Proven Sales Strategies from a Painting Business Pro (Eric Barstow)

Michael Murray: All right, welcome back to another episode of Price. Sell. Paint. I am Michael Murray. Today I am not going to be joined by John. John is out of town, but I am joined by our guest, Eric Barstow. I want to tell you a little bit about Eric. So Eric, I would call him a force in the painting industry. You've probably seen him speak at PCA Expo. That's actually where I first was introduced, Eric. I think it was 2020 I saw you speak at the Expo. Many people tuning in have probably seen your content on YouTube.

Eric's Painting Business Pro channel on YouTube has more than 45,000 subscribers. We were just chatting about it. You recently launched a podcast called Million Dollar Painting Company. If you haven't had a chance, definitely check that out. Eric created the National Painting Group, a collective of painting companies on pace to do around 24, 25 million in 2024. Eric, your presentation at PaintScout X on sales and objections was my personal favorite, which is one of the reasons I'm really excited to chat with you today. I think you create a ton of value in our industry. I know you are really all about giving back. Is there anything that I missed? Anything you want to tell us just to kind of get us started? Give us a little bit of an introduction.

Eric Barstow: I don't think I'd add a whole lot to it, man. Thanks for the intro. And I'm happy to be here and I hope I can contribute.

Michael Murray: Awesome. Yeah. Well excited. I'm kind of just selfishly curious. Tell me, for anybody that's watching on the video here, tell me a little bit about the pictures in the background there.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, that's my wife set up this nice little nook for me. So I got a big office. It's got some stuff in it and a big white board's right over there where I do a lot of videos, but this is just, I got books up there. Most of which I probably haven't read to be honest. You see a book, you buy a book. And then all the pictures are just best friends, pictures of me and my wife, family. Yeah. It's like over like a four year period. So there's a lot of good memories on there.

Michael Murray: Yeah, awesome. I think, if I remember from PaintScout, you have two kids?

Eric Barstow: We got two. Ella is turning five this month. Brady just turned three. And we got a third due January 11th.

Michael Murray: Well, congrats. That's going to be here before you know it. That's exciting. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I'm just a little bit ahead of you there. I got a 12 year old and an almost nine year old. So yeah, it's good stuff. I know you're a big family guy. You love spending time with your family. You've talked a lot about that. I'm kind of the same way. So we're good. Well, I'd love it. Let's get into some of the business stuff here. So talk a little about Painting Business Pro. I'd love it if you could take us back, like how did, what inspired you to get that started? And maybe how has that evolved over the decade plus that you've been doing it?

Eric Barstow: That could be a long answer. So I'll do my best to keep it not too long. I started Painting Business Pro in 2012 with no intentions of it actually being any real business. I wanted to learn just how to do stuff on the internet. And at the time I had worked in the painting industry for seven or eight years and I was running a painting company and I was making about a hundred grand a year working five or 10 hours a week.

I had trained a hundred college students how to knock doors, sell jobs, hire painters, manage projects through CollegeWorks Painting. I did that for six years. So all I, the only thing I knew, the only value I had to contribute to people was how to start a painting business. And so I started to do that. I thought that maybe someday, I thought it was pretty small little thing. And I thought maybe we'll make a couple thousand dollars a month off this, but I'm doing it to learn.

About a year into it, I was selling CDs, these were DVDs, like CDs at the time, 139 bucks for a CD set. And I was running a $600,000 painting company at the time. But after about a year, I shut it down because I was making no money on it. And I was like, I'm just losing money on the advertising to sell the thing. A couple of random things happened. I won't go into the whole story, but I ended up getting featured on an email list that went out to 600,000 people. It's Noah Kagan who runs AppSumo and has a big YouTube channel. I was at an event with him, a small little event, and he plugged me in an email. And he's like, hey, plug that course thing. And I woke up to like 45 sales.

And so I decided to make a few YouTube videos. You could go back on YouTube and see the very first videos ever was like, start a painting business, how to estimate, how to hire people. I mean, really basic stuff. And they started to do really well and sales started to happen. So I made some more YouTube videos and more sales happened. Over the years, what basically continued is like the more I did, the more the business grew. Painting Business Pro grew, but also the more my painting companies grew. So you mentioned at the beginning, we're around 24 million a year now across the portfolio, Foothills Painting is over 7 million, Elkhorn Painting is over 6 million. Then we've got a number of smaller companies that are growing quickly. As my business grew, in my eyes, my course was worse. And so what happened for years is I would make my program better, refilm content, new videos, make the course better. And I would do more marketing. So I did more YouTube videos. And then I started writing articles and then I had a pretty big email list. And then at some point I started running some Facebook ads. And so we've had over a hundred thousand people download free guides and stuff from us. Yeah, I made lots of content.

And so I got to a point in like 2020 where I was selling just a course. I didn't do webinars, I didn't do anything live, I wasn't very involved. It was like, buy this course and then you're done. And I just got to a point where it wasn't super fulfilling. Like I kind of fulfilled the mission I was out to fulfill, which was like I learned how to do business online. I was helping people start a business, but I wasn't particularly proud of the companies people were building.

I had a lot of success stories. There's a lot of people who built a business that gave them freedom, which was really my initial intention. Like why start a business? So I didn't have to get a real job so I could be free. So that's what I wanted to do for others and I did that. But then the more I, you know, I had over 1100 members in my Facebook group at the time and the conversations I saw people having and how they were talking about contractors or painters or customers, I just wasn't proud of it.

