Guides for painting company owners

Why we wrote these

We are a marketing and business consulting service for painting contractors, not a painting company. We don't paint, quote or manage jobs. What we do every day is look at painters' numbers and calendars, and the same few questions come up again and again. These guides answer them in writing.

Every guide follows the same rules as the rest of the site: answer first, show the arithmetic, and only cite official sources we have actually read. Where we use example numbers, we say so. Your own figures are always the final word.

The exterior season calendar

The exterior season calendar is a month-by-month plan for marketing a painting company in southern Canada, with notes on shifting it for coastal BC, the Prairies, Atlantic Canada and the North.

What you will learn:

• why homeowners choose exterior painters weeks or months before work starts
• what to market in each month, and what your crews are usually doing at the time
• how to turn winter into a deliberate interior season rather than a gap
• how to split an annual budget by month instead of dividing it by 12

It is the guide to read before you plan next spring.

The estimate maths

The estimate maths guide shows how to work out what one estimate is worth to your company, and therefore how much you can sensibly pay for a lead.

What you will learn:

• how to calculate average job value and close rate by lead source
• how to turn those into a maximum affordable cost per lead
• why raising your close rate usually pays faster than buying more leads
• the hidden costs, such as slow quotes and missed calls, that change the arithmetic

It includes a nine-line worksheet you can fill in for each product you sell.

Winning strata and property-manager repaints

The strata and property-manager guide explains how planned-maintenance buyers decide, and how a painting company can become known to them before the bid.

What you will learn:

• who shapes a strata repaint decision, and what each person cares about
• why budgets and planning documents put exterior work on the calendar early
• the insurance, safety and reference checks buyers make
• how to build capability pages and project sheets that managers can use
• how to judge whether strata work suits your crew size and margins

How to use the guides with your team

A few suggestions from working with owners:

1. Read the estimate maths with your office manager or estimator. Fill in the worksheet together using last season's real numbers.
2. Print the season calendar and mark your own exterior cut-off date for your region on it.
3. Pick one action from the strata guide this month, such as writing a single project sheet.

If you'd like a second opinion on your numbers, or help turning a guide into a plan, see our services or contact us. Our region pages add local context for every province and territory.

What the guides don't cover

We don't give legal, safety, tax or compliance advice. Where a guide mentions regulators, privacy or anti-spam rules, we link the official source and summarise it, and you should check the source or a qualified adviser before acting. We also don't publish paint product recommendations; that is your expertise, not ours.

If you read only one section today, make it step 3 of the estimate maths guide. Knowing the value of a single estimate tends to settle more arguments in a painting company's office than any other number.