how many square feet an hour. That's $75 an hour. Your crew can do if it's 75 cents a square foot. That's a hundred. No, it's way more than a hundred. What is that? A thousand? In any case, yeah, I know, I know. I'm sorry. My math is really bad. People listening are going to be like, how does this guy do anything in his life?

Brian Struble: I agreed with you. We're in it together.

Michael Murray: Just say it with conviction.

Jon: It's a thousand, what it is. Okay, anyways, we need to do this off podcast, get the math done, but.

Michael Murray: This is why, yes, so just so we know, this is why anyone listening, you should not do your estimates using mental math. That's the worst way to do the estimate.

Brian Struble: Right.

Jon: Yeah, I'm a big calculator fan. So in any case, we can work that. At least use Excel, please just at least Excel. What I'm trying to say though is that you can work this back and you can start to see how many square feet per hour you're really billing at and then build those efficiencies into that. So you can have an understanding like, hey, oh, we thought based on our pricing that we were being really effective with our pricing, but it turns out that our guys produced that twice as fast or half as fast, we don't know. And so it helps give a baseline, understand how you produce to how you price. And so it's not that far away. Like you're really close. You have your hourly rate, you've got your square footage. I mean, is something like that, are you open to something like that, Brian? Or is it scary you kind of where are you? Where do you stand on that?

Michael Murray: At least use Excel. Yeah, at least Excel.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: No, that makes a lot of sense to me because I want to go to market with the best price that I can, you know, on the residential side, we want to maximize our sales, sale price and we use salesmanship to do it. In the GC world, I'm trying to get chosen by a, you know, with very little differentiating me, you know, other than some relationship, they know my quality, they know they can count on me, I'm going to get to get done on time. Right. But a lot of people can do that. So if I can come into a job and the GCs know that my prices are not wildly all over the place, then that would help. And if I can offer a lower price, I would do it because that's just going to get me more work and through volume. I mean, we talk about labor being an issue. It's not really an issue if you pay your guys well, and you take really good care of them. So I have endless amounts of labor is the way I look at it. There's any more work. And I can keep, yeah.

Jon: Totally. Right. So that, that to me, like, you know, as a first step is that's, it's really a big step though, honestly, like I think moving to a new system and a new structure when you've done it for so long, that's got to be a little scary. I know it is for me every time. But are you open to exploring that Brian? Like, is that something that we could lead you on? No. Okay.

Brian Struble: Yeah, I mean, that doesn't scare me. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm used to having my stomach turned numerous times in a week. Where what does scare me though is taking it to the team and asking them who have been used to doing things for so long with so many ways, and now I have to sell them on the idea that sounds like a lot of work to me, but...

Jon: Mm. Mm.

Michael Murray: Spoken like a veteran.

Jon: Yeah.

Brian Struble: But it's true. It's true. Yeah. Let's go sign me up today. Now I got to get my team involved. Yeah, that's doable. But yeah, no. Yeah. The friction would be in. Again, it's just change, you know, when you show up, when you show up.

Jon: Where do you think the friction would be?

Brian Struble: When you're an employee and you're showing up for a job, you just, you don't want a lot of change and disruption. You know, people like consistency. They like, you know, showing up and it's receiving at work what they expect. And if I'm sitting here changing things all the time, it's stressful. It's stressful. So me as a leader, I have to make sure that I'm, you know, bought in 100% and could bring this to the team and change the way we do things. And I have to be 100% bought in to do that effectively.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Michael Murray: I mean, I think the, I think you're spot on. I mean, anytime we're making a change, it's like, you know, there's going to be a, let's call it pain associated with that. And that pain, I'm going to make the change if I perceive that pain is less than the pain that I'm currently experiencing. And so I'm curious as to like, what is the pain you're currently experiencing? Why, like if you were to try to, you know, maybe convince the members of your team as to like, hey, this is what we need to make the change. Well, you know, for these reasons, our current system isn't good enough. What would some of that stuff look like?

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Yeah. One, it has to be compensation. Compensation, if it isn't already tied to somebody's performance and it's not in alignment with what me as an owner wants, well, that needs to be fixed first off. But then I need to be able to provide guidance and a standard of doing things, a standard of estimating that is consistent and reliable because their livelihood is based on it. You know, if I'm offering bonuses based on job performance to an estimator, and I'm telling them to go out there and wing it and just put a little bit of feeling behind it and your gut, listen to your gut and just measure the walls. And there's other variables that we're not really taking into account. And then again, it's handing that job over to production. The job has to be produced well for that bonus to be realized by the estimator. And so to John's point yeah that whole process needs to be cleaned up. Yeah so to answer your question, I'm bought in. I need to make some changes and we need to do this in a different way.