And I just, it just didn't sit well with me. And so I was like, well, I either need to shut this down because our painting companies are growing so much and I loved what we're doing there and how we're building them. So I didn't need to shut this down or I need to completely reinvent and create a new future. I kind of fulfilled the future I was fulfilling. It had been fulfilled. That's what I set out to do. I did it and it turned into basically being about money. And I got, I was clear about that. I was like, I'm trading my time for money right now. I'm doing this just for money right now. It has no soul anymore.

And so I decided in 2021 that we're going to reinvent the business and took about a year, year and a half off of selling the program. I mean, we went from like $150,000 sales months to $10,000 a year later. I mean, just completely turned it off and relaunched the business. And so now we have a totally revamped program and support and accountability and live events and leadership development events. And I'm in the trenches with people. So yeah, that's where we're at now.

Michael Murray: That's cool. So Painting Business Pro still going. It's obviously in kind of the 2.0 it sounds like, but who would you say is that geared towards? If somebody's listening to the podcast, how would they know if that might be something that's the right fit for them?

Eric Barstow: We have the program designed to help people from being a startup up to about $3 million a year. So depending on where people are at, if you're under $400,000 a year, we've got a program that's dedicated just to that. Because the most important thing if you're under 400K a year is get to that $10,000 a week mark really profitably without killing yourself. Like 35, 40 hour work week, doing 10,000 a week profitably. That's the most important problem you need to solve if you're under 400K a year. Once you're there and you're like, okay, I'm at 120 to 130,000 a year on a sustainable work schedule, a consistent sustainable business, that's that 400K level, then we've got a different program for that because now you're in the game of like, I got to actually build a really strong foundation for the business. Then I got to build a team and it's designed, it's really designed to get up to about yeah, three million a year.

Michael Murray: That makes sense. Yeah. That second phase, hiring culture, all that kind of fun stuff. Eventually, hopefully hiring a sales rep. We were talking about that before. Not many companies can get to that point, but I think that's certainly a good goal for somebody. I'd love to talk a lot about like sales specifically today. I mentioned in the intro that PaintScout X, your presentation that you did, I would kind of summarize it on like sales, objection handling, understanding why customers do and don't buy. I'd love if we could just dive a little bit deeper into some of the concepts that you brought up in that presentation. Specifically, there was four reasons that you talked about as to why a customer might not buy from a sales rep or a business owner doing sales in the painting industry. Can you talk about those four? And then maybe we can dive a little bit more into this.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, so the first one, and these should all be pretty common to anyone who's in sales in the painting industry. The first one is I want to think about it or some version of I'm not ready to make a decision. I want to think about it. We need to sleep on it. We never make decisions right away. We're not even sure if we're painting. Some version of we need to think about it. We're not ready to decide. The second one is we're going to get other estimates. We already have other estimates scheduled. We want to get more estimates. I never sign without getting three estimates. You hear all the versions of that.

The third one is price. It was more than I was expecting or I got a price for less. And the fourth, I just kind of put everything else in like kind of random. You've got kind of a random assortment. This can be anything from, my I got to speak with my husband or I got to speak with my wife. We're waiting to get a flooring bid. We might be moving and selling. We're not sure if we're even going to paint this year. I mean, those are a few examples, but there could be others, but they're kind of these all over the place objections that we put into the random category.

Michael Murray: Yeah. So I think, you know, thinking about these, like the main three that you just talked about, let's, if we can, like, even like some scripting, role playing, I think would be really helpful for somebody listening. So how would you train a sales rep to handle this first objection when they're hearing that, like, I need to think about it kind of bucket of things. How do we handle that? Or how do we prevent it, maybe?

Eric Barstow: Yeah, so, can you say the question again?

Michael Murray: Yeah. So I'm thinking if we're, let's give maybe some specific tips to the audience on handling some of these objections. And so kind of like, again, I think of it as like two different ways. It might be, how do we prevent it? So what are some things that as a sales professional I can do so that I'm preparing the prospect in this situation so that they're ready to buy at the end. But if I didn't do that well and I'm hearing, hey, we need to, we need to think about it. We're definitely interested, but send us over an email and we'll get back to you or whatever that might be. Do we just walk out and onto the next one? What are some things that we might do at that point?

Eric Barstow: Yeah, so there's a pretty big framework we have for this whole thing. So we'll try to pick it apart as much as we can. The first, one of the principles that we think about is that if you're not making the sale, it's because you screwed up something earlier in the estimate. And so what we do is at the end of the estimate, we do the close. So you should be delivering your estimates on the spot, which I'm sure has been spoken about in plenty of detail on this podcast. So if you're not delivering your estimates on the spot you're probably leaving 10% of your jobs on the table just right there. So you get to the end of the estimate, you present the quote and you ask for the job in one of many ways I'm sure that people have talked about. And then your customer is either going to say, they're going to say one of a few things. They'll say, yeah, let's do it. In which case you take a deposit, you sign up the job. The second thing that they're going to say is they'll ask a question. In the event that they ask a question, you answer it as succinctly as possible and then close again. So, Eric, what's the difference between these two options? Yeah, that one we're just going to use that more premium paint. Does that answer your question? Great. Which one of those do you think you want to go with?

