plainpainter

I am curious what folks think of the mainstay of homeowners that are still getting the same salaries, still paying the mortgage and all the associated expenses. Yet have cut their spending due to 'feelings' about the economy? I think even though my customers are folks grossing 100-400k+ per annum - are talking in terms of 'budgets'. I've been met with this already. I chalk it up to fear - and perhaps 'paper' losses in their 401k and IRA's. I know for a fact that some customers of mine saw their retirement dip below 500k - and they thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Funny thing perception - if I had 500k - I'd be thinking about how I could live in a shack on the beach in the bahamas, clamming for extra 'martini' money. Perception has to change soon - we need some good news for the media to report on. So people don't horde their money thinking of potential 'what-if' catastrophe scenerios.

Ordinarily I'd think you were right, especially for homeowners. But this is a condo association - that's a whole different beast. I've got a guy around me that is a painter that takes on deck work for condo associations - and he toots his horn about his high quality work. The work is subpar by anyone's standards that comes to these boards - but the condo associations love him. If you follow those specs - I agree you are putting the nail in your own coffin in terms of residential services. But for a condo association - I'd say get a waiver with a quick explanation that you don't agree it's the right course of action - but you'd still glady do the work to their specs - as long as they assume any and all culpability as a result from following those specs. And there you go - you are free and clear of any responsibility - they're happy because you are willing to follow their exact spec. And they're going to get a lousy job that will need to recoated sooner than later - and they'll contact you to do it again. How is that so, you may ask. It's like I had a friend working in the stock market taking care of customer accounts. Say he bought was a sound investment in an unknown stock - he'd get callbacks and angry comments - especially if the stock didn't play out perfectly right away. But when he would choose 'namebrand' stocks that he knew beyond a shadow a doubt would not perform well at all - when it would go down. Folks wouldn't blame him -they'd blame the company - and never hold him culpable, and say - 'yeah, IBM is down, what can you do' You understand? Homeowners totally different breed altogether - they will never take any responsibility on their own shoulders - if they force you to apply 'their' products and perform the job the way they want it - and it doesn't come out good - then they hold you responsible for their actions. So it's up to you as a contractor and educate them as to what you will and won't back up. And walk if they won't agree to your terms.

I would do it exactly as stated on the contract - with an additional signature on a waiver form that states they are dictating the exact process and hold your harmless to any consequences from following their exact specs. F' them - give 'em a lousy job and a lousy product just exactly like they want. This is '09 - get the work!

efc-38 has more phosphates than it does percarbs. Frankly I never saw much fizz action - oxiclean does a better job!

It's different for me - I do painting as well, and I am getting 10-15k type repainting estimates to do. If I get one of those a week - that's like getting somewhere between 30-45 house washing estimates to do. So I kind of equate the two the same. But I definitely don't live in a google 'hotspot!

Easy for you to say John, when you are about in the only city in the country that gets over 4,400 google searches a month for those exact keywords 'Pressure washing Charlotte' - that's unheard of in this industry - you are in a major 'hotspot' of pressure washing. When you say, above anyone else, business is getting bad - then I will really worry!

I've been doing quotes like a mad man the past week.

I haven't seen too many things. But I was confronted with a house wash where the front wrap around porch had mahogany decking that was painted with latex solid stain. I came across a trex deck with latex solid stain as well - but surprisingly held up extremely well. Lots of latex painted pressure treated decks.

I got one - there are these guys on a painting forum talking about how unprofessional it is to put your sign on a customers property, especially when working for high end clients! They frown upon the perimeter marketing ideas of door knob hangers as well - and that it's a privelege to put up a sign. I have it in my contract that a sign is on the property or on the street for the duration of the job - that it's part of my advertizing. If I can't put my sign up - then I feel I have to pay more out for more advertizing, more marketing, and more time and energy delivering estimates to compensate. I don't believe in the 'shi-shi' model of no signs, no truck lettering, no print advertizing, word of mouth only contractors. The last time I saw any of that was back in '99. Nobody is too good for me to not have a sign put up - that's just totally too snobby. I don't mean putting some POS stenciled plywood thing. But a professionaly made sign - I see no problem. I do however see a problem with potential clients that don't like the idea of a sign.

