plainpainter

I finished up this deck yesterday and found out some interesting tidbits from this lady. The guys who did her deck were former employees of cabot stains and had this whole deck restoration business based on their products - they went out of business, and one guy is working for a dry cleaner. The lady tells me she wants to kill the guy. They applied two coats of SPF to this deck, the latter being a 'maintenance' job. A.C. clark cedar toner looks so sweet on this deck now.

I was just looking over some of my 'after' photos of a deck I restored a couple of months ago and compared them to how the deck looked prior to me taking on the job. Then I remembered some of the conversation the homeowner was recounting she had with the other two guys bidding - who were less than half my prices. And I realized why so many trades have gone by the wayside where as deck restoration as some 'immunity' from the sleaze-blobs out there. What I realized is that the quality of our work is commensurate with how 'pretty' the final outcome is. It's that simple. Making a deck that has horrible products applied to it - has weathered horribly - has the mysterious 'black' that is almost impossible to remove. And then you hand back a deck that is immaculate - that impresses folks. These other guys bid so cheap, and it's nearly impossible for them to deliver a quality product - decks are unforgiving - you can't just slop stain on and make 'em look good. It requires attention to detail - and good understanding of your chemicals and a dedication and readiness to invest in very expensive equipment sometimes. Can the 'sleaz-ball' still do quality work? Of course he can, but this is a probability game. And the probabilities are stacked against him - take rattle snakes for instance. We have 'em in New England, but the weather is not conducive for a healthy population - so you don't have to worry about running into them like you do in southwest. A walk through the forest is a probability of life and death - the but the probability is so nil I never worry about it. Same with deck restoration - I know there are some guys that can equal my quality for less than half my money - but the probabilities are stacked against him. Perhaps there someone who is a laid off engineer and can get 20 websites off his own server and put my own domain down - but unlikely. This is what makes it difficult in the painting trades - sometimes there is very little noticeable difference between a superb job and a hack job. I have to go do an estimate for someone that resided one side of their home. There are guys that will slap paint on it and call it a day. Where as I know a full TSP/bleach wash is needed. Some guys will go ahead and caulk the cracks with the cheapest caulking known to mankind. I won't caulk before all those bare wood cracks have been primed. Heck I love to reprime factory primed siding - because it gives much more life to a project. In the end - my job won't look different - but it will be twice as expensive. Who do you think the homeowner will go with?

Oh get real guys, you know me - I use strippers and brighteners, use a $2,500 floor sander after using a low pressure wash and I use that A.C. Clark stain. So obviously I do care - but this anchor seal is just one bit up in the stratosphere. Heck when I was installing cedar clapboard siding - I had an open gallon of oil prime and sealed the end cuts before nailing it in place. And I would pre-cut a piece of tar felt to go behind each cut where two clapboards me - so ingress of water wouldn't find it's way behind the siding. Alas - all my competitors including the very highest end builders never did either of these practices, and nobody paid me more because I did it. Folks see the price on a contract - but they don't see strips of felt behind siding - nor the end cuts sealed and nailed out of view. At some point, if homeowners don't care - why should I?

I'll have to file this under the 'who cares' column. First of all this is a problem of a deck builder not deck restorers, nothing we can do once the boards are screwed down into place. And even if we were installing decks - the better question is, will folks pay more to have anchor seal applied to the ends? And what's the worst that would happen if by not applying it - you get end checking? Folks have to spend more money rebuilding their decks more often? Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

Will be staining a deck on Sunday - will be the last of my season as well - I know how you feel. I made big strides in the deck staining business this year.

Adrian, that is so not a good customer. Can I ask what the premise was in the free demo? Like was she interested in the demo, or did you offer it to her with lukewarm reception from her? It seems to me if she was interested in the demo, and you gave her those unbelievable results, why wouldn't she have you finish? Some folks just don't care about things. I live in an area where the idea of washing a house is foreign - homes don't get washed - they get repainted, or have that maintenance free vinyl installed.

To be honest, Ken, I've thought about it wayyy too much. I got some ideas to get my previous customers into my emailing database with a random drawing for prizes come christmas in exchange for great testimonials - need to discuss the details with you some details and further ideas. Let me know when you have time and/or interest about it.

Ken, I was never taught that ratios and fractions were equivalent ways to express the same thing - mathematics tends not to have more superfluous symbology than it needs. Have you ever cooked, baked, followed a recipe? What do you do when they say mix 3 parts water to 2 parts flour and express it as 3:2? This is what I found from a website.... Ratio: The relative size of two quantities expressed as the quotient of one divided by the other; the ratio of a to b is written as a:b or a/b. So in pressure washing lingo when talking about downstreamers and talking about 1:4 downstreamers as 20% draw. The relative size of the quantity of water to chemical is one part chemical to four parts water. For a total of Five (5) parts total solution, 1 of those 5 parts is chemical or 1/5 which expressed as a percentage is 20%.

