Are you “hiding” the SCOREBOARD from your Painters?

Brandon Lewis from the Painters Academy emphasizes that painting contractors must give their crews clear labor and material budgets—like a scoreboard—so they know what success looks like and can help the business stay profitable. Without these goals, crews are left in the dark, and it’s the owner’s responsibility—not the team’s—if projects go off track.

Do you follow any sort of sports at all? Did you ever play baseball, football, basketball, soccer, you name it? Do you keep up with the score? Does it even matter to you as you’re watching the game? If there wasn’t a score, would you even find it interesting? Probably not. Imagine a coach.

It’s hard to imagine.

Imagine a coach that put his players on the field and then covered up the scoreboard and just said, “Go out and have a good time. the score really doesn’t even matter. Listening to that, it sounds absolutely preposterous. No one in their right mind would do that, especially a coach that cared about winning.

Do you care about winning in your painting company? Let me ask you this question. If I called your painters right now, you got three or four jobs going, and I got your crew leader on the phone, and I said, “What’s the score? Would they even know?” You see, most painting contractors send their painters out into the field without a labor hour budget, without a material budget, with zero incentive for them to come in on budget.

Often the owner doesn’t even know what the scoreboard is for his painters. So, the first thing you’ve got to do is use production rates to determine what is a fair scoreboard. Is it 36 hours? Is it 112 hour job? What is it? What’s the labor budget? If your painters right now, if I call them and they cannot tell me where they are on the labor or the material budget, you have completely missed the boat.

What you do for a living is you buy labor wholesale and you sell it retail. And you’ve got to take inventory of every hour, every gallon of paint, every expenditure that can be tied directly back to that project. Your painters cannot help you make money if they do not know what the objectives are of the business.

and the primary objective that they have is to bring all your projects in on budget at the gross profit mark that you have set for the company. Don’t blame your painters. If you’re not showing them the scoreboard, guess what? There’s only one person to blame, and it’s the coach, not the team on the field.

It’s Brandon Lewis here with the Painters Academy. We exclusively and only work with painting contractors. Not decking folks, not roofing people, not plumbing folks. We don’t have a onesizefits-all approach. We have a nichespecific set of tools, curriculum, and seale coaches to help you succeed. If I can help you in any way, it’s what I live to do, email me brandonpainersacademy.com.

Like and follow our content. And if you would like to get some free information because you’re not quite ready to make more money, you’re not quite ready to get rid of your day-to-day problems, you want to hold on to them a little while longer, that’s fine. You can do it for another 10, 15, 20 years like many people do.

Call me then and tell me, “I wish I’d found you 15 years ago.” But for those of you who are fast acting, reach out. For the rest, visit paintersacademy.com. Download one of our many reports on production rates, on commercial, or the core five concepts that really elevate a painting business. I can’t wait to talk to you soon.

Let’s make sure we’re showing all of the people on our team the scoreboard.