Profitable Painter Podcast
Profitable Painter Podcast is a rich resource for anyone interested in starting, running, and scaling a professional painting business, offering valuable insights, strategies, and interviews with industry leaders. Through case studies and in-depth discussions, we deliver a vivid picture of the painting industry, with a disclaimer that any financial or tax information is general and not a substitute for professional advice.
Profitable Painter Podcast
From Leads to Success in the Painting Market
Unlock the secrets to transforming your painting business with insights from Julien Laplante, the founder of Home Run Marketing. Julien takes us on a journey through his personal connection to the painting industry, inspired by his father's career as a painting contractor. His expertise shines as he shares tailored marketing strategies specifically for painting contractors, pointing out common pitfalls like underestimating the investment scale needed for success. Discover why scalable marketing efforts and substantial lead generation are crucial to hitting significant revenue targets and learn practical entry points such as door-to-door methods and leveraging Facebook ads.
Dive deeper into the metrics that truly matter for painting contractors aiming to optimize their marketing ROI. Julien breaks down the importance of focusing on cost per estimate and cost per deal closed rather than just cost per lead. Quality trumps quantity when every lead can evolve into a valuable estimate and a closed deal. Explore benchmarks for lead-to-estimate and close rates, with an emphasis on the power of Facebook ads and the critical role of sales coaching in transforming these numbers. Hear how different lead sources can make or break your close rates and why aligning your ad spend with job costs is a game-changer.
Finally, the conversation shifts to enhancing sales process efficiency with Julien's real-world examples illuminating the gap between generating leads and closing deals. He reveals strategies for boosting close rates, such as providing on-the-spot quotes and engaging in pre-closure calls. Understanding the vital difference between acquiring leads and securing sales, Julien underscores the power of a robust sales strategy backed by self-accountability and comprehensive training. With these insights, you're equipped to refine your sales processes and drive not only client satisfaction but also substantial business growth. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your painting business with Julien's expert guidance.
This is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters, and today I'm really excited to be here with Julian, the founder of Home Run Marketing. Julian is the founder of Home Run Marketing, a marketing agency built by painters for painters. His team generates qualified leads, schedules, estimates and offers one-on-one sales and business coaching to make sure deals get closed. Welcome to the podcast, Julian. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Good man, Good Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited to discuss all things marketing, sales, branding but I'm really interested on your origin story. How did you get started working just with painting businesses and helping them with their marketing? Yeah for sure, great question.
Speaker 2:I actually get that quite a lot because it seems like it's such a small niche, right. So my father was a painting contractor. He had to kind of give up on his dream, which is part of the reason why I'm so attached to working with painters so around like I think in the 80s. He was doing that mostly to pay for college, which you know can be pretty expensive even here in Canada.
Speaker 2:And when I was growing up I heard that story multiple times of him having to kind of give up on his dream and you know pressure from his parents at the time. And he said that you know, if there was more deal flow coming in at the time, he could have. Probably. You know, if there was more deal flow coming in at the time, he could have probably proved that hey, this was viable and done something that he actually wanted to do. And when I kind of got you know on the online world and all that, it's kind of just put two and two together and was like I should totally do this right. So that's what really brought me into the game and now we're here. So it's been a fun journey.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. What are some of the most common mistakes you see painting contractors make with their marketing?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think well. So this is a good question, because there's a lot of mistakes that painting contractors tend to make. I think the biggest one is that they look too small. I talked to a lot of painting companies that say, oh yeah, we invested $500 in SEO here. We invested, you know, a thousand dollars in this thing there, and you know they're still stuck under 500,. You know 700, 800 K.
Speaker 2:And whenever I talk to companies that are doing way above that which is you know, most 800 K and whenever I talk to companies that are doing way above that which is, you know, most of the people that I talk to on a daily basis they always have done some sort of bigger scale marketing, like have a door to door team or tons and tons of flyers going out, and I think it's one of those things of like you got to find something that turns a dollar into more than a dollar, and then you can scale that thing to be really big Cause I mean SEO. Even Google ads it's not. Are you sure you could scale Google ads? It doesn't go that far. So you have to look bigger, do something that's going to bring in more revenue later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I think you're right. That is a common misconception, especially for painting businesses that are just starting out, as like underestimating how much you actually need to put into marketing to hit you know $500,000 in revenue for the year. That's like what is that? I got a hundred jobs, yeah, a hundred jobs for. So that's you got to sell a hundred people on that. How many estimates do you need to actually do to get a hundred jobs, like 300, at least you know somewhere in there. And then how many?
