[00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of Contractor Freedom and enter the bliss of Contractor Freedom so you can have the Time, Money, and Freedom to Live Your Life With Purpose Beyond Your Business.

As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.

Let's go. 

Jason Phillips: Hey friends jason phillips here i'm excited to be with you today live For our contractor freedom podcast. I have a special treat for you today. I have my friend Mark DeFrancisco, all the way from Connecticut, down here in Texas, in Allen, Texas with us here live today, [00:01:00] and we spent the whole day yesterday together, and I want you to get to know him, and think he's got some great things you're gonna love, you're gonna love hearing from Mark.

So Mark, I just want to say, welcome. Thank you very much. I'm glad you're here. We got to send, spend the whole day today, excuse me, the whole day yesterday and and today together. Man, tell us where where are you from? Tell us your name, your business 

Mark DeFrancesco: and such. So I'm from Connecticut.

Name of my business is MDF Painting and Power Washing. So we've been at it up there for a while. We do primarily high end residential painting and we do some commercial repaint painting as well. 

Jason Phillips: When did you start? How long have you been in business? 

Mark DeFrancesco: I've been in business since 95 but really in business since 03, so I had been painting when I was younger and even through college and all that and and then launched out for real in 03. 

Jason Phillips: Your clients are residential builders or homeowners? 

Mark DeFrancesco: Primarily homeowners. 

Jason Phillips: Primarily homeowners. 

Mark DeFrancesco: Most of our work is direct to owners and even in commercial, we prefer to be direct to owners where we're doing work for the [00:02:00] university or the assisted living complex or whatever building we're painting.

Jason Phillips: I see. Got it. Tell us tell us a little bit, Mark, about just the basic structure of your company. Who does? Who does the painting? Who does the sales? Who does the marketing and such? 

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah, 

so good question. Start with the direct labor of our painters. This has changed over the years.

We've talked about it. I went from being a completely employee based company to a completely subcontractor based company back to a completely employee based company. And so it's been a bit of a Germany, a journey for us. And but now we're all employees and that's the way I prefer it. Is 

that typical for your state?

It's a mix. It's a big mix. I would say it's probably very similar to 50 50. There's a lot of, a lot more subcontractors in the last 15 years are being used by more and more companies.

Jason Phillips: And the employee model, I love hearing from that. Because us, my company, we're 100%, or I'm going to say 99%.

Subcontractor model and you're the employee model and [00:03:00] it's they're both great. They both have challenges at the same time There's a little bit different. What 

Mark DeFrancesco: so

There's certainly pros and cons of both I think what's been beneficial to me is being able to live and see and work in both like I had subcontractors for a full decade, so it's not like I was new to that or I just tried it out.

The things I loved about it in many cases the subcontractors were, just really qualified. They had their shit together, they could get things done efficiently, they cared about finishing a job and going to the next job. That was the positive of it. The negative that I found was I didn't always have the control that I felt that I needed in terms of just getting things done right now as I need them done.

And in many cases, those subs that I had were like family, they were, they worked with us all the time and they were great, but especially in carpentry. So I had always subcontracted carpentry out as well. And after a while, I was just like, I can't, I needed to work more in unison. And I felt like I wasn't doing enough [00:04:00] of building a team.

And I feel like when I went all employee, The second time in I decided I was going to really build culture and build team. 

I see. Big way. Nice. 

So like we, I mean we do an employee event every single month and I know a lot of people do these events, but we pull our people on what they want to do, we invite the families like it's almost what am I marketing people?

Part of what she does is just like promo the events. So we're using like direct mail and phone calls and text to 

Jason Phillips: your own people, 

Mark DeFrancesco: to my own people, to get as much of a turnout as I can to go to the minor league baseball game, to the bowling night, to the crew leaders for billiards with the owner type thing.

And so we do a lot of things like that are awesome and then our weekly meetings. So I was never able to have the type of weekly production meetings when I had subs in, in just in my world that I'm able to have now with these guys. [00:05:00] So that's our path now. But I've taken a lot of things from the sub world like bonus structures, like how I, I call it my payout system.

That's the number one most important thing to make money in this business. Net, net money, in my opinion. And I think I've been able to transfer it in a way into the employee model. Which I think is the key thing for us. I love that you've done that. Yeah, so there's a lot to learn from both.

Jason Phillips: The culture element, also, that you were mentioning. I think you've got something really special going on. 

It's cooking. We've got a long way to go. But it's cooking and it's awesome. It's, yeah. 

What brings you to Dallas? 

Mark DeFrancesco: You. I just, I admire you, and I totally respect what you've done in the business for such a long time.

And in getting to know you in the last few years, just casually at different events, whenever we would chat, I always left the conversation thinking. That's really smart, or I like how he thinks about this because I think we think alike in a lot [00:06:00] of ways. And I always see a person who's constantly growing and learning and trying to improve.

I think it's Tony Robbins is like constant and never ending improvement. I'm a big Tony Robbins guy. And I just see that in how you handle your business, and even just knowing you casually, how you would handle your faith, and your family, and your physical workouts, and your business. It's just not one thing, it's your whole life.

And I think as business owners I'm the bottleneck for my business now. And I was 20 years ago, and I will still be 10 years down the road from now. However, when you make a conscious decision to say, how do I get better every day? I think that's when things change. And for you, I just see it as Hey, that guy's trying to get better all the time.

And that's just we were in Florida or someplace and we, I'm out at the treadmill, it was early morning and you're already on the darn treadmill doing something, and I'm just, so it's not just about painting houses or whatever we're doing as contractors. It's [00:07:00] about life and how you're trying to grow and learn and get better in life is going to have a direct.

I admire that in you and I appreciate you and you've been so open and just, thank you very 

Jason Phillips: well. I'm honored to have you here and I feel I talk to contractors all the time and you've, after us spending a whole day together and really just diving in talking about your business and my business, you've got some really awesome stuff going in your, your Your business acumen is on point.

Oh, I appreciate that. And of course we're, I think, we both know a lot and we're both students. And I think that's one of the things that I really, that really struck me when I met you is I'm like, okay, this guy's smart. He's hungry and he's asking great questions, and you can tell by the questions people ask.

