I don’t know about you, but I always seem to be working on the weekend. I have spoken to other decorators and its not just me, a lot of you guys do it. We always seem to be working and never seem to get chance to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have time off for ourselves and spend some time with our families.
Why is this?
Well I think there are a few reasons. First of all, we want to “make hay while the sun shines” and while we are busy, we want to bring in the cash for maybe leaner times ahead, you never know when your self-employed.
We don’t want to let down our regular customers who just want their lounge decorating ready for Christmas, or Easter or Summer.
We want to earn that little bit more so that we can take a nice holiday abroad or buy a new van. One of the ways we look at earning more money is to sell our precious weekend off to our customers.
Does it have to be this way?
Is there a way to earn more money in less time? Is there a way to produce more work in fewer days? If there was then you could reclaim your weekend without letting any customers down and you could also earn more money while you are at it. It is actually possible to work 5 days instead of 7, turn out more decorating than you would have done in 7 days and earn double what you would have earned in 7 days.
Finally, you can get all your weekends back. Forever.
Does this sound good? Too good to be true maybe.
Spraying is faster
Well one of the things that you will get once you have done a course with us is the knowledge to do just that.
Spraying is known to be faster than traditional methods and, in some cases, can be up to 4 times faster. Less on some jobs more on others. How do I know this? Well I have been on the journey myself and I have found this to be the case. I like to time all the tasks that I do as a decorator and I like to experiment with different ways of doing things to see which is the fastest.
I have learned that its not just as simple as buying a sprayer, there is more to it than that, it is a change of mindset, and its one of the things that we teach at the Academy. Let me give you an example from the real world that shows how much more productive you can be.
I have been lucky enough to work on student apartments over the last five years. We have sprayed most of them and we have done quite a few over that period. I work for a company and the boss makes the decisions as to what is sprayed and what is brushed and rolled. One of the things that he has decided is quicker to roll are the ensuite bathrooms.
Masking the bathroom
These are small and have lots of masking in them, the showers, the tiles, the sink etc. We didn’t do any time analysis, he just “knew” that rolling was quicker. Over the years we have rolled hundreds of these ensuite bathrooms, so we know how long it takes. The walls are magnolia and the ceilings are white and they are being redone so that they are all white, ceilings and walls. Most of them are done in acrylic eggshell but some in durable matt.
Regardless of the paint they take 3 coats by brush and roller. Each coat takes 20 minutes to cut in and roll.
A couple of years ago, the Foreman on my job decided that it would be an idea to try and spray the ensuite and I agreed to give it a go.
I have a chap who masks for me so I had a chat with him and told him to do the following;-
Don’t rush, work at your normal pace.
Time yourself doing a whole floor (14 bathrooms) not a single room. Look at your watch, note the time and then mask a floor, look at your watch again, note the time. He did this and when we divided the time by the 14 rooms, we had a time to mask a bathroom.
6 minutes.
I was surprised it was that quick but obviously that was good news. Now came the time to spray. It took me 1 minute per coat and it only needed 2 coats to cover, so once we had demasked it took 10 minutes a bathroom.
10 minutes!
Think about that for a minute – 6 times faster
Don’t forget it was taking an hour by brush and roller, so this was 6 times faster. This was in a room that was not ideal to spray and had a lot of masking. Even I was surprised I can tell you.
If you think about that for a minute, imagine if you did all your work 6 times faster, you could complete in a day what you would normally take 6 days to do. It takes a bit of getting your head around at first.
But let us just assume that spraying if done correctly is only 2 times faster. That means what you currently do in 7 days you can complete in 3.5 days. That’s your weekend returned to you plus an extra day for extra work if you want it.
If you want to find out more then check out my book on Amazon. Just search “Fast and Flawless” and have a read all about it.
