How to Manage a Painting Business: An Expert Guide

What Are the Common Challenges of Running a Painting Business?

Here are some challenges faced by commercial and residential painting business owners and subcontractors:

Challenge 1: Time Management

One major challenge of running a painting company is allocating time to the many tasks with similar priority levels while still meeting deadlines. From managing tax compliance to handling customer communications and monitoring marketing campaigns, roofing businesses face diverse operational demands.

You have to balance multiple painting projects while delivering quality work to each one. Painters who are used to working on one project at a time may find it hard to come to terms with the increased workload.

While it’s true that there’s only so much you can do within 24 hours, there are ways to manage your time to achieve more daily without getting burnt out:

• Hire capable employees and delegate tasks to them. Never attempt to do everything yourself; Otherwise, you’ll burn out.

• During work hours, eliminate all distractions that sap your energy and time, and limit your time on your mobile phone. Social media platforms are time suckers that distract your attention from more critical tasks at hand.

• Practice time blocking. Group some tasks together and attempt to finish them all within a reasonable time. Use your findings to schedule tasks in the future.

• Focus on urgent and important tasks when your energy levels are high, before moving on to others.

• Practice route optimization strategies to allocate jobs to techs so that they can complete more tasks daily.

How ServiceTitan Helps: ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling platform lets you spend less time assigning techs to jobs, so they can complete more tasks daily. The platform automatically suggests the best times and technicians for a job based on the technician’s skills, job and non-job events, and location.

Using ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling platform allows you to complete more jobs daily, helping you maintain a stable cash flow. It also ensures techs are assigned jobs close to their current location and other job sites, shortening their arrival times.

Challenge 2: Inaccurate Estimates

Creating estimates is such a delicate process that can easily produce unintended consequences.

If the quoted price is too high, potential customers will run away, or worse, tell others you charge unfair rates. On the other hand, miscalculating materials and labor costs can force you to spend more on the project than initially predicted and execute it at a loss.

Creating accurate estimates is even more difficult for businesses with multiple field techs responsible for generating sales opportunities via upsells and closing them. Tech can easily fail to create estimates according to your company’s standards or assign the wrong prices to line items.

Learn how to create accurate residential and commercial painting estimates.

How ServiceTitan Helps: Field technicians use ServiceTitan’s Mobile Application to create accurate estimates easily. 

This is because the application integrates with ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Platform, which automatically collects current material prices directly from the catalogs of top manufacturers and suppliers. Even better, the prices quoted in the Pricebook automatically change whenever manufacturers update theirs.

This protects your profit margins by reducing the risk of underbidding or overbidding projects.

Challenge 3: Inefficient Communication

All employees must work together as a cohesive unit for a painting business to succeed. However, this cannot happen without efficient communication systems.

For example, let's say a technician just upsold a customer on a repaint offer for their patio and couldn’t inform the CSR because of inefficient communication systems.

Let’s then assume that the customer calls to confirm their outstanding balance. Since the CSR is unaware of the additional service, the CSR will quote a price that excludes it.

“Can’t technicians call or text with office staff to confirm details?” you may ask. Well, that’s possible but inefficient since back-and-forth calls will consume part of the time they could have used to prepare the surface to be painted, gather supplies, and choose colors.

A more efficient way to prevent such communication mishaps is to centralize all data on a platform accessible by every employee who needs it to perform their duties. For example, field technicians should have access to customer data and previous histories when they suggest upsells, CSRs should have the names of returning customers when answering calls, and so on.

How ServiceTitan Helps: ServiceTitan’s CRM Platform centralizes all customer data and service history into a cloud-based system every employee can access.

The platform helps employees (field techs and office staff) recognize returning customers and suggest relevant offers. This makes it easier to nurture long-term customer relationships and increase revenue generated from each service visit.

Before investing in ServiceTitan, Arizona Painting struggled with managing its customer data. This issue increased significantly when the company expanded to new locations. Any time a customer’s record changed (e.g. when techs upsold them on a new offer), office staff faced the time-consuming chore of updating multiple files.

To make matters worse, office staff had to cobble together multiple platforms to execute core processes like scheduling, task assignment, and job tracking, causing them to spend more time on these tasks than was ideal.

This changed when the company found ServiceTitan.

