Brandon Lewis: Hello, I’m Brandon Lewis, publisher of Painter’s Weekly, and the founder of the Academy for Professional Painting Contractors, and I am joined by Mike Balding of Absolute Painting in Lenexa, Kansas. We’re talking about something very important to property owners of large facilities and that’s painting them. There are three key elements, if you’re looking to hire a commercial painting contractor in Lenexa. Mike’s going to share those with us. Mike, thanks for coming on the program.
Mike Balding: Yeah, thanks for having me on Brandon, I appreciate it.
Brandon Lewis: Well, let’s get right into it. Commercial has lots of different applications than residential. Lots of different scenarios and situations. Let’s talks about how products and processes, and the knowledge of those can vary at a commercial facility for a maintenance manager, a property manager. Maybe in ways that they are not the same than residential.
Mike Balding: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You need to have a lot of knowledge when you’re in the commercial sector doing painting, about what types of processes to follow and what products to use, because you’re painting a lot of times in high traffic environments, and you’re working in areas that may have a high amount of humidity in factories, a lot of heat and a lot of different things that can happen as far as surfaces being dirtied and damaged quickly. Choosing the right products and using the right process to make sure that the surface is prepped appropriately, and coat it with the right type of product, is super important when you’re doing commercial painting.
Brandon Lewis: There are problems when you get into commercial painting. A lot of times it’s less about the complexity of the actual project, sometimes that’s pretty routine. It’s more about, how do we get this done in a way that doesn’t create any safety issues. How do we get this done while clients, and office workers, and cars, and people are moving in and out of the facility? How do we do this without disrupting what’s going on during working hours, and how do we make sure that it doesn’t impact our bottom line by slowing down the business in any way? Talk about how problem solving is important, and how Absolute … Maybe walk through some of those scenarios with commercial property owners in the past.
Mike Balding: Sure, this is something that’s really important. When you’re dealing with commercial painting, the painting company, the contractor that somebody hires needs to solve the problems before the job happens. If you’re dealing in a retail environment, or an area where customers are coming in and out, they don’t wanna see the painters, they don’t wanna see the dust, they don’t wanna see the drop clots. So you need to be able to work around that environment in such a way that you continue the work to be completed in an appropriate amount of time, while also maintaining the company’s ability to continue to do business.
Mike Balding: Also, when you’re dealing in a wide variety of environments, you may be looking at a large warehouse that has a stucco or an evus surface all over it. You have to decide, do we need to waterproof that, is it already waterproofed? What type of product do we use, and how many coats do we have to do? This is something that your average property manager is gonna need help figuring out. On the front end, that’s where Absolute Painting makes the difference in communicating those things, and educating the property manager as to the appropriate products and the timing and execution of all those things.
Brandon Lewis: Finally, once you get all the problems solved, you’re gonna actually get the work done. To this point we know what to do, we figured out what the problems are in advance so that we avoid any hiccups. But at some point you got to actually do the work, and there’s a lot of flexibility that is required to do large commercial projects, and to take care of small ones for large accounts. Talk about how selecting a contractor that has that type of flexibility is important for commercial property owners.
Mike Balding: Yeah, that’s super important. You wanna make sure that the company is large enough to be able to take on the larger projects that they might have. For example, if you’re painting a 25,000 square foot warehouse on the exterior, you’re gonna want more than one or two painters on that project at any one time, because you need that much work being done on a daily basis so that the project doesn’t drag. The longer that you have a contractor on site doing work, the more likely it is to disrupt the daily function of the particular building or company or business that you’re working for. The other thing to consider is that you wanna have a company that can move quickly on the schedule. If you have a small company, you may have good painters, you may have three or four of them, but if they can’t get to your project for six to eight weeks because they’re booked out, then you have a problem with being able to execute the project. I think those two things are the most important.
Brandon Lewis: I couldn’t agree more. There’s lots of other things that we can cover, but I think this has given people a great place to start. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on the program to talk about some of the commercial painting needs that people have in Lenexa. It’s been fun.
Mike Balding: Yeah, thanks for having me on the pro talk today. I appreciate it.
Brandon Lewis: All right, well thank you so much. Again, I’m Brandon Lewis with Painter’s Weekly and APPC. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of pro talk. Until next time, I’m signing off.
