Here are six surefire ways to make 2-3 times as much per hour in the painting and decorating business. Each of these techniques could make you $30-$70 per hour or more.
1. Spray Painting – if you do a lot of decks, exterior painting, commercial jobs and/or would like to get into new construction painting and want to turn your jobs faster to make more per hour, consider renting or buying an airless paint sprayer.
Because these sprayers are airless you get very little over-spray to worry about. Even painting indoors is safer because with an airless sprayer you don’t get a room full of spray fumes.
If you get jobs that work well using a spray system, you can bid the job as you normally would but get it done in “days” not weeks or “hours” not days, etc.
You cannot spray in people’s homes of course. But if you have a large commercial re-paint with lots of interior wall space you could use a power roller attachment for faster results. For spray painting exterior you will have to mask off surfaces here and there and cover a few shrubs but once that’s done you can go with the flow.
2. Get Help – hiring employees and sub-contractors can be profitable. It’s called “leveraging your time” because you use the power of others to multiply your hours of service worked.
There are a lot of good quality painters out there that just want a job. While you do the estimates and line up the work they (your employees or subs) do the painting and you make part of the profit per painter.
Each painter could be making you an extra $10 per hour or more. Ten painters times $10 equals a $100 per hour. That could work out to an extra $700 or $800 per day just for you. Simply multiply that for each painter you employ and you will be highly motivated to keep doing estimates.
3. Drywall Repair – you can make great money repairing damaged drywall and plaster caused from leaks, vandalism, house settling, etc. There is even texture jobs for ceilings and walls to get.
Everyone “thinks” they know how to paint right? But when it comes to doing simple drywall or plaster repairs they go running home to mommy every time. And even if they do attempt to do it themselves it never works out for them because they don’t know the simple basics that make drywall repair look good.
It has always been easy for me to get $30 – $70 per hour doing drywall and plaster repairs. I may spend a couple hours one day tearing out and patching in new material and another 3 or 4 hours the next day finishing the job. I can walk away with $350 for a total of seven hours of work and I spent very little in materials cost.
So it is always pure profit minus maybe $15 or $20 for materials. Drywall and plaster repair is an easy business once you know a few tricks-of-the trade.
4. Faux Painting – there are 4 basic faux painting designs or finishes that are popular and that you can master fairly quickly and make great money for starters. And you will soon be creating new and exciting patterns as well. Get good at this trade and make some great money because people don’t know how to do it and the ones who do many times make it a disaster.
You can get faux painting jobs doing bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, dinning and living rooms, accent walls, etc. There are customers in all price ranges. Even multi-million dollar homes have beautiful faux painting done in them.
5. Star Mural Painting – here is a type of painting that will make you an “illusionist”. As you get good at creating the night sky or outer space themes on ceilings and walls you will be making it look like the room has literally disappeared before their eyes and they are looking up into the night sky. You will soon be well known and sought after for your mysterious painting art.
It is truly a beautiful type of painting when you actually see one of these for the first time. Colors come alive in the dark. You can do bedrooms, game rooms, hotels, motels and basically everything that has a ceiling or walls.
6. One more way to make great money in the painting business is regular conventional mural painting. People have large walls done, ceilings done, large wall size canvasses, etc,
There are even sign painters that do sides of buildings and muralists do similar work. This type of painting can be easy because you “graph” out the wall after first planning the artwork out on graph paper. Again, everyone “thinks” they know how to paint but when you master any one or all of these above niche painting techniques the crowd goes running home to mommy!