203. Systems, Subcontractors, and Smart Marketing for First Time Founders

0:00Picture this, you're fresh out of college, covered in paint, running your own business, and somehow pulling in six figures while working just five to 10 hours a week. Most people would stop there, but not Eric. While building a wildly successful painting company, Eric couldn't shake the feeling that he was meant to do something more, something bigger. In 2012, he launched Painting Business Pro, a program that's now helped thousands of painting contractors build businesses that are not just profitable, but purposeful. Fast forward to today, Eric is the co-founder of National Painting Group, runs one of the most respected coaching programs in the trades, and is on a mission to help entrepreneurs create freedom through systems, marketing, value-based leadership.

0:38I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Upfoot Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Today, I'm so excited to welcome Eric to the show to talk about how to start your own painting company, tips that he has learned through the years. So Eric, thank you so, so much for being here. So, so excited to have you. Yeah, same, man. Thanks for having me on. Let's go all the way back to Eric in college, which is always just a fun time to go back to. But how did you first get into painting and what made you stick with it after graduation? 2004, I got recruited for an internship with College Works Painting.

1:05So I ran my own painting branch over the spring and summer and knocked doors, sold paint jobs, hired painters, managed the job sites, made a profit. And then the next five years, I coached and mentored other college students. So I do the recruiting in the fall, and then I would train and run the teams and mentor kids in the spring and through the summer. And I did that for five years. I was a district manager, general manager, and then I was a co VP. And I launched a new business model with the company my last year in college. So did the six year plan, got a degree in economics and business and worked my tail off while I was in college.

1:34Yeah, well, let's talk about starting your own company then. I mean, how did you like want to venture off of this? Tell us about like that story as well. Kind of lay the foundation because we're going to really dive in to actionable advice for listeners here. Yeah, basically I got out of school and I didn't want to get a real job and I knew how to run a painting business really well. So I launched a painting business so I could make 50 to 70 ,000 bucks a year super on the side while I pursued other things. And so from 2010, 11, 12, and even in 13, I was pretty much avoiding the painting business, but it was just doubling every year.

2:04It was making me all my money. I was spending five to 10 hours a week on it. And it was in 2013 that I just got resolved. Like, why am I chasing shiny objects and other businesses? I have a huge opportunity here. Painting industry is huge. The competition is not great. Nobody wants to be in this industry, including me. I saw people who were doing really well flooding out of it and just decided to really lean into scaling, you know, my painting company and just being in this industry. Eric, I got to ask, I mean, you graduated with an economics degree. and you're like painting, like why? I know you wanted to avoid it, but like, how did you always come back to paint?

2:35Because obviously if you have an economics, you could be going on Wall Street. You'd be doing kind of whatever you want with an economics degree. I mean, talk to us about that. Really, it was all sort of by accident. You know, I literally started the business with no plans and then it doubled, doubled, doubled. And, you know, by 2013, I was working five or 10 hours a week, making 110 ,000 bucks a year, traveling 75 days a year, golfing almost every day of the week. Like I had a really good lifestyle. So I just decided to like, you know, lean into it more. And then it grew and then it grew. and then it grew.

3:01And the more we've just been in it, the bigger opportunities we keep seeing. We're like, hey, maybe we could do that. Let's go do that. And we do it. And then we're like, maybe we could do that. Maybe we could do that. And it's just like the vision has expanded and grown so much over the years that in a lot of ways it was accidental. I also found along the way, starting some other companies that like business always kind of turns into the same thing. You're building a product or service and trying to make that really, really good for customers. If you're building a big company, you're always going to end up building teams and leading people.

3:28it doesn't matter the business you're in, really. Business ends up being like solving problems, leading people, developing culture, developing leaders. And I just decided to stick with doing that in this industry that I already had a lot of background in. Nice. I love that. That's a really nice breakdown of that philosophy right there. So let's talk about starting that business then. Talk to us about how you land in your first customers and what you know now. What would you advise people if they're starting a painting business on how to land their first few customers? Basically, from 2010 until 2020, we generated all of our customers from two forms of marketing.

