Picture this: You've painstakingly finished a paint job only to realize your wallet is as empty as a freshly primed room. Fear not, for Torlando Hakes, paintpreneur extraordinaire, joins us to lay down the law of pricing it right. We zero in on the delicate dance of valuing our craft, teasing apart the threads of hourly rates and customer perceptions. Torlando shares tales of early underpricing woes and leads us to an epiphany—charge not for the time, but the value we bring. We also tackle the tricky business of managing a team's diverse skill set, ensuring every stroke of the brush is profitable.
Now, let's talk values, but not the kind that jingle in your pocket—the core beliefs that set your business apart. We sift through customer reviews like a detective, pinpointing the values that shine brightest and making them our mantra. Cleanliness, punctuality, and communication aren't just nice-to-haves; they're the pillars upon which we build our teams, hire our crew, and grow our business without losing its soul. And because every great lesson has its roots, we take a nostalgic yet insightful detour through the hallways of middle school, reminiscing on the pressure to conform and the lasting lessons on maintaining one's unique business identity amidst a sea of sameness.
Https://Craftsmanpainter.com/torlando
Picture this: You've painstakingly finished a paint job only to realize your wallet is as empty as a freshly primed room. Fear not, for Torlando Hakes, paintpreneur extraordinaire, joins us to lay down the law of pricing it right. We zero in on the delicate dance of valuing our craft, teasing apart the threads of hourly rates and customer perceptions. Torlando shares tales of early underpricing woes and leads us to an epiphany—charge not for the time, but the value we bring. We also tackle the tricky business of managing a team's diverse skill set, ensuring every stroke of the brush is profitable.
Now, let's talk values, but not the kind that jingle in your pocket—the core beliefs that set your business apart. We sift through customer reviews like a detective, pinpointing the values that shine brightest and making them our mantra. Cleanliness, punctuality, and communication aren't just nice-to-haves; they're the pillars upon which we build our teams, hire our crew, and grow our business without losing its soul. And because every great lesson has its roots, we take a nostalgic yet insightful detour through the hallways of middle school, reminiscing on the pressure to conform and the lasting lessons on maintaining one's unique business identity amidst a sea of sameness.
Https://Craftsmanpainter.com/torlando
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. We strongly recommend you seeking individualized advice before making any significant financial decision.
Speaker 1:This is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm here with Torlando Hakes. Torlando Hakes is the host of the Paint Ed podcast and founder of the Craftsman Painter Collective. The collective is a group of paint contractors that produce high level work across the US. Their mission is to make a difference in the lives of their customers, neighborhoods and the community of fellow craftsmen. Welcome to the podcast, orlando, how's it going?
Speaker 2:Good. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:Awesome, I'm super excited to have you on here. I'm really interested in hearing some of the ideas that you have around pricing and also maybe some ideas about how to save money on marketing or how to not waste your money on marketing. But first off, to go to the pricing bit. Now, this is like folks that come to bookkeeping for painters often have, especially if they're just starting out or even if they've been around for a while. A lot of them seem to have an issue with pricing and getting that right, and that's always a big pain point. So I'd love to hear, kind of, what's your thoughts on some of the key pricing strategies that you've learned through your experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. You know, years ago, when I was in, when I first started in painting and running my own business, you know it was very much. Just like you go in you try to figure out how much time it's going to take you yourself a raise. So, like you know, when I started my first painting company, I was, you know, 22, 23 years old, and I had a backpack full of supplies and showed up to that first estimate on a bicycle. You know, I mean, I was a kid and I had no idea what I was doing, you know. And I went in there and you know I'd been working for another painting company and it was, you know, 2008, the recession, and you know he closed down the company, and so that's how I started at the beginning, and it wasn't like he knew what he was doing with pricing either. So, you know, I had no tools, I had no idea. So I knew that he was paying me, you know, about $12.50 an hour. And so, you know, I thought to myself well, if I'm in business for myself, I need to give myself a raise. And so, you know, $20 an hour sounds pretty good. And because you know, being 23, you give yourself an $8 raise. That sounds pretty good, right. Be in 23,. You give yourself an $8 raise. That sounds pretty good, right.
