2018 goals

The book on millionaires I mentioned in the last post talks about the transformative power of talking about your goals/dreams in the present tense and how they feel in the moment.  There is more to it then I can or want to quickly explain here beyond what I just did, but I just wanted to share what my goals are for the coming year and years using this technique. 

As an aside I got an email from one of the business development programs we've been paying for and he mentions how they followed a class of Harvard graduates.  3% wrote their goals down.  They followed up with everyone 20 years later.  The 3% who had written their goals down had accumulated more assets than the other 97% combined.  Harvard grads!  Moral of the story, if you have any ambition and goals in general, screw the in the general and write those things down.  You're entire life is intertwined and things shape up differently if you do different things and apparently writing goals down is one of those things.  And yes I've asked our painting employees to do this same exact activity.

Goals:

• business/job role goals - I work in a business that provides for my family and meets all my spending and savings goals.  I am fulfilled, excited to work each day, have a great team around me that enjoys being around me and me around them.  In 2018 businesses grow to the point where I quit my full time job so that I can make more money there and have more time freedom.
• At 20% net profit margin the businesses bring in $600,000 in top line revenue.  After 35% taxes and 10% tithing I’ll make $54,000 net on the year.
• That equates to $15,000 in painting jobs done each week for 40 weeks or March 1st through November 30th 2018.  That is 6.5 jobs per week at our average job size of $2,300 that we did in 2017.  At current conversion rates that means 941 leads need to be brought into the business, 621 estimates need to given out and 261 jobs won.
• Health - I jump and dunk the basketball.  I can bench press 200 lbs one time and it is easy to do.  I have abs that show naturally.  I eat healthy planned out meals and sometimes have a cook prepare the food and snacks for me and my family.  We eat organic and have done away with a microwave opting for more natural methods of heating our food.  My wife and I enjoy our bodies and the activities we can do with them ourselves and with our kids and friends.  Going on hikes isn’t a burden.
• Personal life - Ashlee and I regularly attend therapy and our relationship is thriving.  I get to serve whenever the ward has random time of day requests for help.  I’m able to help those in the ward with things they need or want.
• friends/family - I take friends and family out to lunch or dinner and movie on their birthdays and just because randomly throughout the year to catch up with them and I pay for them every time.  I give them special gifts that they’ve never received before.  I take each of my kids out on ‘dates’ to be in touch with them and help them with whatever it is they’re facing at the time and it really enriches our relationships and we’re really close and can and do talk about everything.
• Finances - I live in a really nice house that is completely remodeled and stylish and comfortable and warm and totally insulated.  My utility bills are super cheap because of the insulation and windows we have put in.  The house is also all the way paid for.  I’ve got several rental properties that provide all the cash flow Ashlee and I will ever need.  Our businesses do the same, but are always on a tear with the best margins in their respective industry, most giving in their industry in terms of charity, and growing year over year.  All of this is because it frees up my mind to focus on more important things and take away the stress of worrying about anything that could happen financially has already been solved  Each business is mentored by an amazing mentor who has been there before us and is totally invested in what we can do to give back to others.  Our cars are new models because we want super safe cars that are also really reliable and of course they’re paid for and we have uninsured motorist coverage on our insurance policy.  Burial plans and estate are paid for and set up and tax efficient.  I pay for all my kids weddings, missions, and beginner investments whether that is a rental property or invest in their business.  I do the same for my family and coach them on how to grow their business.
• Personal growth and development - I read several books each month.  Leisure books and non-fiction.  I read biographies of people who i’m interested in.  I now know how to cook really well and we have great cooking tools and equipment.  I serve a “senior mission” even though I’m still super young and everything back home is taken care of in terms of finances and family life.
• Fun (travel, recreation, leisure) - Ashlee and I go ourselves to places we’d love to go and often fly first class because the businesses sky miles pay for it.  We go ourselves and pay family really well to take care of the kids while we go.  When the kids are older we take them with us often so they get to experience new things and we grow closer together as a family.

As an extra nugget of goal setting I did this activity of doing a "Painted Picture" earlier this year or maybe it was even last year after listening to the podcast interviewing the guy who created 1-800-got-junk and he does this with his company and companies and so I did it too and thought it'd be good/cool to share here as well.

Enjoy!

2020 Painted Picture

The best way to ensure the future happens is to create it – first with a vivid image in our minds – and then commitment to this picture as though it’s already happened. Our Painted Picture paints a clear and compelling future for Rocky Mountain Painters – it’s how we will look, feel and act on January 1st, 2020.

