Keeping Busy

Painting contractors often express concern about keeping their crews busy. "If I don't keep them busy," the contractor says, "I'll lose them." Since the tightening economy has likely made this even more of a concern, I am happy to offer a two-step program for keeping your crews incredibly busy.

1. Charge very low prices. This will likely increase your closing rate, so you will have more jobs. Of course, you might lose money on each job, but you can make it up in volume. When you have a ton of jobs, you will gain some economies of scale. For example, you can get better pricing on ProMar 700, and the pennies you save will help reduce your losses.

2. Have your painters use nothing but 2" sash brushes. Certainly they will be less efficient, but imagine how long it will take them to paint interior ceilings and walls. That job that used to take a week can now be spread out for an entire month. Combined with low prices, inefficiency will keep your crews very busy.

I hasten to add that this program does have a few negative consequences. One is ticked off customers. They will not appreciate jobs taking so long. But this problem will be overcome by another negative result--bankruptcy. You probably can't implement this program for very long before discovering that when you spend more money than you bring in, you will go bankrupt.

But financial considerations aren't my concern here. Keeping crews busy is. And this program is guaranteed to work--at least for a few weeks.