My 2 cents on, “This product is worth every penny.”

Who reading this wants to make less money doing what they do? Who wants to waste time performing tasks the most time-consuming way possible? Who enjoys re-doing their work? Who likes feeling ripped off? Who likes working past 5 o’clock or 7 days a week? And, who likes it when products fail on customers jobs?

No one does. Painting is only as complicated as we allow it to be.

When we shift our expertise on identifying common problems and focus on developing solutions, ambition becomes the catalyst to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

So where do we start?

I think many people fail to understand the focus on being successful doesn’t really have much to do with painting. The painting portion, although important, is the lesser part of the equation in the bigger scheme of things. We could be exceptional painters, but unsuccessful everywhere else. We need to be experts in many areas besides applying paint.

Things such as working for the wrong crowd, or failing to grow our business from referrals, or operating hastily, or wastefully, and not knowing our numbers can all contribute to failure.

When it comes to choosing products to make us money, we need to be aware of how products impact the job. This is crucial, and leads me to the title of this post, “This product is worth every penny.” said by a painting contractor about a product that impacts labor in more ways than he could ever imagine.

While the paint contractor seems to find a way to justify the purchase by claiming its “worth every penny,” what he fails to realize is how much money he is losing by using it. When we knowingly lose money, is it ever worth the loss?

Didn’t think so.

In the near future I will be discussing two contractor approaches to a job worth $20,000. What if, on each of our jobs the customer laid twenty grand on a table in the center of the room and we used that money to buy our materials and pay for our labor. With each expense, each day, we watch the money disappear from the table, and if we are lucky due to our oversight, there will be some money left in the end. Our goal is to keep the money on the table.