If you want to know how to start a painting business, you will need to be open to the steps but also some tips and recommendations. Otherwise, it can be easy to fail before you even start. Every business will require money, time, and effort, which we believe you have already set in your mind as the basic yet crucial factors. In addition to them, make sure you are patient.
Finally, when you feel you’re ready with all these details, take the time to review the steps it takes to start your business.
Below, you will find a list of the things you must do in order to set the painting business properly, have chances to make it a success, and avoid the most common mistakes as much as possible.
Just keep in mind that some adaptations could be needed depending on the final goals you set for your journey.
Get to Know Your Market
First, determine if there is enough demand in your area for painting. Are there large neighborhoods or commercial areas close to you? Are you able to do enough interior work in cold states?
Be optimistic but realistic. You must have a good understanding of your market to start a profitable painting business.
Talking with other painters is a great way to gain these insights. Most likely, you already know successful professional painters in the area. Ask them about the market.
Are they able to handle more business? Are they mostly residential or commercial? Is it interior or exterior? Perhaps there is a niche for specialty painting?
No matter what the answers may be, smart entrepreneurs should understand the market before investing time, money, and energy in a new painting business.
Practice Makes Perfect
Let’s now take a look at what strengths you have and what skills might be beneficial.
Painting is a meticulous, detail-oriented profession. Many painters find that working outside is a bonus. You may have to work from the top of ladders, which can make it physically difficult.
Preparing a space to paint can be quite a task. You will need to scrape, patch, and sand before you pick up a brush.
It’s fun and creative to learn how to start your own painting business. You might be able to suggest beautiful colors for your clients. Are you interested in decorative work, such as stenciling and mural making? You will be in high demand for your creative talents if you tap into your artistic side.
Practice is the best way to be a great artist. Ask your family and friends if they want to have some painting done before looking for clients.
To really get the hang of it, you can work in a well-established painting business. You can’t learn more than by getting hands-on experience.
Another thing: What are your people skills and abilities? You will be visiting homes and businesses to bid on jobs, talk with clients and handle any issues that may arise.
You should present yourself as professional, friendly, punctual, and considerate of clients’ time and space. Clients will be more likely to recommend you to others if they like your personality and your work.
Create Your Identity
You will need to be able to start a new company for painting by naming your business. Your business name should be catchy and memorable enough to distinguish you from your competitors in the local market.
When thinking about one, consider:
- What makes you different?
- What is the best way to make people remember you?
- How can people spread the word about your positive reputation?
Providing a reason for your business is important; it will help you to grow your business.
When coming up with a name, you should also design a logo that can be used on everything. This includes business cards and letterhead, as well as yard signs, vans, and other items.
Focus on Your Own Business Plan
Before you start any business, make sure your plan is complete. A solid business plan is essential for any business, particularly in the painting area, where many variations must be considered.
Include the company’s goals in your business plan, along with information about financing and the timeframe required to reach them.
You should prepare one that is successful with all information about the company and any elements that you will need later.
These are just a few reasons business plans are important, and you must keep in mind:
- Business plans are more than just a way to help your company communicate its vision. They can help you make sure your core ideas are solid and can generate real revenue.
- This will enable you to determine when, where, and why your company was founded, as well as the steps you intend to take to make it a success.
- This business plan will show you how to start or grow your painting business.
- If you want to borrow money, you will need a business plan.
Register Your Business Legally
Although you don’t have to register a business to freelance work, you will need to choose a name for your company to become an official legal entity.
Get a federal tax ID number and set up a bank account for your business. These will allow you to separate your professional and personal finances and make tax preparation easier during registration.
However, before you register the business, there are a few things to consider:
- Review Your State’s Business Regulations.
Small business regulations vary from one state to the next. Most small businesses pay less than $300. Be prepared to share your knowledge by visiting the Department of State in your location or Small Business Administration.
During the registration or review, you will need to go over these elements:
- Your business name and address.
- Your ownership structure: Are you the only one? Or you and a partner?
- Are you able to have a registered agent that receives legal documents for your company?
- Choose Your Business Structure.
