Every winter, painting company owners look for a quick fix for a slow schedule. In Episode 37, Haakon Hansen sat down with Nick Slavik, owner of Nick Slavik Painting & Restoration, and Nate Streeter of Aleph Ventures’ marketing team, for a Q&A on what actually works in the slow season. Their short answer: winter is mostly won before it starts.
Haakon compared the usual approach to a diet fad: a quick fix for an acute pain, with no picture of the whole. He also noted that this isn’t only a cold-climate problem. Every market has buying seasons. Nate added that people’s buying patterns follow the holidays more than the weather, so even warm-climate companies see a slowdown.
Both guests landed on the same word: momentum.
“Most of your success in quarter four is going to be about things you did in quarter three.”
Nick described how his thinking changed. He used to start in September to get leads for October and November. Each year the data pushed him to start earlier, until his whole year became what he calls a flywheel that never stops. He doesn’t switch channels for winter. He uses the same channels in different proportions, and he plans the winter months and the summer months as separate business units with their own budgets.
Nate said that in a Midwestern climate, if he could, he wouldn’t spend marketing money between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day at all, because the return isn’t the same. Print suffers most. People forget over the holidays, so a postcard sent in November loses the long tail of responses Aleph usually sees from its marketing. He said Aleph had no direct mail going out for any partner in November, a decision driven by the data.
Social media is different. Nate separates a needs-based business (peeling, cracking, fading) from a wants-based one (a homeowner who wants new-looking kitchen cabinets), and he says many painters don’t know which one they’re in. Social media is good at creating desire, so for partners where it works, much of that budget lands between November and February. Nick has seen the same thing. He builds and tests ads in late summer, then pushes spend in winter, when people are on their phones looking for inspiration rather than going through the mail.
Momentum also applies to people. Door-knocking and flyer teams are hard to build, so Aleph doesn’t lay them off for the winter. Nate said they’re willing to pay more for an appointment in November than in May to keep those teams working, though they’re probably not hiring in November.
“If you’re a painting company though and you need immediate results in the coming weeks, you’re thinking the wrong way.”
Short-term winter work comes from your current list: open estimates, past customers and lost bids. Nick’s team sorts reactivations into tiers. Past clients come first, then people who got an estimate but didn’t buy, then leads that never became an estimate. They call to thank people for their trust, ask about future projects and follow every call with an email. Nick said they were making 240 of those contacts a week.
Two points from Nate. First, don’t skip lost estimates. His data shows calling them is as profitable as calling anyone else on your list. Second, every touch has to add value. A call that only asks whether they have a painting project isn’t worth much. He also said homeowners rarely remember who painted their house, so a company that shows up and cares about their home can easily become their painter.
Aleph’s approach is to be local, present and add value, and Nate said he often has to convince partners, quarter after quarter, that they don’t need to market to dozens of zip codes. He said Paris Painting does about a million dollars a year in one small Minneapolis zip code. The plan for each neighborhood stacks touches: several flyer drops, direct mail and door knocking every home twice a year, with door knockers sent only where the team expects to win. Nick cut from 13 zip codes to five.
“I don’t think there has been one bigger change… to marketing that produced a bigger result than just lessening the amount of zip codes and taking the same budget just stacking that budget up.”
Nate added that when he put a local marketing specialist in charge of a partner’s flyer and door-knocking teams, more than those channels improved. Website visits, repeat and referral business, and digital results rose too, because neighborhood activity drives people to the website, where retargeting picks them up.
Nate frames the owner’s job in two parts:
“A broker goes out, gets the demand, and matches the demand with the labor.”
Haakon separated accountability from responsibility. An owner can hand off tasks, but not accountability for results. Nate said success with a marketing vendor depends mostly on the owner’s participation. If you spend a meaningful share of revenue on marketing, you should spend real time on it too, and know enough to tell whether a vendor is doing a good job. Something that worked last quarter can quietly stop working, and the owners who check in regularly are the ones who catch it.
For the 2026 plans, Nate described a target mix for partners aiming to grow: about 40% of appointments from repeat, referral, reactivation and salesperson-generated leads, about 40% from neighborhood marketing, and about 20% from digital, which he said is harder to control and scale. Haakon’s caveat: that mix is built for companies trying to become much larger businesses, and a wants-based company should plan differently from an exterior-heavy company in a cold climate.
When choosing where to expand, Nate warned against relying on purchased demographic data. Aleph’s best predictor has been its own job history. Nick added a check from his mentor: don’t become so formula-driven that you lose sight of how channels work together.
Want to see where your own company stands? Take the growth scorecard, or start a conversation with Aleph.
If you’ve built a great brand and a durable team, we should talk. No exit clock. No strip-and-flip. Just partners who yoke up and stay.