So we just answer very quickly. A lot of people are nervous and talk too much in the close if it's a question. So very, very succinct answer, reclose. And then the third thing that they'll say, so eventually the questions are gone and it's a yes or an objection. So the third thing is not a yes. So not necessarily a no, but it's not a yes. And that's when we find out it's think about it, other estimates, something like that. So what we do is we want to find out if that's really the issue. So do you want me to walk through just like these questions, the series of questions we would recommend someone does in the close?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I think it'd be great.

Eric Barstow: So the first thing that we do in, this might be hard to follow without the script and everything, but maybe we can follow up with some materials in the description or something like that that we've got available for people. So the first thing I say is I say, okay, Michael, got it. You just want to think about it. Totally understand. No problem at all. So that's the first thing I'm going to say to a not yes, is I'm just going to validate what they said, agree with it. No problem. All good. You just want to think about it. Cool. And then I'll say, hey, by the way, Michael, is it okay if I just ask a few questions before I go?

So I say before I go, like I'm out the door. I just had a couple of quick questions before I go. So you don't need to be threatened like I'm imposing and closing on you here like it's a sales scenario. So everyone says, yeah, of course, especially if you've built good rapport with the person and you've been likable and honest and professional. Everyone says, yeah, you can ask me some questions. And then the questions are, these are the four questions. The first is, all right, Michael, why are you for sure painting this year? Are you definitely going to do this project? Like, is this something you're for sure moving forward on? Because if they say no to that, that's the real reason they're not buying.

And then the second question is, okay, so you're definitely doing this. Did I get you everything you need and want? Like, is this exactly the paint job you want to do? Like, nothing more, nothing less, exactly what you want. We want them to say yes to that. If they say they're not sure, they want to see what other people do, then we haven't actually educated them and given them enough options to actually customize the bid. They feel like you've just told them like, this is what we do at our company. And they're like, it might sound good, but we kind of want to know what other people do. And so that tells us in our sales process that we didn't do a good enough job educating, making recommendations, and then giving them all the options so that your customer feels like they know everything you know, and they've chosen every fork in the road. We pick that. Okay, we pick that, we pick that, we pick that. So there's no uncertainty for them. They're educated and they know that this is the job they want. So we want a yes to that question.

The third question is, do you trust me? Do you trust me? Are you comfortable with me and my company to deliver on all these promises? And you want an emphatic yes right there. If you don't get an emphatic yes, it's basically a no. I've never had anybody be like, no, Eric, I don't trust you. But I've had people say things like, we just met, ha ha ha. Things that, because people aren't going to be confrontational, but anything that's not an emphatic yes is a no. And that means you didn't build trust and usually trust gets eroded because you came across as a salesperson. They could see through you. Like, what's really important to you is winning the job, not taking care of me.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I got to imagine like just even not listening well, right? If we're asking a question and almost like answering it for the client or just not even listening to their needs and things like that, that's got to be a way to erode that trust as well.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, absolutely. And then the fourth question is, is the price about what you're expecting? It's not like, what do you think of the price? I think that looks like a vacation I could take my family on. You don't want to know. Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to. So is it about what you're expecting? And if they say it's quite a bit higher, then I didn't do a good job before this moment preparing them for what the price would be. And so they have sticker shock and that's why they're not buying. So these four questions really narrow down if it's really that Michael wants to think about it, or if it was, well, he's not even going to do the project yet. No one's going to sign a contract for a project they're not sure about. No one's going to sign a contract when they don't feel like they've been educated yet. No one's signed a contract with someone they don't trust, and no one's signed a contract that they think is too high. And so that isolates.

So if we get yeses to all those, and then I can come back around and be like, okay, Michael, so you're doing the project, I got you what you need, you like me, you're comfortable with me, price is in the ballpark. I'm just curious, you just want to think about it. Like, you got to sleep on it, you want to feel good about it. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And then Michael will elaborate and then I validate him and say, hey, totally understand. I get that. If I was you, I'd probably do the same thing. When can you let me know? And Michael, my customer always needs to tell me because if I tell Michael, if I say, hey, I'll follow up with you Friday.

And the customer says, okay, all they've given their word to is they've given me permission to follow up. And now you're in this dynamic of like being an annoying salesperson following up. But if I say, Michael, when can you let me know? You say, well, I can let you know Friday. Now, Michael just gave his word to me that he'll let me know Friday. It's different, different dynamic completely because now I can call and say, hey, do you know? Michael says, no, I don't know. I say, great, all good. I understand you're busy. You got kids. Life happens. When can you let me know?

Michael Murray: Yep, verbal contract.

Eric Barstow: Next Wednesday. Great. Okay. Next Wednesday. If I do this process two or three times, then I'll probably say on the next one, hey Michael, are you even serious about working with me? Because it's totally okay if you're not. And then he says, no, no, no, Eric, I really, really am. I've just been busy. I'm so sorry. Let me look, I'll talk to my wife tonight. I'll let you know tomorrow. And we're just repeating that over and over until someone says yes or no. And they're always the one to set the date. So that's kind of the framework for how we'll close to identify what is the real objection. And not because we can usually handle the objection there, but because it teaches us what we need to improve in future estimates. So if I've got a sales rep who's closing at 35% and closing one out of three jobs, we know something's wrong. And this process tells us, well, what objection is this sales rep getting most? Is it one of those four questions or is it lots of think about it. And now we could get into how you diagnose, okay, if it's a lot of think about it, what's going on? If it's a lot of other estimates, what's going on? If it's a lot of price, what's going on? Or if it's random, what's going on? It tells us what we need to go fix in the sales process. So that's the real value here is the feedback loop to improve someone's sales.

