Why Successful Painting Contractors Start Selling Winter Early

Jon Bryant: Hey everybody, welcome back to Price. Sell. Paint. It's another episode with Michael and Jon Bryant. Michael, how are you doing?

Michael Murray: Alright man, how are you?

Jon Bryant: Fantastic. It is end of June here. Crews are finally settled in. Everything's working well. How are you feeling?

Michael Murray: Good. Yeah. The last three months just feel like complete chaos and craziness. I'm sure you would relate, but especially for anybody that's in the Northern half of the country, this whole going from just painting inside to also being able to paint outside is always a fun and eventful time of the year. And now that we get to late June here as we're recording, it seems like we start to settle into the rhythm a little bit.

Jon Bryant: People remember that they can paint both things. It's not that different. But at first it's like, "What is this exterior thing you're showing me? I'm only used to inside things."

Michael Murray: Yeah. We've had crazy weather in the Cleveland market this year. Just super wet. It was pretty cold too, even up through early June. And then it instantly in the last two weeks here, switched to like 95 Fahrenheit out and a million percent humidity.

Jon Bryant: I'm sure you love that.

Michael Murray: Yeah. We've had very not spring weather. I would love for just some 70 degree sunny dry days, but no. I'm expecting that we're probably going to be painting outside until December or something based on how the first six months went. We'll see.

Jon Bryant: That's awesome.

Jon Bryant: Well today, given where we're at, we're talking about how to stay busy in the winter and the things we can do in the summer to make that happen. And I know it's something that as long as I've been doing this, I get a little panicked at the start of summer because I realized winter is coming again and trying to do all the things necessary to make sure that that's better. Last year, I think the team didn't do all the things that we could have. And so this year we're really trying to get ahead of it. And we hope that anyone who's listening can join us in that journey because I think there's a bunch of things that we can do that's actually going to make that a little less difficult.

One of the things I know you guys have done really well and I want to learn from you today on is how to sell winter work in the summer. We've put a few things in place. I've heard of a number of different programs that you can do in order to make this work. But I wanted to get your experience first, then we can kind of talk about things like Christmas in July and those other marketing initiatives you can do. So yeah, how have you done? I know last year you had a bunch of work booked for January and February. I think I talked to you in September and I was jealous. It was great.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Well, I'll say this—everyone on our team should be able to recite this because they've heard it so many times—at this point, I guess I'm speaking to business owners and I think there's some specific tips we can talk about for sales reps in some of these larger companies. But from a business owner's perspective, the thing that I say a lot is what makes or breaks the success of a painting company is how busy you are January, February, and March.

It all comes down to Q1 for so many reasons because we're typically trying to carry expensive overhead then. And so if we can have more crews that are financially supporting that overhead, we can maybe break even, maybe even make a little bit of money or lose less money, however we want to think of that, during that time of year.

But it also allows us to keep more of our crew members. For most businesses that have employees, there is a very real scenario that everybody that's working for your company in the fall is not working for your company January, February, because we just don't have as much work because we can't do the exterior work in this part of the climate. And so the more people that we can keep busy in Q1, the more those people can be here next summer when we really need them to be our experienced painters, maybe our crew leaders, and can allow for that growth and expansion.

Michael Murray: So anyway, with that thought process in mind, the biggest thing that I would say we do is, generally speaking, August 1st starts what we call More on Winter. More on Winter really means, for our sales reps especially, every quote they go on that's interior or cabinet painting related, they have a conversation with the customer about scheduling. And they let them know that they basically have two options.

They can book at the regular price for our next available slot, typically in that six to 10 week window, depending on how busy we are and backlog and things like that. Or they can receive a discount and wait until January or February if they're OK with their project being done after the holidays. And many people are excited about that possibility. We give a discount of 10 to 15%. It is a very real discount.

And on a $10,000 project, you can do that math. It's a thousand bucks. That is saving somebody significant money. And so we do get a really good chunk of work booked starting in August for people that will wait five, six months until January, February.