Ok - so there is a FAQ about the 3 different linkbacks on this site. Let's have some real discussion about this topic and some real world concrete examples of how to use each. This is important stuff to promote our web presence - let's all get a handle on this stuff.

So - what exactly is a tag 'cloud'? A tag defined by wikipedia is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). So by connecting keywords to a hyperlink in BB code we are creating 'tags'. So what exactly is a tag cloud? Is this something the search engines constructs around our websites based on folks hitting these hyperlinks - or do we need some sort of Internet provider that has some special code sitting on a webserver?

You are a perfect example of what's wrong with this industry, Joe. You get kicked off PTstate and I am the joke <-- very logical. Keep it up - I will enjoy seeing Beth and Rod kick you off this board as well as you continue to spew your lowballer mentality.

Well I was starting to feel bad - then I re-read my post on ptstate, and realized it's no where as bad as some say - it's to the point. And I stand behind that it's good advice to a newbie right now. They can pi$$ and moan all they want over on that board - guys who spew garbage about mixing citric acid and bleach together for a house cleaner - or guys that talk about lowering their price to $225 from $500 for a house wash, and saying how great business practice it is - are all a bunch of buffoons. I'm glad they disagree with me - those guys are a travesty to the industry - and are perhaps causing harm to clients. Not to mention just because a guy reads that citric acid is a main ingredient for rust removal in an off the shelf retailer product doesn't make it so - I've never heard of citric acid removing rust stains.

Or you could what residential painters do - when the world becomes more expensive, products, insurance, labor, trucks - they just simply drop their price even more to counter the price increases. Makes sense, eh?

In the past I've paid guys so atrociously well - and they still didn't give a damn about the success of my company. I let their attitudes run my company into the ground - I take the blame, even though I treated them as professionals and paid them as well as middle school teachers - they robbed my company blind. It's ending - it's sad in a way, and I wouldn't want to work for myself right now either. But guys coming on board are getting minimum wage. And if they're not happy - they're getting let go immediately - everyone is expendable in this economy. No longer will I fear guys leaving me if I don't pay them better. I remember guys complaining to me about how the 'next' guy will pay them $24/hr under the table - yet they could barely brush on a half gallon of paint in a day. Those days of worthless employees are long long gone - there is a silver lining to this downturn.

I am done Rod - I have taken so many notes over the years on production rates - and then I talk to some more seasoned guys, and they were consistently reporting as much as 40% less man-hours to do the same work I was quoting. And what got me really mad was when I heard a guy I employed over two years ago bragging about how he did all the work on the last project. I was fuming - he was a guy that wouldn't go up ladders - I had to install pump jacks scaffolding on 50% of the home just to get the guy to help me out on some of the medium high work. Then I looked carefully into the reported hours and found out he reported 45% of the total man-hours for the bottom half of the home - it should have been no more than a third of the work. This is the crap I've had to deal with. Margins are going to be tight - guys are going to have to kick a$$ for little money - that's just how things are - the gravy train is over.

Nearly all my advertizing dollars is going into guerrila marketing. I highly doubt any mailings will go over 0.1% response rate in '09 - unless the mailing houses and the post office are willing to drop their drawers - I won't be spending money there. I don't think the print media advertizing I used in the past will be as effective - I expect at least 30% drop in interest - yet the price is going up. My plan is to remain in that advertizing and try and catch a greater percentage of a shrinking market. I think my competition is so under funded from their past lowballing - that they will be gone entirely from the print advertizing. So I am betting on a better customer acquisition rate. I will be looking to bring back on exterior painting - as I am already getting demands on it. But I will absolutely not be hiring Americans this time around - they can all go rot imo. They never brought profitability to my company in previous years - they just used my company for their pocketbook - no loyalty whatsoever, even when I paid them atrociously well. I will be using immigrant labor and will drive their salary further down from what they were even use to. This year is going to be a struggle - and I am going to put myself first this time. I've endured enough low income years - and I am going to use this economy to my benefit. I am also looking forward to the demise of builders in general. They have had such a negative effect among subs for so long - they have driven down average incomes so far down and have gobbled up the marketplace. I will look forward to working as a sub againg directly for homeowers with all these builders out of the picture. I know a really really high end builder that pays his floor sanders $0.75 per square foot for sanding and 3 coats of poly - and his painters are paid even worse - but this is typical. I'll be glad when it ends.

