How to get the best of the biggest painting event of the year
By Brandon Pierpont
Every year at PCA EXPO, something incredible happens.
A contractor walks into a session or a conversation expecting to pick up a tip or two, and instead has a much bigger reaction:
Wait…you can actually do that?
Sometimes it’s about scale; sometimes it’s about margins. Sometimes it’s about systems, leadership structure, or how someone rebuilt their role as an owner. But the common thread is the same: a mental ceiling quietly cracks.
That moment matters more than most people realize.
One of the most powerful functions of PCA EXPO is not just teaching you how to do something. It’s showing you what’s even on the table. It exposes you to outcomes, models, and trajectories you may not have known were realistic for a company like yours, in a market like yours, with constraints like yours.
That’s the part that rarely gets talked about, but almost everyone who’s attended EXPO long enough has felt it.
At the same time, EXPO does something else: It brings clarity. It helps you realize that some things you’ve been obsessing over don’t actually matter as much as you thought, while other things deserve far more attention.
That’s why owners leave EXPO talking about different things. Some leave energized by what they now believe is possible. Others leave relieved because a decision finally feels obvious. The best outcomes usually involve a bit of both.
This guide is not about telling you what you should want from PCA EXPO. It’s about helping you recognize the kinds of leverage the event offers, so you can take advantage of them when they show up.
Because the biggest value often isn’t the thing you planned to learn, but rather the thing you didn’t know to look for.
Using the Schedule
Every breakout session block presents you with a handful of great options. In a single time slot, you might be choosing between a financial deep dive, a leadership-oriented workshop, and a highly tactical session on estimating, project management, or production systems. The value is not in finding the “best” session, but rather in making a deliberate choice and committing to it without second-guessing yourself for the rest of the hour.
A simple way to approach each time slot is to ask yourself: “Which of these sessions gives me the highest chance of learning something that actually changes how I operate?”
Sometimes that means choosing a topic that’s directly tied to a problem you’re actively dealing with, like pricing strategy, hiring, or production consistency. Other times it means choosing something adjacent, where a new perspective on leadership, structure, or systems might unlock a better approach altogether.
What usually doesn’t work is choosing based on convenience, room location, or fear of missing out.
It also helps to think in runs, not individual sessions. If you spend a morning immersed in growth topics, then you may get more value by shifting to execution, estimating, or leadership in the afternoon so ideas have something to connect to. Constantly stacking similar sessions often leads to diminishing returns.
Occasionally, the best decision is to skip a session block altogether. A focused conversation, a follow-up discussion, or even a short pause to connect dots can at times produce more clarity than forcing yourself into another room.
When you treat the schedule this way, you stop feeling behind or resenting overlap. You trust your choices and move on. That’s the result of using the schedule as a tool instead of a checklist.
“There’s something special when we all get together. We’re able to network, learn from each other, and gain so much experience just through exposure to what our peers have already been through.”
– Chris Elliott, ONiT Painting
Choosing Session Type
Different breakout sessions and workshops serve different functions. They are not interchangeable, and understanding that difference is one of the simplest ways to get more value from EXPO. It starts with being honest about what is most important to your business growth right now.
You can view the following session types as lenses rather than rigid boxes. Many sessions naturally touch more than one area, because real businesses don’t operate in silos. The goal isn’t to categorize sessions perfectly, but to understand what kind of value you’re most likely to get from being in a given room.
Some breakout sessions or workshops are execution-driven. These are the sessions where you should be listening for mechanics. What was changed? How was it implemented? What sequence mattered? What assumptions didn’t hold up? Sessions focused on estimating accuracy, job costing, project management, or financial controls tend to fall into this category.
Panels such as the estimating discussion with Tom Droste,Gaby Santiago, and Stuart Mackay, or workshops centered on documentation and process rigor like “Document Today, Profit Tomorrow: How Better Systems Drive Growth”, are good examples. These sessions are most valuable when you already know the area you want to improve and are looking for better ways to execute. If you’re still unsure whether it’s the right problem to solve, they can feel overwhelming or premature.
Other sessions are directional. Their value is not in a checklist, but in helping you understand where leverage actually lives. These sessions connect marketing, sales, operations, and leadership in ways that make certain priorities feel obvious afterward. They’re especially useful when your business feels busy, but progress feels slower than it should.
