Unlock the financial strategies that will transform your painting business from struggling canvas to masterpiece of profitability! This episode, with the sage guidance of business coach Linnea Blair from Advisors on Target, reveals the essential financial planning techniques for expanding your team and scaling your business effectively. Discover how to allocate funds for new hires, like administrative support or production managers, and learn the finer points of compensation planning that account for regional cost differences.
From salary nuances to strategic budgeting, we cover the gamut of financial wisdom that will help you paint a path to success. We dissect compensation strategies for critical roles such as office managers and salespeople and explore how to manage the balance sheet so it reflects the true colors of your business vision. Linnea provides actionable advice on budgeting that's far from intimidating, making it an accessible tool that can lead to a more rewarding business management experience.
Finally, we brush up on the expert tactics for maintaining a robust cash flow and securing lines of credit to support your business's peak season needs. Understanding the pivotal role of an effective collections process can make all the difference in keeping your company's finances fluid. With Linnea's insights, you'll be equipped with the knowledge to make informed decisions that ensure your painting business not only stays afloat but soars to new heights of fiscal health and operational efficiency.
Unlock the financial strategies that will transform your painting business from struggling canvas to masterpiece of profitability! This episode, with the sage guidance of business coach Linnea Blair from Advisors on Target, reveals the essential financial planning techniques for expanding your team and scaling your business effectively. Discover how to allocate funds for new hires, like administrative support or production managers, and learn the finer points of compensation planning that account for regional cost differences.
From salary nuances to strategic budgeting, we cover the gamut of financial wisdom that will help you paint a path to success. We dissect compensation strategies for critical roles such as office managers and salespeople and explore how to manage the balance sheet so it reflects the true colors of your business vision. Linnea provides actionable advice on budgeting that's far from intimidating, making it an accessible tool that can lead to a more rewarding business management experience.
Finally, we brush up on the expert tactics for maintaining a robust cash flow and securing lines of credit to support your business's peak season needs. Understanding the pivotal role of an effective collections process can make all the difference in keeping your company's finances fluid. With Linnea's insights, you'll be equipped with the knowledge to make informed decisions that ensure your painting business not only stays afloat but soars to new heights of fiscal health and operational efficiency.
Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast. The mission of this podcast is simple to help you navigate the financial and tax aspects of starting, running and scaling a professional painting business, from the brushes and ladders to the spreadsheets and balance sheets. We've got you covered. But before we dive in, a quick word of caution While we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date financial and tax information, nothing you hear on this podcast should be considered as financial advice specifically for you or your business. We're here to share general knowledge and experiences, not to replace the tailored advice you get from a professional financial advisor or tax consultant.
Speaker 2:We strongly recommend you seeking individualized advice before making any significant financial decision. This is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm here with Linnea Blair, the founder of Advisors on Target Business Coaching. Linnea Blair has worked with hundreds of residential and commercial painting contractors to help them develop more successful businesses. Her specific expertise is in helping business owners grow their revenue and grow their profits by understanding the financial management of their business and running their business by the numbers. How's it going today?
Speaker 3:Linnea it's going great, Daniel. Thanks so much for having me today. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'm looking forward to it as well. I'm excited to dig into topics, especially knowing your numbers and what they mean. To dig into topics, especially knowing your numbers and what they mean, with your extensive experience in coaching both residential and commercial painting contractors, what are some common financial challenges you see among the clients that you work with?
Speaker 3:Oh, so common financial challenges. I think it's often if people are undercapitalized when they're trying to grow. That's sometimes an issue. But I think in general, maybe some of the biggest challenges that people have are knowing when they can afford a person another hire to come on in their business and what that would take. And they often, as you know, need to hire more overhead people in order to scale their business and grow. And that's often a place where I see people struggling a bit to know do I have enough money at this point or do I have enough revenue coming in that I can really afford to hire that office manager, that salesperson or that production manager? And that's where my passion for budgeting and profit planning comes in. I definitely help people figure that out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big one, Knowing when to hire someone I know I see it a lot with. Especially, it seems like the first big one and maybe you have a different view. It seems to be somewhere like around $750 to $1.2 million when they want to hire a production manager or a salesperson and bring some, because usually they're doing sales and production themselves and they want to bring in somebody to help them either do the sales or the production management and hand that off and that's like kind of the first big hire. But then it. You know, obviously it doesn't stop there. As you grow you'll need to hire more folks. But what have you seen Like? What are some things, practical steps like folks can do to understand that problem of when is the right time or can I afford this?