Jon Bryant: So yeah, let's unpack that a little bit because I think it sounds like it's working. So I want to learn about that. So when you're doing this, you're not advertising this. This is just purely people that come in the door and then they've already got the interest and so now you're giving them the option. Is that right?

Michael Murray: Yep, for sure.

Jon Bryant: Would you consider marketing that? Have you ever done that before?

Michael Murray: We have never done that at that time of year. The only time that we've ever offered—like marketed a discount—is when we were headed into winter and we were slow and it was like November and we would put out some emails, social media posts and things like that offering maybe that 10 to 15% discount. "Book your interior project" kind of thing. Otherwise we'll have some standard discounts that we'll advertise throughout the year, but they're not that aggressive. They're less of a discount.

Jon Bryant: So you don't advertise it, you do have the conversation in person. What would you say is the percentage of people that take you up on that offer? Do you have any idea?

Michael Murray: So I would say if we said of the people that are booking, I do think there's some people that might not have otherwise booked. That's hard to quantify because it's saving a thousand bucks. We might have that price sensitive customer. And I think that's a great tool.

So we can have a conversation depending on the timing of that sales conversation. When this might come up, it might come up in more of a "When do you need this project done?" type of a conversation. It also might come up in terms of a price objection type of a conversation. The customer might say, "Hey, $10,000 to paint the inside of my house or whatever is a lot more than I thought it was going to be. I've already got another quote for maybe $8,500 or whatever that looks like. And you guys are expensive."

And we've had episodes on how to handle that. And there's a lot of different things here, but one way to handle that at this time of year is to say, "Okay, great. So it sounds like price is the main concern. If I could give you everything that we just talked about at a price close to or similar to the price you just described that you got from a competitor, would you be interested in that?"

And they're going to say, "Well, yeah, that's the reason I'm having this conversation with you. I didn't just tell you to leave." And then it's like, "Okay, great. I can do that if you're willing to wait until we're not quite so busy in January and February."

And then I get to have the conversation about why are we so busy? Maybe it's because we have such a reputation and reviews and experience and all things that a lot of people want us to paint for them, which is why we're also more expensive. But you can have the best of both. You get to have the best painting company with this awesome reputation come paint at your house and save some money, as long as you're willing to wait until we have some room on our calendar to get you in. So that's certainly helpful.

Jon Bryant: Love it, yeah. So it's so hard to quantify because you feel like you're captured. It's not only people that are accepting your quotes, you're actually dealing with people that might not have ever accepted it. And that gives you some leverage.

Michael Murray: I think so. So let's go back to your question. I would say it's probably about a third if I'm guessing. I don't have hard data on that without having to go back and look through when jobs were sold and then produced. It's probably a stat we could keep better. But anyways, just gut tells me—I've been doing this thing for at least four or five years—that it's probably about a third of customers that we book at that time of year. Somewhere between a fourth and a third would be a good guess as to "Yeah, sure. We'll wait. I'll take that discount. I'll wait."

Jon Bryant: So that's pretty good numbers. When you do that, how does it work? Actually, they sign the job, right? So they say, "Yeah, let's do it." And then you give them a date out in the future or how do you handle the actual scheduling?

Michael Murray: Yeah. So every project that we schedule always is given a week-wide window as to when we're going to be at their house. When they book, unless we have predetermined beforehand—let's say somebody's buying a house and they get the keys on August 1st and they have to—the movers are coming on August 10th and the sales rep has had the conversation like, "Yes, we're going to get this done in that window." In which case we're going to give them "We're going to be there on August 1st or 2nd" kind of a thing just to make sure we get this thing done.

Otherwise, every customer we ever book with, when they book, they are told "You're scheduled for the third week of August." And then as we get closer, every week they're getting updates. And then once we get within a two-week window, they start to get actual dates. But even then, two weeks out, they get a three-day window. "So we're starting your project Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday of this week." And then as we get to three days out, we can start to narrow that down based on all the things that everybody listening already knows.