And of course, I'm look, I'm growing. I'm, I want to grow my company as well. And we've got, people that are listening or tuning into this podcast. They're like, man, how do I, how do I get to that point where, I [00:08:00] can do these things that Mark's doing, would you mind sharing, would it be okay to ask like what type of top line type revenue you guys are just, or how many painters or something?

Mark DeFrancesco: This year we're looking to hit five and a half million. Nice. So it's primarily paint. We do paint, we do some pressure washing. Carpentry obviously has to be part of it.

I'm up in New England. So you really don't paint an exterior paint job without having some carpentry in place. So we do have carpentry teams. So that's where we are for revenue. 

Jason Phillips: Okay, that's absolutely beautiful, which that's not a lot of guys in that realm. And 

Mark DeFrancesco: no, but there's a lot more that could be done.

Our market share is so small relative to everything that's getting done. And we all feel that way, right? Yes, wherever 

Jason Phillips: you are. Absolutely. That's one of the things I look at my market here in DFW, we've got what, four, four, four plus million people and the amount of gallons 

Mark DeFrancesco: of paint that are being spread, it's almost unlimited.

Jason Phillips: Exactly. I've just got, a tiny slice of the pie. So the sky is the limit for all of us. 

Mark DeFrancesco: A friend of mine actually [00:09:00] pointed out recently that they talked to the Sherwin Williams in my area in the state of Connecticut and they were trying to pull what percentage of paint is sold in January and February because I'm always complaining about how it's seasonal and it slows down and it does slow down in those months.

But apparently Sherwin Williams still sells a heck of a lot of paint. And I'm not spreading all that paint. So there's 

a lot of room to grow. Yeah. Why am I not getting those leads? I guess that's my marketing mindset. 

Jason Phillips: I get that. That just, and that's still today. I am like, man, What channel did they get that through?

Because I know I've been on their door, in their mailbox, constantly. 

Mark DeFrancesco: It's a constant grind. I started out putting flyers in mailboxes, and doing, going for jogs, and literally putting flyers in mailboxes. And, I'm not an attorney. Don't take that as legal advice. It's illegal to put it in mailboxes.

As long as there were no U. S. Postal Service trucks around, I would slip it in the mailbox. And still, we do a lot of advertising as well, and we, I feel the exact same way. It's funny that you say that. I'll [00:10:00] drive through a neighborhood that's my neighborhood, and then I'm like... Did we get, and I'll call the office, did we bid that 12.

52 Candlewood Drive? Did we get it? Oh, we did? Okay, good. Did they at least call

us? 

Jason Phillips: I have done the same thing. So tell me, how do you what type of marketing do you do these days? And how do you get your clients? 

Mark DeFrancesco: So we do a lot of different things. I'm still old school with direct mail.

So I do like direct mail. I spread it around. The last I've done a lot of EDDMs every door direct mail so postage is cheap. You can get pretty detailed because you're dialing down to small neighborhoods. Like in our locale, I don't know if all the, I don't know where, what it's like in any other part of the country, but near us, it's pretty tight neighborhoods, like 200 houses, 180 houses.

So those are very similar demographically, you're not going to have a block of 160 houses. Half of them are renters, they're all homeowners. In my area, it's higher end res. They'll all be [00:11:00] million dollar homes, or close to that number. And so they're similar, they're all in our market. We find that works, but we are doing everything from proximities, to saturation, to new homeowners, which we've done for a while.

We do digital like everyone does. We have two agencies that we kind of use. We try a lot of things and we're always watching what works and what doesn't work. 

Jason Phillips: One of the things Mark that I see from various painters is they don't invest in marketing. And you had mentioned you spend a set percentage on 

it.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah. So I'm different than probably most. I'm a little maniacal. Like at one point when I started my business, I would just read every single. Marketing book that I could find. So that's at one point, every winter, I would learn something and one winter was blackjack and counting cards.

One winter, but there was a marketing winter, right? And I just blitzed. I'll read 20, 30 books on something. And so I've always felt like You need to be marketing. And the reason being because there are so many people I meet that are like I don't market at all [00:12:00] and it's a point of pride.

And I just wonder listen, if you love everything about your business and everything's great in your life, then let it be, you shouldn't market. But for me, if I love my business and I feel like we're doing a service to the employees. And to the customers, why would I not want to grow that? Like, why would I not want to expand that to the highest level that I'm capable of doing?

And really, the only way to do that logically is to continue to market. In 20 years from now, we'll be a much different animal as a business than we are now. I hope, MDF painting. And in doing so, I'll still be marketing. And I would actually think it would be crazy for me not to be.

Marketing. Now, of course, I want to, if I could shave a point off of it and save a little here, of course, I want to do that. It's all about getting the best value I can get. for everything we buy. 

Jason Phillips: Once you get the delivering of the widget, the paint jobs down, you want to do more.

Yeah. And you're like, you're providing a great service. Exactly what you said. [00:13:00] How are you going to drive that? Word of mouth is only going to take you so far. Word of mouth is great. We love it. But there's so much more you can 

do. 

Mark DeFrancesco: And word of mouth has always been our best thing.

It is still our best thing. We talked a lot yesterday about allowable cost per lead, right? 

Jason Phillips: Yes. 

Mark DeFrancesco: And it's always too much money, right? I always want it to be less. Hey, that was good, but... I wish it was 30 per lead less or 100 less, but what allows us to, because we're flirting with television, we're going to start our television ads soon.

I know you have experience with that, so I was asking you about it and what allows you to do these different things are the fact that you have so many past customers, or at least that allow me to do it, is the fact that I have over 10, 000. Residential customers that continue to call us and so now when that lead comes in it doesn't cost zero because we do a lot of the, the newsletters and some of that outreach, but it's very inexpensive relative to getting that new client.

So that combination of both allows you to have an allowable average cost that's low enough for it to make sense. That's what I'm 

seeing. 

Jason Phillips: Mark, if you [00:14:00] were starting your business over today or expanding into a new market, What percentage of revenue would you dedicate to advertising? 

