What's Happening in the Painting Industry? // Nick Slavik

Jon Bryant: Hey guys, welcome back to the Price Sell Paint Podcast. I'm Jon, joined by Michael as always, and we have a special guest — Nick Slavik. Nick is a friend of the podcast, a friend personally, and someone I look up to. The theme today is what's happening in your world, Nick, what's happening in the painting industry, and where we're all at. Nick, welcome back. For anyone who hasn't met you, what should people know?

Nick Slavik: 34 years in the trade, coming up on 19 years running my painting company. I do a content creation and broadcasting company called Ask a Painter, which is now 10 years old. I've been a member of the Painting Contractors Association for 10 years, on the board of directors for seven, and I was chair for four. I'm also a huge fan of PaintScout and both of you guys. That's the best summary I can give.

Michael Murray: Ask a Painter — ten years. That's incredible. I remember seeing it early on and paying attention. I can't believe it's been that long.

Nick Slavik: Ten years, and there are things I'm horribly inconsistent at. Ask a Painter is not one of them. Five hundred and twenty weeks in a row I've broadcasted live. It's connected me with guys like you, so I'm very grateful for that.

Jon Bryant: As someone who has to do this every two weeks, I know how hard that is. Impressive.

Nick Slavik: You should try it alone sometime. It's easy and awesome when you do it alone.

Michael Murray: Michael and I committed to doing this for about a year — we figured nobody was going to listen, but we felt like someone needed to talk more about the sales and pricing side of the industry. I don't even know how long we've been going now — maybe a year and a half, two years. Not ten.

Jon Bryant: And not consistent. We look at the downloads sometimes and we're genuinely surprised how much people care. We have some really loyal listeners — people come up to me at the PCA expo and say things like, "You were my top Spotify podcast this year."

Nick Slavik: Right after Ask a Painter. I hear that all the time. But what you're saying — there's a lot to it. We run painting businesses, we do this kind of content, we work with PaintScout. Sometimes we're too close to it. People come out of the woodwork and say they've been following all of us, and here's the thing: if you actually want people who share core values, run good painting businesses, and put out good information — there aren't 30 podcasts doing that. There's a huge need for this content. The industry has completely turned over in the last 10 years, so there's a whole new group of hungry, interested people, and there's not that much quality to choose from.

Jon Bryant: It's also hard to know who to trust. You learn quickly who has similar core values and who doesn't. It doesn't take long to figure out quality versus quantity. If you want to run a good business, align yourself with the right voices — get into Ask a Painter, find those foundational resources. You can get wildly off course very fast, and Michael and I have both talked to people in that situation. Our hearts go out to them.

Nick Slavik: I was one of those people at one point.

Michael Murray: Same. You feel like someone must have this figured out, so you start spending money looking for answers — and there are a lot of places in our industry to spend money that aren't worth it. I think that's part of why Nick started what he's doing: putting out good content without necessarily having an end goal in mind. That authenticity is what people resonate with. Jon and I are trying to do something similar — we want to attract people to PaintScout, sure, but it's also about sharing things we wish we'd known when we were starting out. And honestly, some of it is just working through our own frustrations. It's our own therapy.

Nick Slavik: Just like a paint job — if you do a perfect paint job, something else will suffer. It'll never be done.

Michael Murray: That's the fun of it though. After 24, 25 years doing this, that's where the challenge lives. It's never done. There's always a way to do it better.

Nick Slavik: It's an infinite game. Just when you think you have it figured out, the economy changes or the workforce shifts. The people in our cohort who thrive — they have high pain tolerance, adaptability, and the ability to not get bummed out when things go bad. The labor force doesn't stay 30 years at a job anymore. We just adapt. We don't shake our fist at the universe. We just get on with it.

Jon Bryant: Great segue, Nick. Let's talk about where you're at. Our podcast focuses on sales, pricing, and production — that's where the money lives. You track a ton of data. How do you do it? Data feels like herding feral cats to me.