Michael Murray: I mean, John, I think you, yeah, no, I was just going to go back to something you said earlier, though. I think like you brought it up is that it seems like it's just a matter of changing the production rates to accommodate the efficiencies and the reality of commercial jobs, which are different than residential. I also hear that there's probably a need for more production rates to allow for just like more of the variety of surfaces and situations that you're going to run into. You know, again, like how wide open is the space versus how closed in is the space. It's not just as simple as walls are 100 square feet an hour, but it's just like, are these tall walls or big wide open walls or different things like that might allow for some more nuance without having to just have all that experience and guess a little bit, like Brian was just talking about. Does that resonate with you, John?

Jon: Any other pains? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Michael.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Right.

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, where I've seen this work so well is when people do have, they have a number of baseline rates and we should clarify too, like production rates. I think there's often a confusion between, you know, square footage is still production rates in a way. We're talking about time-based rates here. And that's really where I think in our industry, even when I hear production rates, I kind of fall asleep for a second. Still, like when those words get said, I'm just like, oh, that sounds horrible, but really we're talking about time-based rates and using time to bid out jobs. And so when you start to get those nuances into a program, even in a spreadsheet, to be honest, you've got 10 different things in a spreadsheet. And you've got, you know, eight foot walls, 16 foot walls, 24 foot walls, 28 foot walls with some obstruction, 16 foot walls with some obstruction. And you just start working out the math between those, right? Like, you know, you know there's efficiencies being lower. So those are a little bit lower production or higher production rates. And once you get higher on the wall, that all matters. But I think to your point, so that's going to help you Brian. Like if we set that up properly, you as a sales person is going to be able to go in and start seeing the effectiveness of that. But you still have experience. And with any bidding process, you have to use experience to really bring it home. Right? Like you're going to look at something and the numbers are going to come out and you're going to be like, hmm, that's too low. You know, that's just too low. I feel it. It's too low. And that just takes time. And so as you're building these processes out to also build out training processes for a new sales rep is really critical to pair those together. And so we always talk about the fact that PaintScout's really effective for taking pictures, using even something like CompanyCam, connecting those together, putting the pictures into the estimate so that somebody else in real time at the office, say it's yourself, Brian can see those pictures coming in. Oh, that's what this job looks like. That's how, you know, there's the things to be concerned about using things like Google Earth to start looking at your, like your satellite view of that property on the exterior. Taking your own measurements before you go to site and getting that framework down of what you think the price is before a sales rep even goes out. Now you're having a constructive conversation with the sales rep because you've got not only the information that they've measured and itemized in with your production rates, your time-based rates, you have pictures which accommodate for the nuances of the property, and you have this external view through Google of what that exterior, interior is a little bit different, but you can still take measurements for an interior, like a warehouse or something between all those three things as business owners and sales managers, we can start to give really great feedback and be a part of that sales process with the rep without actually ever being there. And so those things, these types of things paired together, give you control. Like it takes away that risk that I think you're talking about, which is that, you know, you bring someone new on what happens if they just, you know, completely mess up a 97,000 square foot bid on a school like that could destroy your business, right? And so we want to mitigate those risks by putting those little kind of gates in place to be like, did someone review this? Did somebody see the pictures? Are there video? And all of that can be accommodated really nicely and seamlessly through PaintScout. And if you do it well, you can even kind of verify a price with a sales rep on site when they're talking to that GC, probably kind of price band it for them. And they're like, oh, I see this job being 150K. It's like, well, I took a look at the video. I took a look at Google Earth. I'm seeing this at 180. Let's band it between 170 and 200 and see if they're in the ballpark. And now you're having real conversations about price. So that's where the system becomes so effective for at the end of the day, selling these jobs because you can get real data, you can get fast and you know, it's reliable. So anyways, that's man, I'm rambling at this point, but that's kind of the vision that I've always had is that this works so well with that approach.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Right. Yeah.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Mm-hmm.

