514: How your company should transition this spring!

Embracing Spring: Show Updates, PCA Events & Mastering the Basics Happy Friday, happy Friday, happy Sunday morning, everybody. It is, as you can tell, fully spring here on the Slavic farm. It is a glorious time of year both for business and personal. So we're going to be changing up schedule slightly for Ascapainter as we go into the summer. Typically what I do with Ask a Painter is there's a lot of technical heavy learning, mastering the basics like technical kind of stuff in the winter and then summer we kind of want to keep it a little easier and breezier because I know everybody's busy and all that other good stuff. So I'm I'm Nick Slavic. I'm the proprietor of the Nick Slavic Painting and Restoration Company, also the host of this show Ask a Painter Live. It is a weekly live Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all that stuff show where we talk about the life of a master craftsperson and a paint business entrepreneur. So I did not broadcast this last Friday. I was in bluff country in Minnesota Turkey hunting with my youngest son Otto. And it's always tempting. I I have done lives from there before. I have done ask a painters from there before. But this time it just felt different. I just wanted to be present, enjoy the moment and in a in a valley, in a, in a place where there's not a lot of cell service, just be just be present and just do the thing with my son that we did. And we had a glorious week, came back home, did some Turkey hunting yesterday around here with my older son and it's been a lot of fun. So today I want to talk about sort of like, you know, the spring transition, kind of a spring update in, in all the things that are going on here. So like I said, we will probably be changing up the schedule for Ask a Painter Live, just being a little more here and there with it, that sort of thing. We'll be a little more opportunistic with what comes up. There will be some technical stuff, but a lot of the times it's a lot of updates and things like that. First off, PCA events. I just populated my calendar with all of the PCA events for the year. In this fall, we're going hard, four to five of them. And then obviously in February, the big Expo, things like that, that's always a big blast. There's a link here in the show notes for all of those sort of things. If you want to come see me, you want to come see other interesting people in our industry, there's no better place. It's 142 year old nonprofit that serves us. And I think I've gotten more out of this nonprofit than just about anybody else. I know. I'm the epitome of what it what it is like to be a PCA member, be a servant leader, use everyday resource available, actually get them into your business and your family and then make something of it. So that's why I'm a evangelist for this sort of thing because it's basically next to free. And all it takes is your effort and dedication to it. And you will unlock some of the greatest friendships, greatest peers, greatest motivators that you ever will. So there's a link in here for all the PCA events. If you have not been to a PCA event, I would tell you business owners are good at making goals. I would say one of the best goals you could give yourself professionally this year is to go to a PCA event. And I would definitely do that. Your life will be changed and you will think about this industry completely differently. Also mastering the basics. You guys know that this has been a long standing series of shows where we talk about the things you actually need to do to just improve your business, professionalize, have have free time, create a little freedom machine of time and money and things like that. And this year we tried something really novel, which is I packaged it up. There's 8 educational videos, a series of training videos, there's 20 plus templates of my own company. And obviously you guys know I create new ones, we update them every year. All the content is new. And then of course you get my personal contact information to help you along the way with it. And that stuff we launched after the first of the year. There's a link here for that if you guys want to go to that. The thing that I wanted to do, I've been having so many awesome conversations with Mt Beers, I call them Mt Beers. The people who have purchased the package gone through it, and then I've been doing a whole bunch of interacting with me. It has created a great, it's created a great little group of people. Buenos Dias Onyx Painting. Appreciate you watching on a Sunday morning here It's created a great little culture between the Mt beers and I keep in touch with them via Patreon. You can message everybody an e-mail through there but also I'm getting tons of emails from people who are going through it and they are getting my undivided attention when I see an Mt beer come through, it fills me with delight and we start working on stuff together, especially the job costing template and stuff like that. We, we, there's been a couple times, especially this last week, where people have given me share access to their Google Sheets, their job costing template that I sent them. And we've, we actually work through some fairly complex job costing problems. And I show we, I show people how I alter that thing for special things and stuff like that. It's been a lot of fun. So the thing that I'm doing this