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.