My own workshop fits into this category, focusing on how marketing, sales, and operations work together as a single growth system rather than as isolated problems to solve independently. The intent is not to add more tactics, but to help owners step back, see the whole board, and decide where focus will actually move the business forward.
A third category is validation-focused. These sessions help you assess whether what you’re already doing makes sense. They surface tradeoffs, constraints, and second-order effects that rarely show up in marketing material or polished success stories. They’re particularly valuable when you’ve already invested time or money into an approach and aren’t sure whether the friction you’re experiencing is normal or a sign to change course. Leadership and time-management discussions, including those led by experts like Brandon Lewis and Annie Newton, often play this role well.
The tactical move is not to pick a favorite category. You want to balance them across the event. Too many execution sessions without context lead to busywork. Too much direction without execution leads to stalled momentum. Validation sessions, used well, quietly prevent bad decisions before they become expensive ones.
When sessions are used intentionally, they stop feeling hit-or-miss. Each one has a role to play. And you’re far more likely to leave with clarity instead of a massive notebook that never quite turns into progress.
Divide and Conquer
One of the biggest advantages at EXPO is also one of the most underused: bringing more than one person from your company.
When teams attend without a plan, they often default to sticking together. It feels efficient, but it usually produces redundant learning and missed opportunities. The real leverage comes from intentional separation, not group attendance. Different roles should attend different sessions.
Owners benefit most from sessions that address direction, priorities, and leverage across the business. These include system-level discussions around growth, structure, leadership, and decision-making, as well as financial sessions where the insights only matter if the person in the room has authority to act. Finance-focused workshops, such as the one led by Daniel Honan, are a good example. The value isn’t just in understanding the numbers. It’s in being able to make real decisions afterward.
Estimators tend to get the most value from sessions focused on pricing, sales process, and lead quality. Project managers and operations leaders should prioritize sessions that address production systems, scheduling, quality control, and consistency.
This doesn’t mean rigid assignment. It means avoiding duplication unless there’s a specific reason to hear the same message together.
The second critical and often overlooked piece is reconvening strategically. Teams that get the most value from EXPO don’t just split up without a gameplan for how they’re going to compare notes. They do a short daily debrief that can surface patterns quickly. When multiple people independently flag the same idea or concern, that’s something to pay attention to.
It also helps to decide in advance how insights will be shared. Not every takeaway needs to be reported. Focus on decisions, not details. What should we do differently? What should we stop doing? What deserves further investigation?
Teams that divide and conquer this way consistently leave EXPO more aligned than when they arrived. They return with fewer competing ideas and a clearer sense of direction.
The Power of Brainmelds
Brainmelds function like an accelerant at PCA EXPO, pulling ideas out of individual heads and refining them through collective experience in real time.
In these conversations, you hear what people are actually trying. You hear where they’re stuck. You hear what they’re questioning, reconsidering, or quietly unsure about. Patterns emerge quickly. So do caution signs. When the same friction shows up across multiple businesses, it stops feeling like a personal problem and starts looking like a structural one.
That kind of feedback is hard to get anywhere else at EXPO.
Presentations are necessarily curated. Success stories are compressed. Brainmelds expose the middle of the story. The messy part. The tradeoffs people didn’t anticipate. The things that sounded straightforward but weren’t.
That’s what makes them such a powerful complement to sessions. Sessions show you what’s possible. Brainmelds show you what it actually feels like to try to get there.
They’re also one of the strongest networking environments at EXPO, precisely because they don’t feel like networking. You’re not awkwardly introducing yourself, but rather openly sharing business successes and struggles regarding a specific topic. You’re reacting to what someone just said. You’re realizing that another contractor is wrestling with the same decision you’ve been circling for months, or perhaps you’re learning how they solved a problem in a way you can immediately imitate. And those connections tend to stick.
Used this way, Brainmelds aren’t just about finding answers. They’re also about sharpening judgment. They give you a clearer sense of what’s normal, what’s risky, and what’s worth pursuing next. And they introduce you to new friends who can walk that path with you over the coming months and years.
“What I love most about those conversations [brainmelds] is hearing what’s actually working and what’s not. You get real feedback, not theory. That kind of honesty is hard to find anywhere else.”