Our Purpose

We want to build a high quality high value service for each of our clients.  We treat our customers like friends, we do what we say we will do, and we work together to make every day better. And it’s together that we have created a painting company that has proudly grown from start-up to well-respected industry leader in just five short years.  

Our family has grown from serving Salt Lake City, to all cities in the greater salt lake area.  Revenues are 2 million per year and our fun brand helps other companies put their best foot forward for all their customers.  

We show up on the first page of google organically.

Our People

Our people are everything.  They not only do a great job and keep our customer’s businesses looking great, but they stay with us.  They move up the ranks and are trying to help grow the business as well.

Our Customers

Our customers are our main lead source, i.e. more than 50%.  We love to stay in touch with them and help them anyway we can and in return by helping them and staying top of mind we are receiving more and more work from similar people that are their friends.

Our Brand

Not only have we started to reinvent an industry, but also, we’re reinventing how the industry markets. On a mission to create a top-of-mind name, our marketing never lets up. And it works – people tell us, “I love your brand!” Our remarkable marketing style and happy attitude have generated an unprecedented buzz in the painting industry, completely changing the picture in people’s minds of the stereotypical painting company.

Painting companies don’t get press, but we do, and lots of it.  Because of our backlinks and press releases people reach out to us consistently to have us help them with their painting needs.

We partner strategically with commercial sales, leasing, and management companies to ensure we stay top of mind as the preferred service provider for all their painting needs for their occupied, and more importantly unoccupied spaces.

Our Profits

We are happy to have the highest profit margin in our industry to due to innovative marketing and system processes.

Our Shared Success

More than money we love to give back to the community.  We enjoy regular outings together to celebrate milestones within the company.

2017 Recap

Its been a busy year.  I haven't been on my blog since March lols.  Whoops.  I do journal personally several times a week so updates do happen on paper, they're just not always public.

I'm still at the same job I started earlier this year, but we'll see how long it lasts.  The painting business hasn't provided the fat cash I hoped for at the beginning of the year, but we're definitely on our way.  In this post  we said we wanted to 100k for Scott and 50k for Ashlee and I with a tripling of the revenue from the year prior.  Live and learn. 

2016 the business did about $113,000 after some updating.  This year we're already book through the end of the year and into January 2018 and so we should complete the year's revenue at $435,000 barring something weird happening.  So we way more than tripled the business for sure.  I believe more realistic/healthy net profit margins are more in the 20-30% range though.  We are sending Renee to a painting conference in January to learn from other successful painting contractors and that will be one of the many things we get more concrete info on, net profit margin.

A business recap though of things we did in the past year.

We got licensed.  That took a bit of work.  We had to get Scott’s criminal history all compiled, credit history printed/submitted.  We had to get payroll back taxes figured out, filed, and paid, which ended up being a bunch of money that we hadn’t deducted like we do from our employees paychecks and so we had to catch up and that was a hefty bill of like 8 grand or so if I remember right.

Then we set up a payroll company to take the burden off of Scott of doing that all day on Sunday every two weeks. 

Renee became the production manager and then has hired and trained a friend of hers to take over for her so she can focus on higher value work tasks like writing out processes in the businesses, going on estimates, going to conferences locally and abroad, and meeting with and setting up our quickbooks stuff.  She also became a partner in the business, which was and is a big reason why we were able to grow so much in this past year and we’re excited about what we can all get done in the coming year.

We set up liability insurance and workers comp and had everyone fill out their “I’m not a terrorist form” that you have to fill out now.

We set up a new website that is managed by a company that we farmed that out to as well as google ads, which was a big portion of the company growth this year. 

We successfully ran a customer reactivation campaign. 

We’ve started and done just one or two monthly newsletters, but we’ll be better about that going forward. 

We learned and implemented better estimating procedures.

The big thing we’re going to really push company wide in the next month and just always going forward is getting into commercial work.  I think that alone for me personally will be the ticket to me quitting my job full time and focusing on growing this thing to really give myself the time freedom I deserve and crave.

We’ve spent a bit of time on a production rate guide so we know how to estimate any job.

We’ve also spent a lot of time considering and talking about a bonus structure program for our employees so that we can pay out more money to our team and maintain healthy margins across each job.

We’re hoping to roll out charitable giving back this year.

I really want to push into door to door marketing and lead generation because we haven’t done any of that.  This last summer I talked to a guy in the Midwest, want to say Minnesota, and before he did door to door his painting business did like $130,000 in a year.  He said this year he should finish at like 1.4 million in revenue if I remember the conversation correctly.  On a poor 20% net profit margin that guy is making more than most doctors, lawyers, professionals, etc.  The guy he learned from will finish the year with like a 6.5 million dollar a year revenue company so this is definitely something I want to get into.