How often have you come across a customer and submitted a fence restoration proposal - and they exclaimed - 'That's nearly one third the price of new!!!!!' Invariably this situation nearly always ends in the customer not going with the work. And what have we done about this? I have seen folks talk about how fence pricing is totally different animal and you just have to quote if for a lot less - wait hold on, it's the same work as deck resto - yet folks are resigned to getting a fraction of the price due to the perceived value being way out of wack of the price of a new installation. Let me tell you a little story about my Dad's '94 Jeep sport cherokee - firstly my old man loves that vehicle - he bought it new for around 17k. And over the years he has always got it serviced and repaired but over the now 15 year life - invariably some repairs have been extensive work. He had the heater channels replaced on both sides along with some painting - but the floor was rotting out - and the dealer said it's days were numbered, and they didn't that work. Finally I found an automotive shop a year or so later in the dead of winter - without work. And these guys replaced the whole bellypan front to back - major F'ing surgery. One of the guys even looked straight into my Dad's eyes and asked him if he really wanted to put this much work into at the time 12 year old car. My Dad was adamant - the guys were so thankful for the work, they did it for $25/man-hour and parts for cost! They must have done like 5-6 thousands of work for $2300. There was the time my mom backed the jeep into a chain link and destroyed the hatch - a new one was put in and painted. The Transfer case leaked to empty and burned out - so I brought my dad to a really good transmission shop with 40+ years in the valley - with a good new one installed. Then My Dad hit a dear and used the remaining collision to get his whole front redone. the point is there were 5 or 6 times during the life of this vehicle that the repairs was worth more than the value of the car once fixed. My sister said to my Dad that it didn't make sense - that he should buy new. And he told her just because the repair is more expensive than the worth of the vehicle - it isn't logical to assume that buying a new car makes more sense. He told her he'd rather spend 3 thousand on a car worth 2 thousand than go plunk down 28 thousand for a new car. What's the end result? He has maintained a car for 15 years - it still runs great - and if you add up all the costs over the years it's much less than getting a new car every 7 years or getting into leases. I had another friend buy a subaru for $500. He then went to his friend that is a mechanic and told him to pretend he was going to take the car cross country - and it absolutely couldn't break down. Well he spent $2,500 in parts and labor. What was the result? Four years of uninterrupted driving and still going strong. You see what does the initial sale price have anything to do with the maintenance of the product? If you don't maintain the fence - it grows grey mildew and fungus attacks, lichens grow - and it rots and looks ugly - and then gets torn. Some folks may tear after 10 years, some 15, some folks will let it dwindle for 40 years. In each case - it has no bearing on the value of restoration and maintenance of said fence. Folks who buy into maintenance and restoration - get a completely different life cycle, perpetual beauty of nicely maintained fence - and never ending life. Isn't there value to that? And let's examine that installation cost? Did that truly represent the total cost? How about all those tire tracks into the sod from all the trucks driving onto the property? How about all the flower beds torn up in the process? And all the costs of paying a Designer to design, install and maintain a new garden? It probably adds up to a whole lot more. In the end when someone starts talking price between restoration and the price of new - it's exactly like comparing apples to oranges. It has more to do with what kind of 'product' they want. If they want a nicely maintained product that won't force them to upheave their yard every 15 years - then there is a price to pay - it has absolutely nothing to do with what they paid for the initial installer to install the fencing. You could make the argument that restoration could cost three times as much and make sense. The two things have nothing to do with each other - and so should not influence price. The cost of installation is simply the initial cost of having a fence - it's the cost of getting in the 'game'. But there are other costs - and if a homeowner doesn't want to pay - it shouldn't influence our decision of how to appropriately quote it. Now this isn't to say perhaps its smart idea to charge for estimates, since there may be a high failure rate - but why lower price when homeowners have no idea the costs of future maintenance?