– Maggie Kuyper, Harpeth Painting
Peer Relationships
Ask owners who have attended EXPO multiple times what delivered the most long-term value, and the answer is remarkably consistent: the people.
Not the slides. Not the tactics. The other contractors.
PCA EXPO compresses experience. In a few days, you can meet owners from across the country who are operating at a level you may not yet be at, but realistically could be. Some are ahead on sales process. Others on systems, leadership structure, or how they’ve reshaped their role as the business scaled. Seeing those paths up close often recalibrates what you believe is possible far faster than any presentation can.
Where many attendees fall short is treating these conversations as one-off interactions. The real leverage shows up when peer relationships extend beyond the event itself.
A simple habit goes a long way: introduce yourself to at least three new people at every social gathering. Meals. Sponsored evening events. Even hallway conversations.
When you find someone whose challenges, stage, or trajectory overlaps with yours, don’t let the connection end there. Exchange contact information. Make a note of what you talked about. And be sure to follow up with them after you get home.
Then do the part that creates real return: Set a cadence to stay in touch. A quick check-in after busy season. A quarterly call. A message later in the year asking what’s working and what isn’t. These touchpoints create an ongoing feedback loop that extends the value of EXPO throughout the year.
Many of the strongest friendships in this industry started exactly this way. I know countless owners who met some of their closest friends for the first time at PCA EXPO years ago. Since then, they’ve stayed connected, challenged each other, shared lessons, and grown their businesses dramatically along the way.
That’s why industry leaders consistently point to peer relationships as the most valuable part of the event. Sessions inform you. Vendors broaden your perspective. But peers shape how you think, because they make the future feel tangible, achievable, and shared.
Used intentionally, EXPO doesn’t just expand your knowledge. It expands your peer group. And that shift alone can permanently raise the ceiling on how you run your business.
“Being around other business owners who think like business owners was a game changer for me. It expanded how I thought about growth and helped me operate at a higher level. Getting in rooms like this shifts how you see your business.”
– Jason Paris, Paris Painting
Leveraging Vendors
Vendors are one of the few groups at PCA EXPO who get to see the industry at scale.
While individual contractors typically experience one business in one market, vendors often work with hundreds of companies across different sizes, regions, and stages of growth. That exposure gives them a form of pattern recognition that’s difficult to replicate any other way.
When used well, vendor conversations are less about buying something and more about understanding what consistently works, what commonly fails, and where expectations tend to be misaligned.
This is especially true in vendor-led workshops. Many of these sessions are built from repeated exposure to real-world implementations. They often surface second-order issues that don’t show up in case studies or success stories, such as where adoption breaks down, what prerequisites matter most, and which types of companies benefit most from a given approach.
It’s also worth staying open to the possibility that a vendor may genuinely be the right fit. PCA EXPO is one of the few environments where you can evaluate a product or service alongside peer feedback, real-world context, and multiple alternatives in a short window. That combination makes better decisions more likely, not less.
When approached this way, vendors stop feeling like distractions and start functioning as amplifiers. They broaden perspective, surface patterns, and occasionally open doors that wouldn’t have been visible otherwise.
Used intentionally, that access can be one of the highest-ROI parts of the event.
Leave with a Plan
Leaving EXPO without a plan is how much of the value can unintentionally be lost.
It gets lost when notes pile up, ideas blur together, and urgency fades once you’re back in the day-to-day of running the business. The fix is not better note-taking. It’s decision-making before you leave the conference.
The most effective owners do something simple but uncommon: They separate insights from decisions in real time.
Insights are observations, ideas, or examples that caught your attention. Decisions are commitments about what you will do differently, what you will stop doing, or what deserves deeper investigation. Most notes never need to become decisions. Trying to act on everything guarantees that nothing sticks.
A practical approach is to maintain a short, living list during EXPO. Not a running transcript. Instead it’s a short list of items that answers one question:
“What does this change for us?”
This is where certain sessions create disproportionate value. Operational discussions, particularly those that surface production friction, role clarity issues, or system breakdowns, often force decisions rather than just spark ideas. Sessions led by leaders like Michal Cheney tend to do this well, because they expose constraints that are easy to overlook until they’re named clearly. Those moments often turn vague discomfort into concrete action.