So let's say you are an optimist, but in reality you see grim times ahead and you want to be ready for let's say a 30% drop in total sales. What do you do? How do you re-appropriate the parts of the financial 'pie' in your business? Do you take a hit in salary immediately on Jan 1? Do you ask workers to take a hit in salary? Or do you just not hire as many guys? I imagine with many folks that this is an 'organic' process. If the jobs aren't there you just don't hire. But the bigger your company is - I imagine things aren't as organic. For a guy like me that is still an owner/operator - I just forego any salary and work to pay the bills to get my business through another year in hopes of better times - not a great financial plan, but I can't see anything better? I guess in the end as business owners we take the salary commensurate with the market bears - and we make do in our private lives. Which is perhaps why I see so tons of builders living high on the 'cob' - yet were always living on the edge as far as their salary could afford, and then have one bad year, and they are never to be heard of again. I guess my goal is to invest as much 'salary' as possible and take a 3% cut from my investments yearly - and use my business to drive as much salary as possible back into my investments. And just use a 3% cut each year to average out my salary from market forces.

Jim - I am getting my first wave of repeats in the last week after doing this for two years. You are right, doing quality work and high standards do pay off. I was impatient as I changed gears from doing most painting to pressure washing - even though I have been in business over 5 years, I haven't been doing washing for five years. I need to work hard on my systems and keeping customer contact in place, I have to resist the temptation to grow too fast - even though I want more money. I have had 2-3 episodes in my life of running out of steam and just 'crashing'. The only way I can run my business without this happening again is slow and systematic improvements - if too much happens to quickly I could 'crash' again.

Ken, I majored in math - and ratios or proportions like this you have to add both sides to get how many 'parts' there are. When you say 1:5 that's One part Chemical to 5 parts water for a total of 6 parts. That's how it was always defined as far as I know. You could define it the latter number to reflect the total 'parts' of which the first number is part of so 1:5 could be defined as 1 of 5 total parts. But ratios aren't always like this, sometimes you get ratios that look like this 3:2 how do you interpret this? The way I was taught was 3 parts to 2 parts, 5 parts total.

I bet scrappy watched that movie 20 times.

If your pulling 10:1 - that's eleven parts total with one part being your downstream mix of which the original chemical was mixed at 4:1. So you have 1/5 of 1/11 of the total end mix being the original chemical. So basically you now have a grand total of 55 parts one of them being the original chem. So your ratio reads 54:1

Yeah you heard me right - I want the cost of the average gallon of latex paint and oil based stains to be about a hundred bucks a gallon. Sounds crazy, eh? Well someone just taught me something that should have been blindingly obvious to me. Guys, if the cost of materials skyrockets - it's an absolute blessing in disguise!!!! Pray for materials cost to skyrocket across the board, pray for the EPA forcing manufacturers to raise the cost of coatings in general - pray for the day that typical premium interior paint averages $60 as soon as possible. It's a good thing!

Scott - I am still thinking this all out - but I think there may be a tendency to try and relate this back to what we know with hypothetical situations of 'what if'. I think the point is, if you are in an industry where the bulk of your dollars goes into materials, a simple 10% markup can go a long way. Look at the guy installing Mahogany decks or Ipe for that matter. Say he builds a hundred decks in a season with a crew of 5 guys, let's say you have the same crew size - same amount of 'crew' hours but your materials simply paint. A 10% markup on all that lumber can go a long long way towards net profit margins. Looked at it another way - why is it so hard to compete in the painting trades? Because our estimates are mostly man-hours. I think my man-hour needs to be $57/hr - you may think a good crew can make a handsome profit of $47/hr. Then there is local 'townie' that paints all day long for $21/hr. Since 85% of overhead is in labor - this translates to huge swings in the final price tags. Now look at competing deck builders, let's say labor is 33% of the total estimate. The materials is a pretty much a non-negotiable item - it is what it is. Looking at the labor portion - say one guy charges labor at half of someone else - since labor is only 33% - this only translates to a 15% difference in price, unlike in painting. And the materials cost is what it is - you now have with the same labor hours per year as any other trade like painting or plastering - but you have an additional 66% of materials that you can easily markup 10% - and that will translate into huge profits.

It's not great, but that's why you limit it to a one time deal of 2 ozs - if you were to supplement your gas on a routine basis with acetone - sure things wouldn't be good after a while.