Speaker 3:Well, I think, a couple of different aspects to that. I think when you're starting to feel pain in your business because you can't do it all and you need somebody to do some of the tasks for you, and I think some of that I see probably more often the very first hire to be an office manager as far as overhead person or somebody on the on the admin type of role, and that often happens, I think, because that person can handle some of the things in the office and the phones and invoicing and some of those types of things, so the owner can be out there estimating and doing the field production in the smaller phase of the business. If they have an office manager already, I think once they hit somewhere over a million is when they start looking to hire that next position. And I think, as far as deciding which position to hire, I often tell people that you should think about where you can have the best results in the business, what you'd like to do the most, what gets you results and what you're good at. So if you're better at sales than you are at production management or you enjoy sales more than you enjoy production management, then looking to hire that other one, the other position from that would be the next step, and I think in its various points that I see people doing this. I think sometimes it's around a million, 1.2 million where they're hiring somebody other than an office manager. Sometimes, though, it's close to I've seen people get close to 2 million before they do that, and usually they're working very, very hard in their business to make it happen, even if they're effective.
Speaker 3:But what I found in helping people plan for that hire is, I tell people often let's put it in your budget. If you're thinking about hiring the salesperson, let's put it in your budget now and let's see how it pencils out. Does it work? Does it look like it's going to work with the plans that you have for adding another crew or whatever? Does it work financially? And I've had people sometimes put things like that in their budget a whole year before they actually make the hire, and we'll get to the end of the year and I'll say see, you actually could have hired that person. You still have the profits in your business even with that role subtracted out. But sometimes people just need that comfort to know that, yes, it looks like we can do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's several things I want to go, so I think the first one I'll take is you mentioned, when you get to, that you're around a million and you're trying to hire either a production manager or salesperson, and you're not sure which one, and you basically said whichever one gives you the best results, and I think folks and myself included falling into this is in your business. You feel like you're oh, I'm the, I'm the best at everything kind of feeling like.
Speaker 3:I don't want to let go of that, because I'm the best at that, um, but that's obviously not the case.
Speaker 2:There's many, you know, people that will be better at at certain things than you will be better at, and and you probably do have a certain strength like either sales or operations, production management, and so whatever you like doing or whatever you're best at is probably what you should keep at that point and try to get somebody who's better at it than you for the other piece.
Speaker 2:So I think that's really good advice there. And I also like the idea of before you're hiring that key role let's just say a salesperson you go ahead and budget it in now and then see how that plays out over a few months and see if you're still profitable after paying that ghost salesperson on the books for a while and then just kind of getting used to the idea of making sure there's room for them. So I like that idea. Have you seen any good, I guess, for these key positions whether it's the office manager or the production manager or the salesperson any good rules of thumb for how much you should be paying those roles or compensation packages that would make sense for for any one of those roles? Pick, pick your favorite, I guess yeah, um, well, I guess.
Speaker 3:Um, it sort of depends on what part of the country you're in, for one thing, because there are, I think there's regional differences for what might be a good living wage for somebody in one place versus another. I happen to live in San Diego, so it's pretty expensive out here, and I would say people are often, though probably starting a position in like an office manager for example, maybe depending on the experience of the person you know, somewhere in the 50 to 70 range that is probably for a salary is probably where I would see that 50,000 to 70,000 roughly, and obviously different in different parts of the country and in some places be more, some places be less. You might have a part-time person with less experience and you might be able to hire them a lower wage Production managers I want to say $55,000 to $65,000 range as a full-time role and salespeople. I think often people pay their salespeople all different ways, as I'm sure you've seen as well, and I think the most common way I see it is that people will give a base salary plus a commission, so they have the commission sort of built in to incentivize them to hit their sales goal.