Speaker 2:And so I went in there and I thought, okay, so she wants me to peel down this wallpaper and she wants me to then paint it, and it's, you know, it's the living room, the kitchen, the hall, you know, the stairwell. I remember all of this, and I mean $20 an hour removing wallpaper and just kind of guessing how long that's going to take you. I mean that wallpaper came off in dime-sized shreds, you know. So there was just no way that I was ever going to make money on that job and it ended horribly. And over time, you know, I tried to get a little bit smarter. I tried to, you know, track my time and figure out you know how long things were taking, but I kept hitting. You know these roadblocks where, okay, now I'm hiring crew and I'm bringing people in and and uh, and I'm trying to figure out how much time this is going to take, and it's never the same amount of time. I tell my crew it's going to be one time and some of them hit it, some of them don't, some of them are faster, some of them are slower, who knows what. And meanwhile, you know, I've I've given myself another raise from $20 to $35 an hour and I'm thinking, well, that's not bad. And that seems like it's about what this market is. And you know, mind you, this was several, several years ago and the listeners you know, probably listening in here, thinking $35 an hour, that's peanuts. You know, like I've got employees that I pay more than that right.
Speaker 2:Well, I remember one occasion I went to a house and I was doing a bid and I you know it was a beautiful house you know the wife was a pediatrician she's actually my pediatrician, a pediatrician. She's actually my pediatrician, my kid's pediatrician today. I didn't have kids back then, but you know she was a doctor, her husband was, you know, physician's assistant and you know I present with them the bid. And you know how I had it laid out was. You know, here are the number of hours that I expected to take. And here's what I charge $35 an hour. And he looked me in the eye and said Orlando, I can't justify paying a painter $35 an hour. I don't even make that and I'm a physician's assistant. How am I supposed to pay you $35 an hour?
Speaker 2:And that was the moment that I realized that you know the people that we paint for. They don't value our time at all, they don't value what we bring to the table. They don't value people not more than they value themselves, at least. Right, they might appreciate you, but they're not going to value your time more than they're going to value theirs, unless you are seriously, you know, protecting their life savings or something like that. You know, like we understand lawyers, you know that you know they're really, you know, protecting us.
Speaker 2:But for us trades folks, I'm afraid that our customers just aren't going to see us that way, and and so that moment was the moment where I had to wrap my mind around a better way. I had to. I had to divorce the idea of value coming from the people that are in the house doing the work, and I had to move the value to the work that's getting done and, more than that, what the customer ends up with, right, what is the storybook ending that they're getting? And it moved it from a conversation of my price is based off of my time, and my time is valuable to their house's value valuable, and they want it to be in a glorious state at the end, and that's the thing that has value, and so my whole pricing perspective stems from that. But we also it can't be unmoored from the fact that we are paying people by the hour, by the day or by the job. We still have those costs. But the question now is how do we extract the value from the customer?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an excellent point Basically value-based pricing instead of here's what I'm going to charge you by the hour. And that's a huge distinction for the person receiving the estimate Because, like you said, they might have some idea of how much they're going to pay somebody by the hour, but in the same breath, they also have what is this job getting valued at? For someone else to take care of us? What would I pay for it to get done the right way?
Speaker 1:And those two ideas, strangely, can be true that they only want to pay someone $20 an hour, $15 an hour to do it but at the same time, if someone can take this project off their hands, they might be willing to pay $5,000, $10,000, which will be way more than $15, $20 an hour when you actually do out the hourly rate. But if they get that taken care of off their plate and it's an amazing experience and they have an excellent improvement to their home, they're more than willing to pay it. So I think it's. I love how you make that distinction of, instead of thinking of it like an hourly thing that you get to charge the client, it's more. Hey, this is the value you're going to get out of this experience and this project we're doing for you and that's going to reposition it in their mind and you'll be able to unlock more profitability there. I think that's excellent, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's, you know there's a lot of I think a lot of trades people have. You know they have a lot of ego wrapped up in what we do and you know there's a degree to which that's understandable. Like we work hard, we're underappreciated. You know we sweat for a living. You know it's hard work out there. You know it's understandable why we would have so much pride in what we do. Understandable why we would have so much pride in what we do. But that you know there's that whole.