Jon Bryant: All those December rains that come through in Cleveland.

Michael Murray: Well, I mean, I think the biggest thing is I'd love to say that we're perfect at figuring out exactly how long a project is going to take and exactly how many employees are going to show up to work every day, but somewhere in there, we aren't always exact.

Jon Bryant: So true. Okay. So you give them the schedule and then when they come in, they understand the price, everything works. Do you ever have people that try to push you out of that time period? Like, "Oh, it doesn't actually work. Can we do it in April?"

Michael Murray: Not usually at this point. I guess as we get closer to that January, somebody might say, "Whatever, something came up or we're going to be out of town. Can we just move this back a month or two?" But as long as it's in Q1, they get that price. If they move it out of Q1, we're going to have a conversation. "I can move it into April, but you're now paying without that discount."

Which is still probably discounted because you're now paying on last year's price and now we're getting into this year's busier season. But I'm not going to get that complicated. You're just not getting that 10% discount that you see on that quote.

I would say though that has either never happened or is super rare.

Jon Bryant: Okay, gotcha.

Jon Bryant: Well, I think a big part of this is discounting. I know there's probably people listening that are thinking, "Ooh, discounting, you can never discount. That's a bad idea." And I know your opinion, but I think it's worth explaining a little bit how we get here because you said it's a real discount. Maybe explain that a little bit for everybody.

Michael Murray: Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff that happens in the home improvement industry, really in any industry, to be honest, where we just inflate the price and then provide a discount. And that's—it's a little because in home improvement, there's very little price transparency. We don't have any idea what this should cost. You can get away with it. But it happens all the time. You know, you book an airline flight, depending on when you book it and things like that, the price can be wildly different. And so it's not specific to our industry.

But when I say a real discount, it is—I'm not inflating the price to then offer a discount. You have two options. Here's price A—let's call it $10,000, which—that's the project. We can do it in six to eight weeks or whatever. Or price B—let's call it $9,000—you just have to wait until January.

Jon Bryant: So are you giving up all your profit at this point or how does that work?

Michael Murray: Not all of it, but some of it. But really with the intention that I get to keep some painters busy at that time of year. And that's huge. Because if I have—the more crew leaders I have come next April, that means the more work we're going to be able to do at a much higher rate next summer. The profit is really made in—for us, the exterior season on all projects.

It's not just on exterior projects because we're so busy that we can just be more confident in our pricing and things like that. The other thing that allows me to do though is our goal is to book half of January and half of February before Thanksgiving. Ideally before November. Because then when I'm having conversations with people in November, I should already be booked for November and December, because that's within that six to eight week window when we're normally booked out.

And if I'm already booked for half of January and February, I don't have to offer discounts to fill in that part of the calendar. Because it's like, "December's booked, November's booked." Let's just pretend it's the second week of November. And so our next available slot is the second half of January. And if you don't want to take that one, then you can wait till the second half of February. And I have all this confidence that if you don't want it at this price, no big deal. I'm going to go on another quote tomorrow and they're probably going to take it.

But we know that as we get to November, the number of quotes for our sales team significantly starts to go down because people don't want us in their house over the holidays. And they're just not thinking about home improvement projects as much then. But because I'm already halfway booked up, I have all this confidence that I'm going to sell enough work in January and February. So I'm much more confident in my price at that time of year. And I'm not offering discounts then, or not as much, hopefully.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, you can be a little more confident in your price because what I'm hearing is you're not desperate.

Michael Murray: And so we think of things as what's the total money that we need to get on all the work we do in this month? So if—let's just pretend—if 100% is par, meaning let's just use real numbers. So let's just pretend you charge 80 bucks an hour. It's just like, "Okay, the goal is to get $80 an hour on all the projects we do."