Speaker 1:leads do you need to actually do to get a hundred jobs like 300 at least you know somewhere in there? And then, how many leads do you need to get in to actually get 300 estimates? You know maybe 600, depending on what your lead source is. So, yeah, that's all, that's a couple of leads a day, potentially. So how, what are you going to do to get that that volume of lead flow and you get to put your money towards something money or time? But uh, I think a lot of folks starting out underestimate how much they effort and time and money that actually needs to go into marketing to get that kind of lead flow coming in to really scale up the business. So you're asking me what I would do. Yeah, what are, what are some things that you would recommend or like? How can, how can folks avoid that that pitfall of of under like low balling marketing? What should they, what should they be spending on it or what? What sort of time or tactics should they be applying?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm, I'm a big, you know, I'm really big on money over time. Like, if I have money lying around, I'm going to put that instead of my time. I know a lot of people maybe not a lot in your audience, but I'll still mention it aren't there yet where they have just money lying around. So I would say, if you're not there, just do door to door and start getting really good at it. Go watch YouTube videos. There's plenty of you know people out there that are going to show you how to really get leads. And once you have, like you know, a couple grand lying around maybe you know three, four or five grand then I would just say look at Facebook ads.
Speaker 2:Now I get asked to why Facebook? Why not? You know TikTok or YouTube or all these things? Well, facebook is the most widely used one, so it's easier to learn on your own online. There's more coaching readily available if you plan on doing it yourself. And the other thing too is with the other ones, you know the average income of a viewer on those platforms.
Speaker 2:This is just data, right? Like, if you look at YouTube, it's actually the highest, but there's not a lot of people going on there for like stuff like painting your house or whatnot. Mostly it's social media, so that's why it's good. And then it's also the aspect of building your brand right. So when you put your face out there, when you're not just putting videos of your guys painting, that builds, you know, the brand that is one day going to bring you to a million, 2 million, 3 million people are going to trust you, to a million, two million, three million People are going to trust you. It'll become easier to close deals and as soon as you can start getting your face out there like you should, I know people that say, oh, I don't want to put my face out there. Well, you know, it's welcome to 2025. You want to make money or you want to be left behind, you know.
Speaker 1:So I would say that's the the best way to go, at least at this point in time okay, so maybe start something with with door-to-door, get good with that door-to-door sales piece, save up some money a few thousand dollars and then and then start investing that into something like facebook advertising using. Yeah, okay, one of the things that we actually discussed with or discussed right before the podcast, which I thought was interesting, was you know, there's a misconception out there like oh, I'm in a small, small town and I Facebook ads don't really work for me because I'm in a really small town. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:So I, obviously not. Every market is the same and maybe in some markets that's true. I do think, though in very small markets, if you've got the resources to do so, I would just hit as many homes in as many different ways as possible. So I would have some basic low budget Google ads, so your name's always at the top. I would hit door to door on literally every single door in the entirety of your city every year. Hang, does you know?
Speaker 2:Attract the higher quality homeowners that are looking for somebody they can trust, and that usually helps, like build enough revenue to start really mass like hitting those areas, cause some of the bigger, like I said also something I said before the podcast is, like some of the bigger companies that we work with, they hyper-focus on the markets, like the micro markets, that most kind of jobs. They're going to look at an entire city and they're really just making one to a million from like five different neighborhoods. So once you get to that point where you've isolated like where the money is coming from, usually you just start hitting them in tons of different ways. But to get to that point, typically companies use social media advertising Rarely do they just hit the entire city with door to door until they find it, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. So basically, I really honing in on what is your key niche or your key demographic that you're going for, what's your target market, before just blanket, like trying to reach out to paint anybody's house, really kind of narrow in on the specific neighborhoods that you want to target and then go after those specific neighborhoods. I think that's really good advice. I often a few weeks ago just had somebody out of new jersey they were kind of just painting anybody's house and they had their average job size, which was kind of low, like two or three thousand dollars per job. Okay, yeah, and and so we kind of dug into it.
