[NEWBY]

Hi to everyone,

My name is Marc Smith, owner of a brand new start-up paintinting business.
I live in Atlanta Georgia and I am looking forward to visiting this site on a very regular basis. Just in the past hour of reading various postings I have learned quite a bit on how to get started in the painting business. I love the admisphere of this site and look forward to learning as much as possible about the painting business. I do have some experience doing small jobs for an investor friend. My primary plan is to get into apartment repainting on a part-time basis with future plan to go full-time.

Any advise that anyone can share with me in terms of getting started and landing work, etc. is highly appreciated and I promise to soak in every piece of shared knowledge that come my way.

I have already decided that this site is heaven sent and you guys and girls are the angels that comes with it.

Thanks
Marc:thumbup:

 

[JNLP]

Welcome here Marc! Ask & don't be offended by sarcastic responces. :thumbup:

 

[[email protected]]

For the most part, apartment painting won't get you anywhere. Well... it will cause you to highly consider something more fun and rewarding, like real painting...

You don't have to start out with apartments unless that is your avenue to practice some basic painting skills. Search the site for "advertising" and see what you come up with. There are inexpensive ways to advertise for "real" painting jobs. The Craigslist.com is a great place to start for free advertising if your in a well populated city. That site kept me busy all summer of my first year of getting out of apartments. The key to advertising on the CL is a good colorful HTML ad that causes the search for "painters" to have an "img" at the end of the link. When you search for a painter, what you see first is their "title" link that leads you to their ad. In that initial title link, sometimes you will see at the end, the word "img". That is all I look for when i search for anything on the CL. This tells me that the add will have a picture of what I am looking for, whether it is a service or an item. Most people do this. The general text ads don't get much action, based on the idea that, if I can't see it how do I know fore sure? So, an HTML ad is most likely going to have an "img" to look at. I spent a couple months with only text ads and when I figured out how to use HTML, the phone was non-stop. That is a good start if you follow what I am saying. :whistling2:

For example, here you will see my ad on May 1st (Agape Painting) http://portland.craigslist.org/search/bbb/wsc?query=Painter
Now, that ad is different from when I started years ago, I have now only included some pictures and some basic verbage. I don't use CL much anymore, but my partner feels insecure about the market, so I chose to use this avenue once again to push out another month of work.

I used to put this ad up on CL: http://home.comcast.net/~agapepainting/Agape_Flyer_with_Pictures_Interior.JPG
That is just a picture I created in Paint then hosted it to my ISP. It actually looks better posted on CL..... It looks a bit choppy now...

I just edited that ad to include the flyer and Pictures: http://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/sks/666987456.html
It's not too hard once you get the hang of it.

So, those are some ideas...

It's all about advertising if you want to jump right in with the rest of us. From there you will learn by experience and or testimonies from this site as to how to get ball rolling for pricing. Figure how much you want to make, material costs, overhead and profit, those are the basics, once you get that figured out you'll be doing well enough. There is Hope! :yes:

J