year is I'm going to fly somebody out for a work vacation with me. Anybody who has purchased mastering the basics, if you already purchased, you're included. If you have not, you can follow the link in this, you can purchase Mastering the Basics and you will be eligible for me to take out my own wallet and fly you here, put you up transportation and we can spend an entire day doing whatever you want. And if it's hardcore going through job costing, we can, if it's help writing your Sops, we can do that. If you want to go walk in the wilderness and talk about life and family and business and the derivations of all that stuff, we can go do that too. But it's your day to use. I will just facilitate it with my own wallet. April 30th on or about is when we're going to choose somebody who has purchased Mastering the Basics and I'm going to take care of you. We're going to fly out here and it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun to do that kind of stuff. So those two things I will ask you, PCA events and mastering the basics, those are the things before we get too busy because it has been a long winter as they always are. And if you have not worked on your business, if you have not prepared yourself for the onslaught of what is to come, the nicer days, the longer days, the exterior season, you still have time and you can do it. And we're about to lock in. So PCA events, mastering the basics, those are the things I wanted to get across to you guys today. Re-strategizing Ask a Painter: Content Ladder & Listener Feedback And then I wanted to give you a spring update. So I own three companies, Nick, Slavic Painting and Restoration, Asca Painter, which you're watching right now, and then a real estate company called Nightingale Holdings. And with each of those we have goals, strategies, you know, all this other stuff. I'll give you some quick updates and we'll end with the painting company. So Asca Painter has been going through like a two year RE strategization. I'm trying to figure out like of all the people who watch this stuff, who are they? What do they need? I go back through, you know, 10s of thousands of comments, hundreds of shows, like we're going 9 plus years of creating content, all this good stuff. And, and I realize like there's a whole bunch of people who are just like me. I create content for, for people like me that want to improve their family life, improve their professional life. And it's not just what brush to use, what paint to use and all that stuff. That stuff is infinitely interesting to me, but it's the easy solvable thing that we do. So obviously I have shows about that stuff, how to paint anything. I have shows, infinite amount of shows about that sort of stuff, but professionalizing a business is very important to me because at the end of it, it's like we want to do good paint jobs. We want to, we want to run a good business, But then also like at the, at the end of it and not at the end of it, really at the start of it, which ends up being the end of it is we want peace in life and we want satisfaction. So I've been thinking a lot about that with Ask a Painter and we've made a lot of changes. We've been still doing the, the weekly live show, but there's mastering the basics. There's one page weekly, which I just published this morning. That's a weekly thing where I talk about, you know, some of the more inner working, some of the more esoteric mindfulness things that we go through as being master craftspeople and patent business owners. There is masters classes, which I will be in Pittsburgh next week, which will be an entire blast to go out there. I've not done a Pittsburgh 1 yet, and there is all sorts of PCA events that'll be. And then of course there's the retreat. There's kind of the penultimate where if you want to hang out with 15 other, the most interesting people at a place in the northern wilderness of Minnesota that I think is very special, and then work on something very important to you at a personal level with other people who know you and know what you're dealing with. That is the place to do it. So this is great content ladder as I didn't, I didn't understand I was creating this stuff, but there's a thing called a content ladder where you do a whole bunch of free accessible stuff, then stuff that takes a little more barrier, but it's a little more in depth. And then obviously you can get up there to the point where you can stay with me in a lodge for an entire week and we can do something very special called the ask. So there's all sorts of stuff on there and I really appreciate it. So that's kind of ask in a nutshell. We're kind of re strategizing for summer. I want it to be a little lighter, a little more breezy. I know you guys are all busy. I've been really wrestling with doing it on the weekends or during the week. What I want to do is preserve my weekends to just do whatever. The the feeling of not having anything to do Saturday or Sunday but serve my family is a wonderful thing. But also, I know when I do it on Friday at noon and it's summertime, you guys are cranking, you're busy. So I'm kind of like of two minds about this stuff. And I'd love some guidance from you guys. Like if we did a Sunday morning show where it's a little easy breezy like this versus a Friday at noon, I would love some feedback from you guys as to what you guys would prefer to do that stuff because I'll, I'll