PPN Admin | March 26, 2021
Do you want to make more with less? So many of us are willing to do just about anything that has to do with paint. What if I told you that there was a way to make more money in your painting business, without spending any more time? In fact, you might be able to spend less time, and still make more money…without even hiring any additional help.
So many people in our business are insanely busy right now, and my intuition tells me that we are saying yes to a lot of things that we do not need to be saying yes to. The result? We say yes to things we don’t like, we say yes to things that aren’t profitable, and we wind up overwhelmed and inundated. Life is sucked out of us and we don’t have the bandwidth to go after the type of work we enjoy or that will make us more money.
When you’re first starting your business, “no” isn’t a word you use a lot, and that’s okay! Saying “yes” to everything- supplies, types of projects, small profit margins- is a necessary step that you have to take when starting out. And you do this until you’re overwhelmed. Then you can start to establish your “No.”
In order to start saying “No,” you need to figure out two things- what you don’t like to do and what isn’t profitable. Then, you start eliminating anything that falls into those two categories and voila! You have found your focus; you’ve discovered your lane.
If you go to a restaurant and the menu has four meals on it, you can bank on the fact that everything on that menu will likely be delicious. However, if the menu is a novel and has a thousand different items on it, chances are, the food will not be amazing.
We’ve all seen the contracting business that offers everything- “residential, commercial, apartment, new/old construction, no job too big or too small.” When you run your business like that, when you have a novel for a menu, not only will you not be able to specialize in one area, but training a person in all those areas will take forever. If you’re constantly doing something new and teaching a broad set of skills, then you’re constantly learning and training. This is not profitable.
When you focus and train on a very specific skill, it makes the training process that much faster. And your trainees will become incredibly efficient because they’re focusing on that one specific skill, every day, over and over again. The work becomes muscle memory and you are producing at higher rates with better quality. You become more reliable and can produce the same amount at a high level of quality every single time. This consistency produces a happier customer, which leads to referrals, which leads to even more happy customers and so on. This is the snowball effect of specificity.
So you’ve found your lane and you’ve trained your people to drive expertly in that lane. How do you communicate that to your customers and hold that boundary with them? When you decide to say no to a project outside of your lane, explain why. The “why” often will assuage the client, especially when you have a referral for someone trustworthy who will do the job well. You can also design your website to communicate exactly what you offer and what you do not. Tailor your website to reflect what you’re willing to do and allow it to do some prequalification for you. Show the type of houses and products that you are willing to work on and produce. By accurately communicating this through text, pictures, and testimonials, you will also accurately communicate exactly what projects your company will and will not do.
By Finding your NO, you are finding your way to specialization and differentiation. The specialist in healthcare is always going to make more money than the general practitioner. The specialist in contracting is the same. By establishing your lane, you are going to be more efficient, better at what you do and offer, and more profitable in a shorter amount of time.
Painting businesses are often difficult to run and time consuming BUT it doesn’t need to be that way. Specializing your painting brand is just one step to get you to live the life you love. If you are motivated to make more money, grow your business, and spend more time doing the things you love with the people you love, then join Roadmap To Profit today. Roadmap is a course designed specifically to improve your painting business systems and processes with proven techniques by PPN’s founder Nick May.
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