hey what’s up guys? this is eric with paintingbusiness pro and this video i’m going to teach you how to do estimating. so we aregoing to talk about how to estimate a paint job and we’re actually not going to coverall in one video, so on this video we are really just going to cover the fundamentalsand the basics behind how to estimate correctly and then in another video, we are going tocover specifically interior estimating and then in another video specifically exteriorestimating. so how to come up with your prices for interior and exterior, so that’s tocome a little bit later. in this video we are going to cover the fundamentals. i’malso going to have one other video about why you don’t need to be so worried about pricing.and the reason i want to share that with you
guys, there is nothing i get more questionabout than estimating, and i don’t just get question about estimating, i get peoplefreaking out and concern about how they are going to come up with prices. and you reallydo not need to worry about your pricing; it’s going to work itself out. that’s reallyone of the last things you should be worried about if you really seriously thinking ofstarting a painting business. but i see a lot of people not starting a painting companyjust because they are worried about their pricing and it’s crazy, but that’s foranother video. okay, so there is a couple things you wantunderstand about estimating. the first thing you need to know, it’s not going to be exactlycorrect every single time and your going to
kind of roughly get in the ball park and that’sgoing to be okay. however, it is kind of a scientific approach where we do want to getspecific measurements and be as accurate as we can, just to make sure that we are notover estimating anything and not under estimating things. so we are going to get to some ofthose specific standards in some of the other videos, but for now we are just going to lookat some of the basic. so there is a couple of things you need tostart with, before you come up with pricing. the first thing you need to know is what isyour margin? by knowing what your margin is, that’s going to tell you how much you needto mark-up your cost because how we are going to come up with our price, is first we needto figure out how much it’s going to cost
us to spruce that job and then we are goingto add in our margin. if you are running a very small business andyou’re the only person doing the marketing and the sales and then you have a subcontractordoing the job. well your margin may only needs to be thirty percent then; you know that’syou know paying yourself thirty percent for the sales and the marketing, you know allthat. you know that’s probably what i was at when i first started, and then i raisemy prices very shortly after, but that’s probably what i was pricing when i first started.that’s also kind of going to be the pricing that you’re going to do, if you’re lookingat doing commercial type of jobs or bigger projects like $10,000 to $30,000 in a sizeprojects, because the margin is just going
to be slimmer on those jobs. so first you need to know what your marginis, for foothill painting we do fifty percent as i have share in other videos. so what thatmeans is if it cost us $1,500 to produce this job, we are going to charge the customer about$3,000. so you need to know kind of what your mark-up is first, because at fifty percentyou should fall right in the ball park with other companies. here is how we actually come up with our pricing;there are few things that we need to know. first we need to know how many hours the jobis going to take, we need to know how much we are going to pay our employees per hours,we need to know how much our materials is
going to cost and we need to know how muchmaterials we are going to need. so these are the four things we need to figure out thecost. alright for dollars per hour, we are going to go with twenty is good; $20 per anhour is pretty standard you can go with. materials, you’re just going to have tocheck with the paint store and how much your material cost, you can get gallons of painfrom 16 bucks, all the way from up like $50 or $60 a gallon. check with your paint storeand see what paint you’re going to using, you probably want to aim for paint that’sin the $20 to $30 range. so our paint is anywhere from $21 a gallon to $29 a gallon and we letthe customer pick which type of paint they want. let say in this example we are goingto with $21 per gallon paint as they are trying
to, you know save money. so now all we have to figure out, we haveto figure out the number of materials, so how many gallons of paint we need and thenwe need to figure out the hours, now that’s what i’m going to go into in another video.i’m going to kind of give you some short cuts, you know to figuring that out. so hereis the short cut, for exterior painting, there is linear feet. so that’s like trim boardsright, trim board is like a long linear feet, like maybe a two story home has a trim boardrunning up the whole corner, that’s like twenty linear feet of trim board. so there is linear feet and then there issquare feet. linear feet about one hour per
forty, okay, so forty linear feet for an hourof painting, so we are going to assume that you know for trim forty feet per hour forthe body of the house or the eves of the house, we are going to say two hundred and that’sbefore spraying the house. if you’re rolling the house, we are going to do one hundredand fifty. so what that means, if you have a two thousand square foot house, that rightthere is going to be ten hours and then if you have four hundred you know feet of trimon that house, that’s going to be another ten hours. so we got this as a twenty hourjob. those are kind of typical standards and weare going break those down in the exterior estimating videos to exactly what those standardare going to be, more specifically but that’s
what they really all boil down to, that’sthe square foot, that’s the linear feet. and then we also have prep work, so you doneed to estimate hours for the prep work depending on where you work. different areas in differentcountry have different amount of prep works. so in colorado for example we have very littleprep work, out of the east coast you have tons and tons of prep work. so you’re goingto need to figure out the hours of prep work kind of on your own out there, you know andi would talk with the paint store, i would you know, i would ask around and maybe talkto with your subcontractors and things like that. you will be able to figure out how muchat times to bunch on prep work and we will get more of that in the exterior estimatingvideo. interior, i’m actually not going
to get into the interior; we will just kindof cover that in the next video. so now where we at? we got our total hoursfigure out, we have twenty hours we are going to say, twenty hours at $20 per hour, okayso that’s going to be $400, that’s how much our labor is going to cost us on thisjob. and then you know let’s say the gallons of paints, which again we are going to getinto that in the other videos. but let’s say for this job, we actually needed twelvegallons of paints which is actually going to be pretty accurate for this. so twelvegallons of paint times twenty-one per gallon, what is that? that’s going to be two hundredand fifty-two, alright so it’s two hundred and fifty-two. so now we are going to comeup with our total cost of $652, okay so now
here is the last part, now you’re goingto mark this up, that’s how much it’s going to cost you, so that’s how your margincomes into play. so what we do? for oil paintings we take acost which is 652 and we divide it by point 4, so what we are going to come up with inthis example is about sixteen hundred. alright, so that’s our price and then we actuallygive our customers ten percent-up to ten percent off and we almost give them that discount,so this job we are actually ending up pricing for about $1,440 is our final price on thatjob. it’s going to cost us, we are going to paint$720 to produce the job instead of $652 because there is always a little bit of wiggle roomthere, so that’s how we come up with our
pricing for about fifty percent mark-up. sowe actually mark it up by two hundred and fifty percent, we just don’t double it,we double plus sum and then we take a discount off because there are some other miscellaneousaccounts we account for next. for all estimating purposes you need figure out the number ofhours, the number of gallon of paint, come up with your total cost and then basicallydouble it and that’s going to be a good effect of pricing strategy. so in the next videos in exterior bidding,and how to bid interior, we are going to talk specifically about what those standards are,so you can accurately come up with the hours and the number of gallons that you are goingto need to coat a job properly. so look out
for those in the next videos, if you haven’talready subscribe to my youtube channel, go ahead and hit that subscribe button down belowthis video, it’s that little red button or you can hit subscribe here in the corner.if you like this video, give me a thumbs up and i would love to hear from you in the comments.so i’m out, thanks!