Well, one way to do that is just charge everybody $80 an hour for all the projects you do in this month. That works. Nothing wrong with that. Or you could charge $85 an hour as your normal price. And then some customers, you might even be able to charge $75 an hour. All things being equal, if I sell a $100 project at $85 and a $100 project at $75, they balance out to that $80 that I need. And that's a simple way, but really that is the math. That's what we're doing as we head into these winter months when we are providing these discounts.

And some people get that—to that example—that $75 an hour price because they booked four or five months ago and they were willing to wait. And that is exactly what we are doing to fill the winter starting in the beginning of August.

Jon Bryant: Yeah. You know, I've heard it said before, I think it works with this—that's that you never want to give without getting. And a lot of times with discounts, I think where you get into trouble is that people offer discounts for no apparent reason. And it really sets off alarm bells in your prospect customer's mind. "How did they just give me a discount for absolutely nothing? That means the price should have been lower."

And what I like about this so much is that it is a give. You help us out and we can help you out. And it makes sense to the customer. It makes sense to the business strategy that we have of keeping our people busy in those very critical months because without that group of people, we have no foundation for the summer. And like you said, in a painting business, especially in the Northern climate. Now I'm not experienced in Florida or California. I imagine there's some seasonality though too. I still hear and see the impacts of that time between Christmas and Thanksgiving—those weeks are just dead for leads.

And then it starts to pick up again in January, but if you don't have anything planned for January, it can feel like your business is gonna die in those times. Because now you're like, "I'm getting nothing. I don't have anything in January." So I really like this approach and it's just what it is—it rewards that forward thinking. A little bit of forward thinking goes a long way because I think the chances of you getting another job in the summer, because you have more leads to fill that space that goes into January is just so much higher than waiting.

Michael Murray: I think—I don't want to leave the discount conversation real quick. I would say real quick that I think everybody's willing to discount. It's just if you get desperate enough, you're going to offer a discount. And it just depends on how long you want to play that staring contest, if you will.

You can wait until January, and you don't have any work for the second half of January. And you've got five painters, 10 painters, 30 painters, whatever that is. If somebody doesn't have some work to do, your choices between laying off somebody who you really want to have on your team versus not, I bet you're willing to offer a discount. And that's part of the thought of we would not have to offer discounts if we were just OK with the fact that we're just going to have fewer painters in Q1.

It's like for the sake of argument, we're going to have—I don't know—25, 30-plus painters probably that time of year. And it's just like, if I was okay with just 20 painters or something, then I wouldn't have to discount. It would be no big deal. But then our revenue would be less and our potential for revenue that next year would be less and all of those things. And there's no right or wrong way to do that just based on our goals and growth and otherwise that serves us pretty well.

Jon Bryant: I think there's one other point though about discounting that we're missing here. And that's that seasonally, and we've talked about this before, and I know it's your belief as well, that seasonally when things are busy, prices should go up. And we need to charge more when demand is higher because we don't have infinite resources here. So just a simple supply and demand curve, and that pushes the price up.

And I think that that's also a good reason why we can discount for the winter as well. Because a lot of people, I know you're listening and you're thinking, "Discounting, just taking all of that profit right off the top. And now I make nothing." There is your reasoning for that—keeping people busy, making sure you've got that base for next year. All absolutely true. But the thing I think to make clear here is that we're also discounting off our summer rates. And summer rates are just a little bit higher.

If you are not raising your rates in summer, I would encourage you to do that. I think when demand is high, we need to price our services appropriately. And we can discount off that knowing that demand is going to be lower. And so we're actually giving you a price for a lower demand season. Any other comments there, Michael?

Michael Murray: 100%. Yeah, I agree 100%. I think the thing—it just goes back to how macro versus micro overview. If the thing is "I cannot lose money on any one project or I could never break even on one project," then you're going to have a hard time discounting. If you see it from that monthly perspective, that example I gave a few minutes ago of that $80 an hour, 75 versus 85, then you're like, "Okay, yeah, I guess maybe I could get on board with there's some discounts within the month."

