Abstract
Painting contractors can maximize their profits by directly demonstrating the value in their pricing and service, looking for opportunities to increase the scope of work for each job and investing in efficient techniques that allow them to carry out more jobs.
Ask any independent neighborhood contractor, “What’s the best way to make more money on brush painting projects?” and the response you receive will probably be, “Sell more jobs, keep quality and prices up, while doing all you can to prevent costs from getting out of control.”
Ask a highly successful independent contractor the same question and you’re likely to receive a completely different answer: “Sell more service, not more jobs; show customers the value they receive for your price; use quality materials and avoid cutting corners so you get repeat business from extremely satisfied customers who appreciate the quality of your work.”
As a painting contractor, you’re a business owner (whether you like it or not); and that means you need to focus on selling your services and your own capabilities—not just the price of the job—if you expect to grow your profits. The fact is that the great majority of contractors try to get as many jobs as they can, simply submitting a proposal and hoping they’ve come in as the low bid. At the end of the month, they look at their financial statements and wonder why they’re not making money and why they are having such a difficult time paying their bills.
No matter how many bids you submit, however, you can only do so many jobs with the number of people you have in your company. You can bid on 50 jobs a month, but if you can only handle 12, any bids above that number are wasted effort. The key is to maximize the dollar amount you earn from each of the jobs that you do handle, and that requires a little bit of selling on your part, as a contractor.
Another fact of life is that most contractors hate selling—you got into this business because you like to paint, not sell. You need to realize, however, that you, indeed, got into a business, and no business can thrive without at least a minimal sales effort. You should be thinking of yourself as a business person in the painting trade, rather than as a painter who keeps books.