Mark DeFrancesco: 10%. And if I did 8%, I would be doing like a little happy dance, a little penguin dance, and make a little bit more money in my pocket.

And if I did probably 12%, I wouldn't cry about it too much, but I would know I've gotta, I've gotta tighten it a bit. Yeah. Okay. That's a number, that's a percentage of top end revenue. I think that's, 

I think that's a great number. Ours is very similar. Yeah. And I've been in a range.

Yeah. What who does the selling? 

So I have a sales team that does the selling. I did the selling for a long time. So I like to say that I sold like 20 million worth of residential houses, 500 power washings at a time. But we have a sales team now that goes out and they strictly sell.

So that's their job, but there's a bit of a process to our sales methodology. I've seen bits and pieces of yours and it's the closest thing I've ever seen to, [00:15:00] to what we try to do, which is spend the time with that client and yeah, I'm not going to go deep on that here, but I think it's about spending time drawing out some of that pain, being able to obviously present and talk about the price on the spot but to also have options like, Hey, let's go shopping together.

This is for what we talked about to do it this way. It looks like this. And I just noticed in the meeting, I just got to sit in on there's some cool things that you guys do, with financing and with some offers that also allows them to feel like they have options, that you can't take a 15, 000 job and make it 3, 000. You can't. It would be a different job, right? You could say I could give you 3, 000 worth of that 15, 000, right? Like you want, you ordered a steak, but you're only going to get that little half an ounce. You could pay for the half ounce. But when you have these other things in play, I think it's powerful and it allows people to feel like we call our sales people paint care consultants That's the name of the title and that's by design and I really want our [00:16:00] guys to feel that every day like Put on the hat of the customer sit on the side of the table with them and say hey I'm your consultant.

I want to help in this decision process. So it's high on information Now, obviously we have, we already have a good reputation, in the market and people know that. They call you for that reason but we're on the expensive side of the market, and as I talked to some of your salespeople, they feel the exact same way.

And so you're selling high value, low risk every single day. That's what we sell. High value, low risk. And for some salespeople, it takes time to understand that because not all industries and not all sales positions sell high value, low risk. 

Jason Phillips: Particularly in the painting industry. 

Mark DeFrancesco: Correct. There's a lot of chuck in a trucks and they're going to go and sell low price, GEICO sold low price for a long time and...

As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.

Let's go.

So Mark, I just want to say, welcome. Thank you very much. I'm glad you're here. We got to send, spend the whole day today, excuse me, the whole day yesterday and and today together. Man, tell us where where are you from? Tell us your name, your business

Mark DeFrancesco: and such. So I'm from Connecticut.

Name of my business is MDF Painting and Power Washing. So we've been at it up there for a while. We do primarily high end residential painting and we do some commercial repaint painting as well.

Jason Phillips: When did you start? How long have you been in business?

Mark DeFrancesco: I've been in business since 95 but really in business since 03, so I had been painting when I was younger and even through college and all that and and then launched out for real in 03.

Jason Phillips: Your clients are residential builders or homeowners?

Mark DeFrancesco: Primarily homeowners.

Jason Phillips: Primarily homeowners.

Jason Phillips: I see. Got it. Tell us tell us a little bit, Mark, about just the basic structure of your company. Who does? Who does the painting? Who does the sales? Who does the marketing and such?

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah,

so good question. Start with the direct labor of our painters. This has changed over the years.

We've talked about it. I went from being a completely employee based company to a completely subcontractor based company back to a completely employee based company. And so it's been a bit of a Germany, a journey for us. And but now we're all employees and that's the way I prefer it. Is

that typical for your state?

It's a mix. It's a big mix. I would say it's probably very similar to 50 50. There's a lot of, a lot more subcontractors in the last 15 years are being used by more and more companies.

Jason Phillips: And the employee model, I love hearing from that. Because us, my company, we're 100%, or I'm going to say 99%.

Mark DeFrancesco: so

There's certainly pros and cons of both I think what's been beneficial to me is being able to live and see and work in both like I had subcontractors for a full decade, so it's not like I was new to that or I just tried it out.

The things I loved about it in many cases the subcontractors were, just really qualified. They had their shit together, they could get things done efficiently, they cared about finishing a job and going to the next job. That was the positive of it. The negative that I found was I didn't always have the control that I felt that I needed in terms of just getting things done right now as I need them done.

And I feel like when I went all employee, The second time in I decided I was going to really build culture and build team.

I see. Big way. Nice.

So like we, I mean we do an employee event every single month and I know a lot of people do these events, but we pull our people on what they want to do, we invite the families like it's almost what am I marketing people?

Part of what she does is just like promo the events. So we're using like direct mail and phone calls and text to

Jason Phillips: your own people,

Mark DeFrancesco: to my own people, to get as much of a turnout as I can to go to the minor league baseball game, to the bowling night, to the crew leaders for billiards with the owner type thing.

That's the number one most important thing to make money in this business. Net, net money, in my opinion. And I think I've been able to transfer it in a way into the employee model. Which I think is the key thing for us. I love that you've done that. Yeah, so there's a lot to learn from both.

Jason Phillips: The culture element, also, that you were mentioning. I think you've got something really special going on.

It's cooking. We've got a long way to go. But it's cooking and it's awesome. It's, yeah.

What brings you to Dallas?

Mark DeFrancesco: You. I just, I admire you, and I totally respect what you've done in the business for such a long time.

I think it's Tony Robbins is like constant and never ending improvement. I'm a big Tony Robbins guy. And I just see that in how you handle your business, and even just knowing you casually, how you would handle your faith, and your family, and your physical workouts, and your business. It's just not one thing, it's your whole life.

And I think as business owners I'm the bottleneck for my business now. And I was 20 years ago, and I will still be 10 years down the road from now. However, when you make a conscious decision to say, how do I get better every day? I think that's when things change. And for you, I just see it as Hey, that guy's trying to get better all the time.

I admire that in you and I appreciate you and you've been so open and just, thank you very

Jason Phillips: well. I'm honored to have you here and I feel I talk to contractors all the time and you've, after us spending a whole day together and really just diving in talking about your business and my business, you've got some really awesome stuff going in your, your Your business acumen is on point.