Michael Murray: Do you coach a sales rep to grab that information, capture that information, like post appointment? Is it some sort of documenting like maybe even in the car before they leave of like, hey, this is how the conversation went. This is what we talked about. One of the things that we struggle with is unless you're over there doing a ride along as a sales manager or something, we can kind of see that, but we also might get a different experience than when we're not there because they're going to act differently. And then if they come back to the office after an appointment, it's like, hey, how'd it go? What'd you hear? What did they say? And it's like, I kind of don't remember. How do you help in that situation?

Eric Barstow: Well, the first thing we make sure of is that we've trained our sales reps on the five most important processes in the sales process. The most important systems. And that's the initial phone call, what we call the Need-Satisfaction Selling Cycle, pre-closing, the Q&A, and then the close. And then you could throw rapport in there too and personality selling and mirroring clients and stuff. And so this close, what I just went through with you, we will role play that with our reps until it's flawless. And with the pre-closes we will role play those until they're flawless. With the initial call we'll role play those until they're flawless. Because if a sales rep doesn't have those things down, that's the problem. Like if they're not doing the systems that we know produce results perfectly, then that's the biggest thing in their way of performance. And so that's not an overnight thing. We have to train a lot, role play a lot, practice a lot, and circle back a lot. I think the biggest mistake people make is just under training from the beginning.

So now let's just assume that we've done that because we do. And if someone's listening to this and you just haven't trained people enough, well then that's what there is to do to make sure that they're doing the close properly. So let's assume that they do the close properly. Then when they come into their meeting on Monday and the last two weeks they've, usually they close at 50% and they've been at 35% two weeks in a row. We can just say, okay, open up your calendar. What did John and Barbara say at the end? They said they want to think about it. Okay. And we just go through and we'll literally count. Out of the 12 people that didn't book with you, what did they say? Other estimates. Think about it. They weren't sure. And we just go down until we see like, what's the pattern here? You either are getting a lot of think about it or you're getting a lot of other estimates or you're getting a lot of price or you're getting like a mix of everything. And depending on which pattern we see tells us where to look deeper to diagnose the issue.

Michael Murray: Got it. Two quick follow up questions. And then I want to talk some more about price anchoring. I know that's definitely something I took away from the PaintScout X. What do you think is a good win rate? You mentioned somebody selling 35% or closing 35%. I think you just mentioned maybe 50%. What's the target? Where should somebody in our industry be thinking as a good benchmark for success?

Eric Barstow: I think as the owner, and this is important that we put some prerequisites on this because it's a little bit different. One is let's assume that you're pricing properly, right? Which is you should, to build a healthy company with healthy profit margins where you're earning a good living and your company is healthy, where a down year doesn't put you out of business and you can pay your team well, you've got to be at at least 50% gross profit. Calculating gross profit with labor and materials is 50%. So your pricing is correct because anybody can sell at a high rate when your price is too low. So let's assume prices are right. And then let's take an owner first. Owners should have higher sales rates initially at least just because there's things an owner does without realizing it that a sales rep doesn't do that makes sales better. Let me give you an example. An owner knows that if I over promise, I'm going to get myself in trouble. So owners will often say things like, look, this isn't going to look good when I'm done with it. Like I'll prep it right, but it ain't going to look good. A sales rep trying to make a sale says like, yeah, we can do that. It'll look great. And what's interesting is they say that because they think it'll win more sales, but what wins more sales is what the owner says. And so there's some natural things that owners do. They speak with more I statements. They speak with more conviction. They make direct promises that sales reps don't. So it's not that owners sell better because they're the owner. They sell better because they say some things that sales reps don't say and it's a little bit natural. Does that make sense?

Michael Murray: It does. Can you teach a sales rep to kind of mimic that owner mentality or is that just kind of inherent in the system?

Eric Barstow: I think you absolutely can. So let's go back to benchmarks because we have sales reps that sell at the benchmarks our owners do. So I think as an owner, if you're the owner of the business and you've got the proper prices and this is just cold leads, so you should close all your referrals. So let's just assume it's cold leads. It's from Facebook ads, people calling off your website and so on. I think you should be able to close about 70%.

Michael Murray: Okay. Owners.

Eric Barstow: And we've seen that pretty much across all of our partners. It's like 70%, 65% maybe, but two out of three. And then for our team, what we aim for is we want our average to be at 50%. And we're kind of like, if you're under 50%, there's things we got to work on. And so our top rep, Adam this year has been around 70%. We got another rep who, I mean, I don't know where she's at for the year, but she's the number one in the company or across all the companies. But I know there's like a two week period where she was 22 for 24. She's a superstar. She's probably over 60%. And then company averages, our top performing companies are around a 50% average. If we see like under 40% as the average or under 40% as a sole person selling, like there's just some really big things off. Like my experience is, I've seen this with all my partners that we work with. If we've got a sales rep who's at 30% or 35%, I'm like just go watch a day of estimates. Don't say anything. Just go watch. It'll make you cringe. If people are under 40% it's because they're saying things that are cringe-worthy without fail. That would be the benchmarks, I think, we like to see.

