The Online Resource for the Painting Industry
You’d think painting a house would actually be the toughest part of your job. However, figuring out how much you should charge your client is often a much more exhausting task. There is just so much to account for that there is no easy way to do it. Still, we can make the whole thing […]
Bidding on commercial painting jobs isn’t easy. The process demands detailed planning. It also differs from usual residential painting gigs. Painting a 30k sq ft warehouse doesn’t have much to do with painting a single two-story home. However, you shouldn’t be scared of doing large-scale jobs since you’ll undoubtedly get to that point. We’ve prepared […]
Operations As you are achieving success with your sales and marketing goals, you need to ensure that that you have a team in place that can perform with excellence. One of the worst experiences you can have is to build great relationships and opportunities with customers, to see it all disintegrate due to the inability […]
ESTIMATING The cornerstone to your estimating operations is hiring/training excellent commercial estimators. Any changes with respect to your commercial estimating plan should ideally occur before or consecutively with the plan to establish a more solid customer base. You don’t want to generate more bidding opportunities than you can deliver on. One of the key elements […]
Sales Department The Sales Manager should have good strengths as a leader, and not lacking experience with commercial painting in general. He/she specifically needs expertise in dealing with general contractors and with contract administration. This person’s skillset should also include managing the estimators under his/her supervision. Plan – General Contractors With respect to dealing with […]
Most of us would like to expand and improve our Commercial painting operations, including Marketing, Estimating, Sales and Production. I would encourage anyone to set both short and long-term goals. These should be based on a very realistic evaluation of your resources: Financial, equipment, vehicles, skilled employees, market growth potential and how hard you are […]
No single factor creates as much havoc for industry companies as how to set the price. The first complication is how to arrive at the best possible price; afterward the issue becomes how to sell it against competition that always seems to have a lower quote. Despite what you may have heard, a price has […]
I want to start by saying that the actual Sales Process begins well before you meet the customer in-person for the estimate. The marketing messages you use; the way you answer the phone and the methods you use to pre-position the customer all set the table for a successful sales appointment. Here are my 10 […]
The folks at PEP Cloud have been busy adding new features to the program to streamline the estimating process. It’s easier than ever to build detailed estimates, follow up with clients, and track jobs from start to finish. Here are some highlights Estimating Forms Populating the estimate with all the tasks that you’re going to […]
Here at Blogging Painters, we often are contacted by inventors, software developers and industry representatives. They are very interested in the feedback from our readers on products and ideas. Recently the folks at Field Pulse contacted us, they want to refine their product to make it better suited to the painting industry. I posted in […]
Project Manuals are the other tool that is provided, along with blueprints, to enable us to assemble an accurate bid. Whether you are bidding to general contractors or directly to the owner of a project, often you will be provided with an FTP site link where you can download the “Plans and Specs”. Once you […]
Putting it all together The first step to any bid is of course to gather the quantities, whether you are measuring an existing structure or doing a takeoff from a set of plans. From there you must “extend” your numbers, either manually or by entering the information into an estimating program. There are many such […]
Field budgets Your field budget is generated from your bid. The total amount of time and materials that you have bid for each phase of the project makes up your field budget. This tells your superintendent and foreman on the job exactly how many hours and how many gallons of paint that […]
“How much should I charge?” One of the most divisive topics in any contractors group is pricing. Ask that question, and watch the fireworks begin. May as well ask “How much is a bag of groceries?” There are several unfortunate methods like Despermating, WAG (wild ass guess) and RID (rent is due), or asking strangers […]
Eyeball vs Measure Which do you usually do for an estimate on an exterior repaint? Do you measure or break out the different substrates? Recently one of our readers had an opportunity to use a new technology after we posted this press release and he commented. PaintScope hooked up Nick Dunse from Thinkpainting with a […]