Speaker 3:I do know people that just pay a straight salary for their salespeople. That's a little more unusual and I see very little outside sales commission only. So I think you're also aiming at I think for a salesperson I like to think of, for the business owner, that you're not paying any more than about 10% of their sales in their total compensation. But you also have to look at what's going to make sense for you and for them. So it has to be something that attracts them as well as affordable for you. So that's some of the thoughts I have on that. I don't know what your experience is on that. Does that kind of dovetail?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, especially for the sales, like 10% or less of if they're just, if they're just closing, you know going and closing and they're not getting their own leads. I think there's some painting businesses where they might incorporate, like a door knocking or canvassing, you know going, and actually getting their own leads, you know, and that, and that might provide some more room to get above 10%, maybe closer to 12% to 15%. But yeah, if they're just doing the sales, just going to estimates and basically working with the leads that they're given, yeah, usually, from what I've seen, it's somewhere around 7% to 10%. Usually seen is somewhere around um seven to ten percent usually. But yeah, um and uh for the production manager. That's because that's another um key role, I guess you know let's, let's like what do you usually see Cause some people have different definitions for, especially with a production manager and what the officer manager is doing, and you know everybody has a little bit different spin on what the production manager is doing versus the office manager, like for scheduling or for getting colors from the clients.
Speaker 2:Have you seen any good separation between those duties where there's a good delineation or good balance between office manager and production manager?
Speaker 3:I think it's somewhat dependent, I think, on what works for the company and if they've already got a person that's working well with the scheduling in the office maybe the production manager doesn't do that maybe a lower priced person who is mostly just going out there and making sure that the teams and crews on the jobs are producing a good result, meeting with the customer before and after the job and generally making sure that things are coming in on hours. So I do see that role sometimes scheduling and sometimes being on the office manager side and I think again, it sort of depends on the skill sets in your company and what makes the most sense to buy that path. So one of those things where I don't think there's one definitive answer, like many things, Right, many different flavors and all flavors work.
Speaker 2:So let's take a look at budgeting. Let's talk about budgeting. Can you kind of just go through, because when I think people hear budgeting, their eyes kind of glaze over, or can you go through what it is?
Speaker 1:in a short.
Speaker 2:I think everyone has a general understanding, but then why should we be doing it?
Speaker 3:Right. So I like to call it profit plan instead of budget, because that's what you're really trying to accomplish and so many people do have kind of the eyes glazing over, as you said, a negative connotation to budgeting, like it's something limiting, limiting my ability to spend money. But I see it as a growth tool and I take a very mathematical approach to budgeting, not surprisingly because I'm a numbers person. But so many people in the paying world do charge by the hour, so helping to, if you're thinking about certain revenue numbers, how many people is it going to take in the field to produce that at the price that I charge and the wage that I'm going to be paying for these people? And I think that's the building block of getting to your revenue number. So if you say you know I want to do a million dollars this year and let's say you did 750 last year, how am I going to get there? How many more people am I going to need? How many more billable hours am I going to need to get there? And start to break that out month by month, and which also helps you figure out your hiring too, because you'll see how many more people, when do you need to hire these people to hit these, these budget numbers, which has to go hand in hand with sales too, so the sales have to be there. So I think it's a balancing act between hiring and marketing to get the right people in place. And I like to look at it definitely as the whole year, but also broken down month by month. We going to hire the next set of crews? Are we going to hire in March, april, may? Putting those people into the budget at that point, if you're going to hire a sales or production manager at some point, putting them in when you think you're going to hire them, and all of the other expenses that you think you're going to have.
Speaker 3:I would use for people to use their last year's expenses as a guide if they don't know. So the percentage of materials, the percentage of gas and so forth, and hard costs on insurance premiums and so forth. I would put all those in. And then I suggest people look at the bottom line. Is the bottom line what you want and is it enough to sustain you and your family and provide for additional growth? So you need to look at all those things and kind of keep going back until you arrive at a plan that looks like it's really going to work for you. And then the beauty of having it then is that you can then measure your numbers when people are using bookkeeping for painters and they have their financials. Then they can see am I hitting these numbers I had in my budget? Am I hitting the revenue? Am I hitting the gross profit? Am I hitting the net profit? And if I'm not, what do I do differently?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, I like how basically budgeting is, is planning, is basically what you're saying yes, it is.
Speaker 2:So you know before, and most folks are doing planning for the year around December to February timeframe for the next year, and so it sounds like you're basically sitting down what do we want to hit in the beginning, like what is our sales target going to be? And then, okay. So instead of just saying, like man, I really wish we hit 2 million this year, and then stopping there, it's then taking a few steps forward and be like, okay, we want to hit 2 million. Now what are the actions that we actually have to do? How many hires do we have to make from last year for your expenses to fill in and how much are you paying for insurance or accounting and bookkeeping and all that stuff?
