How to Start House Painting Business
House painting is a reliable business idea that does not require a large initial investment with simple technology. You can start with a small set of brushes, a truck and a ladder.
A house or apartment requires special attention when it comes to painting, both inside and outside. Painting can make any home or business look well-maintained and prosperous. If you enjoy painting big things and are looking for a career change, you may want to consider starting your own house painting business. Take the time to determine your ability to run a successful house painting business, establish your company thoughtfully, and you can start making money doing something you love that can also make others happy.
Are you passionate about house painting, do you want each of your clients to be able to work in a building that looks as beautiful as them? So rest assured: you have the ideal profile to become a house painter! Do not hesitate any longer and embark on the adventure with ease thanks to our step-by-step guide. Our goal: to make your passion your job!
In Summary:
- Profile of a House Painter
- Getting to Know the House Painting Business
- Why House Painting?
- How to Start
- Success Tips
- Conclusion
Profile of a House Painter
Creating a house painter business cannot be improvised. The business manager must be:
- A rigorous and experienced technician.
- A good advisor for his clients, never short of ideas or technical or decorative solutions,
- A good manager if the business has employees, because house painter interventions require excellent organization to be profitable. The business manager will have to make realistic quotes, take into account downtime and travel, manage his time, restart payments, etc.
- A good communicator, the entrepreneur will have to take care of the quality of his services to trigger word of mouth and thus develop his clientele without having to spend on communication.
Getting to Know the House Painting Business
Before setting up a house painting service, it is important to know the industry in which you intend to operate. Research the subject on the Internet, talk to other professionals in the sector and try to interact about the decoration trends and the types of paints that exist.
There are two ways of offering house painting services: the entrepreneur can work as a freelancer, being hired by the service to work alone or with helpers or he can set up a company that provides painting services, hiring labor.
Why House Painting?
The question is logical: Why exactly the painting of houses, and not their construction? It’s simple. In any city, the construction sector is developing at a staggering speed, new buildings and structures are being built, which are then sold for fabulous money. However, development requires not only appropriate building permits, but also good diplomatic and legal skills.
On the other hand, while new houses grow on the concrete soil like mushrooms after rain, old buildings that require repair are gradually collapsing. But often they only need economical aesthetic repairs, rather than costly capital repairs. This is because the walls of a building can still be quite resistant and durable, but their appearance, on the contrary. There are times when such old buildings do not fit into the surrounding environment at all with their colors.
But painting houses requires the correct allocation of time and material for painting. In general, with the correct approach, you can develop your own exclusive technology. For example, initially you will need to clean and polish the walls of the house. Then start painting with different materials. In order to completely save money and time, you can simply paint the house. In this way, any small building can be refined in just two hours, and a particularly large one in a few days. At the same time, painting will not require large expenditures on money for materials, because the low cost of paint is known to everyone.
A business based on painting houses and other structures is an ideal way to make money and gain experience for those who decide to connect their lives with construction. However, do not immediately count on the coloring of expensive old facades of historical buildings. For a start, in any city in the country there will always be individuals who want to improve their home. You just have to drive along several streets and, seeing old houses, offer your inexpensive services
How to Start House Painting Business
- Ask Yourself the Right Questions
Opening a house painting business is an important decision that requires careful planning. Otherwise, you will be forced to cease your activity like many other finishing specialists.
To prevent this situation, ask yourself the right questions:
- Are you really motivated to start your own house painting business?
- Do you really have the skills to run the business?
- Is your personal life aligned with your professional goals?
- Create your Niche
Give yourself the time to refine the idea that will make your business more than just covering surfaces. Let your passion express and transform your sites into real showcases of your know-how. Ask yourself why your customers would call on you in particular.
- Attractive prices
- Meticulous and original achievements
- Real advice to customers
You can also differentiate yourself by offering specialized services or by making new choices. So, you could choose to only work on renovations of old buildings. You could also suggest that they make a decoration inspired by various universes or to focus on interior painting, exterior painting or both.