Speaker 1:It was like, oh, we're just kind of painting anybody's house, like we have some really good clients that we like working with that we charge, you know, five, six, seven thousand dollars, but we don't get those too often. And I was like, maybe look at the neighborhoods that those folks are living in and just focus on those neighborhoods. And so they just started kind of doing that strategy of just kind of focusing and that can be a huge, a huge uh like improve, improvement to your revenue but also your profit, because usually they're they're a lot more, um, profitable. And then, additionally, when the with the hired job size, it's often better for your marketing because you'll get a better return on investment on your marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like one company that we signed up two days ago, their average job size was seven grand, which is like pretty solid and they're doing exactly that. The other thing too is because your jobs are all super close by, like naturally less driving time, staff is happier, they're always in the same neighborhoods and it's yeah, it's more profitable, Like you said.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, yep, cool. In your experience, what sort of things should folks be tracking in their painting business to measure how well they're doing with marketing? Because, just to use the Facebook ads, for example, there's a lot of different metrics that Facebook throws at you and it can be overwhelming. Rose at you and it can be overwhelming. What are, like, the key things that you really like to hone in on to make sure that you're on track to give someone a good return on investment for their marketing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. There's well, okay so, return on investment, because there's this might be two different answers. There's how do you determine if you've got a winning ad and how do you determine if you've got winning marketing? So I guess I'll just go with winning marketing because that seems to be the best way to answer your question. So, surprisingly, I don't really care about cost per lead, which, coming from you know marketing agency, maybe sounds a little crazy For me, as long as it's, you know know, reasonable enough. I I start to care more about the cost of getting an estimate, like scheduled in the calendar, and then the cost of actually giving somebody a quote which isn't necessary to track. The next best one is just going to be a cost per deal closed, right from the ad specifically, and then I try to get that under 10, which usually is is, you know, the case, unless, like, there's something else wrong in the business. And if you track those you know, on top of close rate, of course, usually you can backtrack, like exactly what numbers you have to hit once you figure out your average job size. So those numbers are like pretty important. Okay so, cost per deal closed. Can I re-answer that question, cause I just thought of a better answer. Yeah, go for it. Okay. So, yeah, good.
Speaker 2:Question the numbers that I think somebody needs to track. I don't think cost per lead, unless it's like unreasonable, so above $100, $200, I don't think that that's super important. I think people start optimizing for cost per lead. They just try to lower it, lower it, lower it, but they don't think about the quality of the leads. That's coming through right. If an ad is getting $150 leads but every single one is getting scheduled into an estimate and the estimator is closing 80, 90% of those, that's a crazy winning ad. Let's put everything in there.
Speaker 2:Now, the numbers that I track to get to there is number one how many leads are getting turned into estimates? Now, industry average, I'd say 30, 40, 50%. If you've got above like 40% of your leads being scheduled, especially from Facebook, you're doing something good, unless it's like hyper-targeting for higher quality leads. And once you got that, then I look at the cost of getting an estimate. Then the close rate. So what's the close rate? You can also track close rate per area, but that's maybe a bit advanced there. So just track close rate and also track, of course, average job size and cost of getting a job. Try to get the cost of getting a job from the ads right. So let's say on a given month you close five jobs, you spent five grand thousand dollars per job. Then you want to try to get that under 15, 10, 15% of the total job cost and try to get at least like 30% net on every job anyways.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So first of all, the lead to estimate rate, basically the set rate, like once the lead comes in, getting that set on the estimate calendar is something to really pay attention to.