Brian Struble: Right. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you've said a lot. No, that sounds great. And a few of the things that come to my mind is the fact that one, it's like, okay, we're dealing with an outside GC from time to time, right? He comes in from out of town. He just needs a painter that he can trust to rely on. So I have to somehow without even talking to him hardly prove that one, we can do the job. We know what we're talking about. We're bidding $80,000 to do the work. And in my scope, I have everything included. So I'll show up on the job and say, oops, surprise. We're not doing the decking. So with PaintScout, when I presented that in our residential division, that created a sense of confidence with the homeowner that we knew who we were and we knew what we were doing and we're able to convey confidence. With an out of town GC, I have like no opportunity to convey confidence other than that Word doc that I'm sending or PaintScout with pictures in, not only pictures, but pictures that are notated as to what we're doing on a remodel or new construction, either one. Yeah. Huge difference.

Michael Murray: They're good.

Jon: How does that sound to you, Brian? Sorry.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Jon: So yeah, let's, so anyway, I'm glad to hear that's resonating with you, Brian. I mean, I think it's a super fascinating thing that we've seen with GCs is that GCs are people too. And there's an emotional element. There's an element of trust and confidence. And I think a lot of times in the commercial space, people discount, you know, creating the emotional connection. They, you know, it becomes quite transactional. I think a lot of people's minds. But when you're also on the other side of things as that, like, you know, GC trying to manage this, you don't want to look bad. They don't know all these guys, you know, like someone's super cheap. What are they thinking immediately? They must miss something. I don't want to get screwed over again. I don't look bad to my boss, lose my job. And so giving them the confidence that you've got everything in there. The proposal actually, I think still matters, you know, in a strange way. Because I think you still can make that connection. Like, hey, we're not just some, you know, a couple of guys out of a van and a garage, like we've got a lot going on here and we've done a lot of work for good people, so you can still build value that way, but I wanted to, I wanted to ask you, I mean, this is a bit of a segue, but I want to ask you on the blueprint side of things. So Michael and I, I think we've done at our company for blueprint jobs ever, ever. And when you're learning to do blueprints for the first time, every time it's a lot of work. So I do think there's a bit of a fit for PaintScout there too, but maybe we can just for everybody listening, hear how that process works for you. Like when you get a job, start to finish, how does that get bid out?

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Right, right.

Brian Struble: Exactly.

Brian Struble: Mm-hmm.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, John. So you're asking what is the process when we're approaching an estimate currently for a blueprint, how we're reading it and so on. Yeah, absolutely. So with that new build ground up and oftentimes a remodel, they'll take an existing building and add new and revamp everything existing. For the most part, there's a lot of the same. You have exposed decking, you have wall or you have gypsum ceiling, and you have hollow metal doors painted or stained. And usually it's hardly ever any baseboard, they use the plastic cove base. And so that's pretty easy. For the most part, there's not a ton of nuances with that. So what we do is we use a system called PlanSwift. And what that does is that allows us to measure walls, heights, everything else, go around and count everything with the blueprints. And what I've learned, I get an opportunity to bid quite a bit. And I enjoy the blueprint reading process is you have to read all 97 pages because that architect's going to bury somewhere that this rolled metal is getting a coat of satin on it. And the last thing you want is a GC to call you later and say, hey, did you, is this included? You didn't mention it. Well, no, I didn't mention it because I didn't see it. It's kind of embarrassing that you're missing it. And then reading the addendum. So the addendums continue to come out, one, two, and three, sometimes four addendums on a job and you have to take a moment. You have to know what's in the job currently. See what the addendum is and adjust accordingly that could be added doors, reduced doors, change of scope. And so you have to know that. And then basically just take an Excel doc that you've created with formulas and put in quantity of doors, roll up doors, whatever it is, ballards, ballards rather, and count those out. And then that's what I've been currently working with to create our estimate is that square footage off of blueprints. And there's so many, there's so many painters that call me so often, I get a call a week asking for help with a blueprint. It takes time. If you're looking at a warehouse, for instance, that could be three to four hours in front of your computer screen, rolling through that blueprint, and if you go any faster, you're going to miss something and you're going to end up having to pay the price later because that GC is going to expect you to do it regardless of if it's in your scope or not. And so there's issues there that you could run into if you're not paying attention to the details. Yeah. I mean, I can keep going on, but that's really the gist of it. And there's so many, yeah, but it's not hard to learn John. I've done blueprints back in the day with a triangle shaped ruler. This was decades ago, but now we got this technology and you could learn within half a day and start reading blueprints. Or you can hire somebody offshore to do it, as long as they know what they're doing.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Jon: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, yeah, there's some risks that I'm sure too. We had a, I'm curious to hear Michael's questions, but really quickly, we had a commercial job where it was a large church. And at the end of the day, the biggest argument we had is whether we were responsible for the exterior of the doors or not. And man, it's just frustrating when that was, it was buried like on page, you know, 400 something. And you're like, honestly, we didn't account for the 70 exterior doors because you asked us to paint the interior. It says, well, on this line right here, it says you guys are responsible for the exterior of the doors. I'm like, okay, fine. Anyways, yeah, wild. So anyways.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Yeah, yeah, just get it done. Get it done and walk away.