And then if you zoom out again and you're like, "Wow, let's take that same concept over an annual plan." That's the point you just made, which is at certain times of the year, I'm at 85—just to use that example. And at other times of the year, I'm at 75 and it all comes out in the wash at 80 because I know my numbers really well and I budget really well. I use the spreadsheets and all the things.

Then you can really start to understand this concept and you can take it even to another level, which is starting to get a lot more complicated—now what about over a multi-year period where I'm trying to develop people into roles for leadership and otherwise over a couple-year plan. And it's like, "Yeah, I'm willing to break even or lose money on a few projects in January or February to keep what might be two or three years from now the field manager busy. Because if I don't, they're going to leave."

But at the very least, you should be able to understand it from a monthly or annual perspective.

Jon Bryant: It's a long-term vision, long-term view of what you're doing, which yeah, it definitely makes sense.

Jon Bryant: Can we move on from the discounting?

Michael Murray: Move on from the discounting. Yep. Because there's specific other things that are very important to this.

Jon Bryant: Yes. So one of the things you mentioned is that you don't market this. And we've heard of other great ideas, I think, like Christmas in July, other ways of positioning this such that you are putting in the customer's mind, "You can wait, contact us now and wait till six months from now to get this done." And you mentioned you don't really do that. Is there a particular reason or what are you thinking there?

Michael Murray: No, I mean I think the main reason is because I think I believe that somebody who's calling us in August for a painting quote isn't thinking about the painting that they want done in January and February. They're—most people don't plan like that. They're thinking about over the weekend, they thought or their spouse thought or whatever "The walls in here looked dingy. We should make them not look dingy. I wish I could wave my magic wand and snap my fingers and just fix this, but I can't. I hope Amazon can deliver it tomorrow, but I can't. So I'm going to call the painting company and I hope they can come out here in a week or two."

It's like most people aren't thinking six months ahead. And so, but now we get to—so really what it is is just I don't think it's going to work all that well. I think I'm going get the same number of leads with a different marketing message where there's maybe a different pain point that I want to focus on. And so then instead of—I don't think it's going to draw the leads in. I do think I can draw the sales in once I have the lead with that sales rep having that conversation I just described. It really just comes down to marketing versus sales.

Jon Bryant: You know, one thing I think is difficult with it and having been thinking about this for a while in terms of the marketing side is that customers don't—so you're absolutely right. Customers aren't thinking about the project six months from now they're gonna do. They want it kind of done yesterday. And marketing something like that, I think brings up an idea that people just haven't really thought of before.

And so now not only are you dealing with the need, but you're also trying to explain how to fulfill the need. And sometimes I think that's conflicting messages. And so you have to be really careful on how you advertise it to make sure that the person understands what's going on. Or else they see it and they're just like, "Christmas in July. Okay, what does that mean? Okay, if I wait, how many painting projects I gotta get done in the next year?"

There's a lot of steps to it. Whereas I think what you're talking about, it's like, "You already have the need, just give me the options." With that, I guess, would you try to advertise more during the summer months or less?

Michael Murray: Yeah, so that's really—that was a huge part. Going back to business owners, we crank up marketing starting in August. So when we talk about summer to your question, that's maybe misleading to us. August is winter marketing. So we are not necessarily in August—we're generally not advertising for anything exterior.

I think we're going to do a different episode on that because we're still going to be busy on exterior. I don't even need to advertise. We're probably close to booked up for the exterior season at that point. Hopefully not already, but certainly start to think about it. And so I'm less concerned with driving exterior demand because there's just a big natural exterior demand with back to school, end of the season. There's this big sense of urgency. I don't really need to create anything.

