We recently connected with Alex Lathery and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

So I actually have always wanted to start a local service business. I run a digital marketing agency, Blue Collar Builds, and we exclusively work with local service based businesses. It made perfect sense to build my own on top of that leveraging our skillset. The problem was that I didn’t have the time I knew it would take to truly start and grow one on top of everything else I’ve got going on.

Fast forward to the Fall of 2024 and I ended up getting dinner with a friend of mine I met at an entrepreneurship meet up in Cincinnati. He was an owner of a home care franchise and apparently had been looking to buy a business for quite some time now. After multiple acquisitions falling through, him and his partner had decided it was time to build instead, and painting was their idea. It just so happened that painting was also top of my list for industries to go into. It is very fragmented, high-ticket, and relatively low-skill requirements (no special licensing or barrier to entry for finding talented employees). They had operations and finance covered with their unique skillsets and they pitched me on being the third partner running the marketing and branding. Of course, I said yes.

From there we had many discussions on the “idea” of the business. What we wanted to offer, how we wanted to brand ourselves, who we wanted to be. We landed on a throwback to the Golden Age of Service. Memories of painters in the famous white painter shirt, the painter’s cap. We wanted to feel timeless and premium. To achieve that, we adopted bold red and navy colors, a cursive script style of font, and a timeless mascot as our logo and branding foundation. For the name, we wanted to be simple and clear. Cincinnati Painting Co. It instantly told you who we were, what we do, and where we do it. We went through many specific iterations on the logo details and after polling friends, family, and a few folks online, we got unanimous preference for what ended up being our final decision.

After nailing the logo and branding, we got to move on to the website and to “figuring out” how to do the business. Learning the ins and outs of quoting painting jobs, finding good crews to work with, what materials to use.

All in all, from initial idea to launch it was about 5 months of winter prep. The painting season doesn’t start in Cincinnati for exterior painting until around March, so we took those winter months as prep for the season to come and to hit the ground hard early Spring.

Alex, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I mentioned a bit about this in my previous answer, but I run a digital marketing agency called Blue Collar Builds. I got that started back in College and it grew from, initially, just a coding hobby into a full-fledged business. I’ve been able to hire my brother as our bookkeeper, hire my dad as our full-time project manager, and have done 300+ websites and dozens of logos for local service businesses. Today, we still stick to that same vision, which is building the world’s best home service brands, whether that be for clients or for our own businesses like the painting company.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Coming from a creative agency background, I really had to resist just taking the path I thought was best for our branding.

I have a personal taste, but that taste is not always what will resonate with people we serve.

I tried multiple times through our branding process to inject a second version of the logo and mascot that was more fun, more cartoonish, but each time the feedback we got took us back to the tried and true vintage logo concept I had created.

It was perhaps the most prominent reminder that you should always be thinking about the customer and what will resonate with them.

Have you ever had to pivot?

About 6 months in to our first season, we were not in a good place financially with the business. We were missing payroll for our operating partner’s salary (he was salaried and had equity), we were not closing deals on new painting jobs, and we didn’t have much hope for the future of the business.

We had an all-hands meeting to strategize through where we were failing, what we could do about it, and what the three of us wanted out of the business.

Ultimately we identified a few key areas we could fix in the business and we brought in a full-time admin to help ease workload from our operating partner. That combined with a renewed priority on sales above all else helped drive us to finishing the year with nearly all of our best months of sales.

We basically broke even that first year, but we had learned so many valuable lessons through our mistakes and we’d started to build a team and a process that was in much better standing to dominate year two of the business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cincinnatipainting.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cincinnatipaintingco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61572983566603
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cincinnati-painting-co/

Image Credits

All images are our own