A few days after this happened I had the thought come into my head as I was driving in to work at my full time job that perhaps I could take over the job, pay, and duties, and then that would allow me to still bring in money for my family, I could quit my full time job, and then also help the business grow. As soon as I got into work I messaged my wife my thoughts and she loved it. To her everlasting credit she has been behind having me quit and work full time on the business for years now.
I then talked to my mom about this potential idea and she really liked it. She discussed it with Scott and he was also on board. We had a few more conversations about transition, timeline, upcoming jobs and when I'd take over managing them from start to finish. Then there was also the discussion of an upcoming painting conference we'd booked a flight for my mom to go to in late January that we had to work through.
After figuring out when would be best for me to go and take over in the production manager role it then came down to figuring out how do I go about quitting my job. This was interesting to noodle over in my opinion since secretly my dream had always been to have enough savings, a business already up and running, and somehow get laid off from my job so that I could collect unemployment. After a bit of conversations and thinking it came down to me just quitting my job. As nice as it would've been to collect unemployment I have no idea how long it would've taken for me to actually get fired or laid off and so the most logical thing would be to just quit.
So I put in my notice. A couple weeks later I was out of the full time employment game and into you eat what you kill game, i.e. self-employment where I was and am in charge of my results and not someone else telling me what I need to do.
The transition didn't go as planned to be honest. There was too much already wrapped up in the jobs we'd already had going and ones upcoming that that just didn't really happen like we planned. I did end up going to the painting conference though in late January, which I'm really glad that I did. I learned a lot, made great contacts, and it changed the course of how to proceed in the painting business.
While I was there they had "hot seats" where each painting business owner would get up and talk about one or two good things they did in the past year and would ask for help/input on one or two things they needed help on. In my session I said our online presence really helped us and doing cabinets. Our problem, which was being over on budget, had been discussed a lot through keynote speakers so I wasn't entirely sure what to ask about to be honest. The moderator asked our partnership split and duties and who was doing what and it made his head spin. He asked me to stop talking mid sentence and just blurted out, "You need to do your own thing". As soon as he said that about a half dozen heads in the room nodded in agreement and a few people vocalized their agreement with his assessment.
TBH that was not the thing I wanted to hear. Going through my head was...
I don't know how to paint.
I don't know how to estimate.
Where would I get leads?
How would I pay for stuff?
How would I get licensed?
I just freaking quit my job so wth???
Those were just a few of the things that went through my head. I then went on to explain that though convoluted and not ideal it was a thing that if I started new activities in the business and if I took full charge of them that the partners and I had agreed that I, or any of the partners for that matter, could take profits from said jobs. So while somewhat defeated I was actually resolved to go home and make it work in the current layout of the existing painting business.
I flew home on Delta, which has upped their game by the way in terms of what they serve and the in-flight entertainment just fyi.
I called my mom to discuss things about the conference and how things were going in the business that past week. Things with customers and employees were fine, but she and Scott were having issues resolving how to do certain things in the painting business and apparently it wasn't the prettiest how it was playing out. But we had always worked through things in the past so I continued to hear her out. After further explanation it was like that seed in the back of my mind of starting my own thing was blooming into a real thought that maybe now was really the time to make it happen.
So I paused my mom, like the moderator had done to me, and explained to her what I'd experienced while sitting on the hot seat. She listened and then I explained why this might be the ideal thing at this juncture. Instead of slogging through a business that would face occasional push back from our other partner maybe it would be best to start anew either with him out of the existing business or if that wasn't agreeable to him then we'd start our own. We talked a bit more about that idea and how we should approach him about it. Have him retire and keep his percentage, buy him out completely, or some variation of the two or just start our own. One thing we did say for certain was that based on the impasse of the previous week that we were going to say that we'd decided to do this thing and that it was final and that we wanted to work through what he thought about it.
We went to dinner, ate our meal, and talked about Ashlee's pregnancy. After I finished dessert I explained that the painting conference was good, but what it made me realize is that there is a lot of stuff still yet to do and that before we started doing those things we needed to resolve who was going to be involved or not and how to move forward with that in the future. Scott was certifiably pissed, which we, or I should say I pretty much expected, although that possibility wasn't lost on my mom or Ashlee in the least. We knew we kind of sprung it on him and we tried our best to talk through as much of it as we could. He didn't want to be bought out. He said he couldn't retire. With that said we knew splitting was our only other option.
