AAA Painting was not started to get big. It was started because a painter with decades in the trade got tired of watching paint get stretched. The outfit he worked for would quote a job at two coats, buy half the material the spec called for, thin what they had, and bank the difference. The customer could not tell. Not that year, anyway.

John is a Christian man and that arrangement wore on him until he left it. The company he built in its place runs on the arithmetic he could live with: every paint has a spread rate printed on its data sheet, every surface has a square footage, and the two numbers together tell you exactly how many gallons a job honestly needs. That is the number we quote, that is the number we buy, and you are welcome to count the cans.

Today the crew carries about one hundred years of combined time in the trade, and the work runs from single bedrooms to whole apartment complexes, from kitchen cabinet packages sprayed to a factory finish to commercial suites painted overnight so the doors open on schedule. We hold a California C-33 painting and decorating contractor classification, and we have liability insurance and workman’s compensation insurance on every one of our workers.

The tagline on our letterhead is the sentence John says to every new hire: if you can’t do it right, then find something you can do right, so you don’t make the customers into victims.