How technology can drive growth in painting businesses
Polson Painting
residential painting | TAMPA, FL
Donald Polson started Polson Painting in 1995. An experienced painter himself, he has hand selected and brought on multiple talented crews, most of which have been with Polson for 10 plus years now. Polson takes pride in providing honest, reliable, residential and commercial painting services that stand head and shoulders above the rest. Their family owned business run by Donald and his wife, Erin, along with their daughter and son-in-law, has been rated A+ on Angie’s list every year since 2008 and is a BBB A+ rated company.
Knowify fav
Vin (Customer Success team member)
Priorities
- Efficient bid/invoice preparation
- Customizable documents
- Affordability
Top features
- Bidding
- Invoicing
- Job costing
Polson meets Knowify
Three years ago, Erin had just started working for her husband’s painting business, and was on the search for affordable software. Keeping with Polson’s values, Erin’s priority was to improve their customer service by creating a better experience for the customers. As an experienced operations manager (and a Six Sigma Black Belt!) joining a small painting company that was started 25 years ago, her first order of business was to get the company operating more efficiently. Somewhere along her search for a software that was effective, flexible and would fit in her limited budget, Erin found Knowify.
As leaders in customer service, quick and easy communication, as well as catering to the customer’s needs, is extremely important to Polson. Erin was extremely impressed with Knowify and was initially drawn in by the easy customization and management of documents. As a professional with a background in operations, she particularly appreciated Knowify’s ability to easily send a bid digitally with a click of a button and receive the customer’s comments and requests for revision within minutes.
While the efficiency and flexibility of the documents was saving Polson time and money just like she had hoped, what she didn’t expect to gain with using Knowify was the insight to the money the business was losing in other ways.
Buckets of wasted money
Erin was using Knowify to budget her jobs and was consistently finding that they were going over their set budget. For a small, family-owned company with a limited budget, jobs underperforming expectations can be a high risk issue. Luckily, Erin was able to use Knowify to determine that it was the materials costs that they were exceeding; she was even able to pinpoint how it was happening: “we actually identified that our crew in some cases were not being as efficient with paint… wasting it, spilling it, that sort of thing”.
Erin is grateful that she was able to identify the issue quickly with Knowify. “It’s helped us. We’ve increased our profit substantially, mainly due to material cost and things of that nature. I can look and see the analytics and see my actual profit percentage for a particular job. It’s helped us to decrease our materials cost because we have better control over loss prevention of the materials.”
It helped in the ways they expected, too
Erin attributes their 20-25% increase in clients per year to their switch to Knowify. “It’s absolutely because of Knowify. Mainly because we’ve been getting the quote out there.” She says she likes being able to see when the client has opened the quote, the ease that they can respond if they have a challenge or cannot understand something. “It comes immediately. I’ve got it on my phone, in my email so I can see it.” The documents that they are sending also are received very well by the clients, “They love the professionalism. It really differentiates us from the competition and we hear that feedback a lot.”
She also notes that she has seen benefits with the speediness of invoicing as well, “Payment has been huge – being able to get that invoice out quickly. We used to send them out by email and it was very difficult to keep up with.”
We feel very lucky that Erin found Knowify and selected us to manage her business. We are proud to be associated with such an incredible family run business and are eager to continue to help Polson Painting grow and save buckets of money!
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The road to success is clear: leverage technology to win more jobs, impress your customers, and keep costs under control. Are you ready?
Find out whether Knowify can meet your business needs and start your digital journey! Over a 1-hour consultation call, our team of experts will walk you through our platform and show those features most relevant to your workflow.