Put a couple of ozs. of acetone into the gas tank - and try to use starting fluid to keep it running for a minute. If it's a 'fuel' problem - this should sort it out.

James - you have two companies where labor constitutes 85% of your overhead and another where labor constitutes only 50% of our overhead. The difference between the two companies is that materials cost is very low for one but not the other. Now say you markup your overhead to reflect a 10% net profit margin for your company. The company with a high materials cost has a lot more gross dollars to mark up and therefore will have a much greater net profit margin. I don't know if I agree with this statement or not - but the guy telling me is a 4th generation painter/estimator whose company has been freelancing job estimation for multi-million commercial jobs since the 60's. This guy knows his stuff. If all the Walmarts across the country need to be painted, and some national company is doing the painting - more than likely they have hired this guy to do the estimation off of blueprints - he estimates 100's of millions worth of work per year. Like I said - this guy knows his stuff - and if he says you are better off with a company with high materials cost - It's something to chew on! Also think of it like this - last time I bought sheetrock, it was something like $7.56/board. You are company that buys 180k worth of sheetrock a year, you won't pay the same $7.56/board - more than likely you'll get 15%,20%,25% off of regular price. So marking it up 10% for the customer is no big deal. But that's an extra 18k of net profit in your pocket - that otherwise you couldn't have gotten with a company like our staining companies where materials are like only 15% max.

Ok - cognitive dissonance or not - we've been to the edge and back, we skirted a great depression. This was the absolute worst of times at least in the last 40 years. So are you still standing? It occurred to me, that I learned a tremendous amount the last couple of seasons - and I am better off now than I was this time last year. And it also occurred to me - it's not going to get any worse - it's only going to get better. So we have all learned to be lean and mean and survive this recessionary cycle, what plans do you all have for when things get 'easy'. Are we going to get 'plump' and ride the next easy wave - or are we going to use the tools we learned and really take all the meat off the bones?

I had a eureka moment, you should think it over for a while - maybe you'll understand why.

I like to give fat warrantees to homeowners - and that means not skimping out on the stain. What I like most about A.C. - is that I can fill wood with so much stain, that it's even still puddling when I leave the job. And unlike other stains - that puddling doesn't turn into the the 'shinies'. It eventually gets all absorbed. And what I like further about the wood - even after it's formed it's 'cap' of hardened siccative oil/alkyds, below it is still the 'juicy' parafinnic oils occupying the voids of the dried wood. So even if the finish up top cracks and eventually leads to micro ingresses of moisture - the wood is still going to bounce moisture right out. This is further insurance that mildew isn't going to take hold underneath the finish like another product I know. Nothing lasts forever - but I feel this is the best 'recipe' so far for wood restoration business. Now I am not going to argue with other crowds about the superior technical aspects of preserving wood like 100% parafinnic type stains. I am not talking about what is best for the wood itself, I am talking about the perfect comprimise of durability, looks, preservation value, customer satisfaction, ease of use, and general ability to systemize a high output business and maintain a loyal customer base. Personally I think this stain will give the average consumer a good 3 years of use before maintenance - only because you can flush more of this stain into the wood than any other stain I've ever used. A competitor of mine got wise to this stain before I did - and he has a deck/front porch right along a semi-major highway, it will be 2 years old this coming spring - right now it still looks as good as the day it was put on. I like this model because most of my customers think 2 years is like yesterday - 2 years between me coming back is still too short of time in their opinion - obviously this excludes hardwoods.

I never equated lasting with looking great. It's just for most folks the deck looks alright at yr. #2 - it isn't grey, with a quick bleach clean looks respectable. I am saying at year 3 is when they decide to have it done, that it does look bad at that point. At which point I am not selling maintenance but an entire restoration. And the way A.C. applies - I bet you could even get away with a maintenance coat after a heavy duty TSP/Bleach wash, even at year #3.

One thing Ken has shown to me - as long as you can continue thinking out of the box in terms of advertizing/marketing - you become the 'going' rate and competitors don't matter. I've seen for the first time this year the stark contrast on what folks thought was the value of my service depending upon how they found me. The difference is staggering. But it's been a long and tough road to find innovative ways to market and how to sell folks.

LOL hee hee

This me thinks why the majority of guys are going to hold off more and more sharing information on these boards. I talked about this before and got lambasted for suggesting this idea. But in an economic 'contraction' period the free-flow of information hurts more than it helps in my opinion. The right demographic of guys are no longer on these boards to help, now it's just a bunch of bottom feeders looking to undercut to get work.