We spend a lot of money starting in August advertising for interior and cabinet painting leads. And so we get a lot of them and that gives our sales team a lot of opportunities to go have these conversations with people. So we intentionally turn down marketing, I would say May, June, and July to then basically save up that ammo, that dry powder, if you will, of marketing money to go and really push hard in August, September, and October.

We think of all of our winter marketing as August, September, October. And then we still do stuff. There's a baseline of marketing that's happening in November, very minimal stuff in December. The only things we spend money on in December is the stuff that it would be really expensive to have to turn back on. And then as we come out of December, we start to dial things back up a little bit in January and then February much more so, especially with home show season and things like that.

That's a pretty good understanding of how that six to eight months or whatever spend is thought of for the whole year. Is that how you guys think of it? What are your thoughts?

Jon Bryant: I think, man, there's so many theories on this. I've talked to so many people with different ideas on how this works. I've come to realize that it's very hard to generate demand when people don't care. And so you said earlier, which is that around the Christmas season or the holiday season, people aren't really thinking about that type of work. They've got their mind on other things.

And trying to then advertise during a season when they're getting inundated with advertising, whether it's Cyber Monday or Black Friday or all this stuff, to compete with that as a trades business is really hard. So I think—

Michael Murray: It's also expensive.

Jon Bryant: Very expensive that time of year. So my conclusion has been just try to capture as much as you can when demand's high. And I think this strategy you're talking about is super helpful for capturing that demand and giving someone a price sensitive option for moving to the time when demand's lower. So I think I'm on board with what you're saying. It feels weird.

One, because you're like, "I'm going to try to get more leads in this season when we're drowning in leads." But really this is when the hard work pays off. This is when the hard work gives you that chance to win in the winter. And it's a little counterintuitive, but I'm on board. I'm sold on that concept.

Michael Murray: Woo! I convinced one person I'm not crazy.

Jon Bryant: Yay. One person and maybe your mom is listening.

Michael Murray: Even if she thinks I'm crazy, she would never tell me. Or she probably would. Yeah, no, that's it. In a nutshell, there's a lot of demand in August, and I want more of it. And our sales team better be way busy and really selling stuff for winter. That's the goal.

Michael Murray: The other thing though, just going back to sales reps, I think there's some really important conversations to be had about relationship building. You guys do a really good job with this. So this is something that we talk about a lot, and partially maybe because we keep them so busy with too many leads or quotes in August and September.

Where I would also like to have them doing way too many quotes, but also really upping the networking and relationship building and things like that. So that when they get to, let's call it maybe December and January, there might start to become some fruit of those relationships where the realtor is like, "Hey, we've become really good friends over these last six months. I've got a client who needs something painted. Can you help us out?"

Talk a little bit more about your thoughts on maybe spending intentional time in the summer to create and cultivate relationships with more of a long-term mindset.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. So we came to that conclusion several years ago, which is that people in the winter, they buy off relationship because it's interior work. And I think exterior work, it's easier to trust people who maybe you don't know around your home. But when you have people in your home, it's a little different.

So building these relationships is really hypercritical in order to get referrals, which when you get a referral, it's like an automatic trust signal. "These guys are good. You can trust them." And people feel so much more at ease getting a referral for inside work.

We've asked our—anytime I've done sales coaching, I always say you need to start setting a regular cadence of relationship building. And it can't just be when you need it. This stuff takes time. We're talking about months of effort here. You're planting the seeds now for something that might happen in January. And that can't stop ever. And so you have to build that into your schedule. In my opinion, you have to build it in your schedule because that's where you're gonna get the bigger jobs in the winter, and you're going to be able to do it more consistently and at less of a cost.

And so we encourage the teams, any sales reps I've coached to set a weekly points tracker, looking at your relationships, breaking up what a relationship means into different point reward systems. So if you're doing enough work that week to achieve building relationships. And when you do that, you're gonna see, especially when you do that July, August, September, October, the results hit in January, February, March.

