Breaking Points

Customer base & referrals. As you grow a customer base and are able to budget a percentage of your business from repeat customers and referrals you can grow.

"Accomplishments, awards and degrees" mean nothing without a customer base. Once you have a base you can expand your "services". As we grow we can offer different services and at some point I will offer my clients interior and exterior painting (thats why I am here).

To more directly answer your question; make people really happy so they tell their friends and family, repeat, repeat..........

1. Developing systems. This allowed me to quit baby sitting, greatly reduced the hours the business requires of me, and allowed me to focus on other things, like...

2. Generating enough leads. This allowed me to be more selective about the jobs I wanted, which in turn led to...

3. Charging the right price. This allowed me to reduce the number of crews from 5 to 3 to 2 and still make more money.

Brian Phillips

Hmmm...

Experience
Details
My name

right price
tracking everything

welovepainting said:

Name the top three breaking points that made a great impact for your company. Services, Accomplishments, Awards, Degrees etc.

Click to expand...

I think I am actually going through my first 'breaking points' (better term would be turning points IMO) as we speak :thumbsup:

1) I am finally hiring my first (part-time at the moment) employee
2) will add window cleaning to my business.
3) buying a house and switching to LLC

I am very excited. I'm treading new waters, but it's bound to be a good thing.

...and I now accept credit cards through paypal

Rich said:

I think I am actually going through my first 'breaking points' (better term would be turning points IMO) as we speak :thumbsup:

1) I am finally hiring my first (part-time at the moment) employee
2) will add window cleaning to my business.
3) buying a house and switching to LLC

I am very excited. I'm treading new waters, but it's bound to be a good thing.

Click to expand...

Good for you, do keep us informed on how the employee works out.
BPTL

Rich said:

...and I now accept credit cards through paypal

Click to expand...

What do they charge you for a rate? Is it a flat rate or does it depend on the card.

Name recgonition
Creating a customer base
Customer appreciation (thank you notes, holiday cards)

Points I need to work on are marketing.
Sage

FHI Decks & Windows said:

What do they charge you for a rate? Is it a flat rate or does it depend on the card.

Click to expand...

Basically it's somewhere around 2% or 3% per transaction. I don't recall there being any stipulation between which card is used, but I could be wrong...and I think it's only the 4 or 5 major cards they accept. And you only get charged when a transaction occurs, not for just having the account open. You hook everything right with your business account and wallah....

If you go to www.paypal.com and click on merchant services, you'll get all the info :thumbsup:

Rich said:

Basically it's somewhere around 2% or 3% per transaction. I don't recall there being any stipulation between which card is used, but I could be wrong...and I think it's only the 4 or 5 major cards they accept. And you only get charged when a transaction occurs, not for just having the account open. You hook everything right with your business account and wallah....

If you go to www.paypal.com and click on merchant services, you'll get all the info :thumbsup:

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, PayPal is trendy enough now so I will begin to offer it.

Brian said:

1. Developing systems. This allowed me to quit baby sitting, greatly reduced the hours the business requires of me, and allowed me to focus on other things, like...

2. Generating enough leads. This allowed me to be more selective about the jobs I wanted, which in turn led to...

3. Charging the right price. This allowed me to reduce the number of crews from 5 to 3 to 2 and still make more money.

Brian Phillips

Click to expand...

I too went from 8 (painters }to 4 to none and each time I made much more money:thumbup: BPTL

BenPaintinTooLong said:

I too went from 8 (painters }to 4 to none and each time I made much more money:thumbup: BPTL

Click to expand...

It is the other way for me.
The more painters we are getting, the more capacity we have.
The profit margins have been steady, so why not make more money!

Came across this thread and I think we all need to re-look at this. Its all about focusing your time on the "RIGHT" areas and we all save ourselves time and money. Great businesses can be formed based on these. My 3:

1. Hiring the RIGHT employees
2. Setting up a system where the crew foreman takes an important role doing crew final walk throughs and collecting the customers check.
3. Correct pricing, allows for good profit and time to complete the jobs.