If you are a decorator with your own business, you will think about how much money you are making from time to time, usually when you have completed a job and sent the invoice. For most decorators, the decorating tends to come first and the profit margins second. This is not how most businesses run; they put profit first and actual production second.
What does this mean?
This means most businesses will look at their profit margins and find ways to increase them. If that means moving into a new market, they will do so if the profit margins are there.
This approach begs the question: Are you truly maximising your earnings, or is there a smarter way to grow your business by focusing on specialisation?
Most decorators earn their income by painting walls and ceilings—whether it’s a lounge, hallway, or even a commercial space like a school or office. While this type of work is steady, it’s also highly competitive. In today’s market, anyone can attempt to paint; even Joe at the pub, who just got laid off, may try his hand at painting for some extra income. As competition increases, prices are driven down. For a self-employed decorator, making £175 per day is the average. Of course, this doesn’t account for overheads, meaning actual profits can be much lower.
Some decorators will offer paper hanging as a service as well as painting. These days, not many decorators are confident at wallpapering because there has been a 20-year period where people didn’t have wallpapering done; it fell out of fashion. These days, however, it is back with vengeance. People are prepared to pay £150 a roll for the actual wallpaper to have a feature wall in their lounge wallpapered.
If you can master wallpapering, you could charge between £25 and £40 per roll and hang up to 8 rolls in a day. That’s £320 a day, a significant boost compared to basic painting work. By positioning yourself as a specialist, you not only build expertise but also establish a reputation for which clients are willing to pay more.
This is why it is good to specialise in a more lucrative area. If you decided you only wanted to offer to wallpaper, then what would happen is that customers would see you as a “Paperhanger” and, therefore, expect to pay more. You would also be wallpapering all the time so that you would get really good at it, so good, in fact, that you would be difficult to compete against. Joe down the pub is no longer a threat.
Customers would come to you because you have built a reputation for being “the go-to” for hanging wallpaper. This does not mean you cannot take the odd painting job; you could, but what would happen is that you would make less from the painting, so you would naturally do less of it.
We share our building at the training academy in Preston with a decorator who prints murals. He has a massive and costly printer in his workshop. We have known Paul for a very long time. He is a good decorator who specialised in wallpapering many years ago. He then developed his “One Piece” murals so that he could print a mural of any image and any size.
He also installs them.
When writing “The Specialist Decorator“, I decided to include a chapter on installing murals. Before I did this, I had a chat with Paul to see how much he charged and how much he could install in a day. I wandered over to his office. Paul said he charged £15 per metre to install and could typically install twice the amount he could wallpaper. If you could hang 8 rolls per day, this would be 40m2 (8 rolls x 5m2 per roll). He could install 80m2 of mural in a day.
Of course, that would be a big mural job, and you might have to work at more than one job to get that meterage. However, if you were installing a mural in each hotel bedroom, getting the meterage in the day would be easier.
I went back to my office and did the maths. I was shocked at the number on the calculator, so I went back to check that I had heard correctly. Paul just smiled and nodded. It turns out that some of his customers think he is cheap, and other installers are charging £20 per metre! In the States and Australia, they charge £30 a metre!
Besides wallpapering and mural installations, other decorators have found their niche in areas like kitchen resprays. Respraying a kitchen can make old cabinetry look brand new at a fraction of the cost of a complete remodel, which makes it highly appealing to clients. For the decorator, turning around a kitchen respray in a week can bring in excellent profits.
People realise that a new kitchen can cost £15,000, but if they get their kitchen re-painted, it costs more like £2,000 but looks brand new again. This makes the cost of a kitchen respray look cheap to the customer. It also means that if you turn around a kitchen a week, you are earning a healthy profit for yourself.
Spraying technology itself is another highly specialised skill that yields faster job completion times and a superior finish, making it an ideal service to offer.
By honing a niche skill, you set yourself apart from the crowd and avoid the race to the bottom on pricing. Instead of competing with hundreds of general decorators, you become the go-to expert in your field. Your reputation grows, and so do your profits.
At PaintTech Training Academy, we’ve built our business on this very principle. We started by offering spraying courses years ago, and now we provide a range of short courses designed to help decorators develop new skills and enter more profitable markets. Whether it’s wallpapering, kitchen resprays, or spraying, our 2-3 day courses are designed to quickly get decorators up to speed. We also offer ongoing support, so you’re never alone as you grow your business.
We have done extensive research, spoken to many decorators nationwide and compiled a list of average day rates for different types of work. We stress average because some guys earn more and others earn less.
Have a look and see if anything takes your fancy.
As we have grown as an academy, we have developed new courses in conjunction with the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB). We now offer a range of short courses for decorators who want to branch out and specialise to earn more money.
We offer two or 3-day courses for all the above specialisms (in the table) so that you can come to us, do some training, and then offer the new service. We are very good at quickly getting decorators up to speed with their new skills and providing ongoing free support if needed.
If you want to specialise and increase your profits, it’s time to explore new opportunities. You can transform your business by focusing on high-demand services, developing a reputation for expertise, and commanding premium prices. And with the right training, you’ll be ready to start offering those services in no time.
Additionally, if you’re looking for long-term support and guidance, we have the “Decorators Growth Club Pro Membership” and a mentor program aimed at decorators, which is designed to help you not just learn new skills but also grow your business sustainably.
Specialising isn’t just a way to escape competition—it’s a proven path to profitability.