So people are gonna have varying opinions on that. I'd love to hear them, but I don't think that a good expectation for people who are selling painting projects is just wait for the leads. That's not where your best jobs come from. It's not where your highest win rates come from. That's not where the bigger projects come from. So yeah, I'm pretty passionate about that.

Michael Murray: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. So I think the downside of that is in a vacuum, your sales reps might do fewer estimates in a week in the summer, let's just say, than maybe mine would or somebody who's not maybe doing this as well, because your team is basically taking some time. You can maybe give us some more specifics here in let's just say July and August when they're busy—there's not like, "We're slow, let's fill this time with something." But they're basically saying, "I'm only willing to do X number of quotes this week because if I did more than that, that would cut into the time I need to go and be intentional about building some of these relationships." Is that right?

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Yeah. And I've always been a big advocate for less estimates.

Michael Murray: What's the number that you think is the sweet spot for your team? Or how do you guys—give some specifics here.

Jon Bryant: So it's really relevant to how long you've been doing it. If you're a newer rep, you should be out there just getting reps. You should be doing lower value jobs, ones that are maybe less likely to close, but you need to learn the system and how to talk to customers. And so in that period of time, you're like, "Let's just do five—four a day, four or five a day—just crush out those jobs that maybe we don't really want."

But then you start building your network and network building is really that key that we're talking about that unlocks those jobs that just wouldn't come your way from a regular lead line. And once you get to that point, we've seen that 10 to 12 estimates a week seem to be a really good sweet spot. And oftentimes those estimates that you're doing are based off of relationships.

So there's this transition from the start of just taking leads from the company that moves into "I'd like to do my own leads because I'm going to win more." I might—of those 12 estimates, I might get eight. Whereas if I go and do all of those 20, I might also get eight. So if you're winning at that 40, 50% that we see as being top performers are achieving those rates, you can use your time a whole lot more efficiently once you build relationships.

And then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you end up having more time to spend with your customers, build more relationships, get better estimates. And as you do that, we've seen incredible results from people that are doing way fewer estimates, but bigger jobs, higher win rates, built off trust. And I don't think as a business owner, it really matters. In fact, I'd prefer if it was less.

Michael Murray: Less on marketing. You're spending less on marketing.

Jon Bryant: Exactly, less on marketing. Everybody's winning at that point. So that's what we've seen. I don't know. Do you have any perspective on that for a number of estimates?

Michael Murray: I mean we do more than that and it's a chicken-and-the-egg thing. We're good at generating leads. We're not good at generating those relationship referral type things. We get referrals from past customers and we get some from relationships, but not to the same level that you guys do. And so then we're really good at getting more of those flyers and Googles and Facebooks and all the other things, all those leads. And then we're like, "Man, we got so many of these. We better have our sales team go do them."

And now they don't have time to try to do the other things. They don't want to. And it's a little bit of both. I think the biggest thing that stands out to me though, is the self-discipline it takes. Because you don't have to be very self-disciplined as a sales rep if you've got 20 estimates on your calendar. You're going to just be busy. Just go, whatever, four estimates a day, five days a week. You're just going. You just go wherever the calendar tells you to go. And you're going to be just fine. It's almost like high school or whatever. When you're a high school student, you just go to the next class. You're just busy. Really can't get in that much trouble.

And then you get to college and there was all this time. And nobody's really paying that much attention. And if you want, you don't even have to go to class because nobody's really paying attention. And for sales reps, if you said, "Hey, look, you only have one or two estimates on your calendar today. So you can use that other time to go and make some calls and build some relationships and knock on doors and stop by the real estate office with some donuts or whatever."

It takes some discipline because stopping at that real estate office for a lot of people might not be comfortable, especially if you're just kind of getting started with it. And it's probably not going to help you hit your sales goal for this month. It's going to help you hit your sales goal, like we're talking about, maybe in three to six months from now.