Oh, I appreciate that. And of course we're, I think, we both know a lot and we're both students. And I think that's one of the things that I really, that really struck me when I met you is I'm like, okay, this guy's smart. He's hungry and he's asking great questions, and you can tell by the questions people ask.

Mark DeFrancesco: This year we're looking to hit five and a half million. Nice. So it's primarily paint. We do paint, we do some pressure washing. Carpentry obviously has to be part of it.

I'm up in New England. So you really don't paint an exterior paint job without having some carpentry in place. So we do have carpentry teams. So that's where we are for revenue.

Jason Phillips: Okay, that's absolutely beautiful, which that's not a lot of guys in that realm. And

Mark DeFrancesco: no, but there's a lot more that could be done.

Our market share is so small relative to everything that's getting done. And we all feel that way, right? Yes, wherever

Jason Phillips: you are. Absolutely. That's one of the things I look at my market here in DFW, we've got what, four, four, four plus million people and the amount of gallons

Mark DeFrancesco: of paint that are being spread, it's almost unlimited.

Jason Phillips: Exactly. I've just got, a tiny slice of the pie. So the sky is the limit for all of us.

But apparently Sherwin Williams still sells a heck of a lot of paint. And I'm not spreading all that paint. So there's

a lot of room to grow. Yeah. Why am I not getting those leads? I guess that's my marketing mindset.

Jason Phillips: I get that. That just, and that's still today. I am like, man, What channel did they get that through?

Because I know I've been on their door, in their mailbox, constantly.

Mark DeFrancesco: It's a constant grind. I started out putting flyers in mailboxes, and doing, going for jogs, and literally putting flyers in mailboxes. And, I'm not an attorney. Don't take that as legal advice. It's illegal to put it in mailboxes.

52 Candlewood Drive? Did we get it? Oh, we did? Okay, good. Did they at least call

us?

Jason Phillips: I have done the same thing. So tell me, how do you what type of marketing do you do these days? And how do you get your clients?

Mark DeFrancesco: So we do a lot of different things. I'm still old school with direct mail.

So I do like direct mail. I spread it around. The last I've done a lot of EDDMs every door direct mail so postage is cheap. You can get pretty detailed because you're dialing down to small neighborhoods. Like in our locale, I don't know if all the, I don't know where, what it's like in any other part of the country, but near us, it's pretty tight neighborhoods, like 200 houses, 180 houses.

We do digital like everyone does. We have two agencies that we kind of use. We try a lot of things and we're always watching what works and what doesn't work.

Jason Phillips: One of the things Mark that I see from various painters is they don't invest in marketing. And you had mentioned you spend a set percentage on

it.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah. So I'm different than probably most. I'm a little maniacal. Like at one point when I started my business, I would just read every single. Marketing book that I could find. So that's at one point, every winter, I would learn something and one winter was blackjack and counting cards.

And I just wonder listen, if you love everything about your business and everything's great in your life, then let it be, you shouldn't market. But for me, if I love my business and I feel like we're doing a service to the employees. And to the customers, why would I not want to grow that? Like, why would I not want to expand that to the highest level that I'm capable of doing?

And really, the only way to do that logically is to continue to market. In 20 years from now, we'll be a much different animal as a business than we are now. I hope, MDF painting. And in doing so, I'll still be marketing. And I would actually think it would be crazy for me not to be.

Marketing. Now, of course, I want to, if I could shave a point off of it and save a little here, of course, I want to do that. It's all about getting the best value I can get. for everything we buy.

Jason Phillips: Once you get the delivering of the widget, the paint jobs down, you want to do more.

do.

Mark DeFrancesco: And word of mouth has always been our best thing.

It is still our best thing. We talked a lot yesterday about allowable cost per lead, right?

Jason Phillips: Yes.

Mark DeFrancesco: And it's always too much money, right? I always want it to be less. Hey, that was good, but... I wish it was 30 per lead less or 100 less, but what allows us to, because we're flirting with television, we're going to start our television ads soon.

I know you have experience with that, so I was asking you about it and what allows you to do these different things are the fact that you have so many past customers, or at least that allow me to do it, is the fact that I have over 10, 000. Residential customers that continue to call us and so now when that lead comes in it doesn't cost zero because we do a lot of the, the newsletters and some of that outreach, but it's very inexpensive relative to getting that new client.

So that combination of both allows you to have an allowable average cost that's low enough for it to make sense. That's what I'm

seeing.

Mark DeFrancesco: 10%. And if I did 8%, I would be doing like a little happy dance, a little penguin dance, and make a little bit more money in my pocket.

And if I did probably 12%, I wouldn't cry about it too much, but I would know I've gotta, I've gotta tighten it a bit. Yeah. Okay. That's a number, that's a percentage of top end revenue. I think that's,

I think that's a great number. Ours is very similar. Yeah. And I've been in a range.

Yeah. What who does the selling?

So I have a sales team that does the selling. I did the selling for a long time. So I like to say that I sold like 20 million worth of residential houses, 500 power washings at a time. But we have a sales team now that goes out and they strictly sell.

This is for what we talked about to do it this way. It looks like this. And I just noticed in the meeting, I just got to sit in on there's some cool things that you guys do, with financing and with some offers that also allows them to feel like they have options, that you can't take a 15, 000 job and make it 3, 000. You can't. It would be a different job, right? You could say I could give you 3, 000 worth of that 15, 000, right? Like you want, you ordered a steak, but you're only going to get that little half an ounce. You could pay for the half ounce. But when you have these other things in play, I think it's powerful and it allows people to feel like we call our sales people paint care consultants That's the name of the title and that's by design and I really want our [00:16:00] guys to feel that every day like Put on the hat of the customer sit on the side of the table with them and say hey I'm your consultant.

I want to help in this decision process. So it's high on information Now, obviously we have, we already have a good reputation, in the market and people know that. They call you for that reason but we're on the expensive side of the market, and as I talked to some of your salespeople, they feel the exact same way.

