Millennial Values in the Workplace

  Do attitudes of the (younger) people you’re interviewing have you concerned?  Their approach maybe different than yours (or mine) but it doesn’t mean they are poor workers.  While the younger generation gets a bad rap for being lazy, entitled and glued to their...

Craft a Great THANK YOU Email

If you are standing face-to-face with a client and that client accepts your bid for a job, the first words out of your mouth will be, “Thank you.” The same should be true when you’re not standing right in front of your client. Write a great THANK YOU email, enable the...

Business Profits

What do you do with your business profits? We’re talking profits today. If you’ve looked at the cost summary of a job in PEP this week, you may have noticed a new line for gross profit. Gross profit is everything that isn’t raw wages or materials. Some of that gross...

Communicate Better

Every painter I’ve talked to in the last few weeks is moving at a hundred miles an hour. Anything we can do to simplify or speed-up tasks is welcome. Email reinvented how we communicate with clients and potential customers. But it’s also become overwhelming. Any...

Group Like-Items

Getting organized takes a little time upfront, but the results are always better than without organization (faster, smoother, more efficient, less frustrating!). Not that I do this, but grouping like-items on a shopping list makes it possible to breeze through the...

Your Brand: A Cautionary Tale

It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about branding around here, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be thinking about it. Your brand is the image you project to everyone around you. It’s the way people think about you and your company. As painters are ramping up for...

Question More – the Dunning-Kruger Effect

WHY? It’s every 4-year-old’s favorite question. To them, the whole world is new. They’re trying to make sense of it and they’re full of curiosity. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? I hadn’t until the other day. The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that people...

Be Open and Adapt to Change

Change is tough for me. No sooner do I get comfortable with my surroundings – the version of Windows on my computer, the way my iPhone works, the channels on the tv – then there’s an update and suddenly I can’t find the Weather Channel! But as the saying goes, “When...

Email Deliverability

Avoid the Spam Folder   You just put the finishing touches a on big proposal for a new client and you’re ready to email it over. You want that bid to end up in your client’s inbox. In this post we’re going to look at a couple easy things you can do so that the...