Speaker 2:You know they always attribute this to Picasso. I don't know if it was actually Picasso that did this, but you know there's that story of a guy who goes up and sees Picasso on a park bench and says will you? You know, will you draw me a picture? And the idea is that Picasso draws a line and says that'll be, you know, $8,000 or whatever it is, and he goes $8,000? You, just, you took 10 seconds to draw that line and Picasso goes yes, but it took me 20 years to learn how to draw a line in that way. And you know you'll see people repeat that story whether it's a fable or not, I have no idea and they use that as this, like justification for why their expertise is so valued. And I'm not saying that their expertise is not valued or that the fact that they have all of this experience that it does, you know, speed up the process for a good job.
Speaker 2:The problem is when you take that mentality and you use it as this mark of pride and you use it to kind of put yourself in this, in kind of this victim state of well, people don't appreciate all my hard work, they don't appreciate my. You know my experience and my history and so, like you know, you're not paying me for. You know, uh, you know, to show up and put a coat of paint on on your wall. You're, you're, you're paying me for all those years of experience. Well, I'm sorry, customers don't give a rat's ass about any of that. You know, like they're just there, they just want the best deal and they want the job to look good, you know.
Speaker 2:The question is can you, for a second, drop the ego and think about what the customer really wants here and think about how you're going to service them in a way that is showing that value? Because value is simply the price minus the cost. Right, that's the mathematical equation. The value of the job is the price minus the cost, and so once you subtract out the labor and the materials, the difference, you know your gross profit. That has to represent some added value to the customer that they would not be able to get on their own if they were either doing the job themselves or hiring their nephew or, you know, son-in-law to do the job.
Speaker 2:Like that added value that you're giving and sometimes it is part of it is the experience, the expertise, but part of it is the assurance, part of it's the management, part of it is help with color, part of it is a clean house or moving the furniture or whatever it is that you can add to the value of the project that's going to warrant the higher price. Because what will happen is they will not see any value if their baseline expectations are not met. Where they see the value is when their expectations are here, but what they get is way up here and that's when they're like holy cow, that was worth it. Yeah, they were a little more than the competition, but totally worth it right.
Speaker 1:What are some things that you've found that are easy ways or maybe not just easy, just ways that you can add value to? You know, residential repaints clients. I know you kind of listed a few real quick, but yeah, I mean those ones that I listed.
Speaker 2:those are the low hanging fruit, right? Obviously, they expect your team to be managed, they expect your team to be clean, they expect your team to, like you know, inspect the job before they do, right, like, no customer wants to babysit a crew. If they're babysitting your crew, if they're calling you too much, then you're not giving them the value right. Those are the kind of the little hanging fruits. But I think the things that you know really set customers, you know, off and really help them, like love the job that you're doing, are when you've paid close attention to what their specific needs are and you've customized close attention to what their specific needs are and you've customized and tailored that experience to them. And so you know, I would recommend, what I would recommend is actually going through all of your reviews online and just seeing, like, just digesting, what people say about you. Go through it, because the things that they write about in the reviews, those are the things that are remarkable, right, those are the things that were worthy of a remark online.
Speaker 2:And so literally right. So if they say they were so clean, they were so detail-oriented, they were punctual, they explained everything so clearly, they made sure my cat didn't get out, they, you know, watered my plants, whatever it was, you know that they write in those reviews. I would just make a list of every single thing that they say about you and then start to tally, put a tally mark next to the repeat things and the, the. I would say like the three to maybe five, but definitely no more than that. Maybe three or four, uh, traits that pop out over and over and over again in your reviews. Those are your, that's your value proposition, that's the thing that people care about. That, those are the things that you want to double down on. You know, don't just say, oh, that's what they say, you know, so we're good on that. I would lean into those hardcore, right. So if they say something like the communication was excellent, well, okay, communication is important. Okay, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 2:A lot of people say that, well, let's examine, have we been just kind of naturally being good communicators, or do we have a process in place? Or do we have principles in place, right, you know? Do we on a weekly or bi-weekly basis? Do we send out emails to all of our customers letting them know where they're at on the schedule and letting them know that we haven't forgotten about them? Do we send them a daily report once we're on the job, letting them know what got done and what's gonna get done tomorrow? Right, you know? Do we have employees, team members, who are so customer service oriented from the beginning that we don't even have to train it?