Nick Slavik: I've been to your HQ with all the thick-glasses coding nerds, so I'd say my data gathering is pretty knuckle-dragger by comparison. I gather exactly as much as I need to make good decisions — nothing more.

Jon Bryant: Tell us about some of those decisions. Six months into the year — you mentioned before we started that you're noticing some trends, some flavors to this year. Tell us about that.

Nick Slavik: I love figuring out the flavor of each year. There are things you can rely on — winter's slower, summer's busier, two surge periods. But the flavor this year is the slowest start we've had in six years. And now, crossing the six-month mark, we've never produced more revenue — not by a little, by a lot. Sales lagged on exteriors. Last year at this time we were at 75% of our projected exterior goal, which was great. Two weeks ago, we were about 25% behind this year's exterior projection — completely unlike us — but we were 30% ahead on interior sales. We've been selling seven to ten thousand dollar interior jobs through May and June one after another, overwhelming our project managers. Subcontractors don't want to do interiors this time of year. But that's been the flavor of the first six months.

Michael Murray: Two things really resonate with me — Textbook has been very similar. Q1 was really hard. About flat to last year, when we have fairly aggressive growth goals. The numbers weren't catastrophic but it felt like tooth and nail trying to find work. Tighter than anything since COVID. And interior summer sales — we're way out on our backlog for interiors. Some of it is larger commercial projects at schools that have to happen in summer, but residential interior seems busier than we've ever seen.

Jon Bryant: What do you guys think is driving that?

Nick Slavik: Our exterior sales were off so far. We had about an eight-and-a-half week spring surge — we track it from when leads go up and we hit about 62 to 63 estimates a week in PaintScout, up from our normal 45. We were so far behind on exterior sales that I called a summit with my three estimators. We sat down for two hours and I said, any data you have is valuable, any feeling you have — connect it to whatever you want, everything's on the table. As far as we could tell, one of my estimators proposed a new theory I hadn't considered. It's completely unproven, but here it is: consumer confidence being down usually leads people to pause on bigger projects. But what might change even faster than consumer confidence is paint business owner confidence. The average paint business owner is one person, goes out of business every 18 months, makes $43,000, and actually has a lower standard of living than the average employee. So if confidence drops in the broader economy, painters would probably panic first — lower their exterior prices — and suddenly we'd be losing to much lower bids. When we broke our exterior sales into four buckets — sub-$5K, $5-10K, $10-15K, and $15-20K — the sub-$5K bucket was flat year over year. The $5-10K range, our bread-and-butter, dropped 75%. The higher ranges were slightly down. So the theory is painters panicked before homeowners did. We heard more feedback this spring than ever before that our price was significantly higher — not a little, sometimes three times higher. We heard that a lot this spring.

Jon Bryant: I've noticed this over the years specifically at the start of spring. Bids come back as "your price is too high," and for a long time I thought — why? It's the same as last fall. I think about it like a buffet. You ever go to a wedding buffet and they put the cheap stuff at the front? You fill your plate with bread, and by the time you get to the prime rib there's no room. A lot of contractors do this coming out of the slow season — they fill their schedule with cheap, unprofitable work, and then they can't take the good jobs when they come. You almost have to hold the line and wait for the prime rib. And like you said, at a certain point it turns around.

Nick Slavik: Something I noticed more this year — we do a couple sales experiments every year. I'm morally opposed to discounts, and I have the data to back that up. But I'm always curious, because people come out of the famine period in spring just as organic demand is surging. Giving a discount in March and April — when people's natural inclination to buy is already going up dramatically — is the worst possible time. You probably would have sold that work anyway. And now with AI-generated content, all I see are "10% off painter" posts flooding the internet. It's making it easier for painters to give discounts, and they're shooting themselves in the foot.

Jon Bryant: I call those slop cannons.

Nick Slavik: Exactly. I have a group text with painting business owner friends and we screenshot these every two weeks. The flavor of the ads changes with every AI update cycle. It's almost trackable.