keep the content fairly light for the next bunch of months. We'll kind of be doing a whole bunch of, yeah, there will be technical, there will be entrepreneurial based stuff. But also I understand that people are just freaking busy and that's how it works. So ask painter in a nutshell. I'd love feedback from you guys. Building Long-Term Wealth with Nightingale Holdings Real Estate Nightingale Holdings, man, we made a, this has been a slow, long term sort of strategy that we've been doing with a real estate holdings company. There has been two non homestead properties in there, one commercial run, one residential for a couple years. And then I, Jeff Adkins, want the weekends. I hear you, man. I hear you want me to work on the weekend, Jeff, loud and clear. I get you. So we just made a huge acquisition kind of like a what I want to call a dream building, but a non emotional dream building. I want to be very careful with that, which is there's a there's a strategy when in sort of how we create my my professional life with me and my family, where obviously the painting company is a generation for a lot of satisfaction, job opportunities for others and all this other stuff. Ask a painters away from me to reach you guys on a professional level that I don't normally interact with the public or my, you know, clients, things like that. But then the, you know, the real estate holdings company is a, is a strategy where we have service businesses here that that are not asset heavy. And I want to counter that with this is not a service business. It's a very asset heavy. It's a long sort of thing like this. And so this is a strategy that I got introduced to 5 or 10 years ago in the trades where it's just diversifying your business strategy. So we take some of the proceeds from the service companies and we buy real estate as kind of a long term thing. I'm still trying to figure out the ultimate goal and strategy of a real estate holdings company. That's one of my goals for this year. Like you understand that you buy stuff, you lease it out, you rent it out, you have other people make your mortgage payment while you invest, the property appreciates, you gain equity. And then when it's paid off, that is a stream of cash flow that's as close to passive as possible. Obviously, that's what I understand. But there's a whole bunch of other sort of ancillary benefits and things you have to be careful for with all this sort of thing. There's there's depreciation, there's amortization, there's tax consequences, both good and bad of all these things. And so it becomes this little more complex as we do this, but we basically increase the real estate holdings company. God, I want to say by by about 5X of this last year here, we made one big commercial acquisition, which is really fun. It's basically going to be the foundation of kind of long term time and money freedom for my family. And it's, it's been a blast to do. And yeah, just like anything else, I wrote about uncomfortability this morning. And this was the definition of uncomfortability. But the good thing is at this point in my life, I've been there quite a few times and and this is a familiar level of uncomfortability that I'm experiencing. So real estate holdings company is good for a while, where I'm going to make sure that I have a rock solid strategy by the end of the year. I'm talking to a lot of people who have done this before, doing a bunch of this fun stuff. And yeah, it's a super fun thing to operate and I just love doing it. I am a person who deals very well with delayed gratification. I in fact, prefer that sort of thing in the right modes and it tends to have better results. Mastering Spring: Operational Shifts for the Painting Company So ask a painter. Jeff Adkins wants me to record it and just post it on the weekends. I get it. But I always wrestle with this thing about being live. Like, there is a special thing about being live. And I believe it's one of the competitive advantages of this, which is like my clients want people who are local and they're present and they're trustworthy. And I believe that, you know, literally going live on my Slavic farm right here on a Sunday morning while you guys are watching the definition of local and present. Like you guys know that unless there's a three to five second delay in what we're watching here, I am doing this right now and you are watching it in real time and there is something special. It's like I watch the Masters with my kids, which I'm not a golfer, not even that into sports, but it's like an event and you're sharing it with the world and it's beautiful and it's interesting and it's so fun to experience as an entrepreneur and a business owner, like how all this stuff works and seeing people who are really good at stuff. So that's kind of like what I believe this is I'm I'm, I've been, it's been suggested many times to just record the show and post it on a Sunday morning. I don't know, open the feedback on you guys. Now let's get to the painting company. This is where things get exciting, which is there's snow in the forecast for today, but also it's going to be 80 on Wednesday. And that's what we deal with in the upper Midwest in the United States. We've been about two to three weeks now dabbling with exterior, but it's not solid exterior season. Last week was probably the tipping point where it's like, oh, we're cranking out a few small