This coming year I also want to be mentored heavily by painters who are millionaires and can get me where I want to go.

I’m reading a book right now about millionaires and it is pretty interesting.  Definitely makes me think I should consider taking out the safety net of having a job to really push me forward.  And when I think about how we did 435k in revenue and I haven’t pushed a bunch of the stuff I would push if I had the time I think I could definitely get the money to come in when the time comes if I quit my job.  I do still have responsibilities though financially to not try and totally mess up and so I’m going to continue working the commercial campaign we’re rolling out this week to see how that goes and if it gets really good traction I just may quit my job. 

Last year we bid a job for $123,000 that we didn’t win, but that just shows the power of commercial and how it could totally change the landscape of a painting business and so I focused more of my effort there that might be an option to fall back on.

Ashlee is also working on a new business helping people with physical and mental wellness that she is excited about and we’re going to learn more about so we’ll see what kind of trouble we can get into there too.

Clackety Clack

I'm not sure if the keyboard I'm using is a mechanical keyboard or not, but it has a great clicking sensation whenever you type on it and when you're hands are flying on the keyboard it just feels so gratifying and like you're typing a million miles an hour even though I still type quite slow.

That's all.

Rat Race Progress

So I want to retire.  Ya I'm 31, but who cares.  I know there are better things I could be doing with my time than working a full time gig, especially lining someone else's pockets while I do it.  Not only do I want the time freedom, the money with retirement would be nice, but I also don't want to work 20-30 years to get there either.

To that end, and with a few previous posts on a painting business, I thought I'd post another blog on my progress to that end goal.  I go to work each day, or in today's case, work from home, and see my coworkers all around me, including my boss and his boss working 'hard'.  Though sitting at a desk is slowly killing all of us and our backs and legs and posture, compared to manual labor, sometimes it feels like a joke to get paid good money to touch some buttons on a keyboard and hardly talk to anyone all day, but that is mine and a lot of other people's current state of affairs when it comes to their 9-5.  But I digress.

My boss.  Nice guy.  Smart, gets along with people even in 'tense' times of disagreement, and doesn't smell.  But...he's maybe 40 or mid 40's and he is still busting his chops and drives a beater.  Sure he's got a larger family, is busy with church stuff after work, and even has his inlaws living with him because they couldn't really save while they were working due to health and economy issues, but i'm sure my boss makes a decent wage considering the size of the team, size of the department's revenue, and technical experience/know how.  Even still I can't picture him saying he's out of the game if he wanted in the next six months or even six years or even 16 years.  And with that in mind...I don't want that to be me either.  They say that if you want to go somewhere or be like someone you have to do what they do and what my boss is doing and for how long he's been doing it isn't what I want to be doing.

So I built this simple calculator found here:

Rat Race Calculator

It is a very simple concept.  You only fill out the blue cells and then you can see how long it'll be till your passive income from investments (dividend yielding stocks, bond payments, reit payments, hard money lending, rental unit income, or businesses) surpasses your monthly expenses.  I could've built a dropdown list of all the possible expense possibilities like student loans and old navy credit card etc, but i'm lazy and only plugged in the few that I had myself.

I also thought about (and I did find, but wasn't quickly able to implement) adding in taxes into the spreadsheet and maybe I still will when I find the time or I'm just extra curious/bored, but that is also something to consider long term.

So for me I've been working on growing a painting business for less than a year, approximately 9 months right now, and its grown a decent amount.  Last year Scott and us grew about 88%, up to about 110k, with our portion/contribution growing the business about 64% if I remember right.  Scott text the team earlier this week saying that gross receipts last week were about 6-7k, which extrapolated out would indicate the business growing by almost 300% this year alone, or to about 320k.  What is exciting about that is that may be conservative as we're a few days out from applying to be licensed and so once we are it is very likely that we'll win even more jobs that we go bid on.

For our portion, 20% of profit after expenses, so far the painting business has won us about $420/month in passive income.  Not blow your mind kind of numbers, certainly nice, but if we can continue the trajectory of growth steady (don't know currently if that is possible or not), but at $420/month and taking 9 months to get there, using the calculator I project that we'll be out of the rat race just 4 days after my 36th birthday, which would be nice!

So I'll keep everyone posted and please do use the calculator to see how far out you are, where you could trim your expenses to get there faster, and what investments you should focus more of your time on to bring your rat race retirement date sooner.

Painting huh?