4:01And that was door-to-door marketing. And then it was all the organic stuff, SEO referrals, you know, repeat customers, that kind of thing. That was like the whole marketing mix until we were doing five and a half, $6 million a year. COVID kind of blew that up with door-to-door. And that's when we pivoted away from it and started doing things differently. But in the very early days, it was, I actually started very fast with just two employees. So by my second year in business, I just had Ben and he was accountable for generating his own leads with door to door and selling the jobs. And then Paul, who was accountable for recruiting, hiring the subcontractors and managing the projects.

4:37So I would meet with Ben first on Monday mornings. He would hand me all his book jobs because we had paper contracts back then. And then I would meet with Paul and I would hand those contracts to Paul to produce the jobs. And that was like my two hours a week of meetings. and then the rest of the week was like feeling a couple calls from those guys and that was my business when we did you know 400 ,000 in sales and then the next year we had another sales rep Ben was in college he had another buddy who was like hey you're making great money that seems like a good gig can I do it too and it literally started as like just giving a good job to college students and now we run it like as a real professional real business these days but that's how it started yeah let's talk about door knocking I love like the concept of door knocking especially if like you're getting your first customer.

5:16So talk to me, what's like the three things someone needs to get right if you want to role play it as well. But like if someone's going up to a door, I mean, what do they need to say? How many times they need to knock? I'm just kidding there. But when you are doing door to door sales, get the lead. You could get really deep on this, right? Like you can get really, really good at door to door. But what we did and what worked for us and still works for like hundreds of clients that I coach is knock, knock, knock, you open the door and I hand you a flyer and say, Hey, how's it going? And I wait for you to respond and you grab the flyer and say, I'm Eric.

5:43I'm with Foothills Painting. I just noticed you had some peeling paint up here on the window. So I just want to put you down for a free estimate. And I look at my page at the same time, put my pen to the paper. And then I look back at you like anytime now, you know, what's your name? And you know, the most common response I would get would be, uh, okay. And I would say, great, what's your name and number? And then we talk for a little bit and find out they actually are thinking about painting. They know that there's issues and I call them later and set up the estimate. And so that's all we would do.

6:06It was like super, super simple. If you're doing a good job of that pitch, it's not about objection handling or anything because those aren't the good leads anyway. And we would find that, you know, every 40 doors you knock on, you get a lead and somewhere between 35 and 70 % turn into an estimate depending on the effectiveness of the person knocking doors. So from there, it was literally just a numbers game until, you know, one of our companies in 2020, we would generate about 40 estimates every week with seven college kids just knocking on, you know, a few thousand doors every week. And that's where it started to be burning through territory where we were just starting to invest in like getting way better at door to door.

6:43But that's when COVID happened. And we pivoted away from door to door. I've never done door to door, but I respect the heck out of anyone that can do it. I feel like it is like one of the best ways to get concrete sales skills there. So we covered the sales side there. Let's go into like the subcontractor work and how do you actually fulfill these jobs? What did that model look like then? And like, what model would you advise people to actually fulfill these jobs from what you know now? The first thing to understand is that in business, we use the painting business as the example, you're hiring people to paint the house.

7:10And so a lot of people have a misconception about subcontracting thinking like I'm just selling the job to like the lowest bidder on Craigslist or something like that. And that's really not the case. There are a lot of really terrible employees out there. And there's some really great employees out there. There's a lot of really terrible subcontractors out there. And there's some amazing subcontractors out there. And the really beautiful thing about subcontracting, there's like several benefits. But one of them is these are people super committed to the trade. They literally own a business. They own equipment.

7:34Often they have employees like they've been doing a long time. They care about their work. I can hire one subcontractor and get five painters. I don't have to train them because fundamentally like they have to deliver on the promises to my customers to get paid. And so I don't need to train because the quality is already baked into the incentives. It's also a seasonal business. A lot of trades are. So in December, we might have like 15 or 20 painters working on jobs, but in the summer, we've got 150. So it's really easy for us to scale up and then scale back. We don't have that obligation to provide consistent work.