jobs here and then we're going for something bigger Now it's really like, OK, let's get all our our trade partners out there, Let's get our W twos and let's just start rocking and rolling. It is now exterior season. We should be posting up exteriors every single week, no matter what, every single have a nice day, even if it's half day, we should be outside doing something to start picking away at our stuff. And we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff already sold ready to go. And we need to start picking it off because you guys know how it works. The third week of May to the second week in June. Everybody wants those times grad parties end of the year and, and not everybody can get their house painted then. Some people are going to have to get their house painted in April. Some people are going to have to get their house painted in October. It's just the way that it goes. So what are we doing this year in preparation for all this? So the theme of the last bunch of years has been just slight tweaks to things that we know work well. One of those things is we know that we we run about a 2.5 X business in the summer to a 1X summer in the 1X business in the winter. So what that means is we're running about a $1 million business unit in the winter, in the five to six months of winter and we're running about a two and a half million dollar business unit in the summer, which means we need to do 2.5 X more work in, in about the same amount of time period. And it's fine. There's more availability, there's more labor. We are, we are not constrained by production. We have plenty of production to get out there. And in fact we're, if I'm being honest, we're not even constrained by sales. It's just like getting out there and doing everything. We've been building over this a long slow play over many years of building the team, getting the systems down, making them as easy as possible, straightforward, and then lowering the stress of the team so that we can produce more and doing experiments with that. So here's the things that we change at this time of the year. We subcontract, we, we work with our trade partners all year round, but we really ramp it up. Now there's some trade partners that prefer to work more or less. There's some people that prefer interior to exterior and all that kind of stuff. And we have a list of about 11 that we use normally that we'd love to partner with on these jobs. Amazing human beings, deep core value matches, take care of our clients like crazy. And it's a great partnership when we don't have the capacity. I can't wrap up 2 1/2 X with employees for any reasonable monetary way and still run a good business that way. So it's kind of a nice flexible labor force. But we still do maintain quite a bit of W twos. And in fact, we flex with trifurcated labor model where starting about mid-May, give or take, the college kids, the high school kids, the teachers all come back. We'll get about 8 or 9 seasonal W twos that come back and we'll make them into about four different crews of just decks, fences, porches, playsets, that sort of thing. It's like things where we wash and restore wood, we prep and sand, and then we stain in one of three options, give or take for that. I'm just staring at a bunch of ducks in a, in a weeping Willow up here. This is pretty cool. And So what we're going to see come, let's see, what is it? The 19th? About 3 weeks from now, we will be between 40 and 50 humans in the field every single day. But you know, down from about 25 give or take. And it could be even more. I mean, we, we can surge up to probably 60 people, but that's not an accurate number for you guys. I don't have 60 humans working every day, but there certainly will be days where 60 humans are working out there. But we probably average about 40 a day in the summer out there. So we're going to get about four crews, about eight or nine people of seasonal W twos coming back to knockout exterior wood. Think about deck crews, give or take 4 deck crews, 4 vans just out there with pressure washers, chemicals, stains, all that sort of stuff. We'll have anywhere between 5:00 and 11:00 trade partners working every day. We will have our 8 or 9 W 2 crews, our standard W2 crews out there doing mostly interior work, some exterior work as well too. And we will also have a assistant project manager show up mid-May as well, probably late May Somebody who's been with me probably longer than any W2 employee. It might even be 8 or 10 years now. But yeah, it's somebody who just knows everything well, an amazing human. And again, you can imagine a scenario where come summer, we just get constrained in a lot of ways where we have two project managers all year round and they have to do 2 1/2 times more work in the summer than they do in the winter. So you can imagine they probably need an assistant. So what do we do with this person? They work part time, give or take. They'll they'll work a 20 to 30 hour week, give or take. They have a faith commitment, school commitments, things like this, but what it will end up being is a lot of color matches, a lot of kickoffs and close outs with trade partners and W twos. It'll be a lot of site visits, client communication, logistics of running stuff around if something's forgotten. So it's basically just all the things that our time suck to our full time project managers just so the project managers can basically