Speaker 2:You said somewhere around 70 or better is right actually 30 40 being scheduled and showing up right, not canceling, is industry average for just broad targeting like there are some people we've worked with that are getting 70 80, but it seems like it's more of a unicorn than an average gotcha okay, just, it's just normal with social media ads honestly yeah, so for for facebook ads, the set rate somewhere around 35 or better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, is this kind of what you should be? Okay, gotcha, all right. And then. And then the cost per estimate. So so how much ad spend do you have to Facebook ads to actually get an estimate? And so, if you're spending, just use easy numbers $100 per lead, that's $300 maybe per estimate. Right, yeah, okay. And then the next one you mentioned was the close rate, which is how often are you able to close the deal from the estimates that you're actually doing? Yeah, do you see, like a typical, what's a typical close rate?
Speaker 2:of a painting business. It depends on the lead source. I'd say. For social media ads, specifically, which, you are playing a big numbers game. The average I see is about 30%. In my opinion, though, I've done a bit of estimating sales myself just to learn it We've gone coaching from huge painting companies to learn their sales process. If you're running social media advertising and your close rate is under 50%, you definitely need sales coaching, though, just like or you're still in the learning process, because those are the kinds of numbers that you, as an owner, need to be able to train a sales team that will even come close to doing that right.
Speaker 1:Okay, so average is 30%. So trying to get it probably over average is a good target there. And then you mentioned the distinguishing between, like, a social media ad and then someone that went to your website and scheduled an appointment. Oh yeah, it would be two different quality of the lead like yeah, obviously the one that went to your website looking for you. You better, you like you should have a high close rate with those types of leads versus social media. It's kind of like they weren't thinking of pinging their business but they saw your Facebook ad and then, okay, well, maybe I'll look at this and so that's going to be a lower close rate, which makes sense, yeah, okay. And then the other one you mentioned was the cost the ad cost per job. So to continue the example I was running, so if we do, uh, if we have to get three leads to to get an estimate out, maybe we got to just kind of use ballpark your number there another three estimates to to get um, a closed deal. So that's basically three times three.
Speaker 2:so that's like nine leads that we would need to get yeah one ten percent, twenty percent of leads closed is, I'd say, pretty standard for company yeah, yeah, and you say getting under ten percent.
Speaker 1:so, uh, if you get nine leads and you close one of them, you get under 10% there. So that if you're spending, just use easy numbers. If you're spending $100 per lead, which I know you said is kind of borderline, too high, yeah, because it's usually lower than that, but that's $900.
Speaker 1:Yeah, $900 for a closed deal. Yeah, $900 for a closed deal. And if you have a decent average job size, like a higher job size, that might work, of course. What is kind of like the typical for Facebook ads. What should you be spending on leads typically? What's the range you should expect?
Speaker 2:leads. Typically like what's like the range you should expect. Yeah, if it depends on the quality, honestly I would say cost per estimate. Though if you're under 150 cost per estimate like you're, you're good, you're good you can just put more into marketing. Of course, if that's like your first try, then you can definitely optimize that lower. Like we always try to keep it under a hundred dollars, maybe even as low as we can. Right, like 30, $30 is probably the lowest we've ever seen estimate, but even then, like you mentioned, right, it's $900 per job closed If you have a hundred dollars per lead. Typically, if you have a hundred dollars per lead, though, the quality is higher, you set more estimates and then sometimes you end up closing more too. So I feel like numbers typically balance themselves out at around $500 per job closed, and some people find that that's really high. Right, like I pay Angie's $500 a month and I closed three jobs. Right, well, obviously there's the cost of scaling behind this. Right, like, you have a system that you can predictably put money into.
