Are you afraid to raise your pricing for painting jobs?
Most painters are…but you shouldn’t be because competing on price is an intrinsically bad idea. Your only two options are to be the highest or lowest. No one will care if you are the second or third lowest pricing in town.
When you are the lowest price, there is an implied low-quality factor as well. Typically, services that are the cheapest are never the best. You don’t want that stigma associated with your painting company!
However, if you are the most in-demand painter in town, people will pay your prices, no matter what they are.
So how do you become the most in-demand painter in town? You become the most known, liked and trusted. You can accomplish this with the videos, content and Facebook ads that we discussed in Step 1. Here is a link to that article in case you missed it.
By providing content and value through your videos and articles to people in your area, they already know, like and trust you. They know that you are an expert at what you do and they have seen proof.
Therefore, when it comes time to hire a painter, they will automatically think of you. In fact, there is a good chance that they won’t shop around at all. They will need to hire you because you are the one that they trust.
When this happens, they will pay whatever you ask for…and because you are providing value and excellent service, you can definitely charge at least 50% more than you are charging now. You will get just as many clients and make more money.
Let’s Return To Our Example Company With A Premium Offering For Our Painting Business
Remember, ABC Painting started with $40,000 monthly gross revenue. Then, we implemented a follow-up system, which will increase the leads by about 60%. This took the gross monthly revenue to $64,000 with a close rate of 20%.
Next, we doubled our leads from 80 to 160 per month using the tactics in Step 2 of this series. This resulted in 32 new clients and a monthly gross income of $128,000.
Then, we doubled the close rate from 20% to 40%, which gave us 64 clients per month with a monthly gross income of $256,000.
In step 4, we added a premium offering at $12,000 that 10% of our clients chose, resulting in 90% of our new monthly clients (58) with the regular offering at $4000 and 6 of them at $12,000. This gives us a total revenue for the month of $304,000.
Finally, in this step, we are going to increase the regular pricing by 50%. The 90% of our monthly clients (58) will now be at $6000 and 10% of our monthly clients (6) will be at $12000. This gives us an end result of $420,000 for the monthly gross income.
We have just 10X’d your monthly revenue in 5 easy steps!
BONUS Tip For Increasing Your Recurring Revenue
Would you like to start each year knowing that you have at least $500,000 on the books?
You should be able to count on at least 10% of your customers from the year before having a job for you in the current year or referring you to someone that has a similar job.
To make sure that they think of you, you want to stay at the “top of mind” for them. There are a few ways to stay in front of your current customers.
First of all, send out a monthly newsletter via email. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and it shouldn’t be all about your company. Just like your videos and content, send out some monthly helpful advice that would apply to your ideal client.
For instance, if you were a painter located in Virginia, sending out an email with tips on weatherproofing your deck would be perfect for September or October.
IFTS offers a service that does this automatically for painters for under $300 per month, so it pays for itself if you get just one repeat client.
Another way to stay in front of current clients is to turn them into a Facebook audience. You just upload your list of clients to the Facebook audience wizard. Then, you can be sure to periodically place helpful videos and content in front of them via Facebook.
Side Note – This audience is also great to use to create a lookalike to send videos and new content to via Facebook Ads.
A final way to get in front of current customers to send them something via snail mail. Most companies will send Christmas cards or something similar, but this doesn’t really make you stand out in the crowd. We recommend choosing a holiday that most other companies don’t really acknowledge, like St. Patrick’s Day. Send them a “We’re Lucky To Have You As A Customer Card” and watch how many people find a way to hire you again!
By staying “top of mind”, you should see at least a 10% repeat from the year before.
If you followed the 5 step process that we discussed, you’d have a monthly revenue of at least $420,000…which is over $5 MILLION DOLLARS annually. So, if you have at least 10% of the people from last year hire you this year, you will start off knowing you have over $500,000 already on the books.