just talk with clients, line up work, fill the schedule because there's nothing more unprofitable than a gap in the schedule, especially when you have a company where basically all the money gets made for any reasonable measure during the six months, seven months of summer, give or take. And that's that's kind of like the bigger you get, the more you experience that sort of thing. If you're one or two or three people, you basically just fill your schedule with either interior or exterior all year round. But you get super overwhelmed with exterior stuff in the summer. Now we know that and we flex that sort of thing. Optimizing Painting Operations: Estimating, Delegation & Marketing So what are we doing now in the winter? My estimators and project managers will do a bunch of client reactivations. They'll call previous clients because they're only doing about 11:50 estimates a week. We're probably only doing 5 to 10 projects a week, give or take. They have extra capacity. So we actually call it previous clients, thank them for their trust and see if they have any more work for us. Easy. We do stop client reactivations. We stop that marketing effort and now it's just executing estimates and it's executing projects. So I have taken off those things from my people schedule and in fact we have changed the estimator schedules. Now we never want to schedule estimates more than two weeks out. We start losing opportunities. So what we do now is we start scrubbing all the extra stuff in their schedule. And my 2 estimators are posting up about 30 estimates each a week right now. And yes, there's more time away from us. We're not having as much office time. We're having not having as much time together as a company. But also, this is go time. This is April and May in Minnesota, in the upper Midwest. And when people want estimates, we want to get them an estimate. My goal is always within 7 working days, give or take, and we can generally do that, which is pretty good because we're cranking out 60 estimates a week right now to try to help as many humans. As we can because I remember the days where I was a single owner operator and I would book up a summer or two in advance. And that is, I used to think of that as a bragging right. And that is not a bragging right. That is a detriment to my clients. I mean, imagine if you wanted a plumber to come to your house and they say, yeah, I'm booked up. I don't know, I'll get to you maybe 2 years from now and it's the fall of 2027. You're like, dude, that's so cute, but I need this done and I'm willing to wait maybe a week or a month or maybe two months or three months. But dude, it you're crazy if I'm, if I'm gonna wait a year and a half for you, like I will just get this done that my needs are more important than your schedule right now. So that's what we try to do now. We just execute. We clear all the stress, all the extra stuff out of all of our things and we just execute. And then we make sure that we have really good systems and processes in place for all these people. But different things we're going to do this year too. My young protege Jack is going to take over all the seasonal deck crews. He's going to run his own little mini business unit within here. Obviously, he's going to be under my mentorship and my guidance and it'll be a great entrepreneurial effort for him. He's going to be doing some of the estimates for Dex. He will be doing the project management for Dex, the scheduling of Dex. It's going to be an awesome summer for him. He's going to learn a whole lot and our clients are going to be taking care of beautifully. So what we're doing in order to give our main project managers more time and capacity to just knock out big historic restorations, churches, full houses, all these crazy big commercial projects, we're taking off the things that take the most of their time, which are the decks. The decks to schedule decks is an enormous feat. Like we have 4 crews out there every day, washing, prepping. And we got a stage where we wash this day, let it dry, check the moisture, stain it, sand it. Then we're watching the weather and the dew and the temperature. And it takes as much to manage 4 deck crews and schedule 4 deck crews as it does to do about 13 other crews with just full exteriors. Because a lot of the other stuff is straightforward. Here's a house, paint it. It's less affection affected by moisture and all that other stuff. Decks are absolutely affected by moisture. And the finishes are a little tricky because most of them you can see through. So talking with clients, setting expectations is big. So we're going to do a test this year. I would say it's less of a test. It's more of just a really good idea to just take all the decks away from the project managers, give it to Jack as his own little crew and he can just manage that little silo all by himself. Also marketer Mason, who's been setting some records with leads in the company this year is is going to be running the street team. Last year, Jack and Mason ran the street team, but Mason will be taking that over and running that. We're going to be super lean, super efficient. Last year I think we did 56,000 door hangers, give or take, and we set a record for leads. We had 20% more leads last year, but then any other year in the past. It's not due to just door hangers, but the door hanger was one more vegetable, one more spice in the soup