Speaker 2:But and this is maybe, you know, going to sound crazy but I don't think that ads alone is profitable. I think once you start getting, you know, referrals from these people. You start upselling them, you get repeat business. That's where, like the real, more money in the margins are made because you didn't pay anything to get those jobs. And even if you have a referral incentive like a hundred bucks well, a hundred is a lot less than 500. So you know you have higher margins, more profit. You can usually charge even slightly more for referrals. So I think the real key indicator of a massive painting company is what is your referral rate? How many referrals do you get per client that you acquire from your advertising? And that typically determines how big you can actually scale. That's just some niche thing I've observed over the years.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah, I think a lot of folks ignore their customer list and don't really pay much attention to it, which is you're basically sitting on like a goldmine of potential work there Just paying attention, sending out emails or text messages to those folks that you've worked with in the past, can definitely get you more work pretty inexpensively, like you said. So that makes a lot of sense. So, to wrap up the kind of the look at the metrics there, you said about $150 per cost of ad cost per estimate $150. Yeah, ad cost for per estimate 150 bucks yeah, that's a. You're in a in a good um, that's a good spend there. And then the other one was about a 500 for ad spend to close a job, yeah, which, if you have a five thousand dollar, uh, average job size, that's like 10 percent spent on marketing, which makes sense, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, okay, and I want to clarify too, I want to be really clear Like these numbers are. If I was still running a painting company, you know, today and I had these numbers, I would be more than happy to just pour more money into marketing and just keep optimizing here and there. You know, we work with companies that have a $200 cost of acquisition to get a client. It's so area dependent. I, you know, like on, honestly, if you, if you have a good relationship with your competitors, like, ask them how much it's costing them and try to aim for those kinds of numbers. Or, um, you know, if you're in a coaching program, ask other people in your area too, or your coach, maybe they have some insights. So it's, yeah, I would say like those are like standard numbers, but it's almost never exactly that yeah, what should folks?
Speaker 1:what should someone do if, if their cost per estimate is super high or their cost per job is super high, what are some things that they should look at?
Speaker 2:to get. Well, get that lower, for sure. I mean. Number one is track your numbers, like I hear a lot of people talk about. Oh, this isn't profitable, and I asked them why, and they can't give me an answer. Right, so what you track is what you improve and, of course, if your cost of estimate is too high, you're setting above 35 40 percent of your estimates.
Speaker 2:If you're double dialing all your leads, you're calling them twice a day, five days minimum, before giving up. If you're doing all that, then that probably isn't the problem. If your cost of getting leads is too high and you can usually tell this by if you don't test enough creatives or different types of creatives right, like, all your creatives look the same and you're wondering why that's not working probably because you haven't tried enough new things then that might be the problem too. Or if you have some ads that are getting, like I don't know, $50 leads, but most of them are getting $100 leads, then try to look at why is that ad doing so much better? Like, how can I double down on this strategy? Yeah, yeah, does that answer the question?
Speaker 1:yeah, so take it, take a look at your, your speed to lead process. Oh yeah, it's like making sure you're you're doing the right things to get that set rate is as high as you can. So, yeah, I think a lot of people underestimate how quickly you need to respond to leads coming in. Yeah, so like not having an answering service or a set or somebody dedicate dedicated to when a lead comes in, like going after that aggressively, I think people underestimate what you need to do to close a lead or, I'm sorry, to set a lead on on the calendar yeah, like the team that we have calling for our clients and setting these appointments, our SOPs is, you know, we call within 90 seconds of a new lead.
Speaker 2:Unless we're already on the phone, then it's you know, with as soon as possible. We try to reach them right away, double dial. If we don't reach them, we call them later, the same day, and then we continue to follow up for at least five days, twice per day and then, depending on the kind of lead, right, like if it's a beautiful house, they said they wanted to do it as soon as possible Like we just continue to follow up. We almost never give up and especially if we see, oh, they opened one of our emails. Like we continue to follow up even then it is a full-time job, honestly, like it's a full-time job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a, I think, a big point, because I some folks said we're going to do facebook ads, but if they don't have, if not working with someone like you, where you're actually, it sounds like you guys are actually setting the appointments for the folks you work with that's not always the case.
Speaker 1:That's not always the case for for marketing and companies, then they'll. They'll. Sometimes some marketing companies will just run the ads and then it's on the painting business owner to actually set the appointments on their calendar. So, yeah, that's a big operation. A lot of attention needs to be paid to it, so I think that that can't be understated. Yeah, and then some of the other things you mentioned were making sure the you know, doing A-B testing, like making sure you have multiple ads to see what's performing better. So if your ad is not good, you know you get a better ad up there. So that makes sense, of course. Cool, all right, awesome. Well, you've been super generous with your time. I've learned a lot as well. Is there anything else that you think is key to running Facebook ads? Marketing? And we talked a little bit about optimizing the sales process Anything else that you'd like to kind of dig into?