And so you're selling high value, low risk every single day. That's what we sell. High value, low risk. And for some salespeople, it takes time to understand that because not all industries and not all sales positions sell high value, low risk.

Jason Phillips: Particularly in the painting industry.

Mark DeFrancesco: Correct. There's a lot of chuck in a trucks and they're going to go and sell low price, GEICO sold low price for a long time and it worked for them, but it doesn't work for MDF painting.

price.

A hundred percent.

Mark DeFrancesco: When you're the owner, you hundred percent believe in it. In the mission. And you know what's broken. On the machine, right? And you know what's got to get tinkered with, but you believe in the mission because you're behind the mission, right?

And so in sales, your team needs to believe that this is the best possible thing that homeowner can do right now for their home in every way possible. And in doing so, they always sell them the best job. And the best job is at the best price, which is the highest price. It's the highest value.

Jason Phillips: That's right.

Mark DeFrancesco: And that person is always the most satisfied. The person who buys something at the lower value is never as satisfied long term. We deal with a lot of weather conditions in the Northeast. Our customer care program is the thing I've been hanging my hat on the last six, seven, eight years.

And if it's a bad experience, that could affect your family.

Jason Phillips: So many

people don't, so many people don't understand that, and you get that.

Mark DeFrancesco: I get it now, I didn't always get it. I didn't always get it, but the qual I see how maniacal you guys are about the quality. Like when you're having a third party, find out how good your quality really is.

It's not about what Google says or Yelp or any of these other false things. It's right. When you care, like we've been collecting report cards since I started this thing, right? They all say, Hey, like sometimes it says like B minus and you know what? They're just. They're almost meaningless. It's a rah, we clap about it and all that.

Jason Phillips: Yeah, I

don't want my customers to tell me to my face I'm happy. What I really want is I want them to be so wowed that they tell their friends about me.

And if I'm going to get to the bottom of that, I need a third party that they can be honest with. that they feel safe being honest with. Phillips could have done better on this. And because then I can take that data and work with my team to improve. And typically, it's a communication thing, typically.

Mark DeFrancesco: It's typically almost always a communication thing. But the powerful thing when you bring in the third party, I think, is that. Other people on the team are now really forward focused on what those numbers look like. And how do we win by improving that metric? I think that's a key thing.

Everyone around here.

Jason Phillips: It's like Google can change, Google or Facebook can change their algorithm and cut me out of the loop and you out of the loop in a heartbeat. Matter of fact, I've talked to a couple of companies that have been shut down with their Google business profile or their Facebook at times and their leads shut off well.

If I'm in direct contact and I have a relationship with clients not customers that are transactions, but clients that call back, and I can call them, I can email them, whatever, there's no one in between us. There's that, not that third party. And if I'm burning through clients and treating them like transactions, that's not going to be an asset to me.

they don't.

Mark DeFrancesco: I call it chasing greatness. And I think that's what you're doing. Like in, in your customer experience, everything that happens from when they first call you to, the pre positioning stuff to the salesperson shows up.

Their whole demo, their presentation, closing the job. Scheduling is a big part of this. I'm talking to your gal and her RAINN conversations with people and how you set it up. And in a lot of us are very similar in how we're doing that. We're sending them information. We're talking to them. We're really just carrying the customer through this whole process.

And at the end, that experience is great. And we don't run away and don't disappear if and when they have, and one thing I know about paint is it peels, eventually. So one thing I know about it. If you do all that right, you're really chasing greatness and what you're trying to do, right? And so if you're, if you make a hamburger at the hamburger store, make the best hamburger, right?

Jason Phillips: So true. And that's true. That's true.

Mark DeFrancesco: But the hard part about it for someone like me is it's never ending. Right? You don't hit a point.

Jason Phillips: You're obsessed

with improvement.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yes, but you have to be, right? To some degree, you have to be. You just can't let it get in the way of you executing, right?

So you have to be able to, I think, just constantly chase it and be like, that's the game we're in. We just chase it,

right?

Jason Phillips: One of the things that that I speak about a lot is the concept of contractor prison. And Contractor Freedom. And, and I have to

get one of those shirts, by the way.

I've gotta, I've gotta...

I can make that, I can make that happen. The talking to you you're definitely not anywhere near Contractor Prison. You've got time, you've got money, you've got freedom.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah,

but... I want more.

Jason Phillips: So what is that? What's the next thing? I know you're always wanting to improve.

business?

Mark DeFrancesco: So I'll be honest, I started my business, I wanted to make a lot of money. I'm a blue collar guy. Came up pretty blue collar. I have a great family. Had a lot of stuff taken care of for me. But I would grind. I was that kid selling baseball cards to make money to buy my Joe Montana rookie card type thing, right?

I was always... in business. In the beginning I want to make money and now I want to help people in my team primarily like that's been the biggest change like in I mean we're customer focused but we're even more employee focused right now than we've ever been and I actually think we're a little bit more focused on the employees than the customers.

And I sometimes have pains in me because I'm growing pains, from going from the old model where we fight for the dollar. And I cared about my employees always, but it's different now. It's actually where I care about the employees more. My focus is making it amazing place. Like the facility you have here.

And if that's the case, the quality of your life is directly related to who you work around and in what condition you work. So when I walk down this hallway here and I see how you've designed this, cause this is like this, I call it an L10 factory. And it inspires everybody to be an A player. And think about it, if you're an A player, you're most happy.

And really it goes back to the conversation of like why market? To do more like because we could be more. I'm not at my capacity of what I have the capability to do. I think that's the number one thing. Someone came and tried to buy my company a few years ago. And I didn't sell it. And my wife said to, and we have rental properties and different things that we do.

So it's, I do okay with that stuff. And she said, why didn't you sell this darn thing? And I said, I have unfinished business. And she goes, what does that mean? That's silly, and she's not in the business with me at all. And I said, I just would feel like I just sold out. I gave up on what we could be.

Now, every system's not perfect. It's all got to be fixed and shored up and made a little bit better, but that's part of the fun. It's like the tinkering. So I started, so from that moment when I didn't sell my business, I started calling it my opus. Yeah, my wife hates me with all this stuff but because to be an opus is something I just work on.

