When Should You Hire Painters

Let’s be hon­est. You typ­i­cal­ly hire painters when you’re swamped. Right? You filled up your pipeline and have 8 weeks worth of work on the board. You put your hand on your head and say to your team, ​“We need to hire some painters! Let’s get to it!” Most painters are very busy when the econ­o­my is strong. Right now, this is def­i­nite­ly the case; espe­cial­ly since we’re enter­ing into the late spring months. Is it eas­i­er or more dif­fi­cult to find painters when they’re all busy? It’s much more dif­fi­cult. All the good painters are work­ing right now — or at least should be working. Sure, you might get ​“lucky” now and then. You’ll find a few great painters that want to make more mon­ey, and just hap­pen to look at your hir­ing ads. So, when is the best time to hire painters? Here’s my two cents? I’m more of a mar­ket­ing guy than an oper­a­tions expert. This is just my opin­ion. You can choose to dis­agree and shoot holes in it, but here goes: I sug­gest that you begin hir­ing in the win­ter months. You can begin the recruit­ing stage as ear­ly as Christ­mas time! Per­haps you get a lit­tle more seri­ous at hir­ing in Feb­ru­ary. I know what you’re think­ing!

You should stick to mar­ket­ing, David. Wait a minute! I don’t have any mon­ey to hire some­one in Feb­ru­ary, let alone any work to give him/​her. Why should I hire in the win­ter? I should hire when I have cash!

Well, that’s the tricky part for sure. Here’s the prob­lem with try­ing to hire when you have a full sched­ule of work booked: It takes time to hire the right peo­ple! You have to begin look­ing for recruits, inter­view 20 of them, hire 10 of them and hope that 2 – 3 will work out. Am I right? Isn’t that usu­al­ly how it goes? When this hap­pens, you can­not ser­vice new leads or jobs. You have to turn away work. Then you can­not meet your sales goals! This is my view­point. From a mar­keter’s per­spec­tive, I want to feed as many leads as I can to a client. I’m pret­ty bummed if my client can’t pro­vide an esti­mate because he is too busy. I know he is turn­ing away work to com­peti­tors; and as a mar­keter, I don’t like that. I start­ed think­ing that maybe it is bet­ter to hire when you are typ­i­cal­ly slow and gear up for when you know you will be super busy. Your busy sea­son should be pret­ty con­sis­tent. Many of my clients are swamped from April through Thanks­giv­ing. The book of Proverbs speaks on the ant. (Prov 6:8 & Prov. 30:24 – 25 )

“…she [Ant] pre­pares her bread in sum­mer and gath­ers her food in harvest.” ​“Four things on earth are small, but they are exceed­ing­ly wise: the ants are a peo­ple not strong, yet they pro­vide their food in the summer;

The ant is a dili­gent and ​“fru­gal” crea­ture. It pre­pares for the win­ter. We can learn a lot from the ant! When the har­vest (work) is plen­ty. This is where your paint­ing busi­ness can make sure it is mak­ing mon­ey (most productive/​profitable). Then it is up to you to set aside mon­ey for when the win­ter sets in or your typ­i­cal slow sea­son. I would sug­gest putting some of the prof­it right into your oper­a­tions account and vow not to spend it on any­thing else. When the win­ter sets in, start the hunt for new hires. This is a time when many of the tal­ent­ed painters might be laid off, because the com­pa­nies they are work­ing for don’t have work! You can also begin to look at good appren­tices that might con­sid­er the trade of paint­ing. One oth­er key ben­e­fit to hir­ing in the win­ter is that you can then get some ​“bugs” worked out and do some train­ing. Train your new painters on how your com­pa­ny paints. When the busy sea­son hits, they will hit the ground run­ning and hope­ful­ly have less qual­i­ty issues. If you’ve set some of your prof­it aside for hir­ing, you’ll have the funds avail­able to hire more in the win­ter months. This is how you invest back into your busi­ness and meet your sales goals.

Hir­ing in the busy sea­son is ok too

I’ll close with say­ing that it is ok to hire real­ly any­time of the year as well. In fact, you should always be hir­ing! Yet it nev­er hurts to plan ahead and try to get the bulk of hir­ing com­plet­ed before the sea­son hits. I just read an arti­cle post­ed by Kevin Nolan on how his team hires. Check out his lat­est blog arti­cle on hiring.