Jason: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of Contractor Freedom and enter the bliss of Contractor Freedom so you can have the Time, Money, and Freedom to Live Your Life With Purpose Beyond Your Business.

As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.

Let's go.

Jason Phillips: Hello, contractors, Jason Phillips here, and I actually have another Jason with us, none other than the one and only Jason Paris from Paris Painting and Aleph Holdings. And, I think you're going to really enjoy what, enjoy Jason today and the, and the chat we're going to have. So [00:01:00] Jason, welcome. And for, for those that, uh, man, for those that don't know who you are, Uh, which would be surprising, you know.

Hey, give us, give us the lowdown. Who's Jason? Paris.

Jason Paris: Yeah, so it's pretty cool. Both of our names are Jason. Both of our last names start with P. So we're both jps. We're both Jason. Uh, so I'm a humble painter from flyover country, man. I'm in Minnesota, as we like to call it. also known as a Silicon Valley of painting. We have quite a few major HQs in the painting world up here.

Titan Graco three M. Uh, a handful of others, but yeah. Humble painter from flyover country. Just, uh, you know, slinging one gallon at a time.

Jason Phillips: So, uh, now, now Jason, a humble painter.

Jason Paris: Yeah. Very humble. Most humble. Number one.

hum. The, the humble part.

one, humble.

Let's talk about the painter part. Um, , have you actually ever actually painted?

I did. I painted for a summer in college

Jason Phillips: No [00:02:00] way. You've, man, you've got one up on me. Oh, I did

know

Jason Paris: how to hold a brush. You hold a brush like a pencil, not like an ice cream cone. And, uh, yeah, I, I know how to work the viscous visic nature of paint and cut a nice line. And, and, uh, I, I mean, I know enough to be dangerous.

Jason Phillips: You know, if you handed me a paintbrush, uh, it would probably be like watching Forrest Gump when he was a kid run down, run down the dirt road from those kids on the bikes when he had those braces on his legs, I'd probably be watching

Jason Paris: would hurt your, you'd find a way to hurt yourself,

Jason Phillips: yeah, exactly, exactly. Wow. I did not, man, I did not, did not know that you had actually done painting before.

Super cool.

Jason Paris: Super

sunburns and I mean, a lot of exterior painting and so yeah, scraping houses and did caulking wood, and yeah, did all of it.

Jason Phillips: You know, I, my first week in the business, I actually worked as a helper, uh, And we, and we painted a fairly large exterior, had [00:03:00] all kinds of French doors, uh, stained garage doors, and I, I learned a lot, and it took us a week to do that house. I learned a lot about how much time it takes to do certain things.

Jason Paris: Yeah.

Jason Phillips: And I'm a huge fan of, of sending people, uh, out on the job. To do what I call the, the real work initially, uh, so they'll have an, have an appreciation for it, especially if they're going to be in like a sales role or something like that. But so what, what are things, man, what are things today look like for, know, Paris painting?

Where are you guys at today?

Jason Paris: yeah. So Paris painting is an eight figure. Business and residential repaint. We dabble a little bit here and there in commercial, uh, but it's more stuff that we trip over. So somebody's uncle owns a building and they want us to give a a quote, but for the most part, our bread and butter is working with homeowners, working with clients.

We are in Minnesota, so we kinda have April through October to really hammer out exteriors. . [00:04:00] We are majority subcontractor base for our labor pool. We have a good size team that's in-house, so that's about 12 employees that does in-house painting, but the vast majority is subcontractor base. Um, the amount of exterior to interior spread has gotten more and more, uh, even over the last five years.

So that's been a continual push to try and, uh, not decrease our exterior volume, but to increase the interior volume. Uh, but, but still by and large it's probably a 60 40 split at this point of exterior to interior,

Jason Phillips: So, uh, do you guys do anything else other than painting?

Jason Paris: we have a little division called Paris Roofing, where we'll do the roofing of houses. Uh, we kind of dabbled in whole on remodels through a branch called Haven Builders for a while. Uh, we started that with an operating partner. And ended up selling that to him, uh, earlier this year in January. So we no longer do remodels.

We do remodels, we do new construction [00:05:00] builds through our all of capital arm, but that is to build multi-family housing that we own. And so we're the clients and the builders and the investors and that endeavor.

Jason Phillips: Wow, that's pretty awesome. You know, we should, uh, circle back on that here in a few minutes. You know, you said, you said eight figure for, for Paris painting. That's, uh, quite rare in the painting world,

Jason Paris: It is rare,

Jason Phillips: especially.

Jason Paris: Yeah, I was gonna say in residential especially, um, you know, it's the wild west of an industry. Uh, it's going through, its maturation. It also is just fundamentally different than a lot of other trades industries. So it's not like HVAC and plumbing, which we call the license or, or electrical.

Right. The licensed trades, um, . And I think it will professionalize over time, but it's always gonna be just fundamentally different from those two things. Uh, from those three trades. it's a, it's a trade that the gap between a chuck and a truck and a professionalized company is large, but it's much larger in other industries.[00:06:00]

And I think that's gonna continue to drive, um, you know, what the aggregate average is in, in painting.

Jason Phillips: and the barrier to entry is so small

barrier

Jason Paris: entry is small. The um, emergency levels are low. There's no pain emergencies, there are plumbing emergencies, there are electrical emergencies, there are HVAC emergencies, and then the consequences for improper installations. Are pretty low as well, right? The consequence for an improper installation for a plumbing company is very high.

prop, the consequence for an improper installation for a painting company is relatively low, especially compared to those other licensed trades. So those are some of the fundamental underlying, uh, elements of our trade that will always keep us a little bit different, a little bit separate, but um, for sure right now it is the Wild West and you don't have, uh, you have a lot of self-employment out there, but not many entrepreneurs, not many business owners.

Jason Phillips: So what do you, what do you think Jason is the, uh, and of, and of course. I know you're speaking more than just for your company, [00:07:00] because you've, you know, been a part of the PCA for, uh, in a leadership role there for several years. Um, I'm sure you had, you were privy to a lot of other insider information, right?

What do you, what's, you know, the key to you guys becoming eight figure? And, uh, kind of the part two of that is, what do you think is limiting, what do you see as limiting most painting companies from, from really taking off and growing?

Jason Paris: Yeah, the number one limiter for painting companies is who's the owner? , who's the founder? And that is often their output that's gonna determine how, how high that that company flies, what's even more rare. So that, that's the, the number one limiter, the governor, you would say. Beyond that, it, it's pretty rare to architect a system that scales beyond yourself.

Right. So for most founders it's how well can they execute their business model. So what is their execution ability? That's a combination of bandwidth and skill. So what is their bandwidth? What is their skill? The second element [00:08:00] would be what is the model that they're trying to execute? Is it a model that is very easy to execute, it's very complex to execute?

How well does it leverage their talents of both bandwidth and skill? Then you start to architect a organization or a company that inherently requires quite a bit of humility, which is pretty counter, um, Counter to anyone who starts a painting company. A lot of egos involved. So scaling yourself beyond yourself.

That's been the key to us achieving eight figures. It's not like I work harder. I, I don't, there's nothing that I do day to day, week to week or month to month in Paris painting what you would call an active board member. Uh, so it's not my bandwidth and it's definitely not my skill. Right. That was probably one of my, um, saving graces in building a team is it was very easy for me to find people that were better than me at pretty much ever...