of marketing that we do in our 12 or 13 channels give or take. And I believe it's sort of like the creatine or the Nitro methane to the rest of our marketing where we're seeing a very interesting thing that that one marketing professional had predicted I would have seen with this strategy, which is the more concentrated area that you market to and the more channels you stack in that concentrated area, each channel becomes more efficient and the cost per lead drops. And we saw our overall cost per lead, all leads, all dollars between 25, excuse me, 25 and 26 go from $112 a lead to $111.00 a lead so far, so small, but it is trending in the right way. And that means every dollar we're spending is a little more efficient. And we also set a record with leads by 20% in the year previous. So it's everything is getting a little more proficient, a little bit better at this point. We're not doing a lot of moon shots. We're trying some big innovative things, but we're not doing these crazy things. Let's just scrub this entire model and start this new, let's start a new division. Let's do drywall and carpentry and floor coating. No, no, no, no. We know what we're good at. We're making tweaks to the plan in order to make it more efficient and to just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. We want a better experience for our client, more value for our client. I want to pay my people more. I want to lower their stress. I want to increase their time and, and money freedom. And that's sort of the goal here. Achieving Satisfaction: Winning Through Others with an Abundance Mindset So we are basically just ready to go. My event calendar is updated any anywhere you want to see me around the USI have my master's classes, I have PCA events, and of course I'm going to Australia in late May, early June. And so we're going to be working that out. That's going to be an absolute blast. I get to go down there and see a whole bunch of people I know and love. We've been trying to do this for over 5 years, actually probably over six. We tried to line up an Australia visit before COVID and COVID hit and we're just getting back to it right now. So that'll be a lot of fun. But in summary, this is the time of year where things change a little bit. We're going through awesome strategic modest plan changes in the painting company to make sure we can get to more people. And we are going to make slight tweaks to Ask a Painter, which are kind of normal. And the real estate holdings company is rocking and rolling. And we're just going to be funding that and stacking up cash as we can to to fund that for a while. And I'm going to spend a lot of family time. So thank you guys for all watching. I really appreciate this. This is always such an exciting time of year, pensive excitement because we know it lies ahead of us. But man, it is so much fun. I will tell you guys, if you have a personality that likes to win through the agency of others, there's no better thing than this. Creating this little freedom machine, getting a whole bunch of humans, anywhere between 30 and 50 humans a day that are somehow interacting with all this stuff and seeing them get wins. I will tell you, there's times where this industry can be nitpicky about each other. You know, we as craftspeople and master craftspeople, we can nitpick to death what everybody else does. But I will tell you this, that is a scarcity mindset. If you're able to either have a abundance mindset or foster an abundance mindset, be open to other people's ideas. Train some people, foster them up, teach them what you know, and then start seeing them win. Seeing another human win and and a client love their work and then provide for their family is a far greater love and fulfillment than doing it yourself. And for me, I have the type of personality that thrives in that. I completely understand if there's people out there who just want to work alone. They don't like the hassle of managing other people, training and holding accountable, things like that. I don't necessarily love every minute of that too. I don't think anybody really does. But if you're willing to be uncomfortable, a topic I wrote about this morning on one page weekly and see that through, there's a big reward and there is a level of satisfaction that you can't even imagine on the other side of that. And I just love experiencing that with all my people. And so it makes areas like this wilderness. You can see the red winged blackbirds up here, Cacklin by the by the marsh here. We've got geese, we've got ducks out there. There's all sorts of critters. And it really brings a lot of peace this time of year, especially when you have to manage a lot of people, you need a little stress relief. And this is it for me and I hope it is for you. And as always, I'm glad I can share it with you guys. So have a good rest of the weekend. I'm about to do a whole bunch of hours of Land Management with my people out here to get ready for all the springs. So let's see. Brett Fisher, love this mindset. Started my painting business again a couple months ago and love it. So oh man, that's awesome. Feel free, anything you need, man, you e-mail me [email protected]. Anything I can do to give you a hand, I'm here. And that goes for all you guys. Good luck with the summer, good luck with the spring. Take care of your clients, take care of your people. And we'll see you guys next week.