“We picked Service Titan (in 2019) because it could do everything from the start to the finish,” says company owner Joe Campbell. 

“From the first call a customer makes all the way to the collections process—and then even follow-up and memberships and things like that. It was the only program we could find that could do that for our company.”

Challenge 4: Tracking Job Progress and Financials

Financial mismanagement and failure to generate profit consistently are two reasons small businesses fail. No painting business venture remains operational without knowing each job’s profitability and how much revenue comes in, as there would be no sustainable cash flow to fuel growth.

Additionally, without a proper bookkeeping culture, it’s very easy to overspend on phantom projects, overpay for materials and labor, and attract fines from the IRS for filing the wrong taxes.

To track job progress and financials, follow these tips:

• Invest in project management tools.

• Create a business bank account and credit card to separate personal and business expenses.

• Save all receipts and invoices digitally or in a folder. This includes overhead costs and money spent buying painting equipment, such as drop cloths, sandpaper, and paint sprayers.

• Create detailed goals and objectives.

How ServiceTitan Helps: ServiceTitan produces detailed financial and profitability reports and sends them to users’ inboxes.

It also delivers reports that track each technician's performance, the location and amount of each inventory item, and the contribution of each business unit or job type to general revenue.

How Can You Streamline Your Painting Business Operations?

Managing painting businesses becomes more challenging due to inefficient processes that make it difficult to deliver exceptional customer service. Employees also spend more time on busywork than on painting, which is what generates revenue.

To streamline your painting business operations, you need to simplify tasks, eliminate unnecessary steps, and minimize inefficiencies to the best of your ability. Here are some ways to do just that:

• Invest in digital technology to automate key business processes such as marketing, job scheduling, and invoicing.

• Design a centralized scheduling system that makes it easy to assign jobs, respond to unexpected events, and communicate with customers.

• Design a business plan and monitor your progress toward achieving your goals.

• Enhance communication between employees by using digital tools and enforcing a culture of collaborative work.

• Create standardized workflows for repetitive tasks and save them in a centralized database. Review the effectiveness of these workflows every quarter.

• Design templates for invoices, proposals, and estimates to save time.

And that’s it. After streamlining your business operations, the next step is implementing standard team management practices.

What Are the Best Strategies for Managing a Painting Team?

Managing a team involves implementing strategies that motivate staff to work together and assist each other in building the company. It involves finding ways to accommodate team members with varying experience levels, communication styles, work ethics, and personality and cultural differences.

Managing a painting team starts with hiring employees who align with your business’s culture and meet a real business need. You can do this by writing a job description that attracts the right people and outlines your specific requirements.

Learn how to write a job description that attracts the right people.

Once that’s out of the way, follow these standard team management strategies:

Prioritize Communication

Encourage open communication to build a cohesive team. No unit should operate in isolation, and employees shouldn’t leave things open to interpretation—it’s better they over-communicate to prevent tensions and misunderstandings.

Hold weekly meetings to review progress and challenges. During these meetings, encourage attendees to speak and share the blockers they encountered during the week. Then, based on their feedback, take the necessary steps to encourage other employees to speak up in subsequent meetings.

You can require employees to spend some hours each week with another team in addition to meetings. For example, CSRs can spend three hours weekly on service visits with technicians.

This fosters a collaborative mindset by helping each employee appreciate and understand the role others play in the company’s growth. It also opens channels of informal, direct communication between different departments, making it easy to resolve misunderstandings quickly.

Invest in Training

Employees communicate better when they are confident in their skill set. Training programs also provide opportunities for team members to interact and learn from each other, fostering relationships that enhance communication within the team.

Before creating training programs, set a goal directly related to your business needs. Then, send invites to relevant employees and remind them of the date so they don’t forget.

Set Clear Expectations

Employees find it harder to communicate with each other when they are unsure of their respective roles and responsibilities.

Unclear expectations also make it harder for managers to measure performance and give constructive feedback. As a result, employees will feel demotivated and unengaged and spend more time on low-priority tasks.

To avoid such a problem, create a business structure with clear roles and responsibilities for each employee. Define the performance KPIs by which they’ll be judged and explain what you expect them to achieve. Reinforce these expectations during standups, onboarding calls for new employees, and performance reviews.

How Can You Improve Customer Experience in Your Painting Business?