8:01It's also just like a ton of work to staff. You have to buy equipment. You've got to provide vehicles. You've got to deal with a lot more liability issues. You've got to deal with a lot more training and staffing. And it's just so much more work to use employees. You also have a harder time guaranteeing your margins with employees because oftentimes it's hourly or things change with subcontracting. It's like, I'm going to pay you three grand for this job. You buy the materials and my margins are fixed. And it creates this really beautiful partnership where we have subcontractors that have worked with us for a decade now.

8:29And we're like their primary go to source for business. And a lot of these guys make really great money. They run a great business. They don't want to do marketing sales. They don't want to scale a business like that. They want to manage their guys, run job sites, produce jobs, and they're really, really good at it. And there's a ton of them out there. So it's a really efficient way. And especially for people starting up, it's like such a great way to take pressure off of you as an early business owner. Because if you only sell one job in the first month, that's fine. Like you don't need to make sure you have work for people every single week and you don't need to deal with turnover and you don't need to deal with like scheduling as much.

8:58It's really, really effective. That's what I coach most people to do. It's a really useful model. Most people spend months, sometimes years, just thinking about starting a business. But what if you could do it in just 10 days? That's exactly what the 10 day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step by step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. Yeah. So with that, then, I mean, some people might be thinking, Eric, I got a C plus in painting and art class when I was in fifth grade.

9:29Like, do I actually need to know how to paint or can I like truly just subcontract this out in my roles only get leads then? Yeah, so I'm an awful painter. I painted two houses in my entire life from start to finish. And, you know, I remember probably a decade ago, like we put a new shelf in our garage. It was like 10 feet long, three feet wide. And I was like, I'll probably paint it. It's tiny. And I think I made it three feet before I just like set the brush down and called one of my painters to come over and do it. Like I get paint all over myself. I make a mess. I'm slow. I suck. I am not good at painting.

9:58There are a lot of really amazing painters out there. And if you're going to build a big company, like you're never the one that's going to be doing the work, like no big business has the founder doing like the entry level work. You always find great people to do that. And then that's the same case when you're hiring salespeople and project managers and office staff, like you're always going to find and hire people who are better than you at that particular role. And then you're going to level yourself up. So I think it's no different. And I work with a lot of people who do the painting themselves currently, and then they're like trying to grow their business.

10:24And the very first thing we do is like, get them to stop painting. When you're doing the painting yourself, you're paying yourself what you could pay someone else to do it. And you can pay someone else to do it, you know, 25, 30 bucks an hour, your time is way more valuable doing the marketing, sales, project management, actually building the business. So it's really, really difficult to get past 60 to$80 ,000 a year in income if you're actually slinging the brush. Yeah, listeners, take note of that. What I just like love about the service business, and you talked about it really nicely there, Eric is like, we had someone that he runs a pooper scooper business, they do like literally like a million dollars in revenue a year from just scooping dog poop.

10:57The magic in that is like he's never scooped dog poop. Like he just hires it all out. He just knows how to get the customers and knows how to get them in. And true to this model as you're talking about, I mean, it's similar to what you could do for this, just subcontract it all out then. So my next, of course, question of that is like, okay, Eric, I hear you. Yeah, subcontract it all out. But like, where the heck, like, where do I find these people at? Is it a Facebook group? Is it Craigslist? I mean, where are you getting like good subcontractors at then? So for our company, we've literally never had to look past Craigslist.

11:22We post in the general labor section and the skilled trade section. And when we need to find subcontractors, we post twice a day in each section. So we're posting like four times a day, we're paying for it. And in two weeks, you will literally get like dozens or hundreds of responses. And then you're super selective, just like you should be for any other role. I also have clients who have success posting on Facebook marketplace. I've had clients have a lot of success actually running Facebook ads. And then the other big one is literally like, you see an unmarked white van at the paint store, and you just ask them, Hey, are you a subcontractor?