Here are some #'s I've crunched to shed light on mass mailing campaigns - with some certain assumptions here and there. First what's the cost of a 10,000 mailer campaign? Well for starters - I add my costs and it's always more than what others say. But let's just pretend for now that all the costs of design, acquiring lists, printed, sorted, bulk mailed runs you approximately $0.50 per postcard. So the cost of a nuts to bolts mailing campaign will run you $5,000. Now for a 'succesful' campaign, and success is defined by how much money you need to fulfill a real business model, i.e. direct overhead runs you 50% of your gross sales, you have a 10% Net profit, etc, etc. And guys have said in order to achieve this business model you need an ROI -{Return of investment} of about 10:1. If it's less - your overhead will eat too much into profit, if it's more - then you are doing really good. So now we know from some basic assumptions, you will spend $5,000 and due to an ROI of 10:1 - we need $50,000 in gross revenue to justify the expense and stay on track for real business model. So let's say you are advertizing pressure washing services to homeowners - how many jobs do you need to accomplish in order to gross 50k? Well from looking at alot of #'s I am going to throw a random of a reasonable 'average' job. I am going to say for a company that is well equipped and gets a good customer base - you will succesfully be able to average about $461 per job. You may ask, why this amount and not $250 or $750? Well you could lower your pricing to average $250/job - you will have a higher closing rate - but at the expense of a much higher direct overhead for operating your company - i.e. more workers salary paid out, more wear and tear on equipment {have to set aside more for amortization} , more jobs takes longer period of time so the 'density' over time of profits decreases radically. And if you quote too high - you simply won't get many jobs. And there is theoretical limit - only so many folks are going to call you anyways from one mailing - even if you get every job - it's not an infinite pool of work. So we've decided $461 is about where you want to be for the 'average' pressure washing job in the residential universe. So what does this tell us? We need to gross $50,000 - divided by the amount of an average job - that's rougly 108 or 109 jobs we need from this mailing. Basically we need to 'close' roughly 1% of our entire mailing list. You see this is where you start to see the #'s coming together - had your average job been lowered to half {$230.50} in an effort to close at a higher rate in order to secure work - this would have implied that you would have had to perform work for approximately 2% of all the households you mailed to! 2% doesn't seem like much, right? Well we know from much anecdotal evidence and personal experiences - getting 2% to even call you from a single mailing is quite a feat! So now we know a good balance per average job is $461, and we need to close 1% of all households. And our target audience is good and our sales skills are good - we figure we should be able to close anywhere between 1/3 to 2/3'rds of all the calls we get. This implies we need anywere from 1.5% of the entire list to 3% of the list of folks to even call us inquiring about our services!!!! These numbers seem to be very aggressive - there are a few assumptions, but we know that no matter how cheap we price our services - we aren't going to get 5, 6, or even 7% of the folks to call us. And the figure of $461 as an average represents a company that is actively pursuing a very determined marketing and sales model and pursuing a higher end demographic that isn't based so much on price. All these assumptions are tenuous and could easily fall apart. Getting 1.5 to 3% response is an aggressive assumption based on anecdotal evidence, and closing anywhere between 33% to 66% of all the prospects is equally aggressive. And put into perspective that your competitors are doing $150 house washes - and you start seeing putting $5,000 however plausible is also quite risky. My own data suggests that these numbers reflect a market during good economic times - and during the up and coming year could be a disasterous investment especially for those for whom 5 grand is putting everything on the line.

Matt - are you targeting the same 5,000 folks throughout the year. If not - how many times do you 'rotate' your mailing list?

I have a feeling the majority of folks in the trades especially pressure washing and painting have never heard of an 'Income Statement' nor a 'Balance Sheet' or even a cash flow report. I think most guys have a checkbook mentality of running their finances - as long it's positive, they're ok. Well, as bold as the statement is - I think contractors that don't have an intimate understanding of what those items are, or don't even make monthly reports to keep track of how their business is doing - I am willing to state they aren't professional and don't deserve to be in business. All these threads that go into battles over price - I think are totally useless. It just proves to me that my peers aren't truly in business, if they did the books, or paid someone to do the books and make reports back to them - they'd know whether or not something wasn't worth doing or not.

