Can You Color In The Lines? Here’s How to Make $61.6K A Month 🪣

Can You Color In The Lines? Here’s How to Make $61.6K A Month 🪣

Hey, it’s Alex.

You remember when you were a kid and the teacher gave you a coloring book.

And you NEEDED to draw perfectly inside the lines or else the picture would not turn out perfect.

I was always pretty fire at that.

That’s why this business model got my attention this week, this husband and wife started a $739k-year parking lot striping business.

$739,000 a year……… Drawing straight lines……….

Here’s what we are going over today:

• 🧍‍♂️ How Luke (The Founder) Started The Company

• 📈 His Simple Marketing Strategies

• 🪣 Services They Offer

• 🫵 How You Can You Do Something Similar?

Read Time: 4 minutes 47 seconds

Meet Luke:

At the young age of 19,

Luke started working for a seal coating company where he began learning about parking lot maintenance. (A seal coat provides an extra layer or membrane on top of your asphalt driveway.)

However, he never really got interested in the seal coating side of things, what he actually was interested in was the final step, striping the lines.

He thought painting parking lot lines could be a good business.

It made sense, parking lot stripes are an essential feature that every parking lot needs.

So he went for it. He bought the gear from his boss after two weeks and started his own line-painting business.

Heather, also 19, paused her teaching plans to help Luke run the money side. They built 1-800-STRIPER together, working as a team.

Gonna tear up writing this.

His Simple Marketing Strategies:

When Luke started this business, computers and websites weren’t really a thing. So his marketing strategy was actually pretty old-fashioned.

He would stop at every paving/seal coating job in the area, passing out business cards to anyone who needed to make their parking lot pop with a fresh coat of paint.

They also received a lot of business from cold calls and door-to-door sales and would take practically any and every job that came their way.

Thanks to this, they developed strong relationships with many property managers in the area who would refer us to their colleagues.

And it wasn’t long before they became known as the local parking lot stripers you could count on.

Another thing they did which I absolutely love is that they focused on branding.

Whether it was:

• Sprucing up the truck with their logo

• Fine-tuning their slogan

• Creating business cards

• Developing their website

They wanted to paint our name everywhere so that people would know who to call if they needed pavement markings.

Services They Offer:

Feel free to skip this section if you want, but if you are genuinely considering trying this business model for yourself..

Here are all the services they offer:

“

Restripe - This type of line striping simply repaints over the existing lines and pavement on a parking lot.

Relayout - Lines often peak through under newly sealed parking lots, which is why we call this service a “relayout” since it isn’t as simple as a restripe, but doesn’t involve laying out a parking lot from scratch. This service can also be applied to parking lots with significantly faded lines that are difficult to see.

Layout and Paint - When a parking lot has been newly paved, we consider this a “layout and paint” job, which means we make a blueprint of the parking lot in chalk before painting fresh new lines.

Sports Courts - We layout and paint as well as restripe all kinds of sports courts from tennis courts, basketball courts, and more both in the community and at residential properties.

Indoor Layouts - All year round, we stripe indoor facilities that need lines to help organize the flow of operations. This could be a large warehouse or storefront.

“

So How Can You Do Something Similar?

According to Luke, there were a couple of factors that contributed most to his success.

Having worked at a seal coating company, Luke already had a decent flow of customers coming in.

So in my mind, the first step would be making connections with seal coating companies who could possibly get you jobs.

However, just because they were already getting business from the seal coating companies, this didn’t stop them from passing out their business cards every chance they got.

Something else he said was that the majority of their exposure came from their company truck, which had our logo and slogan on it.

They received many calls from people around town who saw them driving by and were reminded to restripe their parking lots.

Something else I wanted to mention was that since the time he started this business, there are plenty of other ways of marketing that didn’t exist back then.

For free exposure, I would go on:

• Facebook Groups

• Facebook Marketplace

• Craigslist Ads.

Once you have a little bit of money you can start diving into:

• Facebook Ads

• Google Ads

• Paid Craigslist Ads

At the end of the day, Service-based businesses are some of the simplest to start. However, they require a large amount of work to succeed.

And if you are willing to put in that work, I say go for it!