Let your imagination and your desires run wild. The main thing remains that you must offer your customers an original, new and powerful concept in order to stand out from the competition!
- Market Research
The Market research that you are going to carry out will focus on the analysis of the finishing or painting sector in buildings. It will allow you to validate or not the continuation of your project. With this type of study, you will be on top of your competition, your possible suppliers and future partners.
You will also precisely characterize your customers and identify their expectations. In short, this study will confirm or deny the value of “launching yourself into the market”! Following the results obtained you will refine the offer you are positioning in terms of price and your prospect conversion strategy. To make your market study a reality, you will have to face the field. This is a crucial step. On this occasion, you will meet your customers.
Remember to collect and report their expectations or remarks:
- Increase your presence on the Internet
- Increase your communication
- Provide useful advice to your customers
- Specialize in certain types of high added value work
- Offer short deadlines
You will also be able to establish a detailed profile of the local clientele:
- Socio-Professional Category
- Average amount of work
- Most frequent paintings: living room, ceiling, kitchen, etc.
- Types of buildings
- Ideal Location
Now, your market research is complete and you have methodically compiled each of the results of your analysis. Now you are going to search for the best location for your house painting business. It cannot be said enough: location matters as much as the quality of the services provided.
Therefore, to increase the probability of achieving your goals, take into account as many parameters as possible:
- The dynamism of the local market
- The state of the real estate market
- Proximity to a passing axis
- Easy parking (parking, public transport, etc.)
- The presence of places of life in the surroundings (shops, cinema, schools, etc.)
Possibly, check with other professionals in the sector. They may provide you with valuable information when you are starting out.
- Business Plan
To prepare a business plan you must create a document that describes what your business will be.
At this stage, your project becomes more and more concrete. You are now assured of its true potential. But it’s not over yet. Indeed, you must now involve your banker in this adventure. To this end, we could not advise you better than to write your house painting business plan. This document will allow you to present your entire project. After having read it carefully, your banker will also be able to verify the feasibility of your project. This business plan is accompanied by financial tables including:
- The provisional balance
- The financing plan
- The cash budget
You may need to add other indicators if they are relevant. On the basis of these elements, your banker will be able to judge the solidity of your project and will give you his confidence.
- Marketing Strategy
It is not enough to just be a painter and open a house painting company, as there is a need to seek customers who will support your business in the market. The first step is to specialize in order to offer such a good service, to the point that your own customers refer new customers to you naturally, because there is no better advertisement than this.
Many painters have based their strategies to get customers on the internet, so it is feasible to create your own website where you can make available your contact options, location and even pictures of services performed to make everything as clear as possible for your customers. Social networks also help a lot, so you can create a Facebook page and use your own profile to promote your house painting services.
A traditional strategy that can bring good customers is to go out to the buildings offering their services, always with business cards, so it is hard work that needs to be done frequently, but that can have results.
Read Also: Developing A Marketing Strategy For Small Business
- Find Customers
After getting to know some of the best marketing strategies, it is time to outline your plan to attract customers. For this, I prepared a step by step that is valid for your house painting business.
- Dedicate yourself to your target audience : You can learn about different types of marketing and delve into strategies. However, when putting it into practice, all knowledge will not bring the results you want if you neglect the target audience. They represent your ideal customer profile and therefore define where to approach the customer and how to do this. In fact, you must establish the personas before choosing the strategy, as it will only be ideal if it meets the particularities of your potential customers.
- Study the channels: Let’s say you defined your target audience and found that Facebook is the best channel to reach them. From that information, you already know that you will have to develop a social media marketing strategy. That’s when you need to go in search of the best practices to attract customers through Facebook. This includes finding the most suitable times for publications, ideal text size, what type of image to use, the most appropriate tone of voice and so on.
- Set an action schedule: Once you’ve identified everything that the ideal publication should have, it’s time to put together a plan. It is not enough to limit yourself to a forecast of days and times, but also to advance to the definition of those responsible for the tasks. If you invest in content marketing, with blog articles, for example, you need to determine who is going to survey keywords, structure guidelines, produce content, insert images and publish texts.