We tried talking through that for about 20-30 minutes, and eventually it just all became too overwhelming for Scott and he just left. The good thing that did come out of it was that we were splitting, he'd keep the existing name, license, insurance, payroll, employees for the most part, customer list, logo, but the biggest thing to me was that I got to take to our new business the thing I valued the most, which was our lead generation and website company.
With that alone we had a business and the rest I knew we could work hard through.
Scott came and picked up some stuff the very next morning and he actually was quite calm and feeling good about the split. Being able to capture a 100% of the profit from jobs and not have to do things that he didn't want to do that perhaps the other partners did was likely another big win for him.
From here was a mad dash of activity though it seemed to go on forever at the same time. Rebranding, starting all new everything, getting licensed all takes a lot longer when you do it all in one chunk versus doing it over a year and a half like we'd done with the previous company.
At the painting conference one keynote speaker talked about levels of a business, which there are 4. Start up, build up, build out, and enterprise. I decided that one of those levels would be a good name to use for my new painting business. Can you guess which one?
If you guessed Startup Painters you're wrong. We went with Enterprise Painters. I liked that name for a few reasons. I liked the revenue size, the professionalism and vision/dream and team behind it and margins, and it would translate well regardless of location if we were to have multiple locations around the state and country.
After picking the name we worked through a logo, talked to our web company about the transition, and started working on getting licensed, which involved scheduling of classes, getting our llc setup, ein number, bank account, and what not.
I also spent a bit of time getting Scott ready with his new web guy who was also a painter of his and getting content and hosting moved over to a new account. I spent days working on rebranding all of our estimating and marketing materials. Spent a day gathering stuff from the shop that we could use in the new business for our employees. Spent time interviewing and talking to a few guys about doing door to door activities. Only one of them panned out and actually went and did door to door the other has fizzled out due to the fact that he already had another full time gig that was paying him well to go and do window estimates.
I ended up being the one to go to the contractor class after learning the amazingly good news that the state changed the requirements last May that the requirement of needing 4,000 hours of experience as a painter to get licensed had been done away with. We got workers comp waivers done and a million dollar liability insurance policy setup. We setup new streamlined and integrated payroll, bookkeeping, time sheets, and estimating software that I learned all about at the painting conference and those will make all the difference in the world I think since we'll be much more streamlined and efficient with everything involved there.
We started getting leads from our web guys early to mid February. To date we've booked $64,849.75 in revenue. The numbers may be just a tad off, but that is on the back of 39 leads, 32 estimates, and 21 jobs won. That is a lead to estimate conversion percentage of 82% where industry standard is that you're doing good if you're converting those at 40%. Our estimate into a job conversion percentage is 66%. Industry standard is that at a minimum you should be converting at least 25% of your jobs with the high end being 50%. If you're above that something is off, i.e. your prices are too low or perhaps some other factor isn't being accounted for, but the biggest one being your prices are too low hence why you're winning so many and so if you are winning that many then you're labor and material costs are likely getting decimated and you're not making the margin you should on each job.
Renee and I will be going over our job numbers in the next day or two and so we'll have a better idea on whats going on there here soon. I do know that I'm learning stuff everyday with estimating and that our conversion percentage should come down since I'll be better at accounting for all of our costs going forward, which then affects those customers that are of course price sensitive and will go with another contractor at that point.
Next month's report that I'll post on the blog maybe I'll post/share what our job numbers came out to be and other noteworthy stuff. This first post I wanted to be a general recap of what is going on and went on for the first part of the year so that I could get us caught up on that.
We've hired some great people, fixed a lot of stuff, and hope to have a lot more stuff formalized and streamlined to get us to that ultimate goal of being the real Enterprise Painters I hoped for from the beginning.
Other noteworthy things were landing a big commercial ceiling that I talked to a lot of people about and through that and persistent follow up and tenacity we landed that. That was like $20,000 and my very first huge job to have won and bid like that, which seems like a miracle.
Another thing was that Renee did awesome by talking to her dad about borrowing his truck to help us fulfill our first couple jobs. He gladly let us borrow it, but then when we went to return it because we'd bought a work van to transfer everything over to he cut us a check for the full amount of the van, which was amazing.
We've learned some great things on how to do liens to protect our paint and job costs, test runs of new paint lines to get big discounts here and there too, which has been cool. Lots of moving parts, but it is coming together.
If you're local to Salt Lake City and read this and refer anyone that works with us we pay $50 in the form of a visa gift card or as a donation to your favorite charity.
Until next time.
Brock
EP