11:49Would you be looking for work from anybody else. And so you can go and like sit there with a bucket of coffee all morning on any day of the week and just talk to the unmarked white bands. Those are your subcontractors. Let's move to marketing, which is kind of a subcategory of sales and whatnot. You've helped hundreds of painters grow past$1 million in revenue. Like people will be like, yes, absolutely. Marketing channels. What are the best marketing channels to consistently get customers now? Talk to us about that. Yeah. So it depends on the phases that you're at. So I talk about the business, like there's phase zero where all you're trying to do is get to consistency and stability where you're making$100 ,000 a year, you're doing it in 35 to 40 hours a week, and you have some space to breathe.

12:24Then you get into phase one where you're building the foundation of the business and getting all your core functions really dialed in and playbooks written so that you have the foundation to move into phase two, which is hiring your team, sales reps, project managers, office managers. And those are the three phases of business and your marketing mix should change at each stage. In phase zero, when you're just starting out, you want to do the things that are pretty like guaranteed, pretty manual. And it's kind of like just hustle door door-to-door marketing, putting lawn signs on corners on Friday afternoons near Costco's and Whole Foods and grocery stores and neighborhoods you want to target.

12:54They don't get taken down over the weekend because city workers aren't working on the weekend. So it's door-to-door, dropping lawn signs, dropping flyers, and then lead services can be used as well. Things like Angie and things like that. Don't love those, but they do work because you get to trade money for a lead. And then also Facebook ads, if you run them yourself, you should not hire agencies. You should not invest in long-term things like branding, vehicle wraps, SEO, website stuff, because that takes too long to turn over. So you want to put all of your effort and time and money into the things that get leaked quickly.

13:27That's phase zero. Once you move into phase one and you have positive cash flow, you should start to transition away from the manual stuff and into paid stuff like SEO and Facebook ads. And then when you get into phase two, you know, my benchmark is you need about 30 estimates a week to do 3 million a year. You can get that on just a couple channels. That That should literally be like your organic, your referral, your repeat, and maybe Facebook ads or continuing to do lawn signs. You can generate a million dollars in business from any of the things that I just mentioned. So it's not really about the channel.

13:58It's about how effectively you make the channel work. That is really good. I love like the different phases right there and like breaking that out. I mean, realistically here, how soon or what's the average someone gets to like a million dollars in revenue year? Obviously, there's so many variables in it. But like the people that you have coached, I mean, paint us a picture of like what success could look like to get to a million a year. Yeah, I have a number of people who've gotten to a million run rate in six to nine months where they're doing a hundred thousand a month netting twenty five, thirty thousand dollars a month.

14:25And they're getting there in like nine months. And then, of course, all the way to people who like never make it because they don't apply and all that stuff. But, you know, if you really apply yourself, you can go fast. I have run into lately because we've gotten really good at what we do. We have been running into lately people who are actually growing too fast and they're generating, you know, I've got a guy who got to 100 ,000 a month by his fifth month in business, and he broke himself. I'm like, did you actually need to scale back a little because you're too busy right now to actually build some of the things that we need you to help you build.

14:52And so ramp it back a little, we need to get a foundation in place, because you're actually at a point you need to hire, but you're too busy to do the hiring, you're too busy to clean up some of these systems. So you actually got to pull it back a little bit. So there's just that balance where you actually can go too fast. Yeah, people can make moves really quickly. There was another guy that came from corporate America. You know, he worked at Mars candy bar, you know, that company for like 15 years. He started his company in January, 2023, almost quit by March. I started working with him. And by March, the following year, he was doing 150 ,000 a month with a team in place, making 40K a month in net profit.

15:24So that's like some of the really killer success stories. Got a bunch of those. And then, you know, quite a few people have gotten up over 3 million a year and a couple over 10. I mean, what makes like a successful story? Is it, are they in the right market? Is it like they're truly just like applying it? Again, there's so many variables that go into it here, but like what makes successful stories? Is it just applying it? The markets, good timing. I don't know. Like what makes a successful story? For like the people I work with, it's mostly like how aggressively they implement the systems that we're providing them, how well they follow what we're telling them to do.

