Tom Heiler set a $10 million goal for Heiler Painting and reached it. Here is how he structured the company, where he invested, and what he says breaks on the way.
Plenty of residential painting companies reach two, three, even five million. Far fewer reach ten. Tom Heiler of Heiler Painting in the Philadelphia suburbs did, and he says it took eight years to get to three million and about five more to get to ten.
His story starts with door-knocking: when his father, a painter, was laid off, Tom sold jobs on one street and used the deposits to fund the company. In his second year he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He brought on a partner to help him through a two-year fight, and he says the business did even better while he was mostly away. That was when he learned the company could grow without him in the day-to-day.
At three million, Tom says, everyone was trying to do everything. So he and his partner split the company cleanly: Tom took sales and marketing, his partner took operations and finance, and they stopped crossing paths. He compares it to two parents with a clear division of labor.
From there they built one department every year or two — operations first, then sales, then marketing — getting the people and the process right in each before moving to the next. Today a marketing manager runs a team of coordinators and business development, operations has a leader, and Tom has five salespeople who he says each sell over two million. The one core function he says is still missing is the one he calls most important to growth: recruiting.
Tom calls four to five million almost a Goldilocks stage: a couple of project managers, healthy profit, and an owner still in parts of the day-to-day. Getting to ten meant adding people he didn’t need at five — a head of operations, an integrator managing the day-to-day, a marketing manager, a CFO — along with a bigger marketing budget.
“[We] were willing to bite the bullet on profit because we were investing it back into the business.”
To keep his head clear, he looks at his P&L two ways: what the company truly earns, and how much it is investing in growth.
Where did the confidence to write those checks come from? Tom says it came from watching bigger companies do it. When Heiler was around $4.8 million, he visited Paris Painting, then about twice his size, and asked their leaders what they were doing. His reaction was that his company could do the same. He still calls larger operators to ask what worked.
Tom is direct that some of his biggest mistakes were hires made before the company needed them.
“We brought on an operations manager when we didn’t need an operations manager. What we needed was a project manager.”
He wanted out of operations, so he hired a manager. But someone hired into a manager role didn’t want to be in the field doing the gritty work, and the gritty work was what he needed to hand off. He points to the “replacement ladder” idea in Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time: bring someone in to take the basic work you don’t want, and once they have learned it, let them move up to the next level.
That is why he has had the most success promoting from within, even choosing people with less experience who have proven themselves at the company over outside candidates with more.
“I would much rather work with someone that’s ride or die than someone that has a ton of experience.”
One hire he says was worth making before the company technically needed it: someone to execute marketing. He calls it one of the key hires for getting past five million. Owners tend to have the ideas but not the time to execute them.
Tom’s approach to sales starts before the appointment. Leads are filtered so salespeople don’t waste their time, and a team sets expectations with the homeowner ahead of time, so the rep arrives, as he puts it, across the 50-yard line.
Then the process stays simple. Every estimate has to cover what he calls the three Ps: preparation expectations, the products the crew will use, and the company’s seven-step process. Beyond that, the rep has to make a play. Every week there is a 30-minute sales practice where the team role-plays situations — handling “let me think about it,” the other-estimates objection, setting the tone as soon as they walk in — and trades word tracks.
He also stopped blaming himself for every underperformer. With a proven process and other reps hitting the number, he gives a new salesperson about a year — the first 90 days to learn, the second to apply it, the third quarter to show they can do the job — and parts ways with those who can’t. He went through five estimators before reaching the current team, who have all been there three years or more.
Asked what breaks on the way to ten million, Tom named technology first: data spread across systems and the human errors that follow. Then forecasting. With enough history, he can predict where a quarter will finish from the past five quarters and make decisions now about trends more than a year out. And overhead: with about $300,000 in expenses going out every month no matter what, one odd month throws everything off.
“What breaks is the short-term thinking and you really have to focus and get out of the day-to-day certain times and look at the forecast.”
Tom credits EOS and the book Traction as the biggest reason for the company’s growth. The method he describes: picture where you want to be in three years, then ask what this year has to look like to stay on pace, then the next 90 days, then this week. His goal was to reach ten million by 2028; he says they got there two to three years early.
Growth also changed how he leads. A small company is a speedboat; a bigger one is a ship. His team told him his frequent changes of direction were overwhelming them, and a big change now takes a month or two to work its way down. So his ideas go through his partner, the company’s integrator, who decides how they get executed — and sometimes whether. That is a large part of how the company runs without Tom in the day-to-day.
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