Like just, I'm always going to work on it because I used to, when I was younger, I used to be frustrated that it wasn't perfect. Okay. I want it to be like this. Just like coming here. I just said to you there's 10, 000 things I've learned from hanging out with you for a day that I should do, but I can't do 10, 000 things at once.

It's just going to help my people and that cascades to help the customers.

Jason Phillips: Going back to something you said a moment ago is like in the beginning, you said, I just want to make money and it's there's these three, there's these three phases and of survival, then success, and it's now you're into that significance phase.

You're not doing it, you're not necessarily doing it for the money.

Mark DeFrancesco: No, you want

to make an impact a hundred percent. And you want to, and I like yourself, I definitely want to help contractors because I feel like I've been very fortunate because I hit some really bad roadblocks. When I started out, I was damn near bankrupt.

I cared about the customer. I cared about everybody, but it wasn't working. It was broken. [00:28:00] And, fundamentally, things had to change. And for me, it was fixing in the cost of my labor. That was the number one fundamental change that immediately went from On the fringe of bankruptcy to paying everybody back that I owed money all the everybody I owed money to everybody at that moment Yeah, that was a tough moment.

Jason Phillips: It's Our biggest expense is in this type of business. It's not materials not factories It's not licensing marketing either because and it's not marketing it is labor. It's payroll dollars. Yes And one of the things, one of the things we measure is the labor efficiency ratio.

We talk about, maybe we'll share more about that at another time. But that's that's the number one place you can waste. You can, and next behind that's probably materials. And then right behind that, marketing.

Mark DeFrancesco: Correct.

Jason Phillips: And a lot of guys waste money on marketing.

Mark DeFrancesco: And cause we were talking about profit yesterday.

Like I said to someone last week, if you don't control that labor properly, you can be masterful at everything else. You can have the most. Efficient, amazing marketing with a great CPL. You could have a sales team. That's amazing. You can, you could do everything right and you still won't really be profitable.

That's right. So start with making that part of it work, right?

Jason Phillips: Everything

that's, so many times, guys will fight to, save money on copy paper. And yet... And

Mark DeFrancesco: the jobs are going 30 percent over. Yeah,

Jason Phillips: it's the higher it is on the top of your income statement, the more impactful it is.

That's why, it's, you're absolutely right.

Mark DeFrancesco: So that's been powerful for me.

And here's something that's going to add value and move the needle for my company now. Do you have any takeaways after just, we've done a lot of just talking business.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah,

so I think I'm probably just going to break it down to two cause there's a lot, but two would be my metrics.

So I do have metrics. And quite a few metrics that I look at. With this whole L10 and traction tools and the whole EOS system, I'm not sure how many people listen to this will know about that, but I want to really run on EOS and I don't run on EOS completely yet and I'm seeing you running on some version of it.

In order to have any type of efficiency, everyone has to know like what winning looks like for them individually. So if I'm going to show up someplace for eight hours, what does winning look like? And so We start to do that in a lot of ways with meetings that we have and with little incentives that are out there.

But when the metric is on the wall and it's hey, your crew needs to get this done. Most painters have this done with their crews, right? They know, hey, you go to this job, it's got to be done in seven days. Everyone has an idea of that. Some people are much better at others and spelling it, at spelling it out.

Right? Yes. The more detailed that is, the more you're allowing A players to go ahead and win. There's a lot to that though, because you have to hire right.

Jason Phillips: Correct.

Mark DeFrancesco: That's a whole other department.

So I look forward to seeing you online and at the summit right here in Dallas, it will be transformational. I promise.

Jason Phillips: You

know, it's, I talked to a lot of owners and a lot of owners don't have a specific goal for what they want to hit in revenue.

We just know we want to grow. We want to grow. And very few of them have broken it down even to the month. And then, like what you and I've been talking and this has been a game changer in my company, but it's one thing for us to as managers, leaders, owners to sit down and look at our reports and what are our targets.

It's another thing for the play by play. of our frontline workers who are on the phones in the field to act on it, to, to have something actionable for them for right now. And one of the, one of the things actually are rallying battle cry for this quarter actually is win the day,

So I've never, I have to give you high praise here. I've never seen anything quite like this, where the metrics are. Give in to put in front of people in as close to a real time way as possible. I haven't seen it and it's awesome and I'm in love with it and I want to steal it. It's gonna take me some time to steal it.

But in the reason is exactly what you just said because if you're going to have a great place to work and you can't really give people a chance to win the day. Then how great

Jason Phillips: what does

winning look like today? I came and I worked hard,

Mark DeFrancesco: but it's

cloudy. 90 percent of the U. S. population has no idea what winning the day means for them at their job, I bet.

Jason Phillips: Maybe even more than that.

Mark DeFrancesco: Maybe even more than that. So for your people to all know in a very clear way, it just, it makes the checking on them a little bit easier. Because they're wanting to win the day. I had a coffee conversation with one of the women here. I'm going to script her name, so I won't say a name, but She just clearly knows what winning looks like.

And they're never lined up. There's always too many leads or not enough leads and too many and it's and you're right You're always and she knew she doesn't call it building with blocks, but she knew exactly because she's in HR So I said, what do you need now? Just out of curiosity and she knew But she knew what winning looked like for her.

Jason Phillips: Yes and here's the thing

Mark DeFrancesco: amazing

Jason Phillips: you can give everybody these metrics and we say it's about accountability And it's not necessarily to say, point the finger at people, your numbers are off, but the right people on your team want to clear, they gravitate toward it. They want a clear picture of what winning is, and then they want to go get it.

They're thinking, okay to move that needle, what do I have to do next?

Jason Phillips: Yes.

Mark DeFrancesco: You're not spelling it out. And so it's getting a players to stay here. There's a lot.

Jason Phillips: There's a lot.

Mark DeFrancesco: There's a lot. So the hiring process is huge for us and that's something that we've been doing well on in the last probably three years and we just completely scrapped what we did and changed it.

A lot of it has to do with this behavioral analysis as well and adding and I know you're big on to disc profiles but beyond that if you don't give them this Culture, you're going to lose them. You're going to hire the A's and you'll lose them.

