How to Start a Painting Business

Painting is a hands-on job. Yet, it is also a skill that you can turn into a business. In fact, it is such a useful skill that many job seekers hang around home improvement stores early on weekend hoping to find a piece job. But the main difference between those individuals and you are that you want to turn it into a real business. A professional service that will provide you with a steady income and (hopefully) profit. You want to start a painting business…

Starting a business requires the basics of creating a name, registering a business, deciding on the structure of your business and setting up bank accounts. This doesn’t change. So once you have created your business’s name, you can figure out how you are going to fund it and cover the costs of registering your enterprise. Odds are, you will need to self-fund. This is called bootstrapping, a fancy word saying you cover expenses out of your own pocket.

The Blank Canvas: Start At The Start

You don’t need to be a highly skilled individual to run a painting business. In fact, you can learn on the job. However, you need to know some basics on how to use different types of paint brushes and rollers, what the best painting techniques are, and when to use what paint.

You can advance your knowledge by watching YouTube tutorials, and enquiring from paint shop owners about the best ways to use certain paints, on which surfaces and which equipment to use. You can even sign up for a course if you have the funds available.

Remember, practice makes perfect!

Prime the Surface — and the Market

A painting business requires market research and marketing to your potential clients. Your market research will help you determine how you are going to market your business.

TIP: Ask a paint or home improvement store if you may conduct research in their store. Compile a questionnaire with a few short answers to asks paint buyers. This can be about the type of paint they are buying, what they plan to use it for, how much they are buying, and if they intend to paint a surface themselves or ask a labourer to do it for them. This will give you an indication of where you clients are finding painters, what quality of paint they look for and insight into what types of projects they will need a painter for. A dad painting a child’s playhouse over the weekend with weather resistant paint won’t be your target market, but a new home owner who needs someone to paint their new house might be.

Knowing your audience, find the places that you can ideally advertise your services such as posters at shops, social media, targeted social and web ads, business cards and placing a listing in the local newspaper.

Business Basics is the Base Coat

Start up costs for a painting venture is relatively low. With a social media, a registered business and coveralls, you can start promoting your business. Here is a list of items you can place in your budget to calculate how much money you need.

• Coveralls or workwear
• Steeltoe shoes
• Transport
• Basic paint brushes like a small, medium and large brush
• Paint tray
• Paint roller, perhaps a small and a large roller
• Marketing costs
• Business registration costs
• Paint rags
• Cellphone cost (to communicate with clients)
• Cleaning materials
• Filler and filler knives
• Wallpaper scrapers
• Sand paper

Additional costs include:

• Plastic sheets to cover spaces
• Scaffolding or ladders

These you can add to your business as your list of services grows.

The benefit of a painting business is that the client will choose the paint and usually buy it as well. You can offer the service of sourcing paint too, but that can be an additional service once you feel your business has been established.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

It’s not enough to just start promoting your business and painting people’s houses. No, you need to provide exceptional customer service. If you have staff working with you, your entire work force needs to be professional, reliable, strong communicators and responsive to customer needs.

You can keep up with client feedback through testimonials and surveys to ensure you keep standards high and show to potential clients that you care about the outcome of the job, not just the money.

Track performance indicators like customer feedback, business referrals, repeat business, profit and continuously improve.

The Finishing Touch

To make your business stand out, you can pick a particular type of painting to specialise in. There are also many finer details that you can use to show customers that you are a cut above the rest. This can be in details like hiring experienced staff, always following up with a phone call to confirm client satisfaction and making the booking, painting and after-sales processes seamless.

You might also give a small corporate gift like a magnet, coaster, memory stick or keychain to potential customers when they invite you to inspect the area to be painted for an estimate. This not only makes you stand out from the crowd, but ensures that you are on their mind when they see the keychain, magnet or coaster.

Paint your own success by opening a painting business, one that makes the lives of its customers easier and delivers that extra bit of quality service.

Take a look at the various business solutions we recommend to help you manage your business.