Michael Murray: That sounds like somebody you wouldn't want to work for ever again.

Jon: Yeah, we decided not to. Yeah. It was pretty wild. So anyways, yeah, Michael over to you.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Michael Murray: No, I mean, I would just ask Brian, like what other kind of questions or, you know, concerns do you have, I guess? I mean, I have some other questions in regards to like, just getting into commercial work and things like that, that if we have time, that might be helpful, but I'm curious if you feel like we've talked enough about the whole, you know, using PaintScout in the commercial setting.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Yeah, I love helping a guy who's residential move into commercial. There are a ton of pitfalls and issues that could be, that could destroy your business and destroy your reputation that need to be avoided. Yeah. I could talk about that all day. Yeah. Such.

Michael Murray: Such as. He's leaving us hanging.

Brian Struble: Yeah, first the bidding, the estimating. You have to be able to, because there are GCs out there. They know you're new. They know you're getting into commercial and I'm talking about GC work, not commercial repaint right now, but the GC side of it, they'll take advantage of you in a heartbeat. There is very little relationship there, especially in the beginning. They'll take advantage of you and leave you high and dry. So you have to know what you're doing. Start small. You know, all of us as residential painters, we get the opportunity to do commercial that kind of falls into our lap naturally. But when you want to go and focus on it and do things to bring that type of work into your business. Yeah, I mean, the, I think the main pitfall that you're going to have is estimating, getting tripped up on that. Because if you're on a $40,000 job and it costs you $40,000 to produce it, you just lost maybe half a month of good production and you could feel that pain for a few weeks.

Michael Murray: Yeah. It's not about the, you're right. It's the opportunity cost, not just the, you know, well, we broke even on the job. It's like, yeah, gave up a lot of other profit on other jobs.

Brian Struble: Right. Yeah, you would have been better off staying home.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Especially managing the risk and everything else that's involved with every single time we send employees out to a job site.

Brian Struble: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Jon: Brian, when you were, sorry, a really quick question about that, when you were talking about putting together your pricing and pitfalls here for new contractors, you had mentioned just getting the right amount of jobs and knowing that you were the right fit. Can you just explain that a little bit to maybe someone who's new? How does that actually look?

Brian Struble: In the commercial space, especially. Yeah. So with GC work, whatever you're bidding today, you're most likely not going to be painting for another eight to 12 months. So if you're, if you're a commercial painter, if I go hungry and I'm not bidding for whatever period of time, for whatever reason, I'm going to go hungry for quite a while until I get that work started. So you have to be bidding now. So the work we're doing today is, really, our sales focus right now is for the winter of 2025. That's where our push is right now. But you have to, I really believe a good commercial company could or should have a balance between commercial repaint and GC work, the repaint we can go out. And, you know, I had my biz dev manager knock on a door last week at Omaha Steaks. And we're estimating this past week to repaint their entire office. We may be on that job within a few weeks from now. So that commercial repaint, it's nice to have that commercial repaint fall in your lap. But if you're willing to hire either a biz dev or even yourself go out and knock on doors with the property managers, the building maintenance or HOA managers, whatever it is, commercial property managers, doesn't matter. They're everywhere. And they need a good painter. And if you're showing up at the right time, or if you're showing up well in advance to when they need a painter, they're going to call you. And you could easily build a commercial business this way, just by knocking doors, if you will.

Jon: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Right.

Jon: So when you do that and kind of in your pricing realm or pricing structure, how much do you expect to win? Like are you 30% of the time on GC work or, you know, kind of.

Brian Struble: Yeah, it's low. I know I know that we can boast in residential side, I have a 50 or 60% closing rate. And, you know, I can really sell really well. But the reality is, there's other budgetary factors. There's so many other factors within commercial and yeah, we have to put out a lot more numbers than what we're getting back in. And I'm happy with a 20, 25% closing rate with the GC work. And I'm happy with a 30, 40% close rate on commercial repaint. And there's a lot of salesmanship in that commercial repaint that we could leverage to get the work.