Speaker 2:Filling that in and have a perspective financials, basically your budget and evaluating okay is, once you put in all the hires and supporting the revenue that you your revenue goal of 2 million or whatever it is, then plugging in those expenses, the overhead that costs from last year, plugging in the new hires that you'll need to make, that additional production manager, that additional salesperson that you'll need to support that 2 million in revenue, and then you evaluate okay, with all that in there, what's my bottom line? Is that good or bad? Does that fit well for me? And then you have that as a plan going into the next year and you can do what you budgeted versus what actually happened and do those budget versus actual comparisons to see are things going well or not.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think that's excellent strategy to to see if you're on track. What have you found are some achievable metrics that painting businesses should be striving for on that budget, whether that be a gross profit target or a contribution margin target or a discretionary earnings like take-home pay target for the owner net profit. Earnings like take-home pay target for the owner net profit. Do you have any heuristics or typical things that you see that work well in the painting industry?
Speaker 3:I do, and I've been tracking and benchmarking numbers for my clients for 20 years now, so I definitely have some statistics on that and what I see is the average, which has not changed much over the time, is that the kind of average painting contractor, residential commercial, small commercial maybe that uses primarily employees, or even if they use sub. I do see 45% is the average nationwide for gross profit margin, and so I think people should be striving for at least that. I do have people I work with that are over 50%, which is wonderful, and also it really points to the fact that they're pricing very well and that their crews are producing efficiently and profitably. So that is such a good measure that people need to be looking at and I'm sure you agree with that. It's critical because if you don't have the gross profit margin, then you don't have as much money to cover all of the other expenses. Sorry.
Speaker 2:And sorry to cut you off, could you just define how you just define gross profit, just because everybody has a slightly different definition, they do.
Speaker 3:And I have a definite one myself. So what I count as direct cost cost of goods sold are materials for the job, equipment, rental, subcontractors, employee labor, payroll taxes and workers comp, and those are the primary things that I would consider cost of goods sold and after which you calculate the gross profit, um, after you subtract all those things from your top line revenue. Yeah, so that's, that's my working definition. Thank you for clarifying. And then, as far as go ahead, I know absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, keep keep going um, oh, I was going to talk about, um, owner compensation. So, first of all, I think owners should have a number when they're doing their budgeting. They should have a number like this is what I want to take from this business. This is what I need from this business to sustain my own life and and meet my own personal goals. And I think you had somebody on talking about being S-corp. I think a lot of peeing contractors are S-corp, so they're going to take part of their compensation through W-2 salary and part of their compensation as a draw distribution and so when they're budgeting, I like to have people budget for both of those items so that they know that they're aiming at the number that they need.
Speaker 3:And as far as what you're looking for as a net I guess net operating profit, I like to use a number that I call net operating profit before owner's compensation. I call net operating profit before owner's compensation. So, whatever your net operating profit is, whatever that percentage is plus the percentage that the owner is taking above the line as a W-2 salary, I like to see that number to be 20 to 25% and I think that would definitely be a goal. A lot of people aren't there yet, but that would be a goal for them to be. So I have them look at that percentage as well as net operating profit and that would probably quite often translate to a goal net operating profit of about 15% after the owner's compensation. But people pay themselves so differently, as I'm sure you've seen as well. Some people take a big salary and a small distribution, some people take a small salary and big distribution. There's thoughts about both of those strategies. But when we look at that net operating profit before owner's compensation, that kind of strips out the variability in those kinds of numbers.
Speaker 2:Going back to gross profit, you said the average is somewhere around 45% from what you've seen, and some folks they're heading over 50% and sometimes when I talk to folks they're a bit sometimes I guess that someone's getting gross profit of over 50%. Wow, how is that possible? What's the biggest gross profit have you seen? Because I think some people's beliefs around this topic is like the market's not going to support me getting more than 40% gross profit, like it. I guess I just want to break that idea that you can't have a high, a higher gross profit than 40% or that your local market's not going to support that, cause you know from what I've seen, it's definitely more than feasible to to get a well above, above average gross profit more than feasible to get a well above average gross profit.