Jason Phillips: They're going to leave.

Mark DeFrancesco: And they're not going to stay because you have a bowling party once a month.

Jason Phillips: When you're, let's just say, for instance, that you're

Mark DeFrancesco: What did I say to you?

I said, I look at my metric, I can see my metrics weekly. Remember? Yes. And I said, 20 years ago, I didn't know my I never knew the number, any of this stuff ever like a year would pass. I had an idea, right? I'm a country. I have an idea. Like I have an idea of how that went,

Jason Phillips: but if we're going to,

if we're going to hit

our annual goal

Mark DeFrancesco: daily or all the time,

Jason Phillips: if we're going to hit

our annual goal,

we got to win every month.

If we're going to win every month, we got to win every week. If we're going to win every week, we got to win every day. If we want to win a day.

Mark DeFrancesco: We got to execute.

Jason Phillips: And so the way like on our sales team, we got to win the play. Each appointment is a play. So they've got to win the play. It's dialing it in Hey, I would need this many leads this year.

So I need this many each month, put it on a seasonal curve and I need this many every week. Weekdays are this much, weekends are this much.

Mark DeFrancesco: And then it's simple. You're in the red, the green, where you're

at.

I am going to help you. I want you to have this with this, because you're going to, this is going to, this is going to change your life, man. But let's just say you were, say you're a guy out there that's let's look back, let's say your company was a million, 2 million. What are the key numbers that you wish you had live up to date constantly without having to go fetch a report or make phone calls?

If you could literally open your phone or look at a TV screen in your office, what are the key numbers you really wish that you could see?

Mark DeFrancesco: Okay.

Jason Phillips: Boil it down to the most simple ones.

Mark DeFrancesco: You put me right on the spot. I love this. So I'm going to go with first for that day.

Are you writing all this down?

Jason Phillips: No, but I am recording it.

Mark DeFrancesco: That's true. And so I also want to see The average dollars per lead and S L I?

Jason Phillips: Yes.

Mark DeFrancesco: N S L I, I'm getting it.

Jason Phillips: Yes.

Mark DeFrancesco: I want to see that 100 percent just real time would be amazing. Beyond that, production. I'm big into dollars per crew. So dollars per crew per week.

So I'd want to see like work completed, like aggregate work completed. And so that's a tough one. You're looking at man hours and what's produced in the field. And you're able to see it based off your charge rate. We're pretty clear. We see it every week, but to see it every day or as parts of the day.

Would be like Disney world for me, like that would be

Jason Phillips: a lot easier to fix

something when the. Okay, I'm going to relate a story that I may mess this up

a little bit.

Mark DeFrancesco: Is that too many metrics?

Jason Phillips: No. I think that's

people are going to be drooling thinking about having this.

I bring in some financial ones, too, though.

Mark DeFrancesco: There'll be a few.

Jason Phillips: Some financial

ones.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah.

Jason Phillips: There was the way I heard it when we first sent the U. S. sent Rocket to the Moon, that apparently it's like trying to, Throw a basketball in a hoop that's four miles away. It was that accurate.

You had, and if you didn't hit the moon's gravity, gravitational field at the right speed, at the right angle, it wouldn't loop you around where you could orbit and land. It would slingshot you passed out into never land in space. And so they had to hit this just right. And what I don't remember, it took them what, three days to get there.

I don't know. This was before I was born, but the idea was that they didn't wait till they were, halfway there to check. They're tracking that every few hours they would update their trajectory before they were too far off course. And so to me I don't want to wait till end of third quarter to realize Why we're way behind on our annual goal, right?

Mark DeFrancesco: If guys think about it like this, I'm going to break it down to a job site, right?

So if you're on a job site, you're training or we're training our crew leaders to. Win the day. How do they win the day? They show up at the time they're supposed to show up. They have a short communication with the customer. They have a huddle where they assign roles. So if there's three people on the crew, this is what I need you to get done.

If they're really good at their job, what do they do? They actually specify what they want done. They don't just say, Hey, start over here and start painting this side of the house. They say, you're gonna start over here and paint this side of the house, and you need to get to here. By lunchtime.

Jason Phillips: Oh,

Mark DeFrancesco: that's part of what the crew leader has to do, right?

Jason Phillips: Yeah,

Mark DeFrancesco: and then they have to keep it disciplined and keep the clock running.

Jason Phillips: So that's about

Mark DeFrancesco: It's the

same thing with metrics So you're asking a crew leader to divide up their day the same way by planning it organizing it But allowing them to have targets they could win with So why would you not have a call center person knowing that they have to rehash so many appointments or that you need this many to come in or this many outbound calls to get to that number?

It should be on a board that allows them to win. It's the same thing as the crew leader designing that day for his crew to win, which everybody in painting should understand that to some degree. Absolutely. And it's not just with them. It's with every salesperson. It's with every, it's in financial accounting, right?

They have to be, it's, to me, it's about expense reports. So it's there's certain expense categories that are going to kill me. And there's other ones that I don't have to worry about so much. Yes. Because I, I never studied financial accounting. In fact, it's probably the one thing I'll have my daughters make sure they take a financial accounting class.

I didn't do that. So that's it. And yeah,

Jason Phillips: man.

Mark DeFrancesco: Does that make sense?

Real quick what is a, you mentioned, the EOS, you want to get that's the book traction and entrepreneurial operating system. And you want to get, you want to get that in place. And it sounds like the. The metrics is a key thing. What what's another system?

Give me two examples. Give me a system in your business that is so good that you have handed it off or could easily hand it off to someone and it would continue to thrive. Start there.

Mark DeFrancesco: My sales system is pretty darn good. It's gotta get better. Everything's gotta get better, right?

We know that we've established that. My sales system is pretty tight.

After talking to you, I'm gonna

Jason Phillips: 100 percent you are leaps and bounds

ahead.

And I said, I need to probably move out of that. Because I'm not giving enough of myself to that team. That team deserves a person that can really just their whole job. 50, 40, 50 hours a week is just catered to those guys. Yeah. Like I love sales. I'm a sales baby. I grew up in sales of in this business, right?