Jon: Gotcha.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Michael Murray: What is that typically like on the commercial repaint? You know, I know you mentioned like the Omaha Steaks might just be in a few weeks. Side note, hopefully you're getting paid in food from them. Their stuff's good, but, you know, what do you find like typical? I mean, you know, and the other question maybe is, do you find like a seasonality to that at all? Is there certain times of year that you're trying to be more focused on that type of activity?

Brian Struble: Yeah, I know, really? So true, so true.

Brian Struble: Well, it gets cold up here in Omaha. And yeah, we don't like to go out too much knocking on doors in the winter. So we definitely capitalize on our summer, spring and fall months for sure. And hit it hard, but there's so much you can do virtually, you know, in the commercial space, we don't talk about it much, but LinkedIn is rich with leads. Because who's on LinkedIn? And we say as owners, oh, we're not on LinkedIn. So nobody's on LinkedIn. Every employee that works for a GC that works for a property management company, all those employees are on LinkedIn because they're going to move from one company to another, and that's just the world they live in. So I can go and search Omaha property managers and find 75 employees that work for big companies that I want to become friends with so that we can open a door and get in and become their primary painter for whatever it is, maintenance or repaint.

Michael Murray: So I love that. If we can just stay on this conversation just for a second. So we go on LinkedIn, we search for Omaha Property Managers, we find 75. Just cold outreach, how do we introduce, walk me through, if you just hired me to come on board and do some of these business development activities, and I've never done it before, what would you teach me to do?

Brian Struble: Yeah. Optimize your LinkedIn. And what I mean by that is, you know, have clear descriptions as to who you are and what you do linking to the parent company, which would be Shaver Painting in our case, and then having some posts from time to time that just share information, you know, value post. And it doesn't have to be often. It's not like TikTok where these people sit on their couch for three hours every night. It's LinkedIn. We check it once in a while. So we don't need a tremendous amount of posts. Just some value that shows you know what you're talking about and you can add credibility to yourself and your company. And then it's simply just making that connection and just starting a conversation. You know, I did it. We have a GC here in town that is just blowing up. I mean, he is getting his hands on a tremendous amount of work and I was able to connect to him through the owner himself through LinkedIn, who I would never have access to. I mean, there's probably four gatekeepers between me and him, but now he's aware of us. He knows what we're doing. And we just got our first big consideration recently from him. And I'd like to believe that it's from LinkedIn, but it doesn't have to be that dramatic. It could just be an HOA property manager. And they're tasked with finding all these people, they're tasked, their job is to go find a good painter. And it's our job to put ourselves in front of them. And LinkedIn is an easy way to do it.

Jon: Hmm.

Michael Murray: I know we're going to start wrapping up soon, but you just mentioned their task is to find a good painter. How would they define that? I think that's different than maybe a residential answer for a homeowner, what is a good painter? Might be different than a property manager? Maybe not. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how they might answer that.

Jon: Such a great way of phrasing it. Yeah, it's great.

Brian Struble: Right. Yeah, when we're talking to residential, we're talking product, we're talking, you know, how long it's going to take, how it's going to disrupt that family. And in commercial, it's often the same thing. They want to be assured that their business is not going to be disrupted, that we're going to show up when we say we do. And we're going to give them a finished product. But more importantly than that, that we come in on budget, and that we're, again, not disrupting their business. What was the other point? Hassle. So these people are more adverse to hassle. They do not want to be hassled with any drama that we show up with. We have to show up as the expert and just make life easy for them. You know, I like to say that we make life easy for our customers. Oh, and we also paint by the way. Because they're showing up to work. They don't want to be hassled in their job and they want to look good in front of their boss. So we have to make sure that we're making whoever's hiring us, whoever was ever in charge of maintenance or, you know, the association or whatever it is that they look good in front of the board or in front of their boss and that's priority one. Paint can be figured out. We can figure out the paint later.

Jon: That's a great way of phrasing it.

Michael Murray: Nice target.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Michael Murray: I like it.

Jon: Right. Yeah.