Speaker 2:The other day I was on one of my job sites. I was so proud of my guys because I was just there being a fly on the wall and I overheard both people. There was a two-man crew. I overheard both of them having individual conversations with the homeowner, one after the other. It was like two different instances and I got to hear the difference between. You know the way that they talked to me and the way that they talked to the customer, and both of them were so polite, so kind, so gentle, so good natured. They spoke with a smile on their face. I was in another room but I could hear their smile and I could hear the smile on the customer's face right, and it dawned on me. I didn't teach them that I've not had any kind of training whatsoever on good customer service. I hired people who I felt had those qualities.
Speaker 2:One of our core values is to spread kindness like confetti. I don't hire people unless they're kind, unless they're kind, and so so if I, if I hire a kind person, I don't have to worry about training them. How to? You know, talk to the customer. They already know it's because it's who they are, right, and so that's one of those. That's one of those value adds, right? So when, when I'm on the job and talking to the customer or on the estimate, talking to the customer, talking about my crew, I'm going to say you know what You're not going to find kinder, sweeter people. They're quiet, they're polite. You know they're just really good young men and I think you're really going to like them right. That's added value.
Speaker 2:Think about how nerve wracking it is to bring somebody into your house, especially if you're a female consumer. Some, some guy, some ragtag, you know motley, crew of a, you know of a group coming in. You don't want to be there while they're there, right, you know that's, that's the experience that they're used to getting. You know, can you find those people that can? That can justify added value and in a way that matters to your customers. Communication is important to them. The experience is important to them. How do we bring in people and hire people that that that's who they are.
Speaker 1:That's how they live. A lot of gems in there. We just said so first was like going through your reviews and identifying how are you providing value? Right, know as it stands now, so you can kind of say, hey, here, here are my uniques or here's my uh, you know my, my proposition. This is what I'm good at, this is how I'm providing value. Going through historically to see what are you doing naturally.
Speaker 1:Well, I like that idea of going through your reviews and checking off those communication or cleanliness, whatever those things are that you're providing your customers. And then you said actually having maybe codifying it in your business as a core value so that you can continue to reinforce those uniques in your business as a core value. So that you can continue to reinforce those uniques in your business as it grows. Because, as I'm sure you know, it's easy when you're smaller to not necessarily maybe make the core values very explicit, because you're, as the business owner, probably involved very closely with a lot of things. So those kind of come through. You embody your core values naturally and you're doing a lot of the work. So those are coming through, but as you grow and you're hiring more people to do the work for you having the core values communicated explicitly with your team and hiring against those core values and firing against those core values and promoting against those core values will help you maintain the essence of your company and to continue to provide that same value as you grow.
Speaker 1:So I love everything that you're saying. That makes a whole lot of sense. Do you mind sharing what your core values are? You said one of them was sprink. You know sprinkling kindness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, spread kindness like confetti, Be fearlessly authentic and don't stop until you're proud. Those are the three key characteristics that we hold and then they're part of our broader kind of guiding principles where we have a set of critical actions. You know the critical actions. You know being to. You know be conscientious of time, cleanliness, quality, to level up you know every day. To level up, you know every day. And to do the work right the first time right. And so you know our principle, the guiding principles.
Speaker 2:There are in place for two reasons. One, the key characteristics those are the things that if you don't have those things, you don't get hired right Because I don't have the resources to teach you don't get hired right Because I don't have the resources to teach you how to get there right. Some companies might have the resources to you know, babysit you and train you up, and you know, from training wheels in terms of those soft skills. I don't have that time, unfortunately. We can polish what you've got, but I can't take you from, you know. I can't take you from, you know, being on the outskirts of society and you know, in rough land and then turning into somebody who can be in somebody's house with their wife and kids.
Speaker 2:You know I can't do that right, but what I can do is I can take somebody who has these three things figured out. You know, they're authentic human beings. They're kind, they work until they're proud of the work that they do. They want to be proud of the work that they do. I can start there, right, and we can progress from there. The critical actions those are the things that if you do these things every single day, you'll be successful here, right? So one is the stuff that you have to come with and the other is the stuff that you got to do every single day do every single day, and we started this conversation talking about value.