Beth, in a not so great year - I agree with your assesment. But this year is going to be so bad - how are these guys going to afford a pressure washer, inevitably ladders, and all the other tools? In the past they have relied on family, wives, girlfriends to front them the money - that ain't happening this year. And certainly they won't be able to touch upper middle class and up type folks whatsoever. One plus one still equals two, and unless they find a money tree - they won't have a pot to pi$$ in this year.

I don't expect many lowballers this year - I think the economy is so bad, not even lowballers will even be able to 'play'. If there are lowballers - they will be in the lowest income bracket neighborhoods, you'll never come across them.

I am just saying that I think 90% of the problems in our industry come down to one thing. Folks aren't following basic accounting principles for their business. I still see so much resistance to folks wanting to consider what they do professional. I think the first step is get your company finances in order and start generating financial reports - I am sure if guys did this, they'd see there was no point to pricing things so low to begin with.

If you are like me - the whole ordeal of sales is like a 900lb gorilla sitting in the corner. There it is - not knowing how you are going to tackle it - how to approach the problem and come up with solutions. I have listened and taken the good advice of many here and other BB's - names like Ken Fenner and Brian Phillips come to mind of the dispellers of good advice. But as good as their advice is - what is often missed is the ability of the 'listener' to interpret the message correctly. It's not as easy as one may think. So let me give you some background on some of the problems I have been having this year - what I tried to do solve the problem - how I came back to the many ideas that Fenner & Phillips gave to me - and finally the 'pop', the lightbulb that has finally come on after a full season of dealing with that 900lb gorilla over in the corner. First and foremost, no matter what anyone tells you, the biggest problem we have to confront as contractors is - price. As a contractor we have to fight a daily battle on how to get a decent compensation for the services we deliver - and for those folks that want to make 'good' money - the kind that allows you to treat a wife to the occasional vacation, and a nice car - then the battle is that much harder! This battle is so hard to fight that many contractors simply wave the white flag of surrender - and drop their price so far in order to appease the customer, they eventually start working for 'going out of business' wages. And as some have seen first hand - the amount of denial is so great, that when you bring up this touchy subject - tempers start flaring up - and 'words' are exchanged. Well at the start of '08 after a 'partial' and first year at pressure washing in '07 - I had better cemented my 'numbers' for doing business. I was a professional, I had a tandem axle trailer, yellow page ads, classifieds, lettered truck, professional equipment - and here I was waiting for the onslaught of business. So I went out and started meeting with customers and giving the quotes on the spot. What I was met was tremendous resistance at the price of my estimates - apparently my pricing and what they thought was the 'going' rate were way out of wack. And no amount of discussing that I was professional, had insurances, even offered features and the benefits of going with me. In the end all they saw was what they thought a huge disparity in price between me and some of my 'lowballing' competitors. So after a month of this treatment, even though I did manage to sign some customers, I decided something had to change. One potential decision was to lower my price to become more competitive with the other quotes. I had asked Ken Fenner for a real terse breakdown of the costs of doing business, as I had never really analyzed my finances other than to see what my balance was in my checking account. Ken had given me some reall 'rough' average numbers - but still it showed my competitors were operating so far in the 'red' - that competing with them on price was not an option. Jarrod Gumblatt had told me another danger of doing business with customers that are this attached to price - they become loyal only to the price. So add insult to injury - if you work cheap for folks, there is no guarantee they will even give you business next time! Indeed not only had Jarrod told me this, when I went out in the field to deliver estimates I saw this first hand - customers raising objections, then I asked how much the 'last' guy did it for, they usually gave me an estimate at around $0.02-$0.03 per sq.foot. - and then I asked how come they didn't call him initially. Their answer was simple - they saw my ad, so they figured why not call me! And had I come in at what they paid last in addition they were prepared perhaps 10% for inflation - I would have gotten the job! Absolutely no loyalty!