The 9-step startup checklist from the team behind a $60M painting company
$250
to get legal, insured, and selling
$4,000 profit
in Eric’s first 30 days, starting with $200
3,000+ members
have started or grown a painting company with us
You can start a painting business for around $250... without draining your bank account, committing to franchise fees, or taking on part-time work to afford it.
Eric Barstow started his first painting company with $200, then made $4,000 in profit during his first 30 days. Since then, he’s used the exact same core framework to build a $60 million painting portfolio.
The nine steps below come straight from the checklist he used to get legal, start selling, and win his first painting jobs without burning money on overhead he didn't need.
This isn't a promise that running a business is easy. Hard work is non-negotiable. But sacrificing your life, freedom, and family security isn't. With a simple, proven plan, you can start lean, build the right systems early, and create a company that gives you real control over your time and income.
Starting a painting business isn't sexy. It is, however, one of the most low-cost, high-margin business opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Homes and commercial buildings will always need to be painted, and that work happens in the real world. You aren't inventing a complex new product or trying to convince people that painting matters. You’re simply finding property owners with an existing problem and building a business that solves it professionally.
You also don’t need a storefront, warehouse, fleet of trucks, or expensive payroll to win your first job. You can start part-time, keep your overhead near zero, and invest back into the company only after it starts generating cash flow.
Better yet, the industry has a massive structural flaw: a surprising number of contractors still lose jobs simply because they don't return calls, show up late, send sloppy estimates, or fail to follow through. You don’t need to be the cheapest painter in town to win. You just need to communicate well, price for real profit, care about the customer, and consistently do what you said you would do.
Most people get stuck before they even start because of the same three misconceptions:
You don’t need 10 years on a ladder to own a painting business. Start with simple residential repaints, learn how to run an estimate and recommend the right prep, then hire experienced painters or subcontractors to handle production.
You don’t need a massive ad spend. Start with your immediate network, local Facebook groups, Nextdoor, realtors, door-knocking, and neighborhood flyers. The immediate goal is simple: start conversations and book estimates.
You don't have to quit your day job on Monday. A painting company can operate part-time with low risk, giving you space to prove the model and stack cash before taking the full-time leap.
Prefer to watch first? This is one of our most-watched videos of all time, where our founder—Eric Barstow—walks through how to start a painting company in nine steps.
We unpack all of these steps with a lot more helpful info and tips in our official playbook.
Starting a painting business does not need to be expensive. Below is what you can expect to spend before you’re making money. Once the first jobs are running, even a small house painting business covers its own expenses, so these are only the costs to get to that first job.
Minimum
$250
Business registration, insurance, and your marketing and sales materials. Every state charges a small fee to register your business, usually an LLC, between $0 and $150. A $1,000,000 general liability policy should run under $150 a month, and workers’ compensation can often be set up at $0 until your end-of-year audit. Flyers, estimate forms, contracts, and a client manual print for $100 to $500.
Recommended
$850 – $2,350
Business registration ($50), insurance ($150), marketing and sales materials ($150), and business training ($500). Add an optional $1,500 in marketing and advertising and you’re at the top of the range.
Maximum
$15,000
It’s everything above plus $5,000 on equipment you do not need. Equipment only matters if you hire employees, and starting with employees makes everything harder. Subcontractors bring their own ladders, sprayers, and trucks.
About the license: most states don’t require a painting contractor license. If yours does, it’s under $1,500, and your first deposit can pay for it.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re opening a painting business: most of the ones that fail don’t fail because the owner couldn’t paint or couldn’t sell. They fail because there was never a plan, and nobody hands you one. You register the business, land a few jobs, and end up wherever you end up.
A painting business plan doesn’t need to be 40 pages. It needs to answer one question: what do I have to do this week to hit my goal? Every good one includes:
A real goal with a number on it.
Pay off $40,000 of debt. Take a $10,000 trip. Put a dollar figure on it.
The revenue that goal requires.
Divide your profit target by your margin. $50,000 in profit at a 33% margin means about $150,000 in revenue.