So tonight I'm feeling a little stir crazy if I'm being honest.  I've started a new job this week as a developer for a company here in the valley.  I think it is going to be a great gig.  I'll be able to work from home twice a week here in about a month according to a team member of mine.  There are some things that are not the greatest about the job already.  The commute sucks to me.  I know a half hour isn't crazy, but to me its an abomination.

Also some of my coworkers...odd ducks.  What place doesn't have that though, right?  Apparently we're quite busy though and so the usual banter isn't happening right now, but really hours go by without any conversation between anybody.  I guess that is a good thing because people actually work and perform here.  I do need to get used to that seeing as how the last place was quite different.

I really hope I don't have a psuedo panic attack though when it comes to being a peon for another company that isn't one that I'm not the owner of.

With that said I wanted to do a recap of what happened last year with the painting business I got involved with.

My father in law, Scott Wray, has been painting for 40 years.  Busting his hump for that paper.  It hasn't resulted in true financial security for the guy...yet :).  Last summer I'd listened to a podcast of a painter who turned his company around and is now a millionaire all in the span of a few years.  After some dull thinking a lightbulb went off shortly thereafter and I thought, "hey i'm not loving my job the most, its definitely not setting me up like crazy that i need and want, and i happen to know a guy who runs a painting company that i'm pretty sure needs a crap ton of help/work and maybe I can adopt what i've learned in my life to help it grow."

So I approached Scott and said I wanted to do more in my life to get paid what i'm worth and work towards something that is more fulfilling and that I think/thought his company would be a good way to do just that.

So we're in it.

For now what we're doing is splitting profit after all expenses/wages 80/20.  Essentially I'm getting little just so I can get my foot in the door.

A lot has transpired though I think in the past six months.

We signed up for lead gen services, built him a website (www.rockymountainpainters.com), started the licensing process, got a LEGIT company book to showcase to potential clients at estimates, bought/paid for two separate courses on how to grow a painting business, hired a production manager (my dear old mom), got yard signs, cards, shirts, car magnets made, got a bunch of reviews on google, home advisor, and video testimonials, before and after pictures.

Right now we're working on more licensing stuff, getting a business bank account set up, hiring door to door marketers, looking at adwords and social media advertising/exposure, digitizing the estimate process, etc.

So for me some of what i'm excited about are the process things we've implemented, including the big one for me and ashlee of hiring my mom to handle scheduling/production manager stuff.  Last month we had our first meeting where she'd taken over all of the scheduling issues and responding to new leads that came in.  To my surprise they had finished 2 or 3 jobs from start to finish and we got paid on them.  True passive income.  It wasn't world changing, but it was around 300+ bucks.  Yes we're doing edits to the website and having weekly meetings to recap and run over numbers, but it seemed amazing.

Tonight I did apply for the bank account for the business so we can more easily track all expenses/revenue.

I also tallied total revenue numbers for year over year progress and I must say I'm pretty happy about it.

In 2015 he did...

Win Rate	Revenue	YOY Growth
70.45%	$56,812.50	15.67%
	Average Job Size
	$1,832.66

In 2016 he did with our help...

Win Rate	Revenue	YOY Growth
44.44%	$107,242.00	88.76%
	35870	$71,372.00	25.63%	63.14%
	Average Job Size	Average of last 5 years
	$2,437.32	$1,547.46

We contributed an additional $35,870 in revenue to the company, or 63.14% of the 88.76% year over year growth.  And we're not even that good at doing estimates yet as far as professionalism goes and being licensed.

The drop off in win rate isn't actually too crazy because a good win rate is 40-50% of estimates.

We're hoping that with getting licensed we can land some HUGE wins with some of our connections too.  My brother in law is a vp for pc laptops and has hinted that we could bid his stores for painting once we're licensed, which could potentially be as much revenue as all of last year in just one shot.

Our goal for this year is triple the revenue of the company from last year and he wants to make 100k and we want to make 50k  from it.  We'll see what we can do.  Long term the plan is to continue to grow, but completely stop painting all together.  We'll then focus on running the day to day of following up on leads, getting more leads via our marketing channels, working with subcontractors and what not.  Once we have legit subcontractors doing the actual painting for us I've already broached bringing the profit sharing to 50/50 with Scott.

So that is basically it.  I want to track my time spent on the business this year to see how much I put in vs get paid, a la the monthly reports that are done on affordanything.com.  It isn't top priority however and so maybe it'll happen next year.  And do you count writing a blog post as time put into the company lol?

Let me know your thoughts and if you need a good painting company that has a 5 year warranty on materials and labor...get in touch!

www.rockymountainpainters.com
(385) 243-1990