Your business structure is also important. While most painting companies are Limited Liability Companies (LLC), some prefer partnerships and S-Corporations. Each has its own benefits.
Check with your county or town government to determine if you require a permit to open a painting business and do business legally in your locality. All this must be done after considering your final legal structure.
Get Insured
You don’t need to purchase insurance for everything. However, it is a good idea to have basic coverage in case you are injured or become sick while working.
Although general liability insurance is not required in every state, it’s recommended for any case where accidents do occur.
While registering your company as an LLC/corporation, this insurance step gains more importance, which means you should consider adding business insurance.
This will provide protection against claims and accidents as well as natural disasters. You will need to increase your business insurance as you grow and hire more employees. Some elements that will need inclusion or extra insurance you might need later include:
- Workers’ compensation.
- Unemployment insurance.
- Insurance for the disabled.
- You can get auto insurance for all vehicles that you use.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses offers a variety of services.
Finances? They Must Be in Order
The goal of any business is to make money. It is not a business if it doesn’t make it after all. Thus, it is important to know what you need to run a business that succeeds.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what causes businesses to fail. Cash flow problems and insufficient funds are, however, two common reasons for failure.
This is why you need to take your time with your finances and understand that this coin has two sides: securing financing and financial literacy.
Let’s start with the first. Many businesses can be started for low startup costs. Others will need capital to purchase equipment and inventory.
Before you make any spending, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of your total investment. This will enable you to accurately project your financial future, including when you will reach break-even.
The money will go to your business. Our market research shows that inventory and product costs make up a large portion of spending in Year 1.
If your calculations show that you need more money than what you can pay, you may be eligible for a private lender or a small business loan.
The second part of the equation is financial literacy. This is the ability to understand how your finances flow through your company.
Your business won’t work if the math doesn’t work. Bookkeeping should be done as soon as you are ready to buy or take clients.
To monitor your cash flow, you can keep detailed records of your income and expenses. This will make it easy to transition to working with an accountant or bookkeeper.
It is easier to manage your personal and professional finances separately, which makes it less difficult for you to file your business taxes. Automating many of the financial tasks involved in starting a new business can be a great help.
This is particularly important if your goal is to start a small business that doesn’t require much money.
Establish a Bank Account for Your Business
After registering your business with the state or local governments and considering the previous factors, you will need to open a checking business bank account and handle personal finances. This is an essential step in the startup process.
If your business doesn’t have a business bank account, you risk leaving your personal assets open to grabs in the event of a bankruptcy or lawsuit.
It’s very easy to open a bank account for your business. Many brick-and-mortar banks allow you to start the process online and then finish in a branch.
These banks are not suitable for businesses that use cash to transact business transactions. Also, they do not offer ATMs where greenbacks can be deposited.
You might want to keep your bank account for business more traditional if you plan on doing most of the business in cash.
Select the Services That You Will Offer
Learn about the market to understand how to start a painting company in 2022, just like we mentioned initially. You’ll then be able to understand the people you want to work with.
When done, it’s time to decide whether you want to work in residential or commercial areas. You can’t choose between these two options unless you know what you want, or maybe you’re aiming for both?
Regardless, this is what you must know about both options in the niche:
- Residential painting is always a business with new clients. But it can be difficult to get contracts. Residential clients don’t require painting services all the time. They will only call you once in a few years. To have consistent work, you need to have a large number of clients.
- Commercial work has a lot in common with residential. Cash flow is slower, and you may have to wait up to 90 days before you get the money you earned for your work. Although it is easier to get a job, the scope of work is always more difficult. There will be less to do, but you will make more in some cases.
Get Your Equipment
The jobs you do will determine the tools you need for your painting business. Do not invest in additional equipment until you have taken on enough work to justify the cost.
Avoid buying cheap brushes and rolling rollers that are not designed for professionals. These cheap brushes and rollers can be a pain in the rear when you use them on professional jobs. You will have to do costly and time-consuming repairs.
Depending on your job, you may need additional equipment such as ladders or paint sprayers. To help you determine what equipment you will need to do the job you are doing, you can consult local contractors, or you should be quite well-informed in this with some research.