Jobs, estimates, and leads, in that order.
At a $3,000 average job size, that’s 50 jobs. At a 25% close rate, 200 estimates. With 70% of leads turning into estimates, about 285 leads.
Weekly targets.
Over 40 weeks, that’s about 7 leads, 5 estimates, 1.25 jobs, and $3,750 in revenue a week.
The actions that produce each number.
Where the leads come from, how fast you call them, how many jobs you’re bidding, and the sales process that closes them.
A pricing floor.
Subcontractor cost around 50%, marketing 5% to 10%, miscellaneous 5%, and a 30% to 40% margin on every job. Never estimate below 30%.
That’s the exact framework our painting companies run on today, doing $60M a year. It’s also the first thing we build with every new member, because “we’ll see how it goes” is how people end up out of business. Want help building yours? That’s what a strategy call is for.
This is the fear I hear most often: “I can handle the paperwork. I just have no idea how I’d get customers.” It’s also the part almost nobody explains, so here’s exactly what we tell every new owner.
READ CASE STUDY
Fast. That’s one of the best parts of this business. But it depends on how you start.
Start completely on your own and it’s hard to say. Best case, profit in the first month. Worst case, you run out of money before you break even. I hear from people every week who dug the hole before they made a dollar: $5,000 of equipment, employees they had to keep busy, prices copied from a competitor. Fixable, but a hard way to begin.
Follow the plan and turning a profit in your first 30 days is a realistic target. It’s a target, not a promise. Your market, your decisions, and your effort set the timeline. But here’s what it looks like when it works:
About the license: most states don’t require a painting contractor license. If yours does, it’s under $1,500, and your first deposit can pay for it.
You’ve got the nine steps. You know it costs about $250. The only part nobody can do for you is start.
So here’s what I’d do today if I were starting my own painting business again. Pick your name. Register your LLC with the Secretary of State and keep the articles of organization; the bank will ask for them. Then book a free 15-minute strategy call with our team. No pressure, no obligation, no sales pitch. We’ll look at where you are, map your first 90 days, and give you a straight answer on whether our program is a fit. Either way, you leave with a plan.
Hunter Miller started with $1 in his bank account and a maxed-out credit card. Today his company nets $1.2M a year and he runs it in 25 hours a week.
Yes. Since 2013, we've coached over 3,000 contractors. Unlike traditional business coaches who teach abstract theory, our operational blueprints come directly from our own active parent portfolio, National Painting Group, which generates over $60M+ in revenue annually. We don't just coach seven-figure scaling; we live it every day.
Mastery is an investment in building an asset, not an ongoing business expense. Month one is built to completely pay for the program with a single, high-leverage operational win. From there, the target is helping you unlock $600k or more in annual profit. When you look at the compound growth of your margins and equity, the math isn't close.
If you are working 50+ hours a week, it's a symptom of a systems problem, not a time problem. We tackle this immediately by putting you through our proprietary Master Your Time™ framework in the first 30 days. Because your time is the real constraint to scaling, we focus on high-leverage delegation and scheduling fixes first. Most members are shocked by how much lighter month one already feels.
Accelerator is designed to get you to a highly profitable baseline and completely off the brush. Mastery is the next tier of business evolution. It is built for established owners who are ready to build a bulletproof management team, protect high net margins, and scale past $3M so the company can structurally run without you.
Finding reliable people is the biggest bottleneck to hitting $1M or $3M. Mastery hands you our exact, proprietary recruitment playbooks. You get our real-world hiring ad templates, interview scripts, onboarding schedules, and compensation structures for Office Managers, Sales Reps, and Project Managers—allowing you to build an autonomous team you can actually trust.
Once you cross $3M, you have built a true enterprise that no longer relies on your daily labor to thrive. For elite members who reach this level and want to explore a corporate transition, that is exactly when a formal partnership or an institutional exit with National Painting Group network can be put on the table.
No pressure, no obligation, no sales pitch. Walk away with a clear plan of action for your business.
“What an amazing coaching group! I never thought my business would’ve succeeded so much in just six months.”