Speaker 1:How do you provide that additional value? How do you charge more, really is the question, how do you price so you can be profitable? And now we're talking about core values, which is really the same thing, or key characteristics, I think you're calling it, and critical actions Different terminology, but I think we're talking about the same thing, or key characteristics, I think you're calling it actions different terminology, but I think we're talking about the same thing.
Speaker 2:Well, your, your people are the value. Right, the people are the product. You know they're, they're, they're getting, they're getting a paint job and there's an outcome that that stems from the people that that you hire, and and, and. So you know we have to have people who can, you know, who can, deliver on that value. Right, it's not, we're not iPhones, we're not, you know, we're not Teslas right, Like all of the quality assurance in those products happen in another country long before they're shipped to the US.
Speaker 2:When we do a paint job, they're putting a down payment on a product that hasn't happened. And when it does start to happen, it's happening under their own roof, and so they're watching the process of the sausage get made, and nobody wants to see the sausage get made right, and so it's not typically a very pretty process. It's very nerve wracking. But when you come in that first day and your team looks good and your team looks like quality and you didn't, you know you didn't have a pretty website and a slick sales process, and then you know the unmarked van with the rusted outside and you know crew, you know sub crew comes in and you know nobody can communicate, nobody knows what's going on, right, all of these things or they, you know, maybe you've got the crew that you know smells like cigarettes and booze and weed and you know, and all of that.
Speaker 2:It's like you have this great posh marketing and sales experience, but your operations experience that's not what I was, that's not what I thought I was getting Right and so so that's that's why I talk about the values and who you're bringing in, because because that's who's delivering the product. If you don't have that right, then you're not going to be able to deliver any added value at all. You really have to get that part right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an excellent point and it makes perfect sense because you're really the painting business is in. You're in the business of delivering services with people. I mean, like you said, you're not selling iPhones here, so people is what it comes down to, and you got to get everybody on the same sheet of music and that comes down with what you called your key characteristics critical actions to get everybody moving in the same direction, to provide that additional value.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it just has to follow the same thread throughout. Like the brand experiences, all of that, you know, like operations is the brand, you know the sales process is the brand, the website is the brand, it's all the brand, it's all the experience, right. And there are three reasons, three primary reasons why people will choose one company over the other. The first is the first two fit kind of under a utility factor and the other fits under a desire factor. So the first two is price and urgency. If the customer is utility driven and they value a cheap price or a bargain more than they care about the other stuff, then you know you're going to have to have a pricing strategy that's driven around, okay, how can I make this job more economically priced, right? And so you know the thing about value, that word value, what I think is interesting. It's like if you think about the crown jewel, you know that's a priceless gem, right. The value is beyond measure. It's the crown jewel, right. But then you go down to Walmart and you shop in the generic section and you're going to find a lot of products that are of great value, right. So that word value is a little bit. It's a little bit of a chameleon and what it really, you know, amounts to is the alignment between those expectations and the price. Right. So people can value different things. People can value a low price they're just more, they're just a more utility driven buyer. But people can also value things like urgency. You know, okay, we've got May graduation happening, we've got these graduation parties happening and we got to get this house painted before our guests come, because I can't show my face if my trim is this nasty. Right, I got to get this deck stained before we start grilling out and bring all these teenagers and parents and stuff around aunts and uncles, all that right. So maybe they have this sense of urgency that they got to get it done right now, right, and in that case they might not care so much about price. They might not care about who can do it. You know, oh, you know, I've been using, you know, johnsonville painting for the last 43 years and they're the best company on earth. Well, they're not available. I'm sorry. I got this graduation party and I'm just going to have to use the other guy who can do it. You know, we'll come back to you guys next time, right? So there's that utility factor of price sensitivity and urgency.