Prices for Your Services
Once you know the basic structure and the organization, you can begin to think about the cost of your services.
Although prices will vary between businesses, there are some common aspects to pricing painting services, either residential or commercial.
For instance, some companies charge according to the amount of work they will have; this includes the number of walls or the meters. Others decide to charge per hour and how long it takes to finish the job.
While we recommend that you look at your competition, it is also important to consider your own costs. Consider, for example, how much do you spend on your equipment, and what about logistics? Employees? Are there additional costs?
You can also decide to cover your costs and then add a specific percentage based on your work and how much you do.
Start Finding Work
Many people hire painters through word-of-mouth recommendations. Start by telling your family, friends, and neighbors about your business.
Although you may be in a friendly relationship with them, you should still communicate professionally and effectively with them, give a detailed estimate, and go over the formal process.
After you have completed a job, ask your customers to forward their phone number and website address to any friends or neighbors who might be looking for painters.
Also, you can get work in your locality without a website these days, but a website is essential for any business to be successful. Potential clients in your area can search for your business or its service online and find everything they need.
Many online tools are available if you aren’t sure how to approach the website process, including Squarespace and Wix. You can look professional and polished with little effort.
But we do recommend you invest some time in WordPress once you have the budget to finance it.
Write a Marketing Plan
While a business plan can provide insight into the business, a marketing plan will give you more details about the strategies used to grow it and bring success.
To reach potential customers in your area, your painting business must have a marketing strategy. These are some of the elements that should be included in the general plan:
- Your company’s mission and goals.
- Description of your target audience.
- Comparison of your competitors.
- A strategy or more to boost your marketing efforts.
- Which marketing channels are you planning to use for your company?
- Your marketing budget.
You should invest as much time as you can in your marketing plan to guarantee you are able to boost your lead generation and avoid going directly to what failure is.
We know how overwhelming it can be to manage marketing, so we created some lead generation strategies to help. Some elements cannot be missed:
- A well-designed website can convert visitors into clients.
You might be wondering if your business needs a website.
A website’s purpose is to allow people to find you. You can search for “painting services near me” and find hundreds of results. You review some, and there it is, done! This is how people find the services.
It has been proved that over 87% of Internet users search for local services or products using these terms or keywords, and they expect to find a website that can show them everything they need. If your website does not appear on the search results page or isn’t available in the first place, you won’t be able to get any business.
Do you know the basics of coding? You don’t have to be an expert in order to create a website. As we mentioned earlier, you can start with a basic website and then move on to a more advanced one.
Now, these pages and other details will ensure that your website is well-designed and, thus, must be added to the elements you include to generate clients.
- List Products/Services.
- Photos of your team or services.
- Company information.
- Contact form/email.
- Testimonials.
- Use SEO (search engine optimization).
Your website will help you build your reputation and demonstrate professionalism to your customers. It is a great investment, both for small and big businesses.
We can also offer additional marketing options for your business:
- Use your network to promote the company on any free channels. This applies to your social media accounts as well as your contacts. A simple email asking for assistance, such as sharing a post via social media, can help you gain traction.
- Customers who work with you early can get discounts.
- Utilize marketing tools.
This last one is important because you need to be familiar with the various marketing tools that you can use to reach more people in your area.
Flyers about painting services can be distributed in your locality. However, only a small number of people will see them.
Online marketing is a great way to expand your customer base, business, and it comes with ten times more tools:
- Google My Business listings include information about your business, including contact information, hours of operation, reviews, ratings, and ratings. This free service can help your painting business rank on Google’s first pages.
- Google Ads campaigns can be one of the most cost-effective ways to market your business.
- Google Analytics to follow your stats and understand how your business is performing.
It is possible to move forward with your painting company by taking the time and evaluating your website’s actions.
You can focus your marketing efforts to increase sales by understanding the factors that brought you more customers or made you receive more calls. These are important metrics to be aware of:
- Where are your customers?
- Who are your customers?
- Phone tracking.
- Clicks done on your website.
- Who is visiting the site?
- And anything that influences the conversions.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Painting Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Painting Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Painting Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.