I've been doing all of our estimates that we've been bringing in. It's been interesting learning the in's and out's of how to do it, what you actually need to pay attention to vs just kind of rolling it into the price on things like caulking and what not. It still gets done, but instead of measuring to the inch you're fine to account for it, but without pinpoint accuracy. After doing it for two months though now and pretty much having nailed down the process for how to do it and what to say there is maybe only one other iteration on it and that would be using an iPad to show content like the customer book and video testimonials. Beyond that though...I'm kind of bored with it.
It is very straight forward especially since we upgraded to our new estimating software that has pretty much completely eliminated WAG (wild ass guessing). Prior to the software it was $100 for this wall and $125 for that ceiling etc. Now you take measurements, enter it into the software, add estimated prep based on each individual situation, and then the production rates from our software that are based on the pdca standards (Painting and Decorating Contractors of America), take our labor cost and material costs and accurately spits out our cost to the customer in a few minutes. It's excellent, but because literally anybody could do it it has me really thinking I should hire this out and focus on other business building activities that could add additional revenue streams to the business without too much additional effort. So that is something I'm actively focused. That will happen sooner rather than later I think once I've got some business foundation things setup and scheduled and systematized.
Numbers from last month.
So we've got our statement of cash flows above for the first two real active months of the business where we were doing estimates and producing jobs. It is skewed though currently because we've been taking advantage of Sherwin Williams' "test drive". We're still a few months out from having some trending numbers that will show a better prediction of actual cash flow or not. We're going to be banking a good chunk of our cash flow as a cash buffer to build up our working capital so we can weather our bills should things slow down. It was nice to see that big of a net cash flow positive bump in our first couple of months of business though. I'm excited for the future too because in the contracting class and just by reason of logic overhead costs are never higher than at the beginning of the business since you can't take advantage of the scale of your production and systems as much as you can later when you have increased lead flow. If we were done building up working capital last month's income would've been more than we've ever made, which was cool to see.
One of the bigger jobs we landed at first was this commercial ceiling we did in Kaysville. It kind of blew our mind that we won it, but that excitement wore off after a few days and I started feeling nervous. A couple weeks ago I made some follow up calls and had one customer follow up with me to tell me that they'd decided to have us do their work, which on that one day alone ended up being about a 3/4ths of what that big commercial ceiling ended up being and it dawned on me that while the big wins are nice the small ones are also nice and just as real.
Bid a huge apartment complex.
One of the interesting leads that came our way last month was a request to bid a 237 unit apartment complex. A good friend of mine helped me with his take off software and I imported all of the apartment's blueprint plans into the software so that I could measure all of the surfaces and properly account for materials and labor. It took me hours and hours to do. All in all I've probably spent close to 15-20 hours on this one bid, especially if you consider travel time.
Our first bid came in around $750,000. I followed up with the contractor and he straight up told me our price was too high and that he couldn't use us. What was interesting is that he was pretty open about the other prices that had come in. I adjusted my prices to undercut all of them and I have a meeting with the contractor this coming Monday to discuss the project. I think we're 95% of the way there and if we land the job we'll have booked our revenue goal for the year in our first 4 or 5 months of being in business.
I am nervous to win the job for the income potential, but also the loss potential. If we mess this thing up it could sting pretty bad. I think we'll be good though and with the margins looking like I think they are even if I mess up by thousands of dollars there is enough padding to hopefully absorb any issues that arise.
It was interesting as the contractor followed up with me amidst an email chain he'd asked his project manager to follow up on the competitor to try and get a response from them. It was weird to me to actually hear that. Maybe the competitor was already busy and maxed out, but by my calculations the money to be made is nothing to sniff at. Let alone the learning experience and portfolio piece that it would add to anybody's portfolio. We'll see what happens. If we land that it'll be all hands on deck to figure out how to hire everyone we'll need. Should be interesting. If we don't land it I'll be pushing to potentially hire a project consultant in Utah county so that we can start getting jobs and leads and revenue and income from there. I'm also wanting to learn how to do estimating for sheet rock hanging, texturing, and then of course painting it.
Appointment Setter
One thing that I knew pretty quickly into our busyness was needing to hire an appointment setter. Some days I wouldn't get anybody calling in to see about us coming out to give them a quote and other days I'd have 4 people call in. Either of these days I'd either be at home super busy trying to build up the business with foundation tasks or out giving bids to people. Regardless of what was going on it was really annoying to have to stop everything that you're doing to return a phone call and hopefully set up an appointment. Or after being out on bids all day to then come home, with the kids going freaking crazy, the wifey is ready for help, but unless you just wanna blow the money on leads to never contact them you better call them back to set up their appointment and then get all of the paperwork and data entry done too so you're not late the next day when you need to go on the bid.
So I drafted up an ad and posted it the local ksl classifieds and also had Ashlee post it to her social media. We started getting applicants right away, but we also had an old neighbor friend that lived just up the street from us say she was interested and that she could likely get it done for us and be ok with the somewhat erratic frequency of when calls would come in. So we hired her and it has been amazing.
She text me today saying that in the current pay period she's setup 22 appointments. At an average time of 25 minutes for being on the phone and data entry in the last 12 days she's saved me over 9 hours of work. Yes I've had to pay for it, but quick math...call it 10 hours in two weeks. 20 hours a month. 240 hours a year. That would be the equivalent of me working for SIX straight full time weeks just answering the phone and setting up estimates. She's been great at it, super willing to adjust to things I notice and recommend she tweak, and I get my time back and we're still converting leads to estimates to jobs at a great rate. Also all of this at a fraction of the cost of hiring an answering service. We're even going to offload even more tasks on her too going forward so I'm excited to do that and see what else I can get done going forward.
Need to schedule biz building time.
One thing I want to do is block out my schedule each week to do business building activities whenever I can. Just having clear tasks and dedicating time to them that will help us dig out of our backlog of work and do so with quality workers will be amazing.
Folders
A small thing that I love that we did last month was creating folders that are super professional that I can gather all of the documentation from the consultations into so that they're not loose and flying around in the wind. I love how they turned out and I think make a huge difference in how we're perceived.
I'm excited to report in next month for you!