And just like it's hard for customers to think, "What's my painting project for three to six months from now," I think it's hard for everybody, sales reps included, to think, "What are the activities I could do today that would make my life easier three to six months from now?"

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. And that's why it has to be built into the system. I think a lot of people I talk to say, "Well, I don't expect that from my reps." And my argument is like, "Well, it's better for everybody. So maybe we should all talk and figure out what we can do here and make it better."

And what we've just figured out is that you have to create this cadence where you have to report on this. It can't be a "Do it if you want to" kind of like that college example of you can choose to do it. Here's all your free time. It's like, I just went and played video games my entire college career. And then I realized I got to get better grades.

So I packed all of my courses into two days, Michael. I don't know if I told you this, but I had this friend that was like, "Here's a secret hack to college. Just put all of your classes on Tuesday, Thursday." And so I did that. And I had an amazing ski life. I was snowboarding all the time and completely forgot about school, 100%. Then you get your grades back. And you're like, "Ooh. Do C's get degrees? I don't know. It doesn't feel great."

So I had to change that program up. I learned that lesson firsthand. And I think that once I actually started going to school on five days a week, my grades just got infinitely better because I didn't forget about it. And so we've had to build that into the sales process for our sales reps is that they have to find a way to do this and it has to be front of mind every week.

And it can't just be a "Did you do this?" "Yeah." It has to be a "Show the plan. What you did every week, give us your performance" because every time we check in, you got to have something and we were measuring this. And what's interesting is that when you do the activity, you get the reward. It's not this crazy thing. We run painting businesses. People need painting. If you just go talk to people and tell them what you do, surprise, surprise, they remember you and they come back. As long as you service them well, that's gonna be great. And so it's incredible to see that activity equals results. We have not been proven wrong in that process.

Michael Murray: Most people suck at internal accountability. They need external accountability. And if you need evidence of that, just go and ask people about their diet and fitness goals and how well they are at doing that. And what I hear you saying is just most people need a personal trainer or a buddy that's going to say, "Hey, you're getting your butt to the gym today and let's go." And that's where your sales coach has to hold people accountable to hitting the activities that they need to be doing. I 100% agree.

And I resonate with your college example. I had a botany class at 8 AM. I think it was three days a week when I was a freshman and it was on the other side of campus and they didn't take attendance. And it wasn't too bad in September, but once we got to December, I didn't go that much and I did not do that well in that class. I think I got a D.

Jon Bryant: Surprise surprise. That's one letter off an F, isn't it?

Michael Murray: I think I did just enough. My grades weren't so great my freshman year. I was like, "This is stupid. Why do I have to take this class?" Oh my goodness.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, we were all learning. They only count the last 20 courses, right? That's what I was told for your GPA.

Michael Murray: I've never once been asked as an adult what my GPA was.

Jon Bryant: Let me ask you now, what was your GPA?

Michael Murray: I don't know, to be honest with you. It was less than a three. I think it might have been like a low three. I just remember it started really bad and I had three and a half years to come back up out of the hole. I think I had less than a two and a half after my first semester. I have some funny stories about how I thought I had the whole system figured out and just kept digging myself a bigger hole. And it was like, "You know what, how about I just study enough to actually get a decent grade and go to class?" It took me three or four semesters to figure that one out. Stop trying to game the system.

Jon Bryant: That's awesome.

Jon Bryant: Cool. Well, let's wrap it up there. Next episode is Jon Bryant and Michael's college lives.

Michael Murray: Yeah. I was running a painting business. I was always the first one to go home at the bar. "I got estimates in the morning. See y'all." Man, kept me out of trouble.

Jon Bryant: Lucky you. Well guys, thanks for tuning in to Price Sell Paint as always. Feel free to give us a like and subscribe if you want, if you enjoy the content. And yeah, just—

Michael Murray: Don't do it.

Jon Bryant: Exactly. Don't do it. So we appreciate doing this. Give us any feedback and yeah, we'll see you next time. Thanks Michael.

‍