After proposing the interior and exterior painting of their new construction dream home, I received the following email from a customer:
Keith, thank you for your detailed estimate and time invested in our conversation. I apologize but your estimate will simply not fit within our budget. I have no doubt that your work is of the highest quality, and you are committed to excellence. The bottom line is we have to be able to work within the budget. I’m very grateful for you and hopeful that someday down the road, we could do business together.
The same is true for the exterior – while I truly wish it were possible it is simply outside the budget. With greater financial resources, there’d be no doubt I’d hire you, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. I’m very grateful to have met you and will still refer you to others looking for an exceptional painting service. Grateful, Scott M.
The following was my email response to him:
I understand budget constraints, and I appreciate your honest sharing and your very generous and kind words about the quality of work you believe my company would do for you, given the chance. I want to share the following for your consideration.
After all the time, money, and heart you and Lea have put into designing and building your new home, the final pieces of electrical and plumbing fixtures, hardware, floors, and painting are the only things you are going to look at and admire for the rest of your years in your home. Or, those will be the same things you regret not spending more on since those are the finishing touches that make your home beautiful and entirely yours. You are not going to see the framing, plumbing, electrical, or any of the other hidden and expensive elements of construction, but you will look at the quality of the painting every day, admiring the way it enhances the beauty and uniqueness of your home, or noticing all the imperfections created by lesser quality laborers.
Two years ago, Matthew and Melissa designed and built their dream home on the Greenbrier Golf Course off Winchester Rd. Their General Contractor brought in his own painters to paint. They did a terrible job, according to Matthew and Melissa. Three times, they had those painters back to fix what they had done, but they just made it worse each time. Matthew fired those painters and then reached out to me. He hired my company to come in and repaint their entire house. $67,000 later, we had fixed and repainted everything to their great satisfaction. That significant cost was on top of what they had already paid to paint their dream home the first time. It should not have cost that much, but it was much more complex and labor-intensive to fix and repaint it all than to have done it right for them the first time.
I have another customer in Nicholasville who recently purchased a million-dollar home on Burr Oak Dr. He hired CertaPro to come in and paint the entire house. After paying them $15,000, he fired them due to the unprofessional experience and appearance of everything they’d done. We repainted their home at a significant expense to fix what his other painters did not do correctly.
Lastly, I have returning customers in Mike and Mary Lou Anderson in the Tuscany subdivision of Hamburg. They asked me to propose repainting their entire interior this past January. I was surprised when they went with another contractor, given they were returning customers of mine and they already knew the quality of our work and our prices. Then Mike sent me this email:
Scott, although this email may conjure feelings of a low-class attempt to scare you, I really don’t intend that. I hope you and Lea can think better of me and that you will receive this email the way your text to me anticipated: written with care and wisdom. You have undoubtedly learned over the years that wisdom comes only after painful or disappointing experiences evaluated with an open heart and mind. I have visited many more disappointed customers in my years as a professional painting contractor than the three I’ve noted above.
My sincere hope is not to add your names to that unfortunate list.
None of this may be able to change the financial budget you have already set aside for the painting of your new home. I hope you and Lea will receive the care and wisdom with which I long considered and then composed this email to you both.
I sincerely hope everything works out great for you and that you are both very happy with the finished look and feel of your new home, especially the finish painting.
I am available to discuss any of this or anything else with you and serve you both should you reconsider either of my proposals.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if you think Scott and Lea found the money needed to hire my company to provide the excellent work and beauty they desired.
Please give us a call at 859-321-7344 to provide you with a free estimate for you next painting project.