Speaker 3:Well, and so it comes down to both pricing and productivity. So one of the biggest variables is pricing, and people often are concerned about raising their prices, because most of the people that you and I work with, I'm sure, feel like we're the highest people in our market, and so it's hard for us to push our price any further. So pricing is one variable, but the other variable is production. So how efficient your teams are and this is where the topic that I'm also passionate about, which is job costing If your gross profit isn't where you want it to be, you absolutely should be doing job costing and looking at what's happening on job, because so many times the teams are not bringing the jobs in at the profit margin that the estimator projected, and so the estimator put in X amount of hours 100 hours on the job and the team took 120 hours to do it. Well, there goes your profit margin, and so if you don't like your profit margin, that's one of the places to look, and I absolutely think you should job cost each and every job. So that's something that I think is really important. I do realize, too, that it's sometimes more difficult if you have subcontractors versus employees on the jobs, because you're usually bidding a percentage of the job for the subcontractor, a percentage of profit for yourself, and I like to suggest to people that they should try as hard as they can to get at least 40% gross profit margin when they're if they're using a lot of subs.
Speaker 3:I do see people using subs and getting 45 or better sometimes, but I think that that's kind of a baseline that people can feel more comfortable with, and I know there's some. In some cases people are in markets where it's difficult to to make those kinds of, I guess, arrangements with their sub that they can get that much. But I would definitely strive for that. And and that also comes down to planning, because if you're subbing out a job, you should absolutely know what profit margin you're going to get on that job before the person steps onto the job, because you've already made an agreement with them and you shouldn't have a situation where the sub is coming back and asking you for more money. You should be able to plan that and know that this is the profit margin you're aiming for before you even start the job. So I think people sometimes miss that. They don't really fully plan for profit in that phase, her profits in that phase.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned when your gross profit is below where you want it to be. There's maybe two different issues. There might be a pricing issue, or there might be a productivity issue, or it could be both. I guess Right, could be both. So how do you parse that out? How do you troubleshoot with you? Know, if someone's looking at their profit and loss and they have a 35% gross profit, let's say where should they start to identify which one of those, or if it's both the job costing and if it is an employee's issue, if you're tracking not only the gross profit margin of the job but the hours bid versus the hours worked.
Speaker 3:So hours variance is really critical and I think then you can see if it's the foreman or the project manager whatever you term your crew leader role. If they are consistently bringing jobs in over, that's more likely than a production issue, than a sales issue, unless your salesperson is low-balling the hours to get the job. So you have to look at both of those things. But I think that hours variance is more likely to be a productivity issue than a pricing issue, although it definitely could be both, and I think people can experiment with raising their rates in small increments and see how it works. You might find that if you sell your value well, you can command a higher price than you think you can.
Speaker 2:And the underlying assumption of what you just said because you said hours bid versus hours worked is that you actually have you're generating budgeted hours with your, your proposals, that, yeah, so you're you're using production rates, uh, which some, some folks should try shy away from and maybe use different methods of estimating uh, like the, the wag method, for example, so that I think that's that's definitely um, having those production rates and then bidding with them so that you can actually compare the hours bid versus the hours worked is is definitely a key point, um and uh, and, like you said, job costing will give you the visibility on what's going on there as well. So, yeah, that that's excellent. And then you also mentioned for net profit. You have this net operating profit before owner's compensation target of 20% to 25%. So if we do the math, if you have 50% gross profit, then that means that your overhead would be 25%, leaving the other 25% for cashflow going to owner or owner's compensation and a mixture of distributions and officer salary. Am I getting that right?
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:The combination of those things and potentially leaving some money on the table to keep growing the business too. Right, okay, the combination of those things and and potentially leaving some money on the table to keep growing the business too.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah Don't want to, uh, take all the cash out of the business. I mean, the business is there to serve you, but if you want it to grow, I guess you don't want to just take all the cash out. That's, that could definitely be a an issue. Okay, cool. Um, so we talked about budgeting and benchmarks. Um, are there any other financial challenges that that painting contractors face that we haven't talked about yet that you feel like is super important?
Speaker 3:Well, I think, um think the capitalization that I might have mentioned early on is really important, and making sure that you have enough operating income to run the business. I like for people to set a goal of where they want their cash in the bank to be. Where they want their cash in the bank to be, and my goal for them is to have it be three months of fixed and variable expenses, so everything below the gross profit times three those expenses, and that should also include if you have debt service, if you have vehicle payments, if you have three vehicles you're making payments on. You want to include that, but that would be what I would say is a goal, and you can be working towards that goal. If it seems high in the sky to you right now, you can start making changes, putting a little bit of money away in savings month by month.