Aside from employees, customers are the biggest asset of every business venture. Moreover, the money they pay and potential clients they bring via word-of-mouth referrals keep your doors open.

Here’s how to improve your customer experience:

Respond Quickly to Inquiries

In most cases, the first time a customer inquires about a company’s services is through a phone call or direct message on a digital platform, such as social media or business directories.

Depending on how they’re treated during the initial interaction, customers will either book an appointment and encourage their friends to do the same or leave angrily, never to return. Unfortunately, the latter will always be the case if you fail to answer their inquiries promptly.

Using a painting CRM tool that saves all interactions with current, past, and potential clients, you can respond quickly to customer queries. The tool should also save their phone numbers and other personal information, enabling you to follow up on leads that don’t convert on the first interaction.

Offer Transparent Estimates

When customers choose your services, they implicitly express their trust in your company and capabilities. 

However, that trust is completely broken whenever inaccurate estimates are sent, including those with underestimated material costs, overinflated labor costs, missing overhead expenses, etc.

To retain customers’ trust, always cross-check estimates before sending them out. Provide a detailed breakdown of all the items and their respective prices to be transparent about how you arrived at the total cost.

Provide Regular Updates

Customers find it easier to trust businesses that communicate with them regularly. They’re more likely to leave a company that only messages them during the project's planning stages or when invoices are due.

Therefore, consistently communicate with customers. Let them know about arrival times, timelines, potential delays, and hiccups. 

Send a brief description of the technician arriving at their house and solicit feedback after completing the job. 

How Can ServiceTitan Help You Manage a Painting Business?

Managing your business is exceptionally more challenging when you still use filing cabinets to save paperwork, clipboards to manage customer details, and pins and physical maps to assign jobs. Employees will spend more time than necessary on repetitive tasks, making it impossible to focus on delivering high-quality service and attending training programs to sharpen their skills.

ServiceTitan’s tool suite automates all key painting business tasks, freeing up your time to create effective business strategies and brainstorm ways to better serve customers.

Here’s a rundown of ServiceTitan’s key features:

• Advanced scheduling and dispatching: Dispatchers and CRM can schedule appointments weeks and months in advance and respond promptly to unexpected circumstances.

• Customizable estimates and integrated invoicing: These enable employees to easily create accurate invoices and estimates using well-designed templates. 

• CRM for better client communication: This centralizes customer details into a cloud-based system, accessible to all employees. Employees can also use it to speak directly with customers and vice versa.

• Reporting tools to track profitability and job performance: You can access reports showing how well specific employees and business units perform. These reports can be scheduled to hit your inbox at specific times.

• Mobile app for on-the-go team management: Field techs can use the mobile app to create invoices, spot upsell opportunities, access customer data, and speak with back-office staff.

Arizona Painting formerly used multiple platforms to manage its business—Excel for scheduling, a Word doc for proposals, and Google Sheets for something else. As expected, this introduced inefficiencies that made it impossible for the company to grow, even though it needed to do so to remain competitive.

So, the search began for a tool enabling staff to perform all key painting business tasks from a single dashboard. 

“We were looking for a CRM program that could integrate our marketing, that could handle a customer from the beginning to the end,” recalls Joe Campbell. “A lot of the programs we looked at, they wouldn’t handle the marketing, they wouldn’t handle the front-end scheduling. Some of them would do the production side of it well, but none of them really did everything.” 

Luckily, the company came across ServiceTitan, and as a result, Arizona Painting recorded a 60 percent increase in leads and staff numbers and a five percent improvement in its profit margin.

“Using ServiceTitan is something that everybody in our industry needs if they want to know how well their business is doing and how to improve it,” says Campbell.

It’s Your Turn Now

Now, you have the tools to better manage your painting business. 

Remember to invest in the right tools and pay close attention to treating employees like you would want them to treat customers. Pay for their training programs and conferences and give commissions and bonuses. This way, you’ll have less trouble managing them, and they’ll treat the business as theirs.

Invest in ServiceTitan, our comprehensive painting business software, to simplify business management. Sign up today for a free demo.

ServiceTitan offers a full range of solutions for home service businesses, including painting companies. The apps make everything easier and faster, from estimating through to invoicing. You get features such as real-time inventory management, detailed job costing, and customer relationship management. All in all, ServiceTitan helps you improve accuracy, efficiency, and profitability.