I own a residential painting business. I’ve begun to say that loosely, some of my coaches have pointed out that I really just own a job. I came back to Florida in 2018 and tried to begin anew from the business my father and I dissolved in 2010. We had worked the jobs together with other painters that worked with us. Did well for five years until around 2008. My idea of running a Painting business was working with my guys in the morning and leaving a little early so that I could do a couple estimates every night. It’s the only way I ever knew to run a painting business. By 2020, I couldn’t keep up with the amount of work that I was painting myself with a couple of other painters. I kept hitting my head around $300 K and was working 10 – 12 hour days, seven days a week. Then I sought some coaching. I was immediately told to stop painting and hire subcontractors. I was told the only employees that I should ever need, would be a project manager, a sales manager and an office manager, but I should be able to do it on my own until I hit around $750 K a year until I would need to make that hire. Subcontractors haven’t worked out too well for me. I decided to go all in last year because I had a great sales rate around 65% and was told I just need to spend more on marketing so I took every dollar I had left and hired one of the best marketing companies there is. I’ve barely broken even because I didn’t have the systems for hiring and managing production, I didn’t have the systems to manage this incredible influx of leads, and worst of all I did not like the idea of not doing the work myself. Cash flow is at an all-time low. Every time I hear someone say, just put money into marketing and it will create more revenue and profit because obviously the more leads you get, the more sales you will make, and the more you can produce. I understand that what’s supposed to happen, unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for me. I continue to try to learn how to work on my business instead of in my business, but I’ve started to wonder if perhaps going back to making $300 K a year with $100 K profit wouldn’t make for a much better life moving forward. These thoughts make me feel like I’m in a dangerous place and if nothing else, I’m definitely suffering from analysis/paralysis. My intention was not to write a very long message, but I guess I just needed to let it out.

My name is Vince. I live in South Florida. I own a residential painting business. We’ve kind of been all over the place for a while. I’m looking to be able to systemize my business and I think that doing concrete coatings is great niche of the painting area that is highly systemized especially when it comes to the production aspect.