Speaker 2:else that you'd like to kind of dig into? Yeah for sure. So a lot of people want leads but they're missing sales and I see that so many times, even with you know companies doing one, 2 million they have you know they, they're getting good leads and that's why they're able to continue, you know, being profitable and growing. But I see so many people, you know they're emailing their estimates. They're not giving quotes on the spot, they're. You know they're not doing a set call where they are, you know, asking questions beforehand, doing a pre-close, like these sorts of things where, if you actually learn how to do the right process, like you know, just going from 20% close rate to 40%, which is super, you know, it's super doable if you have the right training and the right process.
Speaker 2:I mean we're talking about you're doubling your business if that's your only source of acquisition, right, like it's not a small jump and a lot of people will think they need more leads. But then they close 20% of their estimates, right, and that's also why we do sales coaching, by the way, just like if we didn't, I don't even know if we would be making any money because our clients just wouldn't be closing deals. I feel it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's probably, I would say sales and, like most service based businesses, is almost like the most important thing because whatever marketing channel you do, if you got sales then you can close deals. So it's, it's super vital.
Speaker 1:That makes sense and I I have heard like folks you know, especially online uh, painting business owners will kind of complain about marketing companies is like the, the, the leads weren't any good, um. But I think the first thing they should probably do is just reflect on their sales process, cause if you have a strong sales process, you know that that might actually be. The issue is not not the leads weren't any good. In some cases the leads aren't good, I mean for sure. But if it's a, especially with a marketing company that has been working with just painting businesses like yourself, and you can know what works it's most times, I would venture to say that it's probably the sales process that needs to be improved and not necessarily the leads need to be improved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like just to drive that home, that home. I've been in business for long enough to where we've had instances where we've had multiple clients in one single city almost offering the same services. We had two clients doing cabinets in the same city. One of them was closing about 40% of their estimates. The other one was closing about 20% of the estimates. Now you could argue the leads were different and everything, but it was the same kinds of advertising and whatever. And one of them, the guy closing 40% I'm not going to put names on these people, but one of the guy closing 40% he was always saying I need to be closing more deals.
Speaker 2:I need to be closing more deals. What can I do, julian? Can you review some of my calls? And then the other guy was like yeah, I think it's the leads and you know, when you have that bird's eye view, it's like it's hard not to like see this and go like I wish I wish you know you could just see what I'm seeing.
Speaker 2:I go by full self accountability, like extreme self accountability. Some people think that's, you know, toxic, whatever. So whenever something happens, I always look to myself first like what did I do that I could have done differently, like even if, like, my employee messes up, it's like how could this have been my fault and what can I do to actually avoid this from happening? So, even internally, like we have crazy levels of procedures and SOPs and training, just so everything is solid. But yeah, extreme self-accountability is what's taken us so far, honestly, and also the reason why we do call leads and set them for our clients and also why we do the sales coaching, because, quite frankly, if we only did leads, then there's no way we can actually guarantee satisfaction for our clients.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense and I think it's definitely needed and I think it's pretty awesome what you guys are doing over there. Where can folks learn more about what you're doing over there at Home Run Marketing? Where should they go? How should they link up with you if they're interested in learning more?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're pretty much on every social media platform. So we have some YouTube videos, we have Instagram, facebook. They can just search Home Run Marketing. But if they want to look at our website, for example, they can just search the Home Run Marketing so T-H-E, home Run Marketingcom, and then they'll just have all the information that they need to see if they want to reach out or whatnot. Yeah, actually, for anybody who's watching this, thinking about reaching out, getting some personal trust, building Facebook ads, having us settle their estimates, helping them, you know, go from 30, 40, 50% to maybe 70% close rates on their estimates, then we'd be more than happy to give them a month extra free if they sign up, you know, through you guys. So if you hop on a call with us, mention bookkeeping for painters, then be more than happy to give you guys an extra month for free. Awesome.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. I appreciate your time today, julian, if you're listening and you need some help with marketing, definitely check out Home Run Marketing and with that, we will see you next week.