- Measure the results: Finally, whatever your marketing strategy is, you need to monitor the performance of your actions. The result of this assessment will be important to reinforce what is working, correct what is not going well and achieve an even better ROI.
Tips for creating a house paint customer portfolio
Once you start developing your services, it is best to take photographs of all the work you do.
In this way, when new interested clients appear, you can take a folder with the photographs with you. This way they can see other work you have already done and it will be easier for them to gain confidence. They can also be inspired by other ideas.
Photographs will also help you create content on your website and make people more curious to enter.
Finally, if you want to be a house painter and offer a good service, we recommend that you have a form that customers fill out before and after the service is done.
Before the service it serves to know more deeply what the customer’s needs and expectations are. The after form is used to see what the customer satisfaction has been.
If the client is unsatisfied, you should try to solve it and change their opinion so that they do not speak ill of your painting business. In addition, reviews will help you improve and offer better services in the future.
On the website you could also have a recommendations section where people can write their comments about your services
8. Structure
The next step is to think about the house painting business’s structure, which does not need to be large or be located in shopping centers. Just a property with a room is enough to write contracts and to attend via phone or Internet that can be done by a secretary or by the owner, since the visits are scheduled at the client’s home.
A deposit where it is possible to store the material needed for painting, such as stairs, stools, scraper spatula, tool for applying putty, among other items can also be useful. In this case, the entrepreneur’s home can serve as a basis for the house painting business, if he is responsible for scheduling visits to customers.
Usually, items such as sandpaper, rollers, brushes, putty and paint are supplied by the customer or purchased by the c house painting business, with the price included in the painting contract. A vehicle for transporting material and machines and employees must also be included in the company’s calculation.
- Hiring Employee
This will also be an extremely important step for your house painting business to start on the right foot in the market.
Because it is not enough just to know how to set up a house painting business, it is necessary to plan and organize your own work team that will be responsible for the functioning of what you want so much.
Depending on the ideal size of your company, you will need to hire several painters to work in different places, assistants who will help in the painting process, at least one person to work in the service office, one person responsible for the company’s cashier, someone to work in the stock and an employee to take care of the cleaning and organization of the company.
If you decide to set up a paint supply store together with the house painting business already planned, you will need to hire even more employees to carry out the necessary activities.
Among these employees, you will need to hire attendants, a person to work in the stock of products, a person responsible for the cashier, a cleaner and some basic employees, if necessary.
Success Tips
Before starting a house painting business, analyze the regions to be painted: check for cracks, exposed nails, mold, stains, among other imperfections. It is necessary to treat each one of them before starting the work, as this will be decisive for the durability of the applied paint.
For the painting of the house to be impeccable it is necessary to sand the wall in order to remove any and all irregularities present. If possible, use an electric sander, as the paper ones require a lot more effort.
Then, it is necessary to apply putty to correct regions where metals and wood were exposed due to sanding. For a perfect painting, the ideal is to remove window and door frames, hinges, lamp sockets and other accessories that may affect the work. If this is not possible, be sure to secure it with tape and paper with skirting boards and stops. Also, protect the floor with lots of newspapers. Try to cover the entire surface, do not leave spaces for paint splashes to take up space.
If painting is done outdoors, use tarps to protect trees and shrubs from spilling paint while working.
Read Also: How to Start a Remodeling Business
Conclusion
Naturally, those who are starting now or have plans to invest in this type of business want to know how to set up a house painting business as efficiently as possible?
What is certain is that this area today is one of the fastest growing in the world, mainly due to the increase in the real estate market. So only then can we identify an excellent business opportunity to invest today and in the years to come?
What you will need to do to succeed in working at your own house painting business is to focus on product and service innovation, as well as customer loyalty.
All of this will result in a solid house painting business, well recognized in the market and which can easily become a reference in the field of painting.
So, I hope you liked the tips on how to set up a house painting business.