Michael Murray: It's going to be scary by November and December with the couponing and discounting. My goodness.

Jon Bryant: So what did you actually do, Nick? You mentioned you found your way out of the deficit.

Nick Slavik: At that summit with my estimators, we said: we can ideate all we want about externalities but we can't prove them, so what are we actually going to do? We're down on exterior sales heading into the time of year where a 20% deficit could be the difference between profit and loss. First thing we did — we love the new report functionality in PaintScout — we pulled every unsold exterior estimate that had been viewed between two dates, exported it to a spreadsheet, and had my estimators call every one of them. Just check in, see how the project is coming along.

Then one of my estimators, Tom, suggested we offer them a small discount — a little juice right before the Fourth of July. We called and emailed every one of them over two consecutive weeks. Call first, email second. We offered a 7% "Nick buys your paint" discount if they signed by the Fourth. The following week we extended it through Saturday for everyone who had been out of office. The team brought us from a 25% deficit to a 5% surplus in sales. Every revised estimate got a line item added in PaintScout for the sale, which lets us track results cleanly. And the average job size on those was $10,000 — the bread-and-butter range. The last week they closed a couple at $15K. It was a wonderful result.

As for whether the discount actually made the difference — my estimators said they can't prove it, but they believe about 30% of those jobs probably closed because of the discount specifically.

Michael Murray: I'd add that it also re-motivates the sales team. Instead of calling someone for the sixth time asking if they're ready to move forward, now they actually have something new and exciting to offer. That changes the psychology on both sides of the conversation.

Nick Slavik: Couldn't agree more. One of our overarching marketing goals is to be local, present, trusted, and to add value. Sometimes it's hard to add real value — it's just another email from us. But a 7% discount on a $15,000 estimate is literally the definition of value. My estimators had a little more pep in their step because they had something tangible to offer.

Jon Bryant: What's interesting is that 7% isn't a huge discount by most retail standards. If I'm not getting 70% off at Banana Republic, I've done something wrong. Seven percent feels purposeful — there's a point to it, the paint cost angle makes sense — but it's not the kind of slash-everything approach that degrades your credibility. That's what hurts people: discounting constantly until customers just start expecting it, the way you never pay full price for a mattress because there's always a sale somewhere.

Nick Slavik: Exactly. Why ever pay retail if there's always a sale? Now they're just waiting for the next discount.

Jon Bryant: These things have to have a reason, they can't be constant, or you devalue your service — and probably everyone else's too. Know what you charge and why, charge enough for your business to actually work, and don't do yourself a disservice by giving it away. That said — well done. You got back on track. And the real lesson here is that your next best customer is someone you've already talked to or done work for. People forget that.

Nick Slavik: We already paid for the lead. We already sent an estimator out there. The estimate is done. It's a field of corn just waiting to be harvested — and meanwhile people are out buying new meta ads. The work is already done.

Jon Bryant: And a lot of times we lose jobs not to a competitor but to complacency. I'd say 50% of the people who don't go with us just couldn't make the decision at that moment — something came up, life got busy. We assume we lost because we were too expensive, but that may not be true at all.

Nick Slavik: They hate me and I cost too much. That's the default assumption.

Michael Murray: Or the customer is just the problem. And I agree so much — especially this time of year. I've got kids in baseball and softball, camps, running everywhere. My wife and I barely have time to make adult decisions about anything. I'd imagine a lot of homeowners feel the same way.

Jon Bryant: Let's dig into something else you mentioned before we started — this idea of the two companies you run: the summer company and the winter company, and how you approach that mentally. Summer seems to be getting shorter every year for me. I'd love your take on that for people to start thinking about.

Nick Slavik: Early on in my painting company, there weren't enough people for there to really be seasonality. We'd paint the inside or outside of your house and basically worked 10 to 12-hour days regardless. But the longer I did this, we entered a period where it was very difficult to recruit and retain enough labor to meet demand. The old world — hire somebody who already knows how to paint and they stay 20 years — that was gone. We kind of refused to believe it for a while. Once we started actually recruiting and retaining enough people to meet demand, it lit a fire under the business and we became ultra-seasonal.

