Case Study: How to Capture More Market Share
This article is a case study from my first client Steamboat Painting Company who started working with me in January 2025.
Introduction
What the hell is a TAM? TAM is your Total Addressable Market. Many businesses make the assumption that ‘everyone’ is their market or that because they are good at their craft, and that they offer great service, that they will automatically capture the majority market share for their services.
Nope, unless you are truly offering an innovative new service that will revolutionize your industry, you’re not going to be in a league of your own without competition.
As a marketer, my job is more than design and catchy messaging. Successful marketing requires a partner that understands their client’s business and offers solutions to capture greater market share.
This article discusses how we came to the conclusion that my client’s TAM was too small, and describes how we developed strategies to capture larger market shares with lower margins, faster pay rates, and faster job turnaround times.
How we Determined my Client’s TAM
Steamboat Painting Company came to me to build their first website, establish an online presence and gain leads on a more consistent basis. His market is dominated by long time professionals with a strong word of mouth or as I call ‘ski town local prestige’. The challenge in his market is that margins are low, materials and labor are expensive, and the most profitable jobs - exterior repaints have an extremely short opportunity window (4 months at best). The good news is that there is a massive building boom in the area and because of the short exterior painting window, there is a high demand for exterior painting.
The problem is what do you do as a business for the other 8 months of the year?
At first, my customer was focused on filling big jobs. Think full interior repaints and full exterior repaints. This was too narrow and not a large enough TAM for a few reasons:
Steamboat Springs has at least 30 large painting contractors for a town of 12,000. I know this because I managed the Sherwin Williams there and our top 30 accounts spent anywhere from $250,000 per year on paint/materials to $40,000 per year on paint and materials. My customer is in the top 50 as far as paint/materials purchased in 2024.
Competition is very high and with only 12,000 total people, let’s say half of them are households, and let's say half (it’s probably a lot more) own their homes. Now we are down to 3,000 and of those, let’s just say one quarter live in HOA’s/associations that pay a crew to repaint every couple years. As a paint store manager, that was very common as a large portion of the population lives in condos. Now, we are maybe left with 1,000 to 1,500 homes to paint.
AND not all of them need to be painted this year. Some might be stone or brick, which means they will never need a paint job, or they are stucco which has a longer time between repaints than other surface types.
As outlined here, our TAM shrunk considerably, but it actually gets worse as I didn’t even add the economic considerations of our TAM. In Steamboat, a condo built in the 1980’s will run you close to $600k. $1 million is chump change there, believe it or not, that will buy you a track home. Many homeowners are working multiple jobs just to get by.
This means there’s not a ton of money left over after living costs to spend on cosmetic home projects. Average exterior paint jobs run from 20k to 50k to close to 100k (maybe even more for some of these homes).
There are also painting companies outside the community from Denver and Grand Junction that have moved into the space. Homeowners are getting more DIY savvy and willing to save costs by doing work themselves.
Furthermore, payment for contractors is brutal. They often get paid in phases meaning that it might be a month out or more before they are paid. That makes constant lead generation an absolute necessity.
Big takeaway: just going for the high money jobs is not sustainable.
What did we Do? How did we Pivot our Strategy?
We pivoted by focusing on small jobs/projects with faster turnaround times, leading to faster payment and many other benefits that we will explore in further detail.
The big jobs are competitive, and hard to come by. Since they are large in scope and expensive, there are often many, many touch points between the painter and the client before they convert and book the service. Furthermore, large jobs aren’t without their headaches. You are managing extremely high expectations, you have multiple bosses i.e. interior designers, builders, the clients, etc. Work can also be held up for things out of your control. For example, painting is one of the last work items on a jobsite. If an electrician messes up, the drywallers are slow, etc. you are stuck waiting to work, and waiting to be paid.
Large jobs can offer huge returns, but there are many things that can go wrong on a project that slow your job turnaround time and ultimately slow down receiving payment.
Small jobs make sense:
-quick turnaround times
-low labor costs
-Less external factors involved
-quick payments
-lower material costs
-opportunities for reviews
-opportunities for referrals
* more completed work builds credibility and trust. As demonstrated below this connected us with a major builder in town!
Summary:
Addressing your TAM is crucial to successful marketing. As we learned, exclusively chasing big money jobs is not the most sustainable or profitable strategy. By focusing on small jobs to carry the business through the down season, we are able to build our reputation and capitalize on better margins. Furthermore, this work portfolio has led to a partnership with my client with a large builder of luxury homes https://gbdesignbuild.com/. With this partnership, my client has inroads to larger ‘big money projects’.
If you have a small TAM in a competitive market, focus on small jobs to gain access to the big money jobs. Instead of trying to sprint up the mountain, start scaling from the ground up. That way you gain momentum with every job completed and your quality gets seen and your reputation gets noticed. If you only try to take on the biggest projects, you’ll lose out to larger companies, and the less you work you complete, the less credible you are to your community, meaning your opportunities of landing big money jobs diminishes over time. Don’t do that, pivot to small jobs that keep you working and that get you noticed!