By the final day, that decision list should be small. Three to five items is typical. More than five items usually means you’re still collecting instead of choosing.
It also helps to force specificity early. Vague intentions like explore this more or look into that later rarely survive contact with reality. Decisions that stick are concrete: test a pricing change, stop pursuing a channel, restructure a role, schedule a follow-up with a specific vendor, or revisit a system that clearly isn’t working.
If you’re attending with a team, this is a critical topic to compare lists. Where there’s overlap, pay attention. Independent agreement is a strong sign you’re moving in the right direction. Where there’s disagreement, clarify before you leave, while the context is still fresh and the discussion can be its highest quality.
The goal is not to leave EXPO inspired, because inspiration fades. The goal is to leave with a short list of decisions that already feel justified.
When you do that work on-site, the progress your business will enjoy from EXPO doesn’t depend on motivation later. It’s already locked in.
“If you leave with 10 ideas, you’ll probably act on none. The real win is choosing a few things that actually deserve your attention and letting the rest go.”
– Nick Slavik, Nick Slavik Painting & Restoration Co.
The EXPO Flywheel
The biggest difference between owners who get moderate value from EXPO and those who get outsized returns is how they use the event year over year.
For high-performing operators, EXPO stops being a one-off experience and starts functioning like a flywheel.
The first year often expands the map. You see what’s possible. You meet people doing things you didn’t realize were realistic.
The second year, the learnings and understanding improve. You recognize familiar themes, skip what no longer applies, and gravitate toward conversations that are more relevant.
By the third year, EXPO becomes less about discovery and more about calibration. And this is where the return compounds.
You’re no longer evaluating ideas in isolation. You’re tracking how concepts mature over time. You notice which approaches are gaining traction and which quietly fade. Vendor conversations become more efficient because you already understand the landscape. Peer relationships deepen because conversations pick up where they left off instead of starting from scratch.
Most importantly, your judgment sharpens.
You stop being impressed by surface-level success and start listening for durability. You ask better questions. You recognize tradeoffs faster. You develop a clearer sense of what works for businesses like yours, not just what sounds good on stage.
This is also why relationships formed at EXPO often become more valuable than any single session. Over time, you build a small circle of peers who provide context, accountability, and perspective between events. Those conversations often influence decisions long after EXPO ends.
The flywheel effect only works if you treat EXPO as part of an ongoing process, not a reset button. Each year builds on the last. Each event refines your thinking.
When that happens, the value of PCA EXPO stops being measured in takeaways and starts being measured in trajectory. And that’s when the event quietly becomes one of the most reliable strategic inputs in your business.
“I made a lot of great connections at my first PCA EXPO, and those relationships grew throughout the year. When I came back the next year, it felt like a family reunion. Those relationships helped our business grow to new levels.”
– Cory Leister, Inspired By U
How to Know It Worked
The real test of PCA EXPO doesn’t happen at the conference itself. It happens quietly in the weeks that follow.
If EXPO worked, a few specific things should be true.
First, decisions feel lighter. Not necessarily easier, but clearer. Questions that felt unresolved before the event no longer dominate your thinking. You may still need to execute, but the internal debate is gone. You know what you’re doing and why.
Second, your focus narrows instead of expanding. Instead of chasing a dozen ideas, you’re concentrating on a small number of priorities that actually move the business. If your to-do list exploded after EXPO, something went wrong. Useful clarity almost always reduces scope.
Third, conversations at home change. When you talk with your leadership team, partners, or advisors, you’re explaining what’s changing. The discussion shifts from what’s interesting to what’s necessary.
Fourth, momentum shows up without force. The best EXPO outcomes don’t require constant motivation. They show up as decisions that feel justified enough to act on without needing another round of validation.
It’s also worth paying attention to what didn’t happen. If you’re not second-guessing every idea you heard, that’s a good sign. If you’re comfortable letting certain things go, that’s progress. Confidence in what you’re not doing is often more valuable than excitement about what you are.
EXPO doesn’t work by giving everyone the same answers. It works by helping each owner see their situation more clearly.
If, thirty days later, you can point to a handful of decisions that would not have been made without the event, PCA EXPO did its job.
Now let’s get to work!