That's what I roll. I painted for a short amount of time, but I was into the sales end of it. That's what I loved. And I still love it. However, in my day, I, in my week, I probably give them six hours of me.

Jason Phillips: And how much better could they be if they had

Mark DeFrancesco: someone gave them for you and someone better than me? I'm not the best salesperson in the world. I have a pretty good method. I care about this stuff a lot. I live my business. So like I grew, I believe in what we're selling big time. I'm on fire with it. So that allows me to just naturally sell, right? That's some of the owner juice that you get.

And you only realize that when you hire salespeople and then there's, you have nothing to train them on.

Jason Phillips: Yes, that's right.

Mark DeFrancesco: So when I, the first person I ever hired, this is embarrassing, but I will tell you this. He came from ADT. He was selling alarms and I knew I needed a sales guy.

Jason Phillips: We knew he knew how to

knock on doors if he was doing

that, right?

Mark DeFrancesco: So he comes with me and this is a successful guy. He had run karate studios and done all kinds of things, but he was all on board to be the next paint king in Connecticut with me, right? So my idea of trading him was he would just drive with me. I was too busy to stop doing anything. So he drove with me for two weeks and he goes, do you eat lunch?

I think marketing we do some smart things in marketing, so I think that's a good system. Hiring, my hiring system's really good. It's probably my second best system. Okay. Yeah. I don't know how deep you want

me to go. You're already using personality profiles? We're using a combination

of personality profiles, but we're We're always hiring.

And people give it lip service, but we are always... hiring and I'm always doing something outside the box that's probably stupid half the time like I just ran an event of faux finishing event with this faux finish master in order to try to attract crew leaders from other companies to come hang out with me

Jason Phillips: genius

Mark DeFrancesco: at this

Jason Phillips: genius

Mark DeFrancesco: it didn't work so hot but it sounded good.

Like literally I have one person that's part time and they're able to manage it essentially, but it's a series of I'll run through the process quickly. It's basically we would screen the resume. Then we would do a phone screen. Then they would do a few they basically have homework after everything.

So they get a simple homework that's emailed to them that they have to respond to. Then they come in for the first in person, which is a one on one with someone in that department. And they get more homework. The personality profile quiz is an important thing. We do spend the time explaining why we do it and how it's about us communicating better and being better leaders and having a better family and all this stuff.

Oh, and then we do Brandon's painter test. So I like to have him come in and, touch something, pick up a brush, do this, the circle test.

Jason Phillips: Yes.

Mark DeFrancesco: Which is awesome just because it gets them physically doing something, it gets them out there. I have a video that explains all the perks, like why it's awesome to work with us.

And it's probably boring as hell, but it gets me to say the same thing the same way to every person. And so they're indoctrinated in, like by the time they get hired, they put a lot of work into getting hired. And so it's not everyone's way, but it really works well for us. I remember hearing about Zappos, that Zappos would bring people through training, and then they would pay them to leave.

Give them a little bonus to be like, if you don't really want to do this.

Jason Phillips: I have not heard that. That's amazing.

It was like about a week's salary.

Jason Phillips: To quit.

Mark DeFrancesco: Right now you can quit. Here, take this as like your parting gift. Which sounds a little bit nuts. ​

Jason Phillips: I love it.

Mark DeFrancesco: But what it did was it allowed those people that really wanted to be there. So I'm just waiting for people to fall out of my system. And other people are like, no, I gotta hire people.

No, because you need to always be recruiting and you need to always be hiring. One little thing that I've done that worked really well for getting painters, because everyone's worried about how to do this. I made signs up, just we make the signs, Patriot signs. We buy the big poly bag. Thousand at a time for our business.

It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money for a painter, crew leader. That gets the phone to ring. It has other benefits, 401k, paid time off and basic stuff, but it's just on this side. So we just, if I need guys, I'll put up 40 signs at all the Home Depots, the Lowe's, CVS, Dunkin Donuts, anywhere, and I'll, we'll get a ton of calls.

Now, they're not all people that you want to hire, obviously, but you're driving people to the funnel. It's a hiring funnel. And if you don't drive people to it, you're never going to win. So

Jason Phillips: you're treating it just like marketing. I wish more people would do that

Mark DeFrancesco: in some senses I become more maniacal with the hiring being Recruiting as almost like marketing in the last two years, but it's working So now, I'm getting a players that drip down to me I've got to get them to work with me and stay with me a long time and I think Facility is one thing like you don't need it.

Jason Phillips: That's, man, that's

amazing.

Mark DeFrancesco: Yeah.

Jason Phillips: I tell you guys we are coming up right on close to an hour. So I think I think we're gonna, we're gonna wrap it up here. Listen, friends out there, if you're watching or listening

Mark DeFrancesco: we gotta do a round two

Jason Phillips: We are gonna, we've got a, we've got a lot. We can definitely do a round two and then some. But guys, You've got a glimpse into Mark's thinking. Mark has a business mind, okay? And he's got it going on. I want you, by the way, what's the best way if anybody wants to reach out to you? You don't do a lot of stuff on social media.

What's the best way to reach out to you?

Mark DeFrancesco: Go to MDFpainting. com and give me a call, people can just reach out and say, Hey, you listened to this or, Jason, and you want me to give him a call back and I'll just get on the phone and talk to you.

Jason Phillips: Wow. That's an amazing offer.

MDFpainting.com. So Mark, dude I know we've got some more time we're going to spend together, but I've I'm treasuring this time getting to know you here.

Mark DeFrancesco: I appreciate you very much. Thank you.

Jason: Hey contractors. I want to invite you to connect. If you want to get connected with the Contractor Freedom Community, simply point your browser to ContractorFreedom.live that's Contractor, Freedom dot L I V E on there. You'll find the link to our, our. Our Facebook private group, our page, our newsletter you'll find a link to our, podcast. You'll also find a link to register for the upcoming, First Annual Contractor, Freedom Summit right here in Dallas, Texas. So I just want to invite you to, to come on over, join the community. I look forward to getting to know you more. Thanks for listening in today.