We've always had a group of 10 to 15 master craftspeople full-time year-round who now only do interior work, operating as single-person crews. That gives us a consistent base of production every week of the year regardless of season. Then about five years ago when we really got into subcontracting, we brought on trade partners and leveraged up our seasonal W-2s — about 10 who come back each year. Now we're not just selling more work, we're actually producing work the demand was always there for. We just couldn't meet it because of labor. Once we accepted that we're going to have to recruit, train, and retain people four times a year forever, we started leaning into the surge periods. We even shifted our marketing — we used to only market in winter to stimulate demand, but saw diminishing returns. Now that we have a strong labor force with more production capacity than we need, we go hard from March through August to juice marketing when demand is actually high, because now we can deliver.

We run a bifurcated business model. In the six months of winter, we're roughly a $1 million business unit. In summer, about $2.5 million. We plan on losing about $100K every winter because I keep the whole team in place. If we lose $150K, it was a tough winter. If we only lose $50K, it was a good one. You recoup it quickly in the first two weeks of summer, then run a double net profit model in the summer months — targeting 20 to 30% profit to make up for the winter losses. It took me a long time to accept that this is just how it works.

Jon Bryant: And for reference — you're in Minnesota, right? Similar climate to us in Calgary.

Nick Slavik: Yeah, very similar.

Michael Murray: What percentage of annual revenue is employees versus subcontractors?

Nick Slavik: About two years ago we tipped over 50/50. It oscillates between 60/40 depending on commercial work. We've diversified into commercial, which makes up about 20 to 25% of our revenue and is almost all subcontracting. By revenue we're a sub-majority company. By number of projects, we're a W-2 majority — our seasonals do about 100 decks a year, and our full-time W-2s average about $500 per job, just hammering small interiors.

Jon Bryant: Your estimators — they're year-round, right? How do you manage expectations and morale through the slow months?

Nick Slavik: I have a different management plan for every person on my leadership team. With project managers, it's basically therapy. Clients batter them. It's more like, come here, let me give you a hug, everything's going to be okay. With estimators, it's interesting. Every estimator or salesperson has a certain amount of ego and competitiveness. Mine aren't full-commission, rabid, type-A people, but they still need their ego stroked a little, and you have to create this fun, comical competition between them. The main thing is keeping them busy. Idle time is not good for estimators or project managers.

In the six months of winter, we do heavy client reactivation — about 250 calls and emails to past clients every week. They hate it more than anything, but it gets great results. From 2024 to 2025, we increased our repeat business from 50% of revenue to 60% of revenue. That number initially frustrated me — I want to think of myself as this marketing genius bringing in new clients. But then you realize those are your best clients. If you could make it 80%, you would, because it's so much cheaper to reactivate a past client than to acquire a new one. They hate making the calls, but they like the results, so you have to be the shock absorber. Then in springtime, it's all high fives, new sales records, you're the best, everybody loves you.

Michael Murray: How many project managers and estimators do you have?

Nick Slavik: Two project managers, two estimators, an office coordinator, and an in-house marketer.

Michael Murray: What do the project managers do in the winter when things slow down?

Nick Slavik: Project managers have never touched a paintbrush in my business and they're not really superintendent-ish either. If I renamed them, they'd be project coordinators. They own three things: craftspeople, coatings, and clients — client communication, scheduling, and ordering paint. It involves site visits and kickoffs, but that's their world. Estimators own scope and price: what are we painting and what does it cost. Clear delineations between those roles.

Michael Murray: So when a client is upset about something, the project manager is the one going out to have that conversation, smooth things over, come up with a plan.

