How to Stay Busy When Your Painting Business Slows Down

Oh no, you’re out of work…

I’m Ron Ramsden and I’m a DYB coach, also a painting contractor for the last seventeen years here in Northern Massachusets.

It has happened to all of us.

You have your schedule all set out, you have your crews working.

Except now… you don’t have any work for a couple weeks.

I don’t know how many times that this has happened to us over the years that we got a call on a Thursday or a Friday.

The job was supposed to start on a Monday isn’t ready for us.

So the homeowner had something come up in their life that they have to reschedule it for weeks off.

Now I have two weeks I have to fill up.

What do we do now?

Of course we panic, we pull what little hair we have on our heads out.

And now we start thinking, I’ve got to keep these guys busy.

You don’t always have to keep the guys busy to make money.

You’ve got to keep the guys busy to keep your crews.

They get downtime, they are looking because they have families to feed also.

So I’m going to go over a couple of things we do when we have no work for the crew.

Pretty easy, very basic things. It is just getting the ball a rolling all at once. So let’s start with

Phone calls

Take your 10-15 best customers, someone who provides you with work multiple times.

Pick up the phone, say “hello, just checking in. Want to let you know we have a couple openings coming up. Is there anything you need done around the house?”

Today we live in an instant society.

We have emails, cell phones, text, everything happens in an instant.

A lot of people don’t plan ahead anymore, especially the young millennial generation, the 19-34.

So for some of those who are customers, touch base with them.

They might be saying, hey, great, we were thinking of doing that bedroom over anyway.

So fill up a little of your time, you might take up a couple of these jobs to fill that space you have.

But at least you can keep touching base with them, plus even if they don’t need you now, at least you have reached out.

Video & Social Media

1.9 billion people a month are on Facebook. That’s a lot of eyes on Facebook.

What you can do is that you can record a video.

I’ve done it multiple times in the past.

Basically what I do is I put on a nice company shirt, make sure I’m shaved, and I sit in a room or stand in a room with a nice background behind me.

Then say, “I need your help. I just had a postponement for two weeks on our schedule, I have to keep my crews busy. Do you need something done right away? We can help!”

And then you can go on and explain like that.

Then post this on Facebook, post it on your business page, share it to your regular personal page.

You might want to boost it and target your local audience being your Facebook mom’s groups, maybe things of interest if you work around a golf court community.

Maybe it’s vacation homes you want to do, rentals, property managers, whatever you want to do.

But you can zero in on that, put a few dollars behind it. It would be a lot better to spend $5, $10 a day than keep that crew not working.

So what we do is we put videos out on Facebook.

You can get your FREE PDF 3 Steps to Get Lead on Facebook here.

We also email videos, take that same video and put it into an email and send it to your whole email list.

Hopefully, you have all that in a CRM.

We talk about using a CRM in this video.

BIn the subject line of your email, you would want to put, “please help, see video,” or, “I need help, see video.”

If a video was noted in the subject line of an email it is opened six times more often that just a subject line.

People like to watch videos and what I also say is that if you don’t need us now, could you please share this with someone else. I want to keep my crew busy.

And then also, stop by, nothing better.

I mean it is a little uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than making some of those phone calls is actually stop by at someone’s house.

You are driving by, you see their cars home, maybe you just want to stop in and knock on the door.

Very odd to do, a lot of people don’t do it.

But you would be surprised at how many people are happy to see you especially if they had a great experience with you.

That would be a great way to get jobs, and also more phone calls, hey you are not going to have anybody working, you better get on that phone and start pounding the pavements.

Get that one “yes”, it feels great.

Then also if you can’t find any work for anybody, what about calling some local charities.

Hopefully, you have had a decent year and your auto drip is going.

We’ll touch base on an auto drip in another video.

You want to do something good for the community, maybe there is a local food pantry that needs repainting maybe.

It’s a church that needs some work on. Reach out to the community, someone will put you to work ASAP.

If you can handle this, you may probably get one of the paint stores to donate some paint for you.

That would be a great thing.

So just a recap, you want a phone call, pound the pavement on the phones, bang, bang, bang. Call them!

Video on Facebook, boost it if you have to. It’s not very much money, you get a lot of reach out of that.

Also, video emails, email everybody a video that’s on your list.

Let them know that you need help now. Let them know in the subject line, there is a video attached. I need your help, please see video attached.

They’ll open it up, you can track that.

Stop by people, more phone calls and then charity work.

You can also reach out to some of your painting reps, things like that.

They don’t always have something to be done right away but your best source is your past customers.

You’ve already proven to them that you are a great guy, you are a great painting contractor.

They’ll probably have some more work. And if they don’t have any work now maybe they’ll have some work later so you are doing some estimates for them.

So anyways I am Ron Ramsden and I’m a DYB Coach.

If you want to reach me I’m at Ron@DYBCoach.com. I help painters work on their business so they don’t have to work in their business.

Have a great day.