Speaker 3:The other part of that is I think it's really important for businesses to have a line of credit with their bank, and so a good time to get a line of credit is in your busy season, when you're showing the most profit and, especially if you have, the banks are going to look at your financials quite often, and I've had people go to their banker with their budget and with their year to date results and say here's my plan, here's where I'm exceeding it and please give me a bigger line of credit. You can see, I'm doing a successful business here and I need the funds to grow, and I think that's the best time to get one. But it's really important to have a line of credit for when those months come where you have a large project that hangs more slowly or something like that, where you need to be able to cover your payroll and things like that on a short-term basis. So I think that's a really important one. And, yeah, I think that I could go on on that topic, but that's probably enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.
Speaker 2:Getting the credit before you need it like go to the bank during busy season when your financial is probably, like you know, amazing instead of waiting until oh, I need, I need a cash for payroll now let me go, yeah, in the middle of january, when you don't don't have much business coming in, then trying to get uh, a loan it's going to loan or a line of credit is going to be difficult, so that is definitely good advice. Do you have any other tactics or strategies to help with cash flow, either through the slow season, like we just talked, or like what you mentioned, with longer projects, if you're doing a lot of commercial work and cashflow can be difficult if you have, especially working under a general contractor where your payouts are, you know, 90 days after you finish the work or something crazy. Do you have any other ways to kind of help manage cash flow for those businesses?
Speaker 3:Well, I think, whenever possible, structuring your payment schedule on a job to have progress payments, and so I think that helps with cash flow if you don't have waiting until the end of a job, especially if it's a bigger job to invoice people.
Speaker 3:So that requires, you know, staying on top of it a little bit more. And then, I think, having a really good collections process, being able to have the invoice done and ready and in the customer's hands on the last day of the job or the day after, if not as quickly as possible, and having a good collections plan of how you follow up with people. I think on commercial jobs, it's super important for your office manager to get to know the accounting manager at that other company and find out when they pay, because a lot of times bigger companies may pay invoices twice a month or something like that, and if you know what their schedule is, you can make absolutely sure you have your invoice into them before that date so that you can at least get in the cycle as quickly as possible, even if they do take longer to pay. So that's a couple of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an excellent piece of advice. Empower your office manager to get a relationship with the accounting manager of your GC, or whoever your client is, to make sure that you're getting the invoices in on time and getting paid as fast as possible. That's a good piece of advice, but it sounds like get paid as fast as you can to increase the cash flow.
Speaker 3:Right, and I think part of that is making it easy for people to pay you, and I know a lot of people have shied away from accepting credit cards in the past. I think people do more because customers are more wanting to use credit cards now. But I think making it easy for people to pay you quickly and hopefully, when you're pricing your services, you're building in the cost of doing business into your price, which should include those merchant accounts charges, so I think that is another one, so just another way to make it easier for people to pay sooner rather than waiting to mail a check a week later or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think less and less people are willing to have to deal with mail. They just want to be able to click a button, get it done with Right.
Speaker 3:Yes, that's true. We all feel that way, right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:I like paying my bills that way.
Speaker 2:Right and with technology these days it's completely feasible. I mean pretty much every CRM, most CRMs are incentivized to do your payment processing because that's how a lot of them make money. But even with QuickBooks Online, you can have your invoices, quickbooks payments, you can have bank transfers turned on or a credit card receiving credit cards. So there's a lot of different tools out there to make it easier for your, for your clients, to pay. And plus, there's also the you know helping your, your customers finance. If you're doing residential, you can have, you know, work with a third party financing company to that will finance you know, your, your, your customer's house, house painting job and and so where you get the money.
Speaker 3:but then your customer takes out third-party financing and I think the cost on that, if I'm not mistaken, is really not much different than credit card processing either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you may know more about that than I do yeah, I mean it's, it's comparable, I mean, and it's being able, I think, the value of being able to provide that financing solution to, uh, to your customers where they're probably not going to get it for a lot of the fly-by-night kind of painting, you can provide that additional value pretty, pretty easily, easily at a reasonable cost, and you're just going to really set yourself apart in terms of professionalism, being able to provide that financing option.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:All right, so, so, excellent. So I really I would want to talk with you another hour, but I think I'm going to be respectful of your time. And how can folks learn more about you? Or on target advisors, like, where can they reach out to you and learn more?
Speaker 3:They can. My website is advisors on targetcom and learn more they can. My website is advisors on targetcom and you can always email me at info, at advisors on targetcom, so that's the best way to reach me.
Speaker 2:Excellent, I really appreciate your time and, with that to the audience, I will see you next week.