Decorating is one of those trades where the work genuinely sells itself — if people can actually see it. A wall of crisp before-and-afters and a handful of reviews saying you were tidy and on time will do more than any amount of clever marketing. The whole game is getting that proof in front of people while they’re deciding, and making it dead easy to ask you round. Here’s how that works, in plain English, in the order I’d tackle it.
Photograph everything — it’s your whole shop window
If you do one thing, do this. Every job, take the “before” before you lift a brush — the tired, peeling, dated version — and the “after” once you’ve cleared up and it’s spotless. Same angle, decent light, thirty seconds each. That pair of photos is the single most persuasive thing you own, because it shows the transformation you’re actually selling in a way words never can. Build a library of them over a few months, across different jobs — a hallway, an exterior, a feature wall, a full house — and you’ve got a portfolio that sells for you around the clock. Most decorators have hundreds of finished jobs behind them and almost nothing to show for it. Don’t be that decorator.
Be the tidy one — and get people to say so
Ask any homeowner what they’re nervous about with a decorator and it’s rarely the colour. It’s mess, dust, disruption, and someone stretching a three-day job into a fortnight. They’re letting you into their home. So the decorators who win are the ones known for being clean, careful and reliable — and the way you prove that before you’ve even met is reviews that say it in the customer’s own words. When a job’s done and they’re pleased, ask for a review, and there’s no harm in nudging what they mention — “glad it stayed tidy?”, “sorry about the early starts” — so the words “tidy”, “on time” and “lovely finish” end up in writing. Those reviews reassure the next customer and quietly push you up the local search results at the same time. Free, and about the best-value thing you can do.
Chase the clients who need you again and again
One-off rooms are grand, but you’re forever hunting the next one. The steadier living is in the people who redecorate on repeat: landlords turning flats around between tenants, letting and estate agents, property managers, builders who need a dependable finisher, the odd shop or office. Land one good relationship there and it can be worth a dozen domestic jobs, because they keep coming back and they don’t haggle over every pound. It’s worth a bit of deliberate effort — introducing yourself, doing one job so well they never bother looking elsewhere, being the reliable name already in their phone. This is the work that smooths out the quiet months between the kitchens and the hallways.
Turn up when they go looking
A redecorate is a planned job — someone glares at a tired room for weeks, then one day decides it’s happening and searches. “Painter and decorator [town]”, “exterior painting near me”, “commercial decorators”. If you’re showing up on that map and in those results, with your photos and reviews behind you, you get onto the shortlist of two or three they ask to quote. If you’re not, you never knew the job existed. Getting found for the specific searches — the exterior work, the commercial jobs, the areas you actually cover — is a slow build over months rather than an overnight switch, but it widens the whole stream of enquiries for good. That findability is the bit I handle for decorators — here’s how I get you found.
Give them a proper place to land
Your Google listing and your photos will pull people in, but they need somewhere to land that closes it — and a Facebook page with a few pictures isn’t quite that. A simple, phone-first website that shows your galleries big, spells out the interior, exterior and commercial work you do, carries your reviews, and makes asking for a quote a single easy step will turn a browser into an actual enquiry. It’s also the one corner of the internet that’s entirely yours, that looks like you and not a template everyone else is using. That’s the part I build — here’s what it looks like for decorators.
Quote fast, and look sharp doing it
Here’s where a lot of good decorators quietly lose work: they’re slow to get back. Someone asks three decorators to quote, two reply the same day with a tidy price and a friendly note, one texts back four days later. Guess who’s already been booked. You don’t have to be glued to your phone — you just need a quick, professional way to respond, even if it’s only “thanks, I can pop round Thursday to take a look”. Fast and polite beats slow and cheap more often than you’d think, especially with the sort of customer who cares about a proper finish in the first place.
None of this is complicated, but it all wants doing properly and keeping up while you’re flat out on a job. Sort the photos, make reviews a habit, look after the repeat clients, and give people an easy way to find you and ask — and you’ll spend a lot less time wondering where the next job’s coming from. If you’d sooner be on the tools than wrestling with any of it, that’s exactly what I do for painters and decorators — tell me your patch and the work you want more of, and I’ll point you at the quick wins.