15:55So it's not really market. I had a guy, Kyle, who was in Wheeling, West Virginia, 27 ,000 population who did 2 million in the second year. So it's not really market. The market is absolutely huge. I got another client in Grand Junction. His name is Daniel Thayer. And he went from 1.7 million to 4 million in one year, 75 ,000 population. So it's not really population because the market is absolutely huge. And people underestimate how big the market actually is. It's not age. Sebastian, I mentioned earlier, he's in his 20s. I've got a 20-year-old kid who's run rate a million bucks already. And he's a year in.

16:25And Michael was in his late 40s coming out of corporate America. So it's not really age. It's not really market. It's mostly how well you can just apply the stuff that already works and just like do the work that needs to be done, which, you know, seems really simple, but it's not simple. Like a lot of people don't do that. Most people don't do that, which I think actually is why there's such a huge opportunity and advantage in not just painting, but in the home services in general is it's not a very high bar. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I love about services industries. Like really the barrier to entry is so low.

16:55I mean, you can subcontract this out. There's other industries where you need 500 bucks to actually do the work. Like, and then a lot of it just comes down to hustle. For you, I mean, it's truly, going back to like those different phases there, is phase like zero through 100K, is that truly like knit and grit hustle and everything after that is starting to apply? But like zero to 100K, you said the lawn signs at Costco, which I absolutely love, but like what else happens within that very first phase? I want to talk to listeners that are like, okay, I'm really interested in doing this, but I am at phase zero with$0 in revenue.

17:25Like how do I get to 100K? Yeah, so Sebastian, he started December 27th. He did 127K by April in one month. That's crazy. And then, you know, Zach, who just moved into our other program, he started eight weeks ago. His first eight weeks, he did 86 ,000 in sales. So he was already at a$500 ,000 run rate, like from day one, basically. In that stage, there's just four things. Like you only need to get four things right. You need to generate leads and estimates with the things that I mentioned, like super basic marketing, just dis hustle, nothing crazy. You need to be able to have a basic sales process in place so that you can actually win the bids.

17:57you have a proper estimating system in place to price yourself properly so you're not undercharging and your sales process makes sure that you're winning jobs at the right prices and you're not using your price to win jobs. And then the fourth thing is you got to learn how to recruit and manage one or two really good subcontractors. Once you get those four things down, it's like, I need to do six estimates a week. I need to close three of them for$15 ,000 a week. And I need one or two subcontractors who can handle that 15K. And I need a rhythm in place to manage that. And we don't need CRMs. We don't need website.

18:25We don't need SEO. We don't need to complicate it. And the people who move the fastest are the ones that don't complicate it. So like in our coaching program, we've actually stripped it down. We don't even give them anything that could be a shiny object. It's like, it's so bare bones. So it's like, just do this stuff. It's heavy execution on very few things, because that's all you need to get to a half a million a year, you know? And from there, it's like, okay, now you're making really good money. You're doing it on a good schedule. Now we can start to tighten things up with your business plan, your numbers, your CRM, improve all of those systems better and stage yourself to start hiring your team.

18:56What goes into a sales process is like how you price and like showing pricing to a customer. There's so much psychology that goes in pricing. Right. My own company, I know pricing is like one of the hardest things to get right. You don't have to give us all the trade secrets here, but like, how would you advise clients to like prices and like present pricing to someone that you're doing door to door? I want to stick with that zero to a hundred K phase. The way I look at it, man, is you should price exactly how you're going to need to price at 3 million a year because a$3 million company is pricing that and you have an edge on that company because you're the owner that they get to work with.

19:27Like you actually have a benefit that you can sell. So you should be pricing that well from day one so that you're making really good margins from day one. And how you present the price is that's just the last thing you do in the process. It's everything you do before then. So presenting a price is as simple as here's the contract. Here's your information. Here's my information. Here's all the things we're painting. Here's the prep work that we're doing. Here's the materials we're using. Here's some of the notes we talked about with your dog and with your plants and with your new garden over there.