Michael Murray: And so just to expand on that a little bit more, you talked about how important training is. How long, let's say we go out, we hire a new sales rep and we actually have a good training program. Just speak to your experience currently, how long do you give a sales rep in your company to go from brand new hire to, hey, we need you to be performing at that benchmark. What does that look like to ramp that up?

Eric Barstow: Yeah, we don't. How do we answer that? We don't have a timeline where it's like, hey, by this date, you need to be performing at this level necessarily. We're more character focused on like termination or not. If they're operating with integrity, they're following the systems, they're improving, they're coachable, they're consistent with our company values. Like, we know that that person over time is just going to keep getting better. And so as long as we're seeing that it's okay. But in terms of getting someone to like 50%, we hired someone this year who has a stellar background. I mean, the guy, he just wants to be a part of the future of the company, but he's underutilized right now in a sales role. There's two people like that actually. He just recently got to 50% and he started early this year. So it's under like nine months to get really consistent at 50%. And we don't stop training because it's not like someone gets consistent. It's usually like a few years before. I mean, one of the hardest things to train people on is how to be consistent. I mean, it is not a common thing for people to be consistent, especially in sales.

There's so many tendencies that will pull for you to not be consistent. You start performing really well and then just without even thinking about it, you start regurgitating what you said last week this week, but what worked last week wasn't that you regurgitated stuff. It's that you were just present with people and listening and then the thing to say was this. It wasn't because you said that, it was because you were present and listening. And so it's a really challenging, I think that's one of the most challenging things with training salespeople is training consistency. And that'll take years. And so we'll continue to work with sales reps for as long as we need to to get them to that consistent 50% where they can diagnose their own sales, they can correct on their own. They're over 50%. They basically never have weeks under. That'll take a couple years. And we're trying to get that shorter. I mean, we got tons of room to improve ourselves, but...

Michael Murray: Yeah, that's one of my favorite things about just, we've both done this a long time and it's like finding the excitement in it. And I think, especially when I think about the sales side, there's always something to improve. It's just constantly finding new ways to improve and maybe it's even using new technologies to do things better, whether it's training or customer facing or whatever, but yeah, I agree.

Eric Barstow: Well, and I think that's one thing that we know for sure helps reps perform well, is that there is always a focus. When you're focused on improving sales, sales goes up, but often what happens is once sales is good, we take our focus off of making sales better and then the slump comes and then we focus on it again. And it ends up with this up and down thing instead of just like every week, what are the things that we do that we know produces the best results and how do we just do them every single week?

Michael Murray: Yeah. It's just that consistency. Like you mentioned before, just keep doing it. It's not a matter. It's like just, whatever, you go to the gym. Whatever it is every day, three times a week, not because you feel like it. It's not like once you get in shape, you stop going to the gym. It's no, you have to keep going if you want to keep seeing the results and things like that. So, all right, I'd love to go back. So one of the things I mentioned before, this concept of price anchoring. When we were talking through some of the objections, one of the most common ones we've talked about on the podcast before is like hearing, your price is too high or I got a lower price, things around that. I think a lot of our audience certainly aspires to be like the higher end of the price in their market. And so we have to be good at handling these types of objections. We have to make sure that we're providing value above and beyond the price that we're giving our clients.

You talked about price anchoring in your presentation at the PaintScout X conference. I talked about it before, but I got a lot out of that specifically and our team did. So I'd love for you to talk just a little bit more about that. What is price anchoring and how does it work and just kind of give us some education around that.

Eric Barstow: The way to think about it is every single customer before you meet with them has some idea what the price is going to be. So you walk in there and before you've talked to this customer, you have no idea where they're at. Hopefully you're using something like PaintScout and you have standardized pricing so that the price of this house is set before you get there and the price they think it's going to be is set before you get there. So you walk into a house, your price is going to be five grand.

If your customer is expecting the price to be three grand and you show them a contract and it's five, they're going to be like, whoa, and you're not going to get that deal today. You might get it later, but that's an uphill battle. If that customer happened to think it was going to be 7,000 and you show them five, then you're very likely to get that deal. And so what we need to be aware of that fact, first of all, and then we need to do something about it as the sales rep.

And this is about educating your customers. And they usually, you talk to enough customers and figure out like, why do you, where did you get this price from? Most customers, they think it's going to be three grand because they have no idea. They literally pulled it out of thin air. Like, I don't know, I just thought three grand. Or, they painted a house a decade ago in another neighborhood, in another part of the country, and it was three grand then.

Or their friend on the street got their house painted for three grand. But it's a different model home and they didn't know the specs and they didn't know the quality paint and they didn't know anything. There's no, a friend mentioned. Or they read some internet article. And so you, doing the estimate, are an actual expert and professional that works at an actual company. You have more credibility than wherever they got their information from.

And so your job is to educate the client on what the price is going to be and why before you show it to them, before you show them the price. So that if I can let that person who's expecting a price of $3,000, if I can let them know in a number of different ways that houses like this are usually about $5,000 to paint and I can let them know that throughout the process, it gives them time in their mind to think, to work through that before I show them the contract. And it also gives, and that's part of my job in the whole sales process is to demonstrate that value. So you can anchor price. So anyways, that's the principles here. Do you want me to elaborate on any of that so far?