Speaker 2:But then there's that third one, which you know a long time ago. I thought it was quality, and you might see some of these memes online where it's like, oh, you can get, you know, price, speed or good, but you can only get two Right, and I sort of believe that the only thing is is that it doesn't hold up in all circumstances. Right at the companies who, in our industry, do use subcontractors, some of them have really brilliant subcontractors, you know, that do really high quality work and they get them for a pretty low cost. And so getting the quality doesn't actually necessarily mean that it's going to be always high priced. So what they're what they're paying for, because the thing is is if they went with the paint contractor who used the sub, or if they went directly to the sub they went directly to the sub they'd get a much lower price, wouldn't they? They'd get the same quality.
Speaker 2:So so what I realized is that that third factor it's really about the brand. It's really about the promise that comes with the brand, the reputation that they carry, the whole look and the whole feel of the brand. Is this a company that I see myself? Can they help me become me right. When we buy a brand, it's not just about the utility of the factor, it's about what that brand helps us feel and help us become.
Speaker 2:You know, when I was in middle school, you know there were uniforms at our school, okay, but they weren't imposed by the school themselves, they were imposed by the other kids. And so if I wanted to be in the popular group you know I might be dating myself here, but if I wanted to be in the popular group, I had to let go of my JNCO jeans and, you know, my comic book t-shirts and I had to start wearing button-down polo, khaki pants, doc Martin shoes, right, I had to dress a certain way. I had to wear American Eagle and Abercrombie and Fitch if I wanted to be in that popular group. That was the uniform that you know, that the students gave each other right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we were in the same high school.
Speaker 2:Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so if I didn't get that, if I didn't get those clothes, if I didn't wear that brand, I couldn't be the kid that I wanted to? Be right Thing is that doesn't change as we get older, it just gets more expensive. Right Thing is that doesn't change as we get older, it just gets more expensive. You know, if I want to be the kind of person that I want to be, I have to drive a certain car. I have to live in a certain neighborhood. You know, I have to send my kids to certain schools. I have to maintain my yard a certain way. Right, I have to keep my house painted.
Speaker 2:And am I the neighbor who, when my service providers show up, they show up in the rusted out van and the sketchy people? Or do they show up in the van that looks sharp, that's lettered, that is clean, that's newer, that the crew is all in whites and all good shirts? You know, like what does that experience look like? What am? What signal am I sending to my neighbors? Am I telling them that I belong here or am I telling them that I'm a phony, right? So that's that factor, that's the brand factor that matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's, that's huge, and and so just to draw it back to what we're talking about, like, we're talking about pricing and value, and if you can increase these three reasons to buy like you mentioned price, urgency and having a brand that people are attracted to or want to do business with If you can get these all compelling, you're going to increase the desirability of what you're offering and probably going to increase the amount you can charge your customers. So I think that's excellent food for thought on actually evaluating your brand. And what are you communicating to, not only the customer that you're dealing with in front of you, but the community. You know, the neighborhood that you're working in.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. So that's the foundation, right, like you have to make sure that your brand and your positioning to your target customer is all aligned in a way that allows you to charge what you need to charge, but that's not to say that you can't make money in other segments. You know, I mean there's, you know at this point, you know, being on the speaker circuit, that I'm on, you know I talked to a lot of different people who, some of them do really, really well, and if you saw their prices, you would, if you were charging, if you were trying to compete on their price, you would end up in the poor house. But they're not, and and it's, it's like, how is that even possible? And it's just that they're playing a different game and they're and they're accentuating things that matter more than others. You know you can if you have, let's say, for example, you're a company that does, you're on the opposite end of residential repaint and you do production painting.
Speaker 2:Well, these folks who do production painting, it's a manufacturing process and they don't care about brand, they don't bother with websites, they don't bother with any of that stuff, because that stuff doesn't matter in production painting. What matters is speed and getting to it now. And so they have their processes dialed to where they've got a crew that they do trim and that's all they do. And once the house is prepped, they come in after the preppers and they just do the trim and half a day and then they go to the next house and they go to the next house and once that trim's dry, another crew comes in, hammers out the walls, does them as fast as possible, right? And that's a totally different mindset, mentality. The price, you know residential repaint guys would never be able to make it work and it's all about the type of game that you're running, right? So if we're in residential repaints, again, the value is subjective to the buyer, right? The buyer is the one that determines what they value and your job is to figure out how to customize that price to match what they value.