Nick Slavik: Yeah — and of course we've never had an angry client or a callback in the history of the company. That's only a Michael problem. But seriously — we have a comical conflict resolution decision tree. Two branches: if there's a technical problem on a job, that's the project manager's. If somebody questions our core values — "I don't trust you anymore" — that kicks up to me. It has to be a core values question to reach me. And for technical complaints, we have an SOP: first, ask what the problem is and have them send images so we're not blindsided on site. Then we set up a site visit, go there, itemize every complaint, give a solution for each, get agreement, and execute. There has not been a single data point where that doesn't fix it.

Jon Bryant: What about scope disputes — "you said walls, I thought that included the crown molding and baseboards and all the trim"?

Nick Slavik: Pretty easy to navigate. And honestly, my people are kindhearted — when their core values get questioned, they want to fire off a message. You have to say, take a breath. Do not call this person and lose it. This is a simple misunderstanding. We make an attempt to appeal to them personally, by phone or in person. But if they don't agree, we send a copy of the contract. We never lead with a legal document — that's the last resort. And one of the best simple things we've done in PaintScout is have stock line items in every template that say "Includes" and "Does Not Include" — with checkboxes for ceiling, walls, trim, cabinets, closets, and so on. On every template, the estimator just deletes what's not applicable. So it literally says in plain, non-interpretable language exactly what's in and what's out. If a client says "I thought the closet was included," it's right there in black and white.

Jon Bryant: What usually happens when customers try to argue a "does not include" item into scope?

Nick Slavik: One of my favorite maxims — I use this when I'm backed into a corner and I know I'm wrong — is "yeah, but still." You can't argue with it. It shuts everything down. Clients hit us with "yeah, but stills" too. It literally says "does not include the master bedroom" and they're like, "I thought it included the master bedroom." Yeah, but still.

Michael Murray: So basically you're saying, "What I'm hearing is you don't want to pay for your paint job. Let's have that conversation."

Nick Slavik: And then you go to the other maxim we have: when something doesn't make sense, we're missing information. Very often we find that there's some personal issue going on with the client — a failing marriage, a health problem in the family — and we become the lightning rod. So when someone comes at us with a "yeah, but still," it's a signal that we're missing some information that would make sense of this.

Jon Bryant: Every major client issue we've ever had, that's been the case. I always want to just cut through it and ask, "Are you okay?" But you can't — the fireworks go off immediately.

Nick Slavik: That's like telling your significant other to just settle down. But I have dreamed about sending a client a dropdown menu: "Please select the personal problem you're experiencing — animal just died, marriage failing, work isn't going well. Select one, because I already know it's one of these."

Michael Murray: The good news is with AI, you could actually build that app now.

Nick Slavik: AI will smooth that over in a heartbeat.

Jon Bryant: Send in the agent. "I hear you're having a problem with Nick Slavik Painted Restorations. We know it's not the company. Would you please help us understand what's going on with you?"

Nick Slavik: Yeah. And we know it's obviously you. Please elaborate.

Jon Bryant: I hope this is helpful to somebody out there because it's been helpful for me. For our sales reps — especially new ones — when something goes wrong, they feel like they let the customer down. But it's not about whether a problem occurred. It's about what you do with it. Customer service is really defined in that moment. Don't overreact. Give it some breathing room. Paint is not an emergency.

Nick Slavik: And sometimes brutal honesty actually wins you more trust. We say: we may not be the best painting company, and certainly nobody's perfect, but you're never going to find a more accountable one. In home services, accountability is the worst thing most contractors do. If you can say that and actually be it, that alone is a genuine competitive advantage.

Michael Murray: We have a similar saying — I can't promise we won't make a mistake, but I can promise we care enough to make it right. That's all most homeowners are actually looking for.

I'd love to transition back to planning ahead. We're recording this on July 10th. Last winter was difficult. In the next two to three months, what should people be doing to prepare so they're not caught off guard again?

Nick Slavik: Strategy goes like this. Every year we run experiments centered around marketing, and we try to react to what's actually happening rather than what we want to happen. I think of marketing as either money-solution marketing or effort-solution marketing. In spring and summer, we go money — we want our people fully devoted to producing and selling work. In winter, we switch to effort-based.