Michael Murray: I mean, I just, I would love for you to give some examples and let's get into like, how can we do this?

Eric Barstow: Yeah. Okay. And then remind me, Michael, that we want to come back to what happens when they got a lower price. So I can anchor all day long so I can get that. I can do all the educating so that my customer has the proper expectations on price. And then I can show them a $5,000 price. They're expecting $5,000, but they still have a bid for $3,500. What do I do then?

Michael Murray: Yeah. It's almost like if you're the first bid versus maybe the second or third, you're going to handle this a little differently. I follow you.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, yeah. And just how do we deal with that? There are going to be lower bids and how we're going to deal with that. So how we anchor. There's a few different things we can do. So one way we can anchor the price is we can basically tell people what it's going to be. Yeah, I mean, you can do this a number of different ways. So I'll just give you some examples. One way you can do it is if it comes up naturally where you can just say like, if they bring up price or cost or anything like that, you can be like, yeah, I mean, a house like this is probably around $5,000 to paint, depending on what options. And if you want higher end paint, it'll be more. And if you want us to be as cheap as possible, we might be able to do it for a little less. But yeah, it's probably around $5,000. So you can just tell them that. There's not a lot of games here. It's really just about setting these expectations before you show them a contract.

Another way that you can do it is oftentimes it'll come up scheduling, or how long is it going to take to paint. Say, a house like this, we usually bid that it's going to be about $1,000 a day. So, house like this, it's probably going to be like five or six days. And then they'll just instantly do the math in their head, like, five or 6,000. So, telling them how many days and how long it takes and how much typically it is per day is a way to let them know what the price is going to be.

When you're making recommendations on different parts of their project. So, let's just say you're offering a second coat on a side that gets really beat up by the weather. Say, I could price a second coat on this if you'd like, this is the reason to do it, because it gets beat up, blah, blah. Would you like me to do that? Then I can follow up and say, look, it's probably only like an extra six or 700 bucks to do a second coat on this side, but the whole job is going to be like $7,000. And just this side is going to be the reason you need to paint again. So it makes sense to pay the 700 to get more leverage out of the whole $7,000 job. That's what I would recommend is do some extra coats on the side. So I can just kind of be upfront with them about when I'm customizing their quote, when I'm talking about the timeline, when I'm talking about anything price-related, my job is to be an advocate for the client, educating them and making recommendations. Part of educating them and making recommendations is being transparent about how this impacts the price because they care a lot about the price.

So if I'm not even talking about price until the very end, it's like I'm dancing around it and I'm not actually helping my client out. And so that's kind of one big area of anchoring price is how do I just tell them and educate them about the price throughout the process before I even get to the end.

Michael Murray: Yeah, most people don't do this very often. And so to your, and there's very little information out there, right? You mentioned like people can go online and Angie's List or HomeAdvisor or whatever, they publish some pricing and it's always talked about in the Facebook groups about how wildly inaccurate it is. And I think one of the biggest problems is, painting companies, we spend more time complaining about how inaccurate the HomeAdvisor prices are than we do providing another voice in the room to give some education. And one of the ways that we try to do it even, and I'm guessing you guys probably are similar, but even before we get there, is providing some emailed collateral of like, here's some idea of what projects cost. On our website, we have pricing guidelines and some pictures of homes and approximate ideas of what it might cost to paint. Similarly, that if somebody is willing to take a few minutes to do some research on HomeAdvisor or whatever, we want them to, if you're going to get a quote from us, at least do some research on what we charge. It's not necessarily going to be all that accurate, but it is going to frame your mind around, yeah, like some houses cost 20 or $30,000 to paint. And so if your house looks like this, don't expect it to be in the 5,000 range. And if you do, then like, let's not waste each other's time, perhaps.

All right, so let's go back. You mentioned when they've gotten that lower price or they are going to get that lower price. How do we speak to that? How are we having that conversation when our price is $5,000, they've already gotten a price for $3,500 or whatever the example might be?

Eric Barstow: One last mention there that I want to bring up is it's useful as a salesperson to be aware of where customers have bad expectations. One of the most common bad expectations customers have is they don't realize that interior painting costs a lot more than exterior painting. And I think they have that bias because they feel comfortable doing the interior painting themselves versus they don't want to do the exterior themselves. But they're like, I can do an interior. For some reason, there is a pretty consistent, badly set expectation with customers that interior is not a lot more. So oftentimes you can just tell them straight up, like, I'll price this out. I'm going to break out lots of options because one thing most people don't realize is that interior painting costs quite a bit more than exterior. And so I will break this out as many ways as you want me to so you can see all the little pieces and you can kind of custom build it to meet your budget. So it's just something that I think everyone should be aware of, especially going into the winter right now, you're going to be bidding a lot of interiors. You've got to beat that one to the punch because people seem to have sticker shock on interior pricing more than exterior. And I think generally speaking, from what I've gotten feedback from tons of people, is they have a harder time doing sales on interior than exterior, generally speaking.

All right, so this thing, what happens when you actually have someone, so you've done all the price anchoring, that's great, but this other guy has a cheaper price. So this is why it's so important to have a really strong sales process itself, because if they like and trust and are just as impressed with the person at $3,500 as they are with you, they're not going with you. Nothing you can do about that. Nothing. And we'll tell that to the customer too. So there's nothing you can do about a lower price if you aren't better than that person in the estimate process. And so here's the ways that you're better. You mirror their personality better. You are a better listener. You're more present and thoughtful. You educate and inform better. You listen to their needs and wants and make the proper recommendations. And underlining all of that is if you really do just care more about the customer than you do about making the sale it makes everything a lot easier.