Speaker 2:It is not impossible to compete on price. You just have to know how to direct your crew in a way to be more efficient when it matters, right. You also have to be careful about your overhead, because if you are, you know, just kind of trying to crank through leads, you do all the lead services and you do the you spend, you know, a monthly retainer with, you know, an ad agency and a Facebook agency, and you got your coaches, and you know I got all these people, all these expenses. Well, you're going to have to have a tremendous amount of lead volume and that's not going to give you a lot of wiggle room on your price. You have to build up your price so that you can afford all of that. You know overhead expense that you've got right, and I'm sure that you see this all the time. You know fixed expenses are a death nail to a seasonal business like ours, right? And so you know I mean, yeah, I'm sure you can speak a lot to that.
Speaker 1:Yes, this is all true, these are all facts. Yes, this is all true, these are all facts. Uh, so I I'd like to pivot just a little bit. Um, and could you tell me about the craft craftsman painter collective? I know this is something that you've recently started in, in a few months ago. Uh, that's gained a lot of traction recently. Um, could you let the listeners know about this a little bit more?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So we just launched at Expo, actually as a collective, and I'd had this idea kind of in the back of my mind for several years and finally, just, you know, felt like the moment was right and felt like the you know, the timing is right. And so what we offer in the collective is we offer, you know, community under the collective brand. We offer help, you know, I think that's, I think, understanding and knowledge. You know, if there's, like I've recently I've talked about this topic of pricing and this idea of, like, building up your cost from the ground up, you know, you, you build it up from, okay, how much is this job going to cost to produce? You, can we turn all of the measurements in the house into a single unit so that we can implement unit-based pricing and and codify everything so that it's a simple, you know, a simple tally of units throughout the house. And then we talk about that price factor of like okay, how much does this unit need to cost? And if we can understand that unit cost and we can understand, you know, how much it costs us to build that, then we can have a structure, a cost structure in our business that actually makes sense, that actually makes us money. And so in the collective I've got community members who in our chat they'll send me questions about that.
Speaker 2:You know, I had a collective member, danny, a couple weeks ago. He said, you know, I'm getting the leads in but I'm having a hard time, you know, closing the final deal and I'm not sure if it's my pricing, I'm not sure if it's my process, and so I was able to say, hey, well, let's talk about this. You know, so we do a little bit of asynchronous mentoring in the group, where people will send me a voice message and say, hey, what about this? And then I'll respond either in voice or I'll produce a video that kind of explains it fully. And then we have, you know, some digital tools and resources and some apps that can help you grow your business and manage things better. And so that's the main idea.
Speaker 2:And especially for those folks that are a little weak on the branding piece, when you co-brand with Craftsman Painter, you kind of get that badge of quality that comes with it, and so we're really about elevating ourselves and the quality of work that we do and getting folks that you know are definitely in that stage of. You know, maybe they've been subcontracting for a long time, or maybe they just started in business a couple of years ago or within the past couple of years and they just need that added like help to prove that value, to show that they're valued. And when you become a part of that, a part of the collective and that value, to show that they're valued and and when you become a part of that, a part of the collective, and and you know we take that crafts and painter logo as like a badge of credibility you know that's the factor that's going to allow you to close more deals, close them at a higher rate, and and and then just take a lot of stress off your plate as a business owner.
Speaker 1:That's an awesome uh, it sounds like an awesome resource and a opportunity really, and so how can folks learn more about the? The?
Speaker 2:collective, absolutely so. So what I would say is uh, you know, I'm I'm always open to chatting with people. Um, if they want to go to craftsmanpaintercom backslash Torlando, you'll get my that's my digital card. You can book a meeting with me to have a chat. I mean, you know, we can talk about anything. But also I would go to for information specifically about the collective. I would go to craftsmanpaintercom backslash collective and make sure that you subscribe to my YouTube channel at Craftsman Painter. A lot of great educational resources on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'll include the links in the show description. So, grace, I'd like to talk to you longer, but I know I want to be cognizant of your time. I know we didn't hit everything that I wanted to talk about, but we hit a lot of good things in this episode, so I really appreciate your time. Torlando, definitely dropping some knowledge bombs here today, for sure.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Not a problem, absolutely, and with that we will see you all next week.