We've figured out over the years the dollar threshold at which we see diminishing returns on marketing spend. We won't go one dollar past what we can prove actually generates leads. So in winter we bring marketing down to life-sustaining amounts — just enough for brand continuity and recognition in our five or six key zip codes — and we do two things instead.

First, heavy client reactivation: my four main leadership team members calling past clients. That generates a three to seven percent success ratio. Insanely high — but to be told no 93 to 97 times out of 100 is emotionally destructive for an estimator, even though it's a wildly effective strategy. The management I do around that is real.

Second, commercial relationship visits. We have about 14 large commercial clients we service. We do office visits — bring wine, food, homemade cookies — just a handshake and a sit-down. It gets my estimators in front of real people instead of cold calling all day.

This coming winter, we're planning to bring marketing spend lower than we ever have and lean harder into effort-based outreach, especially commercial.

Michael Murray: When does that transition happen?

Nick Slavik: August and September are still high-value exterior months — September especially, that's the second hump of the camel demand pattern. We're still expecting a bump then for houses that haven't been done yet. October is our transition month — historically we can paint outside through the 31st. November is the hard switch: marketing spend drops, effort rises. Right around November 1st. Then March, we're planning to go harder on exterior marketing than we ever have.

Jon Bryant: When you think about effort-based activity for the sales side — calls, visits — what else falls into that category? I ask because some people run out of things to do on the effort side.

Nick Slavik: We also do door hanger campaigns. Our marketer and coordinator are college students, so they go back to school in the fall, which is partly why the street team winds down. But door hangers — we have about six scooter drivers who go door to door. We don't knock, we don't solicit, but we do door hangers. There's a bit of money involved but it's highly effort-based.

For a sole proprietor, it's even simpler: make a list of everyone you know and call them asking for the opportunity. Then get a solicitor's permit for your town, print flyers, and knock on every door. We as a company have decided door knocking isn't something we're comfortable with — door hangers, yes. But if I were a sole proprietor with a gap in my schedule, I'd be out there doing that. That is the opposite of spending money on meta and hoping for an avalanche of leads.

Michael Murray: Do you do door hangers year-round or just when the weather and staff allow?

Nick Slavik: We don't do it in winter — less because of snow and ice, more because our street team is entirely high school and college students who aren't available.

Jon Bryant: We're at the hour mark. This has been a great conversation. There are things that seem basic now, but they represent years of effort and battle scars from being in this industry, and I hope people take that away. For those who want to stay in touch with you, Nick — how do they do it?

Nick Slavik: Every single episode of Ask a Painter I give out my email address. You can DM me, call my company, find me anywhere online. There's enough of me on the internet to trip over. Reach out however works and you'll get an answer.

Jon Bryant: And tell people about the Mastering the Basics modules.

Nick Slavik: This is something I've offered in various forms through Ask a Painter for years — a series of eight shows covering every major silo of a painting business: estimating, marketing, management, everything. This past year I bundled them, added about 20 templates, and made it available on Patreon where you also get my personal support. It's called Mastering the Basics. It's been an overwhelming success.

Michael Murray: What's the cost?

Nick Slavik: About $250, though Patreon adds fees depending on your location — Canadians sometimes get hit with exchange rate and taxes on top. But roughly $250 for my life's work, 20 templates I actually use in my business, and direct access to ask me anything. I'd consider it a deal.

Jon Bryant: Seems almost free.

Nick Slavik: If first-year me had tripped over this, I would have cried tears of joy. Just knowing there was a direction, a framework — that's what it gives people.

Michael Murray: I strongly encourage anyone listening to check that out. I wish I'd had something like it 20 years ago.

Jon Bryant: Nick, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate you and everything you contribute to this industry. For everyone listening, give us a like and subscribe if you enjoyed this — it just reminds us this is worth doing. Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next time on Price Sell Paint.

Nick Slavik: Always great to talk with you guys. Let's do it more often.

Michael Murray: Thanks, Nick.

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