Business Strategies
It’s one of the toughest lessons in our business: Getting paid doesn’t mean you made money. There are a ton of land mines out there that can cause you to win the battle only to lose the war. One way to ensure that you make a profit on your job is by using production rates […]
Despermating on the Rise? Back in July of 2009, I wrote an article about estimating in which I coined the term “despermating,” defined as the act of desperate estimating. The article was a tale of a competitive bidding situation in which my company’s price was twice as high as the next bidder on the project. […]
It is an ego thing…the discussion of size. It doesn’t mean all that much. In the corner to my left, you have superheroes who can do the work of 15 men by themselves. And in the corner to my right, you have the fat businesses with 25 employees, whose workload could likely be handled by […]
I love percentages. Mostly because I am a baseball fan. A successful manager plays the percentages and makes well informed decisions based on history as expressed in data. The data informs the manager on how to build his lineup for each game, when to have a runner steal a base, which outfielders to challenge on […]
…Measure your business. Many paint contractors, especially in the early years of their business, struggle with the metrics of how to measure the performance of their business, their employees and themselves as owners. Even with accurate financial statements, sometimes the business data isn’t enough to wrap our minds around the whole picture. Here, Scott explores […]
True Story about Customer Service This is another archive piece, published last year but just now hitting the blog. Sometimes when focusing on bringing customers the best possible experience, I have to remind myself of the worst experiences I’ve had as a consumer. This one ranks right up there, and it is especially explosive because […]
**Click: Paint Contractors and Marketing (2010) The above linked article is a time capsule piece that I wrote 18 months ago and was published in APC magazine, discussing marketing strategies for paint contractors. It’s been funny that way, the last few years. I frequently go back into the archives in times of reflection and read. […]
We talk enough about product and tool failures, and we all cringe at the concept of “operator error”. But in reality, many contractors actually fail in business. Some contracting companies circle the drain for years before realizing – only too late – that it didn’t work. Often, problems result from negative contractor growth: doing worse […]
Where ever you fit into the great supply chain that is the paint industry (raw materials supplier, manufacturer, dealer, rep, contractor), this is a simple equation that sometimes gets lost in the daily grind. As a surfer of many online trade related forums (painting, carpentry, pressure washing, small business), one of the recurring questions is […]
The TPD folks were, and still are, really into making sure that their dealer readership was as educated as possible about contractor product needs as the whole voc movement coincided with economic hardship in 2008. This article discusses some of the products which would get full on reviewed over the next year or two.
Merle Gilliland
Bill Dawson
Scott Burt
Want More Topcoat in your life?