Back in 1998 a friend of mine had closed on his new home and had asked me if I would be willing to help him paint his garage floor. I said sure and that’s all we did. We cleaned out the floor and rolled on the paint. It looked so nice I said to myself this looks really nice but of course we had done it all wrong. Paint is cosmetic, not designed for garage floors or any floor – reasons being there is no chemical resistance, nor any UVR protection. Painting has absolutely no purpose other than cosmetic.

Jon, 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 have never been one for school. I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. School to me was boring and totally not productive. I have always been “street smart” with an entrepreneurial mind set. Growing up with my parents who where self employed and getting my first job at the age of 8, I’ve always had a strong work ethic. Before my paper route, my very first job was working on my dad’s commercial salmon fishing boat as cabin boy which lead me to become a deck hand for 20 yrs in the bearing sea. No matter what job I am doing, I want to be the best at it. I want to understand the concept, the product, the science behind it and always looking to be better.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I am a big fan of social media marketing. The most important thing to remember is that a website is an online brochure, but social media is all about sharing your daily work, thoughts and jobs. It is a really good way to connect with your customers, build a fan base, visually show and share who you are, what you do as well as the end results. In my industry I now have more followers on social media than any other decorative coating company in the world. I have 1.5 million followers.

How did you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The work I do is very visual. Because I am extremely picky, I take great pride in the quality of my work and I think I am my worst critic. I am only as good as my last job. Paying attention to detail is very important to me and that mind set has allowed me to become one of the best in the world in this industry. In addition, I am always striving to understand the product and science and am never afraid of hard work. Seven years ago my wife joined me and we have become a husband and wife team. Because we have no employees and we do all the work ourselves, our customers love the personal attention we give them. They love knowing that not only can they talk to me, my wife and I are the ones doing the work. Because of that we have amazing google reviews with a perfect score of 5.0. I took 5 years off doing chip and solid floors because I was getting burned out and was actually going to sell my business at the time. I ended up focusing on a floor system that is called “metallic”. During those 5 years, I became a global metallic specialist which got me well known in the floor coating industry. Fast forward to 2020, I decided to bring back my solid and chip floors as options for all of my customers.

This has been a very satisfying professional development.