How I would know if you actually, a lot of people would say, I totally do. Like, well, here's two ways to know if you actually care about your customer more than the sale. One, are you willing to make a recommendation that loses you the sale? Because if you're not, if that's the right recommendation to make and you're not willing to, then you're full of it. You actually care more about the sale because you aren't making the right recommendation that would lose you the sale.

The other way to know is how do you feel when a customer tells you just so you know you're our first quote or hey just so you know we're not making any decisions today. Because we all have customers that lead with that. If you have an emotional response to that you care more about the sale than you do the customer. Because that indicates to you like, you might not make the sale and you're like, what a waste. See, if you really care about the customer, you're like, cool, yeah, I mean, if you need to get 100 quotes, get 100 quotes. You don't want to make a decision? Don't worry, I'm here for you. Like there's no emotional response to them putting up objections early. Those are the two ways to know like, do I really, where's my priority? And they will know what your priority is because they have mirror neurons, they have a brain, and they know when you're full of it. And so there's no shortcutting advocating for your client and what you actually care most about. Is it the sale or is it the client? You just can't get around that. And that's one of the most subtle ways that trust will get undermined. But one of the most powerful is when customers will feel like something just didn't quite feel right with that person. They can't even put their finger on it. And they won't buy.

So we have to build a better relationship, build better rapport, respect how they want to be sold to, how they want to be communicated with. We're more thorough, we're more detailed, we're better educators, we provide better options, we're more professional. If we're doing all those things through the sales process, then the way that we found to deal with the lower price as we get to the end of the estimate, we do the close, we do all the things. And then Michael says, well, I got a quote. I like you guys. I love you guys. You're great. I want to work with you, Eric, because you were the best person I met with, but your price is five grand. And I got this other quote that they said they'll do all the same stuff and it's $3,500. And I say, can I see it? And I look at it. And first I'm just going to verify it's the same. And oftentimes it is. Same paint on the surface anyway. Same paint, same prep, same whatever.

And I go, well, you know what, Michael? I mean, it does look like they're saying they'll do all the same thing. So honestly, man, if you're just as comfortable with these guys and trust them as much to deliver on all this as you do me, I'd save the $1,500 and go with them. I don't know how they're doing it for $1,500 less, because this is what it takes for me to deliver on everything we talked about. But yeah, I mean, if you trust them, you're comfortable with them, I'd save the $1,500. And almost every time, they respond with, okay, we'll go with you.

Michael Murray: Yeah.

Eric Barstow: You know, because it's not really about price, it's about value. And it's about trust.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I mean, I think to your point, right, they have to trust you enough to even have that conversation and show you that quote. And you've built all of that trust up to this point with everything that you've done with the pre-call, with how you scheduled the appointment to how the sales professional showed up on time, professional, and everything that they did with building rapport and all the things that we've slightly touched on throughout this conversation.

I know you have a lot of content out there. I would encourage people to look into it. You've earned that trust and they're just trying to validate it at the end. It sounds like, right. With this, like, okay, well, like, I think this guy actually wants what's best for me, but let me, I'm going to actually like, let's find out here at the end. And I think because what most contractors do in that situation is they almost get upset, get defensive and they're going to lose all of the trust that they've built up to that point. And now, and the customer was like, darn it, I thought I might've had a good one there. And it turned out they were actually just like all the other ones. So I might as well save the money.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, I mean, the truth is my price is what it is because that's what it has to be for me to run my company and hire good people and have good people managing the good people and have a strong process and deliver the customer experience. That's why we have great reviews and get a ton of referrals. We can't deliver, it's not just what's on the contract. It's not just price. It's the experience and it's the great people and it's great communication. For us to deliver, that's what we got to charge. And if you're like, hey, these guys are as good as you and they're charging less, I'm like, hey, by all means, I wouldn't fault you for it.

Michael Murray: Yeah, sure, save some money.

Eric Barstow: By the way, sometimes we'll be like, look, I mean, I don't want to take too much off because I don't want to compromise the integrity of your paint job. Because if I start lowering my price, I don't want my guys to feel like they're pressured to get this done faster and cut any corners. But I mean, if it'll make you feel better, I'll take like 100 bucks off. And I'll laugh, almost laugh and laughingly and they're like, OK, let's do it. Like I got, it for them. It's like, all right, I got to win. I got something out of this. I mean, I know my partner, there's a story I just remember because we've told it a million times for training purposes. But it was like $10,800 or something. And the next quote was like $7,800. And he's like, I could do it for $10,600. They're like, let's do it. They just want to win. Give them a little win.

Michael Murray: Let's do it. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Different personalities too. I mean, some certain people just have to get that little piece where they can say, yeah, like I got what I needed out of that. Yeah. For sure. Well, I'd love to, so maybe one last question or so. We're starting to land the plane here. We've been chatting for a while. I've got a ton out of this. I can't wait to share this with our sales team and there are certain specific things that you've touched on I can't wait to implement in what we're doing here. I'd love to talk just a little bit more about National Painting Group. I find it really fascinating what you guys are doing. I think it's a unique approach to scaling a successful painting company. What's the future look like for National Painting Group? Where do you envision taking that? And I know you talked a little bit about maybe some acquisitions and some strategy behind that.

Eric Barstow: Yeah, we're partnering with just the right people. So our goal isn't a certain number of companies. It's not a certain revenue. It's just when the right people are there and we're values aligned and we love each other and we want to work together and we want to build a company together and it just makes sense, then we'll partner. So right now we've got, is it nine? Seven. Well, we're in due diligence with some, so it's going to be about 11 companies now once we finish up some acquisitions by the middle of next year. If all we ever have is nine or these 11 companies, we're satisfied with that. We love the people we have as partners. But if another hundred amazing people come along, we're okay with that too. So essentially what we do is, we buy a minority stake in a company and then help people scale. And so there's a lot of things that we've gotten really, really good at over the years, particularly on the HR side of things, meaning like recruiting really, really talented people, training people to be high performers, retaining people in like management structure. And then the next big one is like leadership development and developing leaders within an organization. Those are really hard problems to solve for people. And when you learn those things the hard way, it takes months. So, you make the wrong hire. It could be like six months before you replace them with the right hire.

And you might make five of those mistakes until you start getting good with hiring. So it could be, I mean, and I just know because that's how long it took us. It took us so many years of screwing up those things until now we're dialed on that. So we help people a lot with scaling their teams. And then the other big thing is as companies grow, I always was under the illusion that when my business got to a certain point, it would become easy. Like, as soon as I'm at five million a year, I just need to build these systems and then I'm good. And the reality is that the bigger your business gets the more systems you need to build because it gets more complex and the infrastructure needs more. And then the second thing is if you're a good company you should be improving all of your systems all the time. And so you have more systems to build and more systems to maintain. And just the working on your business becomes absolutely daunting. And so we've basically done that. So we build and develop all the systems because our companies, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, Foothills is like seven million a year, Elkhorn six million a year, super healthy, really high margins, amazing retention and culture. Like we've got that dialed and as we keep encountering hurdles we're solving those problems ourselves and we help with our partners. And then we directly help recruit, train, work with people, develop teams, host leadership events and all that to build your team. And then we've kind of got built in exit plans for people too where we can plug your leadership team into our infrastructure where you can kind of walk away but keep your cashflow.

And then we've got some other opportunities we're building for the future for our partners. And in our view, building a painting company is the first step. It's like you go build a really successful painting company to create income and time. But the goal is not to not work. The goal is to work on things you love exercising your gifts and making a difference. And so we're building this company to create that platform to then do whatever's next. And so we're already starting to build some runways for what's next. So anyway, that's it. We love business, we love people, we love doing what we're doing with the people who are values aligned.

Michael Murray: Somebody listening, what's the best way for them to get more of what Eric Barstow's up to? If you want to point them to the YouTube, website? What would be the places here?

Eric Barstow: Yeah, Painting Business Pro. I think we've got, we're doing more with content. YouTube is where probably the most educational stuff is. There's some really good stuff there. If you want to work with me and my team to scale your company, our Painting Business Pro program, we produce amazing results with people. And we're making that better and better and better. We have a lot of really amazing things coming. And then we only acquire people we've worked with at Painting Business Pro. We want to have worked with you for at least a year or two and know you and know your business and how we work together and we've met you in person and all that. That's really where we end up creating partnerships from.

Michael Murray: Yeah, smart. I mean, get to obviously have that long runway of making sure values align and that these are the right types of people that you want to work with. And at the end of the day, I mean, I hear a lot of, you and I have similar core values is that if the company is going to grow it's going to grow but I want to do this with people I enjoy doing it with. I want to enjoy how I spend my time and chasing a revenue goal or profit goals aren't necessarily, those are good. Don't get me wrong. But it's not like to me. I don't think that's my ultimate goal and I hear that a lot with you as well. It's how you spend your time and who you're spending it with.

Eric Barstow: It's easy to get caught chasing more money and more revenue and forgetting what was the point in the first place. And for me it was to be a great dad and spend time with my kids and my wife and to have a great social life and to be happy. And chasing revenue and profit often undermines all of those things.

Michael Murray: For sure. Yeah. There's never enough. There's always more to go get. And, yeah, we got to be careful there. So, well, Eric, I, like I said before, I got a lot out of this. I really appreciate it. I'll do the, if anybody that's listening has gotten a lot out of it, we'd love it if you can like and subscribe to the Price. Sell. Paint. podcast and YouTube channel here, but definitely go check out Eric, their new podcast as well as the YouTube channel. Eric, I look forward to seeing you maybe at PCA Expo or some other event here coming up soon.

Eric Barstow: I might be. I'll have an infant at the one in February, but we'll see. It's just down the road from me. I go to the Broadmoor a few times a year. So I love that place. And Michael, can we put a link to a resource for people under this? A lot of what you referenced from PaintScout X and also a lot of what we talked about around diagnosing objections. And I've actually got a whole worksheet put together on all that. I haven't released it except for a couple of places. So it's just a free doc, everything's free. We can put a link to that where you guys can download this so it's a little more digestible than trying to keep track of just listening to it.

Michael Murray: Yeah, for sure. No, I love it. I'm excited. I mean, again, even just all the way to the end here, providing value. So Eric, thank you so much and look forward to the next time. Thank you.

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