Michael Murray: Brian, I know you're going to be joining us next week. So that's going to be pretty exciting. By the time this recording comes out, I think PaintScout X will be over. But I know personally, I'll just say I'm excited to hear more about some of this commercial stuff from that, for sure.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Oh, the lineup that you have is incredible. I'm familiar with many of the guys, especially in the commercial space. I've worked closely with them and they're not guys that you normally see on TikTok or Instagram talking paint. They're not the normal group of people that you're familiar with, but I'm telling you, their depth of knowledge is incredible. I'm, if we are here in this post, as you all know already, it was great.

Michael Murray: Ha ha ha.

Jon: Awesome. Yeah, we had, we had one change in the lineup too. So John Busek couldn't make it, but we got in Paul Cook. So I don't know if you know Paul, but one of the nation's largest commercial painters for sure. And excited. I mean, man, you're absolutely right. Like you hit that on the head. Like this is a group of people that most people haven't heard of, like because they're not the people that put themselves out there. But these are the people that are actually like doing the real stuff out there. And that's just very different, right? Like these aren't talking heads. These are people that are really good at doing this stuff. And so that was really a key criteria for us. And yeah, this is going to come out afterwards, but hopefully you're at PaintScout X because it was going to be, it was going to be, it was great. Anyways, so, it was a good time. We had fun. Yeah, Brian, I mean, just to kind of close things off here. Obviously this has been a great conversation. I think there's so much more we could talk about, but I think in terms of the pricing, in terms of the PaintScout usage, maybe we dig into that a little bit, maybe we see if that works. Maybe we have a follow-up conversation at some point and just let people know how this actually played out. Like, were you able to do it after a couple of bids where you're like, man, this is junk. I would never use this again. I think that's really an important part of this is to say, like, there's a bit of a follow-up required. So we'll be in touch and I'd love to give you my knowledge and just what I see from these guys who run the system really efficiently with lots of sales reps in the commercial space, how they do it. So are you open to that Brian? Checking that out. Okay.

Brian Struble: I heard.

Brian Struble: Oh, good. Yeah.

Brian Struble: Yep.

Michael Murray: Busy.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: Yeah.

Brian Struble: That it was. It really was.

Jon: That was, it was a good time. We had fun. Yeah, Brian, I mean, just to kind of close things off here. Obviously this has been a great conversation. I think there's so much more we could talk about, but I think in terms of the pricing, in terms of the PaintScout usage, maybe we dig into that a little bit, maybe we see if that works. Maybe we have a follow-up conversation at some point and just let people know how this actually played out. Like, were you able to do it after a couple of bids where you're like, man, this is junk. I would never use this again. I think that's really an important part of this is to say, like, there's a bit of a follow-up required. So we'll be in touch and I'd love to give you my knowledge and just what I see from these guys who run the system really efficiently with lots of sales reps in the commercial space, how they do it. So are you open to that Brian? Checking that out. Okay.

Brian Struble: Right.

Brian Struble: I'm open. I'm open to that, John. I appreciate that. And you know, I appreciate you being so close to the trade. You know, you're not, you're not a smart technology guy only. You're actually in the field. You're...

Jon: Oh, thank goodness.

Michael Murray: Only?

Michael Murray: I was already agreeing with you, Brian.

Brian Struble: But you're in the field, you're out and I mean, you're easy to get a hold of. And so I appreciate you being available to the trade and listening to us more importantly, more importantly, and the fact that you're working so hard to build a product that's used and willing to make changes is helpful for us and not just, you know, working for the mighty dollar. Appreciate that.

Jon: Mm-hmm. Oh, thanks, man. Thank you. Yeah. And yeah, well, I hope this, it's great, great feedback. And I hope that we can work together to make your business better and then make lots of other people's businesses better because this is a part of the industry that really hasn't been advanced in so many years and there's lots of room for technology and for just being better at our businesses. And that's really what inspires me and seeing you add lots of revenue to your business and employ people that you can pay at a top dollar and great micro communities within the world. I mean, that's super fun. So yeah, happy to have you on and Michael, should we sign off? It's always. Yeah.

Brian Struble: So true.

Michael Murray: Fun as always. Thanks for being here, Brian.

Brian Struble: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Murray: It was good.

Brian Struble: I appreciate you guys.

Michael Murray: I mean, I think it was really exciting to bring some more commercial presence. Yeah, I think John and you and I bring such a residential focus. So I think today's episode was hopefully especially helpful for those that are more commercially focused. And I personally learned a lot. So I appreciate you bringing some of that wisdom today, Brian, for sure